Living Under a Dictatorship Muslim Country

At the age of sixty-eight, Gorg Sarian prepares to tell me stories about his life when he lived in Iran. A Christian man who lived in a Muslim country with his wife and four kids while going through the hardships. A man who managed to support his family and got his children the best education they needed in the middle of all the difficulties.

I lived in a village when I was younger, where people lived their lives by farming. It was very difficult because there wasn’t even enough water to even take showers with. People depended on rain to see whether they were going to have a good year or a dry one. When I was about fourteen or fifteen I decided to go to the city. I went to this village called Daran, waited there for about two days until this bus came to take us to Tehran. When I got there I stayed with a relative of mine for about six months and started to work. After that I decided to get my own place.

I was about seventeen when I decided to go back to the village to visit my family. I wasn’t there long when the police got me to be a soldier. They would just get random young men by chance to be a soldier. The police kept me for five days until they got my birth certificate and saw that I was under age. When I was eighteen they announced in the radio that men born in 1938 and 1939 could just buy their papers that said, “You’ve already been a soldier,” and I bought mine for two-hundred tooman and didn’t go to the military. They wouldn’t treat people nicely and it was hard so people thought that it was a waist of two years.

People didn’t even like the police because they were not nice to them. The police wouldn’t let people wear short sleeve shirts or have any hair showing because they said that it was wrong-even on your arm-. That’s how they bothered people. Race didn’t matter Armenian or Persian. The guys didn’t even bother going out with the girls because they knew that the police would bother them about it. Take my son for an example; he went to the beach with his friends for three, four days to have fun and he had kept his hair long. When the police saw him they took him to get his hair cut. They said that you’ll have to get your hair cut or you’ll go to jail; and the jails were awful because they tortured people in there. He got embarrassed and cut his hair. Now that his in America he has kept his hair very long because he couldn’t have done that when he lived in Iran. Does were the kinds of hardships people went through and it was very common in there. 

In 1970 the revolution started. That was when the religious Muslims brought Khomeini to be their leader. Khomeini told people that the Shah was taking all their money and if he became the leader gas and electricity would be free. That was all lies because when he became the leader people weren’t even able to buy food because everything was with coupons.

Right after that the war with Iraq began. Iraqi people taught that Iran would be in a bad shape, since they just went through a revolution. They taught it would be a good time to attack and get back Arvand River which was a border between them and the city next to it. I myself went to the war. The government kept on telling people to go and fight for their country. Since I was a mechanic I helped fix the cars with fifty other mechanics. Things got very difficult. There were times where people were not able to turn on any light because they would get bombed. It was so bad that the taxi drivers weren’t even allowed to hit the breaks because of the backlights, so they would use the emergency breaks to stop the car. Lots of people died in tragic accidents because of the darkness.

After the war things got very hard. There was even a lot of racism between the Armenians and the Persians, problems about school and lots more. We didn’t know any better at first; we taught that it was a good place to live until something happened to my wife. One night while I was walking with my wife to my brother’s house a car passed by and my wife told me that she felt a burn. Not until we got to my brother did we notice that her arm was bleeding. They had cut her arm which she had to get thirteen stitches for and we didn’t even know does people. If we were just simply walking down the street and something like this happened then that was not such a safe place to live, and that was the reason why we decided to move to America.

                                                                        Interviewed by Zepyor Toomanian