Azudi is just like
Genghis Khan when he walks
he walks on a pile of fresh corpses
the Khan did not clean his teeth
either
the Khan also belched the Khan
did not take off his boots either Azudi
has shattered the mouths of twenty poets today *
In these savage lines Iranian Poet-Critic Reza Baraheni describes one of the men who tortured him in Iran's notorious Committee Prison, where Baraheni was held without charge for 102 days in 1973. Baraheni, who now lives in exile in New York City, recognized in torturers like Azudi the "typical thick-necked Iranian jahel [ignoramus], fat and tall and dirty and, at the same time, shrewd, irrevocable, irresistibly virile and strong." Azudi insisted that prisoners address him with the honorific title "doctor," as do equally brutal thugs who run torture centers in Brazil and did so formerly in Greece. The title, apparently, confers on the torturer a kind of legitimacy vis-a-vis his victim.
The interrogator's need to be respected by his victims is one notable feature of a vague, inchoate subculture that exists in every country where torture is an established practice. This shadowy netherworld is marked most obviously by a mocking language of euphemisms and code words. Some former prisoners report, for example, that at the notorious Sao Paulo torture center of the Brazilian political police, a torture session has been called a "spiritual seance," as if it involved a cleansing of impurities. Victims in Chile say that DINA interrogators refer to Santiago's infamous Villa Grimaldi as the Palacio de la Risa—the Palace of Laughter. In Iran, Otagh-e Tamshiyat, or "the room in which you make people walk," is a name for the blood-stained chamber where prisoners are forced to walk after torture to help their blood circulate.
Torturers generally refer to themselves by nicknames, in part because they do not want their victims to know their real identities. Often the nicknames derive from a physical feature, such as "the Tall One," or "the Mustachioed One." In South America, such aliases as El Aleman (the German), Cara de Culebra (Snake Face) and El Carnicero (the Butcher) are common. One particularly brutal torturer at Chile's Tejas Verdes camp near San Antonio used to tell prisoners his name was Pata en la Raja, meaning Kick in the Ass.
-