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Bakhtiyar Ali
194
after the 1991 uprising.
So much so that we speak
about the ‘Golden Age of
the Files’, an era that will
go down in history as the
start of the worship and
disclosure of files, an era
in which the line between
truth and lies became so
blurred that the two could
barely be separated.
The aggrieved colleague
who spirited the files
from the locker in the
security
department’s
basement happened to be
a close friend of Shibr, the
handsome, blond man we
shall come across many
times in these pages, a
man you will certainly
like and will want to meet
after reading this book.
What Shibr then passed
on to us was a muddled
bundle of papers, audio
cassettes and documents
– thousands of pages the
cunning man had written
in different styles of
handwriting in order to
mislead and deceive.
Now, after organising the
stories in such a way that
we understand where
everything began, we
have begun classifying
the myriad papers and
documents at our disposal
so that they make sense.
We have compressed,
abridged, organised and,
as far as possible, dated
them. In places where we
felt the truth had not fully
emerged, we have done
our own research.
Because retaining the
complex
and
opaque
language in which the
entire report is written
would be confusing for
everyone, we first needed
to refine the language of
the ill-intentioned report
writer and to neutralise
his tones, which are so
equivocal and oblique that