A letter from Prison Arash Sadeghi writes to Mr. Javaid Rehman
A letter from Prison
Arash Sadeghi[i] writes to Mr. Javaid Rehman[ii]
Dear Mr. Javaid Rehman,
In the letter I am writing to you, I intend to go a little deeper and more accurately into the forms of torture in Iran that have so far been hidden, not seen, or ignored, or given little importance. Certainly, you have received numerous reports over the years about human rights violations in the Islamic Republic, including the arrest, torture, and execution of political and ideological activists. But you may have heard less from those effected by them. The wives, children, and parents of these individuals, who one day encounter the presence of security agents in their homes, wander the corridors of the courts the next day for follow-up, and when the verdicts are issued, they always bear the responsibility of life.
One of the principles set out in international law is the principle of the personal nature of crimes and punishments. According to this principle, punishment should be considered only for the guilty person, but the principle of being personal only punishes the guilty person; Therefore, no other person can be punished instead of the person who committed the crime.
Unfortunately, the families of political prisoners have been subjected to the most severe torture in the last four decades, including the following:
1- Forced disappearances
It is said that history is written by the conquerors, and in the history written by the conquerors, there is talk of absolute truth and absolute falsehood. The victorious side asserts its absolute right and considers the victims invalid and worthy of any kind of defeat and humiliation. The Islamic Republic's account of mass executions in 1988 is subject to the same rule. An event in which several thousand prisoners of the left and the Mujahidin Khalq Organization were sent to death squads on the orders of Ayatollah Khomeini. The secret execution of more than 15,000 political prisoners in the 1980’s is one of the most widespread human rights abuses in the Islamic Republic of Iran, and protests and lawsuits have continued for nearly three decades. But what has befallen the families since then is an unopened chapter from the prison season under Islamic rule.
The families were never informed of why and how their loved ones were executed, and their children's bodies were not returned to them. Executed people were often buried in abandoned cemeteries without even their families being told where they were buried. Few families who knew where often denied to visit their graves, place gravestones, or mourn. Any violation of these rules, protests against executions and prosecutions, are met with severe punishments from threats to interrogation, beatings, detention, imprisonment and deprivation of their basic rights. (One of our charges under the indictment is collecting and documenting executions in the 1980s by visiting the victims' families).
Many of these families have also been deprived of basic rights such as the right to work and study freely; however, families have been searching for the truth about why and how executions have taken place over the years. Visiting these families gave us a very shocking picture of why and how many prisoners throughout Iran were forcibly disappeared for several weeks and later handed to death squads, secretly executed, and to this day the bodies of not even one of them were given to their families.
Three decades after the secret killing of thousands of dissidents in Iran and the dumping of their bodies in mass graves, Iranian officials continue to harass the families of the victims, refusing to disclose the facts, and those members of the victims' families who want to be clarified. The truth and the administration of justice are threatened, harassed, intimidated, attacked, arrested, prosecuted and imprisoned. Forced disappearances are not limited to the executions of 1980. Many political prisoners, especially Kurds and Arabs, were executed and later their bodies were not returned to their families. Zanyar and Loghman Moradi and Ramin Hossein Panahi are among the Kurdish prisoners who were executed and bodies have not been returned to their families. Arab prisoners include the four recently executed prisoners Jassim Heydari, Ali Khosraji, Hossein Silavi, and Nasser Khafajian, whose bodies were never returned to their families.
2- Imprisonment in exile
One of the punishments for the families of political prisoners is their imprisonment in exile. In many cases, the families of political prisoners whose children have been sentenced to prison in exile experience some form of punishment, a punishment for the prisoner's family. Long distances travel for a 20 or 40 minute visit. The distance itself is another factor in family harassment because it is very difficult to travel hundreds of kilometers between cities. Many of these families are considered poor members of the community and their breadwinner is in prison. Some of them try to support their families by working in prison. In this situation, they have to pay for transportation to another city to meet their imprisoned loved one, and in this situation, they have to bear double the economic pressure. One of the painful cases that can be mentioned is the torture of a prisoner and his family. The death of the mother and wife of Peyman Arefi, a political prisoner on their way back from Masjed Soleiman, where Peyman was deported, was due to a car accident. Another case is that of Shahram Ahmadi's family, whose parents were grounded in a car accident (on their way to Rajai Shahr Prison, where Shahram Ahmadi was exiled), and were unable to visit Shahram for a long time. These are just a few of the tragedies that have befallen the families of past political prisoners and all the illegal punishments that are being inflicted on families.
Saba Kurd Afshari, Sepideh Farhan, Leila Mirghafari, Yasman Ariani, Monira Arabshahi, Golrokh Ebrahimi Erayi, Athena Daemi, Nasrin Sotoudeh, Mojgan Keshavarz, Sepideh Qalyan, Maryam Akbari Monfared, Maryam Ebrahimvand, Soheil Arabi, Ismail Abdi, Nasrollah Musa , Saeed Eghbali, Reza Mohammad Hosseini, Arsham Rezaei, Mehdi Meskin Nawaz, Abdolrasoul Mortazavi, Amirsalar Davoodi …are among the political prisoners who have been transferred from Evin Prison in Tehran to Qarchak Varamin, Kachui Karaj, Amol, Lakan Rasht, Bushehr, Semnan, Quchan, Karaj Central Repentance Center and Rajai Shahr Karaj have been exiled in recent weeks and months. According to the regulations of the Prisons Organization, every person who is sentenced to prison must serve his or her sentence in the prison closest to their place of residence so that they can be close to his family and be able to visit them. Imprisonment in exile has no purpose other than to punish the prisoner's family.
3- Torture and abuse of children
Torture and punishment of children of political prisoners is also one of the punishments of families. Ali Mutsanna, one of the prisoners of the 1980s, was executed along with his wife, while his two children, aged four and six, Zainab and Zohreh, were also imprisoned. Fatemeh Musanna (Ali Musanna's sister) was imprisoned with her mother Ferdows Mahboubi for 2 and 4 years, respectively, when she was only 13 years old. Fatemeh Musanna’s three brothers (Ali, Mustafa and Morteza) were executed along with Ali's wife, one of his brothers, in the 1980s, and their bodies were never returned to their families. The charge and reason for the arrest of Ms. Musanna and her mother, Ferdows Mahboubi, in those years was a lawsuit and protest against the execution of four members of their family. The children of Fatemeh Musanna, Iman, a 17-year-old boy, and Maryam, a 13-year-old girl, were also arrested in 1991 along with their mother and father and spent a month and three days in solitary confinement in ward 209, respectively.
Asal Meskin Nawaz, the 15-year-old son of political prisoner Mehdi Meskin Nawaz, was detained for 12 hours in late 1999. The school did not enroll Meskin Nawaz in that year, and finally, after going to several schools and not registering, he went to one of the schools with the commitment of his mother and grandmother and himself that no one should be told about his father's imprisonment. Meskin Nawaz's family was under pressure from security forces throughout his detention.
Nasrin Sotoudeh's children were detained for several hours and a 12-year-old girl was barred from leaving after filing a case. Nasrin Sotoudeh was on a 49-day hunger strike in prison in protest of what her family said was a punishment. "Family punishment was not specific to me and my family," Nasrin Sotoudeh said in those days. To illustrate the extent of this unfair treatment, suffice it to keep in mind that of the 36 women serving time in political prisoners, 13 are close relatives of those either in prison or wanted. "Among them are more than one family member who is in prison or wanted." The children of human rights activist Narges Mohammadi have often been tools for torturing and punishing her and her family. After the children emigrated from Iran, Narges Mohammadi lost contact with her children by order of the prosecutor. This was very difficult for her because one of her children was ill. Narges Mohammadi went on a hunger strike due to a ban on contact with her children.
4- Prison visitation
Visiting is also a tool to put more pressure on the families of political prisoners. Political prisoners have repeatedly been denied access to their families, either collectively or individually, by order of the prosecutor. For example, after a statement by female political prisoners protesting the death of Sattar Beheshti, prison officials used face-to-face visits with their families, especially their young children, as a pretext for torturing them, and visits were banned for a long time. Athena was permanently banned from visiting her family for more than a year and a half by order of the prosecutor. Hassan Sadeghi, a prisoner in Rajai Shahr Prison in Karaj, has been denied access to his wife, who is also serving her sentence in Evin Prison, by order of the prosecutor's office since February 30, 1997. The two prisoners usually met in the presence of their children, and this meeting room was the only place where the couple and their children could be together for an hour. Abdolrasoul Mortazavi, another prisoner in Rajai Shahr prison, has been deprived of seeing his wife, Ms. Zahra Nazouri, for nearly a month and a half. Ms. Nazouri is also serving a two-year sentence in Isfahan Prison.
Mehdi Maskin Nawaz was also banned from visiting for a year and a half by order of the prosecutor's office and was denied access to his 15-year-old daughter. Relationship with the family is one of the basic rights of prisoners that the Islamic Republic denies political prisoners. According to jurists, the violation of prisoners' rights is considered torture and harassment, and torture is one of the examples of crimes against humanity.
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5- Framing and imprisonment of family members
It seems that with the return of the judicial structure of the Islamic Republic to the 1980s, the methods of torture have returned to the same decades and have become particularly widespread. In recent decades, harassment, threats, intimidation and detention of the families of political prisoners have doubled.
On April 10, 2017, Athena Daemi went on a hunger strike in protest of a sentence handed down to her two sisters, each of whom was sentenced to three months and one day in prison. Athena's family was suffering on the one hand because of the sentence and on the other hand because of Athena's hunger strike. Athena's parents were constantly worried about the health of their child in prison on the one hand, and their anxiety about the possibility of the arrest of their other two daughters which created a difficult and unfavorable situation for the family. Athena Farghdani, a political prisoner, went on strike for harassing her father and prosecuting her sisters. "The act of taking a hostage of the family of a political prisoner will be protested," he said. Maryam and Reza Akbari Monfared, who were imprisoned in the 1980s for protesting the execution of their four siblings.
Fatemeh Musanna, who was arrested at the age of 13 for protesting and suing her three executed brothers and serving two years in prison in the 1980s, was arrested in 1991 with her husband and two children, aged 13 and 17, for holding a funeral for her father-in-law. She was an opponent of the Islamic Republic, was arrested and sentenced to 15 years in prison. Ms. Zahra Nazouri was arrested on charges of supporting her imprisoned husband, Mr. Abdolrasoul Mortazavi, and was sentenced to two years in prison. She is currently serving a two-year sentence in Isfahan Prison. Afshin Baymani was arrested in 1979, along with his wife and two children (a nine-month-old girl and a 3-year-old boy), and these children spend a long time in Detention Center 209 in Evin Prison.
The following are the names of a number of families whose families have been detained for some time:
- Detention of Marzieh Mansouri's family members
- Arrest of Khodabandeh Lou family members
- Detention of adult family members
- Arrest of Hossein Panahi's family members
- Arrest of family members of Motaleb Ahmadian
- Detention of Yazerloo family members
- Detention of Habib Latifi's family members.
Among the cases whose status is still unclear is the status of hundreds of detainees following the 1997 attack on an army parade in Ahvaz. Despite the deaths of the attackers, Iranian judicial and security officials arrested most of the families and activists who had converted to the Sunni religion in recent years.
Two hundred fifty detainees were transferred to Sheiban Prison 8 after the attack on the Ahwaz parade, and more than 200 were transferred to Hamadan Prison. Some Arab female prisoners were first transferred to Tehran, then to Hamedan, and then to Sepidar Prison in Ahvaz. According to some families, forced confessions were obtained by threatening and torturing these women. In the presence of the investigator of Branch 12 as well as Branch 2 of the Revolutionary Court, Judge Shahini, these women announced that they had been forced to confess. The women are being held in Ahvaz's Sepidar Prison despite denying charges of propaganda against the regime and membership in ISIS.
The names of some of the women for whom a case has been filed are as follows:
1- Maryam (Sehba) Hamadi, 23 years old, son of Zidan, married, has a child from Susangard.
2- Zahra Hosseini (Sarkheh), 24 years old, married, son of Saad, has two daughters (Esra and Sena) from Hasirabad, Ahvaz, was arrested on November 17, 2016 at home. Zahra's wife, Sadegh Hamidavi, is also in custody.
3- Wafa Heydari, from Ahvaz.
4- Fatemeh Tonitzadeh, Maryam Hamadi's mother, has been in temporary detention in Sepidar Prison since October 1997.
5- Kholoud Sabhani, 20 years old, a resident of Susangard, was arrested before the attack on the army parade.
6- Masoumeh Saidavi, 48 years old, married, with all her family members, has been in temporary detention since early October 1997 (Fouad, Ahmad and Ayad Mansouri family).
- Susan Saidawi, 45, has been in pre-trial detention with her entire family since early October. (Family of Fouad, Ahmad and Ayad Mansouri).
8- Sakineh Sogouri, 34, son of Jassem, resident of Ahvaz, Kian region, married with one child, Ms. Sogouri, wife of Mehdi Mansouri (Asadi), whose wife was killed by joining the armed forces in Syria, and after her husband was killed in Ahvaz He returned and was arrested. Sakineh Sogouri was detained in Evin Prison for several months before the Ahvaz parade and was later released on bail, but was arrested again after attacking the parade.
9- Elahe Darvish, 19 years old, from Shushtar, has a 7-month-old child. Elahe has been detained since early October. She was pregnant at the time of her arrest and was held for six months in the Ahvaz Intelligence Detention Center and then transferred to Tehran. Her housbad, Hassan Darvishi, is also in prison.
10- Zahra Shajirat, 37 years old, married, with three children, has been in temporary detention since December 2016.
11- Somayeh Hardani, wife of Fouad Mansouri, who was killed during the attack on the Ahwaz parade. Somayeh Hardani was born in March 1994 and was arrested on September 22, 2016, when she was in her third month of pregnancy, for participating in the attack on the parade with her mother, Susan Saidavi. Somayeh Hardani's only accusation was that she was the wife of Fouad Mansouri, one of the attackers killed in the September 22, 1997 parade.
12- Maryam Afzali, 26 years old, was arrested in November 1997 on Naderi Street in Ahvaz and is still in temporary detention. Apart from the names mentioned, 11 Arab women were released on bail until the end of the trial and sentencing on October 2, 1997, as well as arbitrary detentions in October 1997. Such an incident is unprecedented in the record of the detention institutions in the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Ministry of Intelligence. For the past 40 years, the families of political prisoners have been subjected to the most severe physical and psychological torture, in all sorts of illegal ways, often with the aim of forcing confession by the detainee. Almost all detainees have been the target of some form of harassment, and each has bittersweet memories of the clashes.
6- Leave, tool of torture
One of the methods always used as a means of torturing families is the deprivation of individuals of leave as a right enshrined in law. Saeed Masouri, one of the oldest political prisoners in the Islamic Republic, is an example of this type of punishment. He has spent 22 years in prison without a single day off. Arash Nasri, a Kurdish prisoner in Rajai Shahr Prison, could not use his leave to see his dying daughter. He had asked the authorities to agree to his leave or to transfer him to the funeral of her daughter under the conditions of handcuffs and shackles, but both of his demands were denied. Ahmadian is another Kurdish prisoner in Rajai Shahr prison whose father died of a serious illness about a few months ago. He had asked for leave before his father died so that he could see his father for a few moments in the last days of his life. After his father's death, he asked the authorities to take him to his father's funeral, even with the conditions of handcuffs and shackles, which was also rejected.
Request for leave and even transfer of political prisoner Loghman Moradi, to see his sister dying of cancer, was opposed. Houshang Rezaei is another political prisoner who has spent the twelfth year of his imprisonment without a single day off. Pirooz Mansouri is serving his 13th year in prison, having been deprived of his leave for all these years. Hamzeh Savari is a political prisoner who was arrested at the age of 18 and is serving his 16th year in prison denied of not attending any of his family's weddings and funerals. Fariba Kamalabadi, a Baha'i prisoner, could not use her leave to marry her child. She had asked the authorities to go to the ceremony in handcuffs and shackles, but she was not allowed to do so.
7- Seizure of salary and property
Pressure on prisoners' families sometimes occurs in ways that are more unusual than what happens to the public. Shahram Rafizadeh says: "One of the worst harassments of my family during my detention was the severance of my salary. I thought my salary would be paid to my family in two or three months. I was getting a salary as a journalist, and although it was not much, it made me feel comfortable that my family had no problem, at least in terms of livelihood, but after my release, I found out that Saeed Mortazavi had contacted Etemad newspaper and threatened not to pay any income to my family. In February 1998, the bank account of Afshin Baymani's daughter was confiscated by order of Branch 22 of the Revolutionary Court without giving any reason. Mr. Baymani's daughter, who was nine months old at the time of her arrest, is now about 21 years old and a student. His bank account was confiscated without explanation by Branch 22 of the Tehran General and Revolutionary Court.
Also in June 1999, Branch 22 of the General and Revolutionary Court of Tehran issued a confiscation order against Mr. Baymani. According to this ruling, Mr. Baymani's land will be confiscated by the Imam's Executive Headquarters. At the same time, on the 10th of Khordad, the officers returned to this place with a confiscation order, but they faced resistance from the Baymani family and the residents of the place. Arguing that Hassan Sadeghi's father was an opponent of the Islamic Republic, the court ordered the confiscation of all his property after his death, and after a shop and property in Kashan, a house confiscation order for Hassan and Fatemeh (Maryam and Iman) 's two young children. Also exports the people living in it. The Imam's Executive Headquarters also confiscated the only house of Fatemeh Musanna and Hassan Sadeghi, two political prisoners in Evin and Gohardasht prisons, to deprive the children of the two prisoners of even having a shelter. The children now live in their grandmother's house.
8- Divorce
Security agencies that call themselves Islamic and claim that protecting families is one of the values and principles of this system are trying to dismantle the families of political activists. In recent decades, the security forces, especially the IRGC intelligence service, in addition to routine torture, have made a special effort to dismantle the lives of political prisoners' families, with the aim of completely destroying the moral of a prisoner. They try to create difference between couples by threatening and pressuring or using dirty methods and make them suspicious of each other.
The common denominator of interrogations is the interrogator's desire for the activists' private lives. Why is he married? What did he write to others in private chats and messages? But it is not just the curiosity of the interrogator. The interrogator soon puts together the framework of his favorite scenario and turns it into a sexually explicit story. Activists' private relationships in the interrogation room become a tool of pressure on them, for example, that the activist is in love with a friend before marriage and tries to accuse that person of extramarital affairs. Personal photos of people are a tool of pressure in the hands of the interrogator to put more pressure on people. In many cases, they are asked to falsely accept the dirty scenario of the security apparatus based on moral corruption and, for example, to confess to illegitimate relations (from the point of view of the interrogator) with someone. I have also spoken to at least a dozen prisoners in recent years, who were forced to make televised confessions by the security apparatus with the same tactic, and then, by giving the same misinformation to their spouses, caused the couple to separate. I do not know, but human rights organizations certainly have the names of these loved ones.
The image of the moral ruin of the system and the people who serve the security apparatus under the banner of the Islamic system and cross the borders of moral corruption is a clear proof of the distance from the minimum of humanity of those who claimed to have come to bring people to humanity. Such narratives are an undeniable document in revealing the nature of sovereignty that claims human dignity and reliance on pious morality. A government that wants to bring critics to psychological collapse by exerting the heaviest physical and mental pressures.
What was mentioned in this report are only small examples of names and violations of the rights of the families of political prisoners in Iran. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt argues that totalitarian governments always resort to intimidation to impose conformity with official ideology, and that threatening families is one of the most important weapons of these governments to curb dissent and dissent.
Dear Mr. Javaid Rehman!
If we want to understand the main reason for this volume of repression, imprisonment, torture, execution and even harassment of the families of these loved ones we should refer to the sentence of the Leader of the Islamic Republic. "It is obligatory to maintain order." Khomeini (the first leader of the Islamic Republic) made this issue the main pillar of the state religion in order to preserve and maintain the religious government by making it obligatory to maintain the government. He explicitly emphasized that in order to maintain the rule of the clergy led by Velayat-e-Faqih, monotheism could even be abolished; This ideological principle allows any crime under the pretext of maintaining order for the government. The esoteric or ostensible commitment of power enthusiasts to this ideological principle of the system turned the rulers into immoral human beings. When the maintenance of order is above all else, it is no longer a lie to suppress dissent, nor is it a sin to torture the innocents. Adherence to the fatwa of maintaining order is an obligation. The driving force of violence and all killings has been the Islamic Republic from the beginning until today. After Khomeini's death, Khamenei followed in the footsteps of this ideological principle that had turned the core of power in the Islamic Republic into a dangerous totalitarian current, and resorted to all means of repression, including torture, imprisonment, and the execution of innocents. The interests of the system became commonplace.
Arash Sadeghi / April 2021 / Rajai Shahr prison
[i][i] Arash Sadeghi is a political prisoner at Rajai Shahr, Karaj. He was arrested on June 9, 1995 and transferred to Evin Prison to serve his sentence. He was finally transferred to Rajai Shahr Prison in Karaj in September 1996. During his imprisonment, Mr. Sadeghi suffered from a malignant type of bone cancer called chondrosarcoma and underwent surgery. However, Mr. Sadeghi's deprivation of treatment continued to cause many physical problems, especially in the surgical area. He recently underwent 30 sessions of radiotherapy and motion therapy due to the spread of the disease and the involvement of two bones in the upper chest with chondrosarcoma, and a re-scan of the bone marrow confirms promising signs in the body. Since the publication of this letter we heard Arash was released from prison
[ii] Mr. Javaid Rehman is the special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Islamic Republic of Iran
This letter was translated by International Relationship committee of Union for Secular Republic and Human Rights in Iran
International@iran-republic.org
