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Iran’s Interrupted Lives

          
          5/31/2011
          Iran 's Interrupted Lives - Human Rights i...
          Iran's Interrupted Lives
          October 1, 2010
          Other recent newsletters
          Human rights advocate Shiva Nazar
          Ahari, 26, was sentenced to a six-
          year prison term in Tehran on
          September 18, 2010
          In late September, as Iranian President Mahmoud
          Ahmadinejad was in New York asserting his government's
          respect for human rights, several young students in Iran
          were receiving lengthy prison sentences for their efforts to
          speak out in defense of those rights. Indeed—as a small
          photography exhibition about student repression in Iran at
          Georgetown Law School this month powerfully reminded us—
          hundreds of Iranian students, journalists, and bloggers have
          been jailed, many of them in deplorable conditions, since the
          disputed elections of June 2009. And though the matter has
          received little attention in the press, many more continue to
          be arrested and sentenced.
          I was struck by the setting of the exhibition . In Georgetown's
          McDonough Hall, where it was held, law students hurry to and
          from classes. They walk past or stop to look at the
          photographs—photographs of men and women, also students,
          the same age as themselves. But these men and women are
          Iranian. The Georgetown students are free to come and go,
          to speak their minds, to argue with their professors; the
          Iranians in these photos have experienced life differently.
          A slide show from “Interrupted Lives: Portraits of Student
          Repression in Iran”
          Ashkan Sohrabi died from bullet wounds during the mass
          protests that followed last year's contested presidential
          elections. Shiva Nazar Ahari, 26, an advocate for women's
          equality and for children and political prisoners, was being
          sentenced in Iran this month to a six-year prison term for her
          peaceful activities, even as the exhibition was ending.
          Manijeh Hoda'i, a Tehran university student, one of the many
          pictured here, was executed along with her brother in 1982
          for opposition to the Islamic Republic. Ahmad Batebi was
          sentenced to death when The Economist pictured him on its
          front cover holding aloft the bloody T-shirt of a fellow student
          during student protests in 1999. His sentence was reduced to
          ten years under international pressure, but he did not escape
          mistreatment and solitary confinement. He crossed the
          Iran: In Suooort of the International
          Campaign Against the Death Penalty
          February 22, 2011
          Iran Uses the Holidays to Announce the
          Imminent Execution of a Student
          December 24, 2010
          Iran Cannot Hide the Truth Behind
          Sakineh
          December 10, 2010
          Iran: A Reflection on the Death Penalty
          and a Failed Anti-Narcotic Campaign
          October 31, 2010
          Iran's leadership guilty of crimes against
          humanity
          June 8, 2010
          Three Iranian human rights activists
          receive the Lech Walesa Prize
          September 29, 2009
          Terror in Buenos Aires : The Islamic
          Republic's Forgotten Crime Against
          Humanity
          July 18, 2009
          Authorization Denied: The high cost of
          the public expression of dissent in Iran
          July 9, 2009
          Neither Free Nor Fair, Elections in the
          Islamic Republic of Iran
          June 12, 2009
          Thirty Years Aao in Iran
          February 11, 2009
          >> And more.. .
          Visit the Human Rights and
          Democracy Library
          International Human Rights
          Organizations' Reports on Human Rights
          Abuses in Iran
          Testimonies of Victims and Perpetrators
          iran rights.org/engl ish/newsletter-15.ph p
          1/4
        
          
          5/31/2011 Iran 's Interrupted Lives - Human Rights i...
          border into Iraq in late 2007 and is now living in the United of Human Rights Abuses in Iran
          States.
          Iran's Pro-democracy Voices
          The record on display of students arrested, jailed, tortured
          and executed makes for grim viewing, all the more striking >> And more.. .
          for its spareness and understatement. Beside each
          photograph is a brief description, powerful in its simplicity,
          providing name, age, university affiliation, circumstances and
          dates of arrests, sentencing, eventual fate. At the bottom of
          each panel, in tiny print, are the names of the thousands of
          students caught in the web of Iran's intelligence apparatus,
          its secret police, and its judicial and prison system. There are
          echoes here of the Vietnam War Memorial's wall of names,
          except that those commemorated in this exhibition had their
          lives destroyed by their own countrymen, not by an enemy
          army.
          Sponsored by the Abdorrhaman Boroumand Foundation and
          the Georgetown chapter of Amnesty International, the
          exhibition was organized by two sisters, Ladan and Roya
          Boroumand. Their father, after whom the foundation was
          named, was an Iranian lawyer and democracy activist who
          was assassinated in Paris in 1991, almost certainly by Iranian
          agents. Among other valuable work, the Boroumands have
          created a database of some 12,000 executions carried out in
          Iran since the establishment of the Islamic Republic.
          The display at Georgetown included three small school desks,
          the kind in which political detainees in Iran are required to sit
          to write responses during interrogations and, once they are
          broken, to put on paper their “confessions.” Roya
          Boroumand, who takes me through the exhibition, asks if I
          want my picture taken sitting behind one of these desks. I
          shudder and refuse. I have no desire to relive the long hours,
          days and months I srent under interrogation and writing
          answers to questions at Evin Prison.
          The exhibition is aptly named “interrupted lives.” These
          young men and women, you think, should be playing soccer
          and basketball, could have gone to graduate school, might
          have been lawyers and doctors. Instead, jail and exile, and
          aborted schooling and careers, have been their fate.
          Manuchehr Es'haqi was arrested at age 13 and spent ten
          years in jail for “corruption on earth.” He now repairs coffee
          machines in Sweden. He looks at the camera through
          haunted eyes. “I am still not really living. Nothing makes me
          really happy,” the small inscription quotes him as saying.
          Hamed Ruhinejad, a university student arrested after the
          2009 elections, lingers in jail, despite multiple sclerosis and
          the loss of sight in his right eye. Bahareh Hedayat, the well-
          known human rights and women's rights activist and a
          leading member of the Office for Fostering Unity, a student
          organization, has been in and out of jail since 2006. Only 25,
          she was sentenced in May to nine-and-a half years for
          sneakino out on riohts issues.
          iran rights.org/engl ish/newsletter-15.ph p 2/4
        
          
          5/31/2011 Iran!s Interrupted Lives - Human Rights i...
          Thousands of young Iranian exiles, fleeing the unwelcome
          attention of the secret police, have sought refuge in towns
          and cities across Turkey, waiting for a government to grant
          them asylum. The country of my birth, I think to myself,
          brutalizes its own youth, robs them of their futures because
          they dared dream of freedom and liberty.
          There are now a considerable number of political exiles in the
          United States as well. I met three of them at the exhibition.
          Ali Afshari, who is pictured in the exhibition giving a speech
          during his days as a student leader in the 1990s, was
          imprisoned three times and tortured. He refers in a matter-
          of-fact way to “the time when I was broken.” He gave his
          interrogators the “confession” they wanted, recanted once
          out of prison, and came to the US once he was allowed to
          leave the country.
          In 2009, physics student Ali Reza
          Firuzi Ali, 19, was sent to Evin Prison
          for insulting the Islamic Republic on
          his blog and for “acting against
          national security, propaganda
          against the Islamic Republic, and
          organizing illegal gatherings.”
          Kian, a photo-journalist, was beaten up and his equipment
          seized on two occasions during the post-election protests last
          year. During a desperate search for medical attention after
          the second beating, he accidentally ended up in a hospital
          belonging to the Intelligence Ministry. A sympathetic doctor
          hastily patched him up and sent him away before he caught
          the attention of security agents. He speaks of a continuing
          clampdown in Tehran and parents who try to keep their
          children off the streets.
          The other exile I spoke to is a political blogger who recently
          fled Iran and understandably did not want to give his name.
          However, he wanted to talk about Hossein Derakhshan, the
          father of political blogging in Iran. Derakhshan has a
          controversial history. Once an advocate for democracy, he
          turned into an unrelenting critic of the reformist Green
          Movement. Some even suspected him of working for the
          government. Whatever his loyalties, somewhere along the
          way, he seems to have fallen foul of Iran's security agencies.
          He has been held in prison for the past two years. My
          interlocutor's concern for Derakhshan was not misplaced. A
          few days after my interview, on September 22, sources close
          to Derakhashan's family reported there had been a trial and
          that the prosecutor had asked for the death sentence.
          No one knows how many bloggers there are in Iran. John
          Leyne of the BBC cites a figure of 65,000. My interlocutor
          iran rights.org/engl ish/newsletter-15.ph p 3/4
        
          
          5/31/2011 Iran!s Interrupted Lives - Human Rights i...
          says there are many “social bloggers” but perhaps only 100
          serious political bloggers. Still, they play an important part in
          keeping political networks alive and as sources of information
          for the international press, whose direct access to Iran is
          increasingly limited. The intelligence agencies regard them as
          dangerous. In addition to Derakhshan, several other bloggers
          have ended up in jail, sometimes for sending out a single
          message.
          There are exhilarating moments in the exhibition. One photo
          shows a lone, chador-clad woman facing a clutch of soldiers.
          They point batons and bayonets at her; she points back with
          a single, angry finger. Another photograph shows a student
          at Amir Kabir University, as he stands during a speech by
          President Ahmadinejad. He is holding a hand-made poster
          high above his head. It reads: “Amir Kabir is no place for
          you, Fascist President.” An amusing montage of headshots
          shows men wearing women's scarves or in full hijab—a tactic
          adopted by protesters in 2009 to show support for a student
          leader whose picture in female dress the security authorities
          had faked, claiming he fled a demonstration in women's
          clothing.
          I leave the exhibition angry at the thought of so many lives
          fractured, but also uplifted by the courage of these women
          and men who return to the battle again and again despite
          arrests, jail and even the threat of execution. The words of
          Shiva Nazar Ahari remain with me: “After all, this is our
          country. If we leave, there will be no one left.”
          “Interrupted Lives: Portraits of Student Repression in
          Iran/' was shown at Georgetown University Law
          School from September 13 to September 17, 2010. A
          film and slide show about the exhibition is available
          on the web site of the Boroumand Foundation .
          September27, 2010 1:55p.m.
          Copyright © 2011, Abdorrahman Boroumand Foundation I Back to toD
          iran rights.org/engl ish/newsletter-15.ph p 4/4
        

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