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
