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Stop orders for repression and killings!
January 2011
The Iranian community has for some time undergone concerning developments being intensified every day. The developments are responses to the struggles by people who have been trying to achieve their long run democratic goals as steadily and deliberately as possible.
The response of the Islamic ‘Republic’ to these right and growing demands was nothing but its ever-increasing repressions of people. The extent of the concerns, however, is known when we see that the more resistance people show in their demands for freedom and democracy, the more brutality by the regime they face. The increase in the number of arrests and executions in the last few months has been suggestive of the horrific course. The latest example of these repressions is connected to passing death penalties in the Iran’s dungeons including in the jails in Tehran and Zahedan where a number of executions for new strugglers are being planned. The new wave of arrests, highly unfair trials and hostile killings coincides with plans for ‘elimination of subsides’, militarization of cities as much as possible, and exercising increased pressures on the Iranian journalists inside and outside the country and cultural and social activists. Fariborz Raees-Dana, a member of Iran’s Writers Association, has been one of the latest arrests by the Iranian security forces.
In this course, the ‘maneuvers’ to put down the ‘street riots’ in Iran which remind us of the ‘Maneuver of 12,000 members of Basiij (Mobilization) Forces in Tehran’ just immediately before the presidential election of June 2009, are suggestive of not only the people’s preparation to pursue their demands but also of the regime’s plan to exercise more violence against them. The purpose of the orders for ‘anti-riot maneuvers’ and killings in prisons is nothing, as in the past, but to spread of the seeds of intimidation among freedom-seekers, to prevent the democratic movement from being deep, and to continue plundering the national revenues.
While condemning the new wave of repressions by the regime, we call for all people interested in democracy to turn the uncontrolled violation of Islamic rulers in Iran into an instrument for enlightenment and organising people as extensively as possible, using more creative and effective activities. The brave resistance by the strugglers in prisons could be a model for all the activists in movement. This type of the resistance will proclaim ‘end of dark night’.
We end this by referring to a piece of writing by Soltan al-Ulama of Khorasan, a freedom fighter within the Iranian Constitutional Revolution of 1905-09, for which he was tortured every night during his imprisonment and then sent to the ‘Store’, where he was thrown and kept into a well for a while; the poor man died shortly afterward with inhuman hardship. Addressing the then monarch, Nasser-al-Din Shah Qajar, the write is speaking in a way as if he is now addressing to Iran’s Velayat-e Faqih (Guardian of the Jurist):
I wish you would come to sense from drunkenness given to you by your monarchy, and have a glance at your state and the others. Have all the monarchs of the world abandoned their duties and occupations and been busy slaughtering? Are all the other nations of the world prisoners of the repression and sensuality by their monarchs, as our people are? … Have you not realized yet that no monarch can grapple with his nation?
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