Sagg-e Zard

The following petition asks for the arrest and prosecution of Dr. Ebrahim Yazdi for his role in the summary trial, execution and mistreatment of detainees at the onset of the Islamic revolution in Iran. In light of the laws of the United States which consider all suspects innocent until proven guilty, there is plenty of room to weigh the extent of Dr. Ebrahim Yazdi's role and actions. The nation of Iran, and foremost the innocent families of the victims of the Islamic Republic must one day be answered by such an influential revolutionary persona as Dr. Yazdi who will enter the USA this month to seek medical treatment and also take part at a Columbia University panel called: US-Iranian Relations since 1953 and Prospects for the Post Bush Era Date: March 28, 2008 from 10:00 am to 4:30 pm EDT

Labels: Ebrahim Yazdi, Execution, IRAN, Islam, Mehdi Rahimi, Pinochet, Rahimi, TORTURE, Yazdi

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"They have broken my nose and my thumb...and

they have broken my toes, too.”

Zahra Kazemi as reported in Washington Post

The Islamic Republic of Iran, established on the basis of religious laws has been campaigning with a wave of public executions across the country in the past few months. This wave of executions is one of many witnessed since the inception of the Islamic theocracy. At its beginnings in 1979 the enemies of the “revolution” were executed by the hundreds everyday and the campaign of deaths continued for two years until the Islamic regime solidified its ruling apparatus. The campaign of death continued in many stages although it was generally swayed from the public view during the years of Iran-Iraq war, when scores of people were bussed by force to the fronts and were eventually killed on minefields or in dangerous operations. No Iranian has been immune to the version of Islamic justice practiced in Iran, in fact one can with confidence say that Islamic justice is carried equally amongst all the population, but the Iranian youth seems to receive the biggest brunt of it. I recall a boy in my school in the early years of the revolution who had been a rebellious student and had to repeat many grades, and was supposed to be in high school instead of middle school. He seemed generally unhappy, I often saw him walking alone in his brown suede jacket and was often in trouble with his teachers. One day he was caught by the school's government assigned minder (these officials were called Omoor-e Tarbiati Moallem, translated to Matters of Obedience Trainer). He was caught in a corridor writing on a picture of Ayatollah Khomeini the word “Pooch” (translates to: meaningless, empty or void of substance). This was then and is now considered to be a huge insult and even a blasphemy by the Islamist fanatics. By severely punishing the boy, the Omoor-e Tarbiati zealot was able to raise his already highly fanatic credentials. The boy who was probably around 15 or 16 years old was put in custody and tortured, his family were also put under huge pressure for raising a son with anti revolutionary sentiments.

Later that year the Omoor-Tarbiati zealot gave a passionate speech to each classroom giving us the news of the boy's martyrdom. The death did not occur in a prison, the zealot continued, the boy had recanted and had become a believer of the revered Imam Khomeini. He had wanted to prove his loyalty by volunteering to go to fight at the war front where he became a martyr of Iran-Iraq's bloody war. I still remember the chilling affect that the announcement made on me. All students seemed to have somehow stopped breathing, there was not a pen that dropped throughout the zealot's sermon like session. This is the way a theocracy conducts its business even in classrooms. The appetite of the regime for death has not subsided since. Death is what it feeds from and there is no one and nothing that the monstrous apparatus will relinquish in its quest for more power.

After its almost 28 years campaign, the regime has no qualms about executions. Today it performs many in public. It has no problem with forcing confessions from Dr. Haleh Esfandiari and her likes, it has extracted amazing information from many on the television. If we look a little back to another campaign of fear in the late nineties, there were a series of serial murders across Iran that were eventually linked and proved to be the works of the Islamic government and masterminded by the super powerful clergy: Hojatoleslam Ali Fallahian.The victims were opposition figures, artists, writers, university professors, scientific researchers, businessmen, doctors, students and people from all walks of life who the public had been attracted to inside and outside of Iran. Also in the past few years it is become common to find scores of charred bodies, burnt beyond recognition outside of metropolitan areas. We will probably never know why or how they were murdered. All the killings, the methods, in the dozens of waves that have transpired are just a tactic and tool of the monstrous regime to not only quiet and extinguish discontent at every level, but to instill fear and uncertainty of survival on the rest of the population. The repulsive regime's policy towards the Iranian people dictates conformity, or else the examples of disobedience are abundant, numbering over seventy thousand killed. But the example in the psyche of the Iranian people who have all been touched in someway by the Islamic Regime's killing campaigns, is a horrific personal path to death.

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Labels: Child Soldier, Execution, Fallahian, Haleh Esfandiari, Iran Iraq War, TORTURE, Zahra Kazemi

Marina Nemat talks about her book and her harrowing experience at the age of 16, being taken to Tehran's notorious Evin prison: Listen to the interview.

Labels: Evin, Execution, Marina, Nemat, Rape, TORTURE