If there is a single message I could send to those who have faced such brutality by going out into the streets following the fraudulent elections in Iran, it would be to say to them, “You did exactly what we hoped you would do. Only, you did it better.” The young, the old, the women, the men, the people not just in Tehran but in cities all over Iran, they made those of us outside our country feel so much emotion. We have watched the images captured on You Tube of young people making human chains as they faced armed militia, of individuals facing the basiji who attacked with clubs and axes and shot at them from rooftops. If these protesters were afraid, it didn’t show. They continued to move forward. Brave, strong, and voicing their call for freedom louder than I have ever heard it before.
On Facebook and Twitter postings and in countless emails I’ve received over the last three weeks, there is a common theme, and it is of extreme pride. So many posts have simply read, “Today I am proud to be Iranian.” The people who are standing up against the government have no doubt, made us proud.
To be outside the country and to watch the images that are now coming from Iran, the images that are clear indications of the extreme violence being used against our people, there isn’t an Iranian among us who doesn’t feel a sense of helplessness, of duty, of wanting them to know how much we appreciate the huge sacrifice they are making for all of us. Many of us want to return. We have recreated pieces of our culture in places like Los Angeles, Toronto, and London, but there is nothing like home. The only thing that stops us is a theocratic dictatorship that has ruled our country for the last thirty years.
So we do what we know. We protest. We take to the streets to support our brothers and sisters in Iran. We rally, we march, and we give speeches so we do not forget the heavy price our brethren are paying even as I write these words.
As the days have turned into weeks, as the prisons in Iran are filled to capacity and spilling the political prisoners over into football fields, we are left wondering what more we can do to help. We continue to meet, but where do we go from here? How do we best support our fellow Iranians from so far away?
First of all, we have to be strategic in our fight at this point. It is no longer just a matter of showing up with a sign to chant slogans for democracy, though that is certainly still acceptable. But we must take what we know, and build the collective consciousness. We must fight with our intellect, with out voices, with our pens, and with our minds. We must build an awareness in whatever country we have called our second home, so that the citizens of the U.S. or Great Britain, or Canada, or wherever we are, doesn’t put the situation in Iran on page 15 of the daily newspaper. Keeping the media interested and engaged is a challenge. They are looking for the news that sells, and how quickly we've seen the passing of celebrities take the focus away from the fight on the streets of Iran. We have to find ways through networking with the media to keep them focused on the situataion there.
Secondly, we have to unite in our cause. Too often we begin fighting among ourselves. This helps no one, and at the end of the day, we all do really want a version of the same thing for Iran. But we must check out egos at the door as we begin to find ways of supporting our brothers and sisters in Iran.
Third, this is a unique moment in time, because we are approaching the anniversary of 18 Tir—the July 1999 student protests that followed a brutal attack on the dorms at Tehran University. Those protests were, in my mind, and in the minds of many who participated in them, foundational to the current protests. We were the first to question the regime in such a blatant way, and the government wasn’t prepared for us. There were only some 50,000 of us. Many people wanted to come out into the streets with us, but they were afraid. The protesters of June 2009 are far greater in numbers. They are not just students, but they are a cross section of the population. Those who ten years ago might have been afraid to come out, put all their fear aside following the elections of 2009. At the same time, the government was more prepared this time. They had seen protests before, and they had planned for how they would deal with them. At least this time, the government's cruelty is brought to light by technology that sends feeds across the world so that we can see the evidence of their brutality in the broken bodies of the protesters.
The ten year anniversary of 18 Tir presents an opportunity for Iranians everywhere to come out in numbers impossible to ignore. Every year students remember 18 Tir in Iran. This year inside and outside Iran we must remind the Islamic Republic of what we started then, and what has continued until today. We cannot let those who have died at the hands of the Islamic Republic, die in vain.
Finally, there’s no way of knowing how long a fight we are in for. In July of 1999 the protests lasted just five days. The protests of 2009 have gone much longer, but the government has become very adept at dealing with those they believe are against them. The fight from within Iran will need to be fought from many directions, not just with blood, sweat, and tears, but again, with the intellect, and hitting them where it hurts economically as well. By this I don’t mean sanctions that ultimately hurt the people inside, but by boycotting the government from inside.
Most of all, we must believe in our efforts both inside and outside of Iran. We must be persistent, and we must not give up no matter the obstacles we face. We are the sons and daughters of Cyrus, and we are free.
Monday, June 29, 2009
Saturday, June 27, 2009
An Open Letter to President Barack Obama
Dear President Obama,
In just a few days we will mark the tenth anniversary of the student uprisings in Iran that cracked the door open for the protests we are seeing today in response to the June 12, 2009, elections in Iran. I was part of that student movement, and was one of the organizers of the protests that followed violent dormitory attacks at Tehran University in July of 1999. I spent several months in Iranian prisons before I was released and fled the country.
Over the last several weeks I have spent many hours meeting with Iranians here in the U.S. and also abroad. I have had phone calls with many others who are still in Iran. The question we have all been asking one another repeatedly is, "Where is Obama Now?"
I followed your campaign and election, and though I'm not a U.S. citizen, as the founder of an international student organization, Global Student Alliance, I endorsed your run for the presidency. What was most appealing to me and many like me, is that you took a stand on human rights. As you must know, human rights in Iran do not exist under the theocratic rule of the last thirty years. This isn't to say that Iran's record prior to the revolution of 1979 was without a need for vast improvement, but nothing can compare to the barbaric treatment of Iran's citizens under the Islamic Republic's rule.
The protesters who are at this very moment disappearing from their homes at an alarming rate, face a terror that is unfathomable. I have lived a version of what they are going through, and I can tell you firsthand that those of us who have been tortured in Iranian prisons will live the rest of our lives with the physical and mental scars we incurred at the hands of our torturers. Those being arrested at this time are being used as examples, and they face the most vicious treatment.
As ugly as it is, I feel as someone who lived through this that I must give you a view of what current prisoners face. It is likely that the capture will include a fairly violent beating before prisoners have been taken into the jail. Next the questioning will begin. Prisoners will be interrogated night and day, and many will lose touch with time, not even knowing how many days have passed.
The torturers will likely use one of their most common torture methods, beating the bottoms of prisoners' feet with some a plastic cord. When I first heard about this sort of torture before I experienced it, I couldn’t imagine that hitting the bottoms of the feet could cause such pain. In reality there are so many nerve ending in the feet that after the first couple of blows, the pain is no longer centralized in the feet but goes all over the body. They will question the prisoners between blows asking for names of others who worked against Islam. They will sit on their backs as they continue beating their feet. After each session they will take the victims outside where they will be forced to jump on their throbbing bloody feet for twenty minutes or more. This is done so that blood comes back into the feet and the healing begins. The torturers believe that as the body begins to regenerate, it ensures that the next beatings will be even more painful than the last.
The torture rooms are often intentionally kept dark and along the top of the walls they will have a large metal pipe that runs the length of the ceiling and is sturdy enough to hold the weight of the prisoner. This was where they practice a torture method called Ghapani. The victim puts one arm over his or her shoulder, reaches around and grabs the other wrist from the waist. The wrists are then secured, either with a rope or handcuffs, and the victim is hung from the ceiling by the wrists. The pain is excruciating. There are no words to describe it.
Between these beatings prisoners will be placed in solitary confinement to await their next interrogation. The cells are usually nothing more than small closets with a single light bulb hanging from the ceiling that burns 24 hours a day. A favorite means of psychological torture is to make prisoners watch the torture sessions of their friends and family. I recall a brother and sister who were in Tohid Prison with me (a prison that has since been closed and made into a museum), and the brother was forced to watch as his sister was repeatedly raped. I was in jail with two close friends, Manouchehr and Akbar Mohammadi. The interrogators would often have us watch each other being tortured. Akbar died in Evin Prison in 2006. In the end, I lost many friends who were seeking non-violence and a secular, democratic Iran, at hands of Iran’s prison system.
As gruesome as the images are that I have just described, I believe a president who believes in protecting human rights must have an understanding of what is at stake, and for this reason I have shared my experiences.
Over the last few weeks I’ve been concerned by your reaction to the happenings in Iran. In all honesty, my sense is that you don’t have very strong advisors on Iran, or that those you do have are part of a political agenda that you may not completely grasp. I mean no disrespect by this, Mr. President, but I ask that you take a look at a few of the actions that in my mind, and in the minds of many Iranians, seems lacking focus or understanding about the current situation in Iran:
1. Letter to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei: Many in the Iranian community were shocked that an American president would send a letter to the Supreme Leader in the weeks preceding the election. While the content of the letter is still unclear, the message it sent to our community was that it didn’t matter who won, the U.S. would work with them. Given the outcome of the elections and the obvious fraud that took place, it would seem that the regime was given a carte blanche go-ahead to do whatever they wanted in the election, and that the U.S. would bless their actions. I hope this wasn’t the actual message, but surely, President Obama, you must admit that this was strategically the wrong message to send to the citizens of Iran who face the basiji thugs in the streets of Iran in the name of freedom and democracy.
2. Invitation of Iranian Diplomats to U.S. Embassy Fourth of July Parties: Several weeks back a cable went out to all U.S. Embassies and Consulates, saying the U.S. diplomats could invite their counterparts from the Islamic Republic of Iran to their Fourth of July celebrations. The invitations have since been retracted—in an of itself an Iranian cultural faux pas that is considered rude at best. The real issue here is, Mr. President, how could anyone have advised you that inviting the Islamic Republic of Iran to a celebration of Independence Day in the U.S. was a good idea? This is a fundamentalist regime that has no respect for human rights or independence of any kind. The message that these invitations sent to the Iranian people is that the U.S. accepts the regime and all its cruelty.
3. U.S. President’s Reaction to Khamenei’s June 19 Declaration: During Friday prayers on June 19, 2009, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei issued a warning to peaceful protesters that they would not be tolerated. This warning was in truth, a death sentence to protesters. It gave basiji thugs the go-ahead to shoot protesters at will and take prisoners based on little or no evidence. Mr. President, you must have known what this proclamation meant to human rights in Iran, yet your reaction was tepid at best. You issued a statement that you were “very concerned,” while reporters had to literally pull details out of your spokesman, Robert Gibb, who finally conceded that you “condemned the violence” used against protesters.
Mr. President, people are being flung off of bridges, shot with assault rifles from rooftops and beaten with clubs and axes until their bones are broken and they are bleeding in the streets. The injured are being taken from hospitals and put in prisons, and basijisare pulling people from their homes in the middle of the night to be taken in for hours of questioning and torture. Thousands of innocent people who are starved for democracy and freedom are sitting in prisons, unsure of their futures, unsure if they will live another day. They are young, old, male, female, upper, middle and working class, educated, uneducated, and illiterate. They are professors, doctors, bazaaris, and laborers. The cruelty of the regime of the Islamic Republic of Iran cares not at all for their background, but rules with equality when it comes to its barbaric acts against its citizens.
President Obama, please take a moment to consider the following:
1. For the last eight years the U.S. president repeatedly said he supported the people of Iran, but behind that support was an unspoken threat of military violence. He grouped our country as part of the “Axis of Evil” to justify veiled threats that “All options were on the table.” I did not support military action against my country then, and I still don’t today. In July of 2006 I was the first Iranian to organize an anti-war against Iran rally. But three years later, some sort of protection must be offered to the innocent people on the streets of Iran. This is the job of the United Nations, yet Ban Ki-Moon has been no stronger in his call to action than you have. Mr. President, you must push the U.N. on this. It is a human rights issue, and if Ban Ki-Moon is following your lead, it is imperative to remind him of the very charter of the U.N. to promote peace, freedom and "reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights."
2. The U.S. cannot recognize the fraudulent elections of June 12, 2009. Mahmoud Ahmadenejad is not the elected president, and for the U.S. to respond to him as such gives further strength to Khamenei’s dictatorship.
3. Mr. President, you must take this opportunity to evaluate your team of advisors on Iran policy. In this country we literally have the best and brightest academic minds from Iran. These are people who were born in Iran, who have a clear understanding of the complex workings of its political structure, its history, and its cultural nuances. In all due respect, I suspect that among the members of your team you have those with very distinct political agendas when it comes to the outcome of the Islamic Republic’s future in the world. You must take a look and leverage those in this country who are capable of being neutral in respect in religion and past politics. I urge you to surround yourself with some of the great minds you have right here in the U.S. who are qualified to advise you in the best possible way.
In closing, President Obama, I ask from the bottom of my heart that you recognize the blood on the streets of Iran as a problem not for Iran and not for the United Stattes, but as a problem for our humanity. We cannot dance around these issues and when asked to respond chalk them up to not wanting to “meddle” with Iran’s internal processes. We are all watching how you support the Iranian people, Mr. President. Iranians outside and inside Iran watch. Residents of the U.S. watch, and I, Mr. President, as someone who supported your march to the White House, wait and watch to see how you help support democracy and freedom for the people of Iran.
In remembrance of all those who have given their lives for peace, freedom, and democracy, I remain forever grateful,
Reza Mohajerinejad
In just a few days we will mark the tenth anniversary of the student uprisings in Iran that cracked the door open for the protests we are seeing today in response to the June 12, 2009, elections in Iran. I was part of that student movement, and was one of the organizers of the protests that followed violent dormitory attacks at Tehran University in July of 1999. I spent several months in Iranian prisons before I was released and fled the country.
Over the last several weeks I have spent many hours meeting with Iranians here in the U.S. and also abroad. I have had phone calls with many others who are still in Iran. The question we have all been asking one another repeatedly is, "Where is Obama Now?"
I followed your campaign and election, and though I'm not a U.S. citizen, as the founder of an international student organization, Global Student Alliance, I endorsed your run for the presidency. What was most appealing to me and many like me, is that you took a stand on human rights. As you must know, human rights in Iran do not exist under the theocratic rule of the last thirty years. This isn't to say that Iran's record prior to the revolution of 1979 was without a need for vast improvement, but nothing can compare to the barbaric treatment of Iran's citizens under the Islamic Republic's rule.
The protesters who are at this very moment disappearing from their homes at an alarming rate, face a terror that is unfathomable. I have lived a version of what they are going through, and I can tell you firsthand that those of us who have been tortured in Iranian prisons will live the rest of our lives with the physical and mental scars we incurred at the hands of our torturers. Those being arrested at this time are being used as examples, and they face the most vicious treatment.
As ugly as it is, I feel as someone who lived through this that I must give you a view of what current prisoners face. It is likely that the capture will include a fairly violent beating before prisoners have been taken into the jail. Next the questioning will begin. Prisoners will be interrogated night and day, and many will lose touch with time, not even knowing how many days have passed.
The torturers will likely use one of their most common torture methods, beating the bottoms of prisoners' feet with some a plastic cord. When I first heard about this sort of torture before I experienced it, I couldn’t imagine that hitting the bottoms of the feet could cause such pain. In reality there are so many nerve ending in the feet that after the first couple of blows, the pain is no longer centralized in the feet but goes all over the body. They will question the prisoners between blows asking for names of others who worked against Islam. They will sit on their backs as they continue beating their feet. After each session they will take the victims outside where they will be forced to jump on their throbbing bloody feet for twenty minutes or more. This is done so that blood comes back into the feet and the healing begins. The torturers believe that as the body begins to regenerate, it ensures that the next beatings will be even more painful than the last.
The torture rooms are often intentionally kept dark and along the top of the walls they will have a large metal pipe that runs the length of the ceiling and is sturdy enough to hold the weight of the prisoner. This was where they practice a torture method called Ghapani. The victim puts one arm over his or her shoulder, reaches around and grabs the other wrist from the waist. The wrists are then secured, either with a rope or handcuffs, and the victim is hung from the ceiling by the wrists. The pain is excruciating. There are no words to describe it.
Between these beatings prisoners will be placed in solitary confinement to await their next interrogation. The cells are usually nothing more than small closets with a single light bulb hanging from the ceiling that burns 24 hours a day. A favorite means of psychological torture is to make prisoners watch the torture sessions of their friends and family. I recall a brother and sister who were in Tohid Prison with me (a prison that has since been closed and made into a museum), and the brother was forced to watch as his sister was repeatedly raped. I was in jail with two close friends, Manouchehr and Akbar Mohammadi. The interrogators would often have us watch each other being tortured. Akbar died in Evin Prison in 2006. In the end, I lost many friends who were seeking non-violence and a secular, democratic Iran, at hands of Iran’s prison system.
As gruesome as the images are that I have just described, I believe a president who believes in protecting human rights must have an understanding of what is at stake, and for this reason I have shared my experiences.
Over the last few weeks I’ve been concerned by your reaction to the happenings in Iran. In all honesty, my sense is that you don’t have very strong advisors on Iran, or that those you do have are part of a political agenda that you may not completely grasp. I mean no disrespect by this, Mr. President, but I ask that you take a look at a few of the actions that in my mind, and in the minds of many Iranians, seems lacking focus or understanding about the current situation in Iran:
1. Letter to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei: Many in the Iranian community were shocked that an American president would send a letter to the Supreme Leader in the weeks preceding the election. While the content of the letter is still unclear, the message it sent to our community was that it didn’t matter who won, the U.S. would work with them. Given the outcome of the elections and the obvious fraud that took place, it would seem that the regime was given a carte blanche go-ahead to do whatever they wanted in the election, and that the U.S. would bless their actions. I hope this wasn’t the actual message, but surely, President Obama, you must admit that this was strategically the wrong message to send to the citizens of Iran who face the basiji thugs in the streets of Iran in the name of freedom and democracy.
2. Invitation of Iranian Diplomats to U.S. Embassy Fourth of July Parties: Several weeks back a cable went out to all U.S. Embassies and Consulates, saying the U.S. diplomats could invite their counterparts from the Islamic Republic of Iran to their Fourth of July celebrations. The invitations have since been retracted—in an of itself an Iranian cultural faux pas that is considered rude at best. The real issue here is, Mr. President, how could anyone have advised you that inviting the Islamic Republic of Iran to a celebration of Independence Day in the U.S. was a good idea? This is a fundamentalist regime that has no respect for human rights or independence of any kind. The message that these invitations sent to the Iranian people is that the U.S. accepts the regime and all its cruelty.
3. U.S. President’s Reaction to Khamenei’s June 19 Declaration: During Friday prayers on June 19, 2009, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei issued a warning to peaceful protesters that they would not be tolerated. This warning was in truth, a death sentence to protesters. It gave basiji thugs the go-ahead to shoot protesters at will and take prisoners based on little or no evidence. Mr. President, you must have known what this proclamation meant to human rights in Iran, yet your reaction was tepid at best. You issued a statement that you were “very concerned,” while reporters had to literally pull details out of your spokesman, Robert Gibb, who finally conceded that you “condemned the violence” used against protesters.
Mr. President, people are being flung off of bridges, shot with assault rifles from rooftops and beaten with clubs and axes until their bones are broken and they are bleeding in the streets. The injured are being taken from hospitals and put in prisons, and basijisare pulling people from their homes in the middle of the night to be taken in for hours of questioning and torture. Thousands of innocent people who are starved for democracy and freedom are sitting in prisons, unsure of their futures, unsure if they will live another day. They are young, old, male, female, upper, middle and working class, educated, uneducated, and illiterate. They are professors, doctors, bazaaris, and laborers. The cruelty of the regime of the Islamic Republic of Iran cares not at all for their background, but rules with equality when it comes to its barbaric acts against its citizens.
President Obama, please take a moment to consider the following:
1. For the last eight years the U.S. president repeatedly said he supported the people of Iran, but behind that support was an unspoken threat of military violence. He grouped our country as part of the “Axis of Evil” to justify veiled threats that “All options were on the table.” I did not support military action against my country then, and I still don’t today. In July of 2006 I was the first Iranian to organize an anti-war against Iran rally. But three years later, some sort of protection must be offered to the innocent people on the streets of Iran. This is the job of the United Nations, yet Ban Ki-Moon has been no stronger in his call to action than you have. Mr. President, you must push the U.N. on this. It is a human rights issue, and if Ban Ki-Moon is following your lead, it is imperative to remind him of the very charter of the U.N. to promote peace, freedom and "reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights."
2. The U.S. cannot recognize the fraudulent elections of June 12, 2009. Mahmoud Ahmadenejad is not the elected president, and for the U.S. to respond to him as such gives further strength to Khamenei’s dictatorship.
3. Mr. President, you must take this opportunity to evaluate your team of advisors on Iran policy. In this country we literally have the best and brightest academic minds from Iran. These are people who were born in Iran, who have a clear understanding of the complex workings of its political structure, its history, and its cultural nuances. In all due respect, I suspect that among the members of your team you have those with very distinct political agendas when it comes to the outcome of the Islamic Republic’s future in the world. You must take a look and leverage those in this country who are capable of being neutral in respect in religion and past politics. I urge you to surround yourself with some of the great minds you have right here in the U.S. who are qualified to advise you in the best possible way.
In closing, President Obama, I ask from the bottom of my heart that you recognize the blood on the streets of Iran as a problem not for Iran and not for the United Stattes, but as a problem for our humanity. We cannot dance around these issues and when asked to respond chalk them up to not wanting to “meddle” with Iran’s internal processes. We are all watching how you support the Iranian people, Mr. President. Iranians outside and inside Iran watch. Residents of the U.S. watch, and I, Mr. President, as someone who supported your march to the White House, wait and watch to see how you help support democracy and freedom for the people of Iran.
In remembrance of all those who have given their lives for peace, freedom, and democracy, I remain forever grateful,
Reza Mohajerinejad
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