Detention of hundreds in the protests in Iran
To Amnesty International
3 August 2005
Irene Khan
Secretary General
Amnesty International
CC: International media and all human rights organisations
Dear Ms Khan,
Detaining, torturing, assassinating and executing dissidents are a regular part of the life of the people of Iran under the Islamic Republic. Every protest is met by brutal violence. In the past few days, as several cities have erupted in revolt, a large number of people have been arrested.
People of Iran are right to protest against a regime that has suppressed, imprisoned, tortured, flogged, executed and impoverished them for the past 26 years. People of Iran are right not to want such a regime.
This Monday’s protest in the city of Sanandaj, in the west of Iran, against the arrest and killing of protesters, and for the release of political prisoners, was violently attacked by the regime’s security forces. Over 400 people - most of them young people, some barely teenagers - have been arrested and taken to unknown locations.
Today, 3rd August, over 30 people were arrested in Saqez. Last week, at least 50 people were arrested in the city of Ahvaz, in the south. Hundreds of others have been detained during demonstrations in Tehran, Mahabad, Sardasht, Oshnavieh, Marivan and a number of other cities.
The Sanandaj detainees include the following:
1- Keyvan Molla Mirzaee
2- Farhad Sabery
3- Omid Asadi
4- Shaho Abdollahi
5- Hasan Tari Moradi
6- Worya Zamani
7- Ali Reza Nosrati
8- Fayegh Moradi
9- Vahab Mohammad Rezaee
10- Arsalan Sadeghi Nia
11- Amir Ali Vaissi
12- Raouf Heydarian
13- Pooya (Surname N/A)
14- Milad Mahbobi
15- Sirwan Keshavarz
16- Kamal Mohammadi
17- Sasan Aghayari
18- Farzad Salawati
19- Shaho Amjadi
20- Habibollah Saatkhani
21- Javad Rahimi
22- Salah Feizi
23- Hiresh Rahimi
24- Tofigh Seifi
25- Farhad Ali Khani
26- Teymour Ghobadi
27- Khaled Amjadi
28- Hiwa Hosseini
29- Nima Fallahi
30- Saman Bahman Zadeh
31- Jamal Ali Mohammad
32- Farid Sobhani
33- Iraj Kanani
34- Arman Amini
35- Daruish Armand
36- Salah Zamani
37- Afshin Habibi
38- Hamid Nafsi
39- Afshin Gharibi
40- Vahab Ali Khani
41- Hamid Tazinee
42- Roya Toloui
43- Shaho Salimi
44- Madeh Ahmadi
45- Jalal Ghavami
The fate of most of those detained is unknown. Their families and people are deeply anxious and expect organisations like yours to take immediate action to seek information about them and to secure their release. A 13-year old child who was released today in Sanandaj, following a gathering of their families, has been tortured. His back is inflamed and bears blue marks, which are the result of flogging.
Clearly those arrested are in serious danger, and are being beaten up and abused. We urge you to take whatever action you deem appropriate, as a matter of urgency, to enquire about their status and to urge the immediate release of the above and all the political prisoners.
Please do not hesitate to contact me should you require any further information in this regard.
Best regards,
Khalil Keyvan
Secretary of the Worker-communist Party of Iran – Committee Abroad
* Open letter to world human rights organisations
Dear Sir/Madam:
You are aware that for the past 26 years, people of Iran have been living under one of the most barbarous regimes in the world. In Iran there is no freedom of expression, and calls for it are answered by torture and execution; loving is a crime, punishable by flogging and stoning; women are legally regarded as third-class citizens and sexual apartheid rules; children are slaves; workers are starved; drug addiction is rampant, in particular among the youth, thanks to the distribution of cheap drugs; prostitution is widespread, driven by growing impoverishment; tens of thousands of children roam the streets, unprotected and uncared for; people queue up to sell their kidneys to make ends meet… The list is endless.
You must also be aware that every attempt by the people to improve their lives, any protest against this situation, is routed. The following are just some of the atrocities committed by the regime over the past few weeks alone:
• A gathering by several thousand people outside Tehran University to call for the release of political prisoners was brutally attacked. The mother of Manouchehr and Akbar Mohammadi, two students imprisoned for political dissent, was arrested and taken to an unknown location;
• In the city of Mahabad, in the west of Iran, a young man called Showaneh Ghaderi was arrested and gruesomely murdered on July 10th. To spread fear, his body was tied to the back of a truck and dragged on the streets;
• In the city of Sanandaj, also in western Iran, a young political prisoner called Vafa Amani was murdered during a prisoners’ protest;
• A dissident activist by the name of Bayazid Ma’roofi was murdered. The protests by people at these murders that erupted in several cities in Kurdistan were brutally suppressed. At the time of writing, several people have been killed and hundreds arrested and imprisoned;
• On July 17th the death sentence against Kobra Rahmanpour, a 24-year old woman, was re-confirmed;
• On July 19th two teenagers, one under 18, were hanged in public in the north-eastern city of Mashhad for homosexuality;
• The textile workers’ protest in the central city of Kerman on July 27th was viciously attacked; a pregnant woman protester was dragged on the road and kicked in her back, while another worker had her leg caught under the wheel of a car, forced to move on by the security forces;
• Over the past few days scores of people in the southern city of Ahvaz have been detained for protesting against the embezzlement of their meagre savings by fraudulent financial networks linked to top officials of the regime.
There are currently thousands of prisoners languishing in the Islamic Republic’s prisons under physical and psychological tortures. There are also highly secret prisons where lesser known political prisoners are being held in appalling conditions. The recent revelations by a former official of the Dutch Embassy in Iran lifted the veil just a little from the plight of the political prisoners in the Rejaee Prison in Karaj City.
The Iranian government cannot even tolerate criticisms from its former friends. Akbar Ganji, a former top official of the Islamic Republic, and a number of his co-thinkers, have been condemned to slow death in solitary confinement.
Hundreds of thousands of workers have been driven towards starvation and slow death by not being paid for months or even years. Even the slaves used to be fed by their slave-drivers. A few days ago, Gholi-zadeh, a worker at Ghale-Zari mine in the north eastern city of Birjand, set fire to himself after management’s refusal to pay him his back wages. He later died in hospital. He had asked the management for an emergency loan to pay for the cost of treating his sick wife. The workers at this mine have not been paid for the past 17 months. Similar tragedies happen almost every day.
Pulling kids out of school by parents of working-class families because they can’t afford it, is a growing phenomenon. Family break-ups, addiction and begging on sidewalks have become the lot of unemployed workers.
Despite all these atrocities, the international media, for political reasons and following their governments’ foreign policies, fail to reflect much of the facts about Iranian society. Unfortunately, people and their rights have been subordinated to the political interests and ties of states and corporations, otherwise, knowledge of just a fraction of the atrocities committed in Iran in the past 26 years would be enough to stir the conscience of humanity and move it into action in defence of the rights of the people in Iran. Every one of these crimes is enough for an international court to be set up to put the leaders of this regime on trial. The execution of over 100,000 political prisoners from 1981 to 1983, the secret extermination of tens of thousands political prisoners in August 1987 and the assassination of hundreds of political dissidents abroad are part of the criminal case against the Islamic Republic and its heads.
I urge you to treat the fate of the people of Iran, living as they are under the Islamic Republic’s rule of terror, with a greater sense of responsibility and more proactively. Use all within your power to protest at this situation. Defend the rights of the people of Iran and their struggle for liberation from repression and terror.
Regards,
Khalil Keyvan
Secretary of the Worker-communist Party of Iran – Committee Abroad
* Iran: Textile workers’ protest brutally attacked
On Wednesday this week a protest of about 100 textile workers in the south eastern province of Kerman - most of them women - was violently attacked by the Iranian regime’s security forces, according to the state news agency ILNA.
The workers of Asia Wool-Spinning Company were protesting at the non-payment of their wages and benefits. Each worker in this company is owed up to 3 million Tomans (about $3,500) in unpaid wages. The workers blocked the main road outside the factory to highlight their protest.
However, the security forces started attacking the workers. A pregnant woman was dragged on the road and kicked in the back. Another worker had her leg injured when it was caught under the wheel of a vehicle, which had been ordered to move by the security forces.
The workers said their attempts over the years to bring their plight to the attention of the authorities had led them nowhere.
Hundreds of thousands of workers in Iran continue to suffer from long delays in the payment of their wages – sometimes for up to two years; a fact also highlighted by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) in this year’s International Labour Conference.
The disastrous consequences of unpaid wages for workers in Iran, who can barely survive on the basic pay in any case, are all too obvious. Putting children to work, sale of body organs, prostitution and suicide are just some of the tragic results of the poverty that has been imposed on large sections of Iranian workers and their families.
Withholding workers’ pay must be treated as a grave criminal offence, and the government in Iran held to account for this catastrophic situation for Iranian workers.
We urge you to publicise the above as widely as possible and condemn the Islamic Republic of Iran in the strongest possible terms. Please send your letters of protest to khatami@president.ir and a copy to us.
* To the all trade Unions
Support textile workers of Kashan!
Textile workers have started a march from Kashan to Tehran (the capital) in protest against none payment and late payment of their wages.
More than 2500 textile workers are currently on strike, because they have not been paid for more than 14 months. A protest march has started since this morning, Wednesday, 20th July. It started by around 200 of textile workers and along the way others joined them in groups. At the moment more than 600 are marching towards Tehran.
We are strongly concerned that the workers might face violent suppression from the authorities. we see it our duty (and we have been specifically asked by the protesters) to raise awareness about this movement and try to get international support in order to stop the government arresting and imprisoning the protesters.
Dear friends
Workers in Iran are among the most deprived people on earth. They are denied the right to organise and each time they strike or protest about something, they face violence, arrest and imprisonment. In Iran, worker’s wages are not usually paid on time, and there are long delays, months or even sometimes years in paying their wages. The employers and factory owners, simply refuse to pay workers’ wages on time. According to regimes own statistics, workers in Iran are already living under the poverty line and even if they are paid on time, the wages are not enough to get them the most basic necessities of life. You can imagine the misery of a family who has not been paid for months. Most workers are not able to provide the most basic needs of their families, their children are not able to go to school and in many cases they find themselves begging in the streets.
Friends
Despite the brutal suppression and imprisonment and torture, workers in Iran have been fighting for their rights year after year. In some occasions they have received international support and solidarity and have been successful. Today, workers in Kashan need your support. We must not let this protest end up in violence and be suppressed. We must seek international support and help them win. Please help us spread the news of their strike and get people to support them any way they can.
We will be in touch and keep you informed of the progress of this protest.
Khalil Keyvan
Secretary of the worker-communist party of Iran- organisation abroad
20/07/05
BM Box 8927
London WC1N 3XX, England
wpiabroad@yahoo.co.uk