2023-06-18 15:30:17
“Why am I not free to express my thoughts? Why can’t I speak freely, write in newspapers, speak on the radio or on television?” These are the words of a 16-year-old girl in a school essay. And although they were written more than 40 years ago, they are as true today as they were then.
In the Islamic Republic of Iran, girls still have to fight for this right, the regime acts with particular brutality against women in particular, they are less sure of their integrity, their security, their lives – why? What is it that fears them so much? The schoolgirl who presented these lines to her teacher in the early 1980s was not only brought before the school director for it. A little later she was imprisoned together with her father. And then, on June 18, 1983, Mona Mahmudnejad was hanged. She was 17 years old.
Not far from a polo field in the city of Shiraz, she was lined up with nine other women and executed. The Ten Wives of Shiraz. Among them was Roya Eshraghi, the 23-year-old young woman who saw her mother Ezzat hanged. The guards performed the executions according to age, so the younger ones had to watch the older ones die. Or the nurse Tahereh Arjomandi Siyavashi. Her husband Jamshid had already been executed just two days earlier, as one of six Baha’i men.
Watching die
Mona’s fate in particular moved the world at the time, since US President Ronald Reagan had submitted a plea for clemency. There had been an outcry when it became known that a minor was actually going to be executed.
It is the same helplessness with which we look at Iran today when another execution is carried out, we have to see that the German state cannot do anything even for German citizens like the women’s rights activist Nahid Taghavi and the entrepreneur Jamshid Sharmad.
The victims of June 18, 1983
Quelle: Bahá’í International Community
She remains in critical health in Evin torture prison. And he on death row, terminally ill. When hundreds of schoolgirls are poisoned, systematically, over months, brutally and in cold blood with poison gas. Videos circulated of the young women struggling for air after the attacks in the hospital, screaming in panic that they were going to suffocate. The journalist Nahayat Tizhoosh was one of the first to report on the poisoning attacks, it was a group of young people from Qom who informed her about it on social media: “The systematic poisoning attacks on schoolgirls is just one variant of the same perfidious keyboard. Schools in Iran are a particular focus of the regime, it is here that they enforce their ideology particularly brutally.”
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Since the death of the Kurd Jina Mahsa Amini in September 2022, since there have been nationwide protests led by young people, the situation in schools has also worsened. “The Revolutionary Guards have now established a presence inside schools and are targeting intimidation – especially girls.”
Mode of operation des Regimes
According to a report by Iran Wire, violent pornography and rape scenes are being played out to young women, warning them that if they continue with the protests, that’s what to expect. This, according to Tizhoosh, is the modus operandi of the Islamic regime. “We see it in the execution of Mona Mahmudnejad, in the 2003 murder of journalist Zahra Kazemi (a journalist who photographed the outside of Evin prison and died under severe torture for doing so), in the death of Jina Mahsa Amini. Only the oppression of women and their humiliation keep the power structures in tact.” Or put another way: Only then does the worldview work.
Executed 18 June 1983: Mona Mahmoudnejad
Quelle: Bahá’í International Community
Mona Mahmudnejad was a member of the Baha’i community, the largest non-Islamic religious minority in Iran. Since the establishment of the Islamic Republic, this has been particularly severely persecuted, partly because one of the basic tenets of the faith, which was founded in Persia in the mid-19th century, is gender equality.
Olya Roohizadegan now lives in Sydney, Australia. Like Mona, the now 80-year-old was imprisoned in the city of Shiraz in the fall of 1982, first to Sepah prison and then to Adelabad prison, on the third floor: the one for those sentenced to death. She is also a Baha’i. She said the guards asked her if she really believed that she had equal rights. They really wanted to drive that idea out. Roohizadegan was home with her three-year-old son, the two older boys living in England at the time, when officers stormed her home.
The son screamed
With a gun to her head, she was led outside, the small child clinging to the mother. They finally pushed her into a car and pushed her son aside. This one screamed. “The neighbors came out onto the street and tried to help me,” she says, but it didn’t help. Later, 15 people from that neighborhood petitioned the prison to release Roohizadegan, primarily because of their young child.
The prison staff’s response: They let the little boy visit his mother in prison, then threatened her. If she didn’t renounce the faith, they would kill the boy.
From the first years after the 1979 revolution, the newly established fundamentalist state leadership around religious leader Ayatollah Khomeini was particularly intent on destroying the Baha’i as a religious community. That was one of the great goals of the Islamic Republic. Religious committees and gatherings as well as any form of self-organization were forbidden, Baha’i were not allowed to study, teach or work as doctors, lawyers or civil servants. Baha’i children are only admitted to strictly Islamic schools.
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Defense to space
A nine-member community leadership was abducted, while another had all nine members executed. In 1993, the so-called Golpaygani Papers were leaked from Iran and the United Nations published them. In it, the head of the “Cultural Council”, Seyyed Mohammad Golpaygani, had long since made the persecution of the Baha’i a state doctrine: the government must behave towards them in such a way “that their progress and development is prevented”. “A plan must be developed to attack and destroy their cultural roots outside the country.” Employment is “to be refused as soon as they identify themselves as Bahai”. Influential positions, for example in the field of training, should also be refused. The document bears the signature of Supreme Revolutionary Leader Khamenei.
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The purpose of the interrogations that Olya Roohizadegan describes from the prisons was to break up the individual prisoners and to spy on the Baha’i organization. “They took us blindfolded to the cell and then often shot in the air, threatening to kill us today. Then they would test our knowledge of our own beliefs for hours and in between they would always ask; ‘Who is on this board? Who is Baha’i in that city?’ But we didn’t betray anyone.” However, if they went into the basement instead of the hallway, the tortures were due. Up to 250 hits with electric cables on feet or back. For many, the wounds became inflamed due to the lack of hygiene – and because they were abused again and again.
Remember your destiny
Roohizadegan’s husband was offered the option to “ransom” his wife, in return for which he had to turn over the family home, their only possession, to the Revolutionary Guards since he too lost his job. When the fellow prisoners found out about this, they were happy for Olya. “I will never forget their happy faces, their genuine joy. Yes, we love freedom! And what I will also never forget: I promised them that day that I would carry our story out into the world.” Immediately after her release, Roohizadegan fled to Pakistan and settled in Australia. She wrote a book and tells the story of the “Ten Wives of Shiraz”.
The show trials that were put on the women lasted only a few minutes each. “Islam or death?” was the question for everyone. None chose to convert to Islam. One replied, “I love Islam, but I’m a Bahai.”
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In the early morning of June 18, the death sentences were carried out. The young sociologist Zarrin Moghimi-Abyaneh was one of them. The year before she had visited the prison from which she died to visit a political prisoner there. Upon her return, she wrote: “I come tonight from Adelabad Prison, home of free spirits and butterflies… where behind these high stone walls lie chained spirits far greater than these walls. Where every stone cries out in wonder, marvels at these nameless heroes whose silent cries pierce the darkness…”
It is precisely this spirit that is evident again today in the many young women. “They won’t stop,” says journalist Tizhoosh. “These women of Gen Z and younger, they are even more rigorous. The worse it gets, the less afraid they are.”
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