One day in the summer of 1988, with cuts and bruises all over my body, I was sitting in a cell in the notorious Evin Prison thinking about when would my turn come? (In July and August of the same year, some 30,000 political prisoners were executed in Iran).
There were more than sixty of us in that tiny cinder-block room. Like Pythagoras, for hours we would put our heads together trying to find the best way to sleep in a space designed for not more than 15 people. Even when that equation was solved then there were some of us just back from torture chambers in need of a little more room to stretch for a few minutes.
That may seem history now since it was a long time ago but it is still the most real of all memories for me especially at nights.
Since I fled from Iran, one question in my mind keeps nagging, why the mullahs’ regime is tolerated for so long by the west? Some years back I would have said that the western governments were seeking something which never existed in Iran; the moderates.
Years passed and the government which the mullahs until two years ago were vigorously trying to present as a symbol of their moderation is long gone. Then the question popped up again; what now? What are the western governments waiting for this time? Ahmadinjad is a self explanatory phenomenon who is bragging about the regime’s handling of Iranian people.
More than 250 people have been executed in the past eight months. Many hanged before the very eyes of their families. One such gruesome view was organized by Tehran’s Prosecutor General Said Mortazavi last month.
On August 2, in an elaborate spectacle, the mullahs’ regime publicly executed Majid Kavoussifar, 28, and his nephew Hossein Kavousifar, 24; two years after they shot a notorious judge, Hassan Moghaddas to death. Moghaddas, well-known for his role in 1988 massacre of Iranian political prisoners was killed by the two individuals on the 17th anniversary of the massacre. Majid’s mother was among the crowd crying in disbelief calling on God to give his son back. Such scenes are commonplace in Iran.
"We have to have at least one public hanging every week in Far Province," deputy judiciary in southern Fars province commented on recent drive for "enhancing public security," the government-run news agency Fars reported on July 11, 2007.
"Since Ahmadinejad’s ascendancy to power more than 60 political prisoners have been executed and 600 other prisoners are on death row in the notorious Gohardasht Prison in western Tehran," Mrs. Maryam Rajavi the leader of the Iranian opposition said in the official NCRI statement on August 28, 2007.
Last week mullahs set a new record by hanging 31 prisoners; approximately five prisoners per day. Now the deputy prosecutor in Fars Province would be more proud since he had asked for "one hanging every week;" he got five a day instead.
It is extremely exasperating to witness the western governments’ silence and readiness to bend backwards in order to appease the mullahs in Tehran.
As once Abraham Lincoln said, "To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men."
Mostafa Nadari is a former political prisoner who spent 12 years in the mullahs’ prisons, five years of which in solitary confinement and is residing in exile in Canada.