Unimaginable brutality in Iranian regime’s prisons unveiled by an escaped Ahwazi political prisoner

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By Rahim Hamid    

By Rahim Hamid

Ghazi Haidari is drowning in his own blood. The prominent Ahwazi writer, historian and activist from Arab Ahwaz region in the south and south-west of Iran was imprisoned and brutally tortured by the regime there for the ‘crime’ of human rights advocacy. Although he managed to escape the country, reaching Turkey, he’s now undergoing a different kind of torment as the injuries to his internal organs inflicted by the torture leave him in constant agony, coughing up blood from his ruptured lung. Although he was initially given medical treatment for his terrible injuries, his inability to pay his medical costs of over US$11,000 mean the hospital has withdrawn all treatment but a saline drip, leaving him in unimaginable agony and unable to sleep for fear he’ll choke to death on his own blood.

“They’re leaving me to die slowly as I was dying in prison, without any medication,” he told Huffington post. “I’m asking all human rights organizations and media to help save my life and transfer me to a safe country to get treatment, I am suffering a lot please feel my pain at night I cannot sleep in fear of suffocation from my lung bleeding. I have to spit up blood all night.”

Forty-two-year-old Haidari, the author of a book entitled ‘Ahwaz through Ahwazi Eyes’, detailing the human rights abuses against Ahwazi Arabs in Iran (which was published under a pseudonym, Ahmed Tamimi, for his own protection) is renowned among Ahwazis for his tireless activism. Although he worked as an engineer since graduating in 2000 with a degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Ahwaz, his passion was and is human rights advocacy.

He worked tirelessly on raising awareness of Ahwazi history, culture and news, coordinating with fellow Ahwazi activists not only in Ahwaz but overseas, including Mostafa Hetteh in Canada and others in the UK, being one of the founders of the Maysan news website, the first of its kind for Ahwazis, detailing Ahwazi culture, history and current events and highlighting the Tehran regime’s racism and subjugation of the Ahwazi people.

During an uprising in 2005 against regime oppression, the Maysan site documented the vicious brutality of the regime’s security forces against protesters and bystanders with hundreds of photos, videos and first person accounts, providing many news agencies with material for reports. One of his colleagues, Kamal Deghlawi, a photographer whose work appeared on the site, was shot in the eye by regime troops while reporting on the uprising.

Another focus of Haidari’s activism was the Elam Studies Center which he established to study the social, economic and historical aspects of Ahwazi civilization during the earlier Elam period.

His work in supporting equal human rights and documenting Ahwazi culture and civilisation made Haidari a target for the leadership in Tehran, with successive Iranian regimes brutally repressing the Ahwazi people and subjecting them to systemic anti-Arab racism, as well as working ceaselessly since the 1925 annexation of the previously autonomous emirate to eradicate all traces of Ahwaz’ Arab identity, culture and history.

Haidari was arrested on May 6 2009 by officers from Iran’s infamous Ministry of Intelligence. For the next 100 days, during which he was kept in solitary confinement, he was subjected to barbaric physical and psychological torture. Among the torture methods he recalls being subjected to by the regime torturers are having his toenails pulled out with pliers, having his hands laid flat while his fingernails were hit full force with a hammer, having a bucket of water suspended by a string hung from his testicles, guards using pliers to tear his skin and lips, and guards punching him around the head until his ears bled – he still suffers pain in both ears as a result.

After surviving this catalogue of horrors, he was transferred to the notorious Karoon Prison in Ahwaz city on August 8. There he was informed that an Iranian regime ‘Revolutionary Court’ had sentenced him to ten years imprisonment at a trial conducted without his knowledge while he was detained at which he had no representation. Sentence was passed on the basis of ‘confessions’ extracted during the torture which he had been forced to sign. Despite the lack of any trial or even notification of legal proceedings, he had no way to challenge the court’s verdict. The farcical charges against him included ‘disturbing the public’, ‘forging anti-regime propaganda’, ‘posing threat to national security’, ‘acting against national security’, having ‘foreign ties’, ‘espionage’, and ‘sabotage’, as well as ‘inciting insurgency’ among Ahwazis by running the Maysan website. To add insult to injury, the regime’s thugs tortured him into giving them the website’s passwords and security details, and shut it down.

Despite the gross injustice of the sentence on false charges, Ghazi said wryly to Huffington post, “The sentence was a great relief to me and my family because they [the regime] had already threatened me with the death penalty.”

Despite everything, he still continued to stand up for the rights of other political prisoners facing similar horrendous injustice. Talking about his time in the Karoon Prison, he recalls, “I was humbled and honored to meet four innocent Ahwazi political prisoners who’d been sentenced to the death penalty based on false confessions obtained under barbaric torture by the regime agents and their fabricated “confessions” were shown in two broadcasts by Press TV, a subsidiary of state-owned broadcaster IRIB to portray to the viewers they are criminal people and deserve to be executed. I couldn’t stay silent and say nothing. I objected to the unfair sentence imposed on them by writing a letter of appeal on their behalf protesting against their harsh torture and the confessions and their trial.

Since my sentence was 10 years, I told myself, ‘Right, now let’s focus on the case of these four prisoners and get their voice out, let them be heard outside prison’. I wrote a letter of appeal for them and encouraged them to read it out while I filmed them; we had a phone camera and I filmed them while they were reading it, saying ‘Our sentence is unfair and we confessed under torture and didn’t have any lawyers and we’re calling all human rights organizations to step in and save us from execution.’ ‘We are calling on human rights organisations and especially UN Special Rapporteur Ahmed Shaheed to try to stop our death sentence’. ‘We emphasize in this message that we were peacefully demonstrating against the discrimination policies used by Iranian regime against the Arab people in Ahwaz, but we are accused of waging war against God and the Prophet and corruption on earth’. ‘Our demands were peaceful and demanded the realization of the political, economic, and social rights of our defenseless nation, but we were sentenced to death’. ‘In the dark cells, we subjected to the most severe mental and physical torture while blindfold was on our eyes’. ‘We participated in the anniversary of the glorious April 15th Intifada, which was the uprising of the hungry, the barefooted and the oppressed Arabs.’ ‘We revolted against the Persianization and racial disfranchisement, and while we were holding peaceful gatherings, we were arrested by regime forces’. ‘We were threatened if we do not comply and confess to everything that was dictated to us under torture then we will face with death’. ‘We were tortured with the presence of prosecutor named Ahmadi and he threatened us with execution, then Branch 4 of the Revolutionary Court, headed by Morteza Kiaisty, sentenced us to death.’

Rahim Hamid is an Ahwazi Arab freelance journalist and human rights advocate who mainly writes about the plight of Ahwazi Arab people in Iran.

 

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