Ten o’clock in the morning on 11 November. I check out an Internet site on human rights in Iran to find out what has happened to Ehsan Fatahian, who was put on death row yesterday. I learn that he was indeed hung earlier this morning. My world crumbles. It has been a long time since I have felt so deeply depressed – since my mother committed suicide, to be precise.
Who was Ehsan Fatahi? I don’t know. Probably an ordinary young man… certainly not someone who deserved the death penalty. After all, nobody does. That barbarous punishment must be banished from the face of the Earth for evermore.
It is my birthday today. My mother always celebrated our birthdays. I open my emails and learn that Sherko Moarefi and Habibollah Latifi are facing the immediate threat of execution in Iranian Kurdistan. I sign the petition addressed to the Secretary General of the United Nations. When will we finally learn to behave like human beings?
Since the 12th of June, the date of the recent Iranian elections, every time I see pictures of the atrocities being committed in Iran (demonstrators being bludgeoned, torture, stories of prisoners being raped, arbitrary arrests and hangings, etc.) I think of my mother and her sufferings. I tell myself none of these people deserve such treatment. I tell myself my mother never deserved such pain, she was goodness personified.
My parents, my sister and I had been living in Belgium since 1977 when, in the late 1980s, we found out that my mothers’ house in Teheran was to be confiscated. At that point she decided to go to Teheran for a month. She stayed there for four years and she never returned. My mother threw herself out of a window, and I plunged into hell.
What was my mother like? She was a woman who loved LIFE. She loved flowers and poetry and she loved her family above all else. What happened to her? What did the system in power in Iran do to her that filled her with such pain and anguish that she no longer wished to live? With the passing of time I learned to accept that none of these questions would ever be answered and that for me, the only way out of the abyss was to live my life 200% - to LIVE it for her AND for myself, even more passionately and more humanely.
And what about Ehsan Fatahi? What was he like? I saw on the Amnesty International website that he and two other Iranian Kurds, Habibollah Latifi and Sherko Moarefi were condemned to death apparently « in reprisal for a spate of assassinations and attempted assassinations of officials in Kordistan province in September 2009. » Then I read on the senanews site that the intelligence service had threatened Eshan’s family, forbidding them to hold a ceremony for their dead son or talk to foreign media.

The current Iranian regime is destroying its own children, its own people. I call this annihilation of all the Eshans a genocide, which is what it is because they are the life-blood of Iran, the ones with the ability to make it one of the best loved and most advanced nations in the world.
Two days have passed since Eshan’s murder. I have to do something. I decide to send his parents flowers and a letter of condolences. Then I think back to a television programme about Mr and Mrs Klarsfled and their hunt for Nazi war criminals. I tell myself that those responsible for the genocide in Iran will never be able to escape the Iranian people. Wherever they go, someone will find them. Our world has become too small and methods of investigation far more effective. Not a single one of their exactions will go unpunished. NOT A SINGLE ONE. Yet I believe there is still time for the Iranian regime to demonstrate its good will by organising a democratic referendum monitored by international observers to identify and organise the type of political system desired by the majority of the population. That is the only solution still available to the Iranian regime – A REFERENDUM.


In spite of all the tragedies that have rocked our lives over the past 30 years – those of my family and the whole Iranian people – all I want is the good of all and I am sure there are millions of Iranians just like me, people who have been to hell and back and know that the only solution is more goodness and integrity, more light and more humanity. We survivors and all the other democrats and human rights defenders will grant asylum to all the Iranian « Khmer Rouge. » We will guarantee them a fair trial where all their human rights are respected. We will take our inspiration from the Tribunal for Rwanda, the post Apartheid process, the Nuremberg Trials and the periods following the Franco and Pinochet regimes. Then all those found guilty will spend the rest of their lives doing community service (building roads, bridges, schools, libraries, hospitals, youth centres, etc.) I have even thought up a system where every day at least five human rights organisations carry out unannounced spot-checks on prisons to make sure that no-one is suffering any kind of mistreatment.

Soon the Iranian génocidaires will be judged by a court that is fair and humane. Only one question remains. Some Cambodians have shown themselves to be capable of forgiving their torturers. Will there be a single Iranian who is ready to forgive these Iranian “Khmer Rouge”?

Azita Rahimpoor
Brussels, 14 November 2009
bonjour.freedom@gmail.com