Never Be Silent

areza:

[If I had anything to say to my home country’s Supreme Leader and had the opportunity to do so — this is what I would say, and it’s kind of long.]

On June 12th I was home in Iran and was I really excited about being able to vote in the elections in my home country for the first time. I saw so many people filled with a lot of hope for a better future for the country and wanting something better for the country, so many people hoping that more positive changes would happen, and for us to quit being viewed by the rest of the world as we have been for years. On the day of the election when I went to vote, I saw so many people that were happy to be voting for the first time and nearly everyone I came across had one person they were voting for — Mousavi and some for Karroubi. Two politicians who had promised to bring about positive change in the country, two people that had a good amount of respect from Iranians in the country, and even from ones that lived abroad.

As someone who was raised in the U.S. but spent a lot time during summers and winter going back to be with in my family in Iran, I saw so many things that needed change in the country, and I for once started to feel very hopeful that for once these things were going to happen. I felt hopeful that for once people wouldn’t view as some terrorist country and view us as people who didn’t want to be ‘secluded’ from the rest of the world anymore, and were very welcoming of change. Iran in some ways has come along way meaning that I have rarely ever come across anyone that was ‘anti-American’ as so many people have claimed us to be, or from what they see printed in the news about it.

The day after the election and the days and months already following it, are days that are embedded in my brain and that I can’t easily forget. There were horrifying things I saw happen. I was beaten, along with thousands of other people who just had one simple demand — wanting their vote back, demanding a recount, a fair recount this time. It was a simple demand, and could have been made easy if you just listened to the people that you’re supposed to ‘rule’ over and canceled the election and did a re-election, one that would have been fair, and where every vote would have been counted. The fraud could have been prevented. Instead, you chose to ignore those calls of a fraud, and instead chose to throw your own country into a political crisis that hasn’t ended yet. You chose to say that the election wasn’t a fraud, and said there hasn’t been a more fair election. If the election truly was fair and Ahmadinejad rightfully won, there shouldn’t have been a problem in canceling the election and having a re-election.

You ordered security forces to beat, arrest, torture and kill anyone who thought differently. You said 30 years ago that the biggest mistake that the shah ever made was not listening to the people and saying that everything that he said was right and what the people said was wrong — and now 30 years later you’re making the same mistake. You’ve chosen to ignore the people that are citizens of your country and have no problem killing them, and show no remorse. You’ve chosen to say that all the bloodshed that has happened — the people who were beaten and bloodied, the people were shot and killed, the people who were shot and died because they couldn’t get to a hospital in time, the people that one day were swung at with axes that you had basijis armed with and killed, and the people that were arrested and were tortured in a most inhumane way and treated like animals, and the ones who died from internal injuries — you said the bloodshed was not the fault of the government, but it was their own fault.

You have denied the claims of torture in so many of the prisons, the claims of rape that have happened in prisons, and ordered anyone that said differently to be arrested. You ordered for houses to be raided of anyone who participated in protests, or shouted anti-government slogans from their rooftops at night to be arrested. You banned foreign media from reporting what’s really going on in the country so other people can’t see the atrocities that you’re ordering to be inflicted on millions of innocent people. You violate the own laws you’re supposed to make sure are enforced, because people are finally standing up for themselves and making sure that their voices are heard, and are going to any length that you can to make sure that everyone is silence.

You have made sure that people remain in silence from the probably near 300 people that have been killed — that even their families remain in silence against what happened. You had security forces store bodies in frozen lockers and haven’t returned them to their families, and only let bodies of loved return on certain conditions: you force the families into silence by not letting them have a proper funeral for their loved one, have them not file a complaint against the government, and have them not go to the media about how their loved one died. Only then will someone get the body of their loved one back. You would make sure that people that were killed were secretly buried. On one of the days or protests, trucks had a lot of dead bodies of people that were killed from being shot or even swung at with axes — and either hid the bodies or drove them away on trucks to wherever they went to, like those people who were killed weren’t even human beings.

For the past 6 months you have tried to instill nothing but fear in your own people. You don’t care how many people the security forces have killed — and have put the number at a lower one than it actually is. You order security forces to raid people’s homes in the middle of the night and trash their place, destroy their computers, track people who use the Internet to make sure the truth is getting out there to the rest of the world that will listen and arresting those people who do it, and let people die in prisons from the torture.

These are supposed to be people that you are supposed to look after, and instead you would rather silence them by imprisoning them or having them killed, and for what? Because people want something better, people want positive changes, people want to better futures for themselves and for future generations? I don’t see how that is a crime and how you could be against this. Governments should be meant to protect their people — not torture and kill them.

You have chosen to attempt to silence and even kill the young people of Iran — most of which have all been between the ages of 18 and 29, the people that were born after the revolution, as we’re called — The Children of the Revolution. The way you’re oppressing your own citizens, is only making people fight even harder to obtain basic human rights that we should have and make sure that things are not better for us but for future generations. And it should be clear that no one is giving up until those changes happen.

The more you try to silence our voices, the louder we get to make sure that our voices are heard.

-Ahmad Reza

areza:

I find areza’s comments fascinating, but as an outsider I wonder if it’s possible to take down the Iranian Islamic regime? I’m an ignorant American, but to me I would assume there was more popular support against the Shah’s regime than there is against this regime? Isn’t there a lot more support for Ahmadinejad than ever was for the Shah? I’m likely to be influenced more by my Iranian friends here who are devout Shias, supporters of Ahmadinejad, and have expressed doubts over the outcome of these protests. Perhaps, my friends are silly and blinded by the ‘authority’ they believe the Ayatollah and Ahmadinejad have over the country?

It is possible to take down the Islamic regime. Just like the shah was overthrown in the revolution in 1979, the regime can be overthrown. It can take a lot of time for that to happen. Just like with the revolution, it took some time for it to actually happen but it did. But I’m sure that this time things will be a lot more difficult for it to happen.

I don’t think there is a lot of support for Ahmadinejad, and I think the millions of people who have protested in Iran, and even dissidents who don’t live in Iran who have done things, should show that people don’t support. If he had a larger amount of people who supported him, then what’s going on wouldn’t be happening and wouldn’t have been ongoing for 6 months already.

I hate to say it, but having been there I don’t see how any Iranian could ever support Ahmadinejad or the Supreme Leader. Someone has to be pretty blind to what’s going on if they can do that because they are two people who have no problem with the beatings, arrests, torture and killings of so many innocent people — and the Supreme Leader once said when this started that any bloodshed would not be the fault of the government but at the fault of the protesters and said that anyone who protests against the government is committing a crime.

The government isn’t even enforcing their own “laws” in the Constitution, because in the Iranian Constitution, so many things have been violated. People are allowed to have peaceful gatherings as long as no one is armed, and that’s what they are doing, so no one has violated any laws when it comes to that. They have also gone as far as raiding people’s houses without having warrants, which is doing it illegally — yet the government has security forces doing it anyway.

Along with that, it’s also in the Iranian Constitution that people equally enjoy the protection of the law and enjoy all human, political, economic, social, and cultural rights… but they are violating even that by arresting, beating, torturing and killing people for their political opinion.

I don’t like all the deaths that have happened [no one does] because it’s unnecessary, along with the beatings and the torture of innocent people and even of political prisoners. But there are some things that do come at cost, as sad as it is to say. If no one stands up to try to gain the rights they should have — there will be no change. There are consequences for all of the actions, but if no one does anything, then the oppressors win, nothing gets better. Things sometimes have to get worse before they can get better.

It’s not an easy thing for anyone who is involved in the protests, but people refuse to give up and refuse to remain silent about what’s going on. It’s about having persistent and just standing up for what’s right. It might not pay off right away, but who’s to say that in the long run it won’t? People just have to continue to stand up for what they believe in, otherwise it’s just like saying the lives that were lost meant nothing.

I’m an ignorant American with very little knowledge about Iran’s inner workings (not that it’s ever stopped me from posting about Iran. Profusely.) So you guys should definitely follow areza for a helluva lot more insight than you’ll see from me.