Mother of Imprisoned Activist Describes Beatings and Threats by Interrogators to Kill Family
JANUARY
9, 2019
In the wake of revelations
of the torture of labor activist Esmail Bakhshi, others have stepped forward to join the
public outcry over abuses committed against detainees in Iran by detailing
their own experiences of torture in Iranian prisons. The mother of imprisoned
civil rights activist Atena Daemi recently spoke to Center for Human
Rights in Iran (CHRI) about the abuse directed against her daughter.
“I cried when I saw Mr.
Bakhshi talking about his torture. It made me angry,” Masoumeh Nemati toldCHRI on January 7. “I thought I should also write
about the hell we have gone through. I should make the people aware that this
is not just Mr. Bakhshi’s story. It’s my daughter’s story, too.”
Since November 2016, Daemi
has been serving a seven-year prison sentence for meeting the
families of political prisoners, criticizing the Islamic Republic on Facebook
and condemning the 1988 mass executions of prisoners in Iran.
Recalling the
day Judge Mohammad Moghiseh sentenced her daughter, Nemati said: “Her
father and I were not allowed to go inside the court so we were standing behind
the entrance door where I heard the things Mr. Moghiseh told my daughter.”
“He called my young
daughter a prostitute and said she would not have been standing there if she
had been a wholesome girl. He told Atena she deserved the death penalty and
called her a social parasite. He said he would not condemn her to death for my
sake and instead issued a 14-year prison sentence.” (The sentence was later
reduced on appeal to seven years.)
Nemati continued: “It’s
very hard for a mother to hear those things. I broke down right there. I got so
sick the court clerks brought me some water. I wouldn’t have suffered as much
if they had beaten Atena. I will never forgive the judge. There isn’t a night I
don’t think about what he said.”
“The day they came to
arrest my daughter, one of the agents confiscated a photo that showed Atena
standing next to a few people. The agent said the photo proved Atena was a
prostitute because she had not kept a distance from the men in the photo. On
several occasions, the Revolutionary Guards in Ward 2-A in Evin Prison told me
I had not raised my daughter properly and I let her do whatever she wanted and
didn’t find a husband for her.”
Daemi’s mother added:
“Atena was in solitary confinement for three months. She never told me how she
had been tortured but I heard her friends and sisters say that during
interrogation agents had threatened to kill me and her sisters in a staged
accident. They said they could easily kill her sisters because they knew where
they worked and which university they went to.
Hearing these things
during interrogation is more agonizing and painful than physical torture. What
did my 27-year-old daughter do? They are still trying to press bogus charges
against her.”
Describing the assault against her and her daughter Hanieh in
front of Evin Prison in February 2018, Nemati told CHRI: “At the time Atena had
been dragged and beaten during her transfer from Evin to Gharchak Prison (in
Varamin, south of the capital) and we had gone to Evin to ask about her
situation. Atena’s father dropped us off and went to park the car.”
“When we reached the front
office we saw Soheil Arabi’s mother who had also come there to
ask about her son. It was very crowded. Mohammad Ali Taheri’s followers were also there.”
“Suddenly 10-15 agents
came at us with tasers and batons. They ordered us to get into a van. I stood
in front of my daughter to protect her from electric shocks and baton blows. I
was badly beaten. I was just trying to make sure nothing happened to Hanieh.
Then the agents grabbed my feet and threw me inside the van. We were all taken
to a courthouse where several men kept cursing us.”
Nemati added: “The men
said I was a grown woman; I should be at home. Don’t I have a master? Was I
loose? They said so many ugly things. My arms and legs were bruised and
swollen. Then my back started to hurt. I haven’t been able to leave the house
for a month and a half. The doctors say I need an operation on my back. I’m
sure that my problem was caused by the beating I received that day and all the
stress since then. Did I deserve to be treated that way? I’m a mother who was
trying to get information about her daughter.”
“After the assault, when
the authorities found out I was Atena’s mother, I was encouraged to press
charges. The authorities claimed the attackers were plain-clothed agents who
acted independently. But how could they not know what their own agents were
doing? I asked, ‘Are you going to investigate if I pressed charges? You still
haven’t done anything about Atena’s lawsuits, never mind mine.’”
“To this day, I haven’t
pressed charges. But my question to judiciary officials and the Intelligence
Ministry is: Why were I, a mother, and my young daughter, beaten for trying to
ask about my imprisoned daughter?”
“If my daughter gets out
of prison alive, she will describe everything,” Nemati warned.
Nemati also used her
daughter’s Instagram page to discuss her Daemi’s abuse inside prison. On
January 7, she wrote: “I’m the mother of Atena Daemi, a girl who has
been tortured in prison many times. When my daughter was in solitary
confinement, the thought that she was being tortured broke me up many times. I
was never able to ask my daughter about the torture she endured during
interrogations… but torture is common during solitary confinement,
interrogation and imprisonment in Iran’s judicial system and prisons.”
The public revelation of Bakhshi’s torture by security
and judicial agents has led to a public outcry in Iran on social media, with
hundreds of journalists and activists demanding an investigation and punishment
of those responsible for the violations of both domestic and international
laws. Many have noted that the torture of Bakhshi was not an isolated incident.
Arash Bahmani, an Iranian
journalist, wrote: “It’s very interesting to see the reaction of
those who, after reading Smaeil Bakhshi’s letter, suddenly realized there’s
torture going on in the prisons and though the prisons were a paradise. Torture
has always been committed under all governments in the Islamic Republic since
the beginning until today, especially against political prisoners and prisoners
of conscience.”
The psychological and
physical abuse, beatings, torture and even deaths in Iranian prisons have been
long documented and condemned by the United Nations and international human
rights organizations.
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