Translator's
Note: Shadi Sadr is a
young feminist attorney and journalist who has been in the forefront
of women's rights struggles in Iran during the past few years. She
was abducted by plainclothes police on July 17, and released eleven
days later. She was arrested once before at a women's rights
demonstration in 2006. In this article dated August 14, 2009, she
responds to Ayatollah Mehdi Karroubi's open letter to Ayatollah
Hashemi Rafsanjani about the need to investigate the rapes of young
protesters imprisoned after the forged June 2009 election. Sadr
begins her article specifically with the case of Taraneh Mussavi, a
young victim whose identity has been questioned by the Iranian
government.
Taraneh Mussavi may or may not be that green-clad
girl who was arrested at a demonstration near the Ghaba Mosque on June 27. The
girl who was raped, suffered from a torn uterus and a torn anus, landed at a
Karaj hospital, and was finally found dead in an unknown cemetery in northern
Iran. Regardless, her name is the secret name for all the women who have been
raped in prisons since the 1979 Revolution. What I want to say is that Taraneh
Mussavi is not just one individual.
Mehdi Karroubi writes: "Some individuals have raped detained girls with such
force as to cause tears and injuries to their sexual organs." His claim may be
entirely false, but that does not make any difference. The following are not
exceptions: When Azar Al Kanaan (Nina Aghdam) speaks in front of the camera
about how she was raped at Sanandaj prison. When Roya Toloui speaks of how she
was raped by her interrogator. When Monireh Baradaran writes in her book Simple
Truth, about Tahereh, a woman remembered by most prisoners from the 1980s, a
beautiful woman who lost her sanity after being raped by a Pasdar
["Revolutionary Guard"]. When [Canadian Iranian Journalist] Zahra Kazemi's dead
body is covered with cement and her attorney, Shirin Ebadi asks the court, "Why
the victim's clothing was torn and bloodied in a particular location." When the
report from the coroner's office states that Zahra Bani Yaghub was raped in the
Basij headquarters' detention center in Hamadan.
Raping women political prisoners and threats to rape or sexually abuse them are
acts which can be committed by those who arrest them or by interrogators, prison
wardens or even judicial officials. These acts constitute the most brutal forms
of torture, and cause physical and especially psychological effects which are
not comparable to other forms of torture.
Published reports are available about these types of torture committed against
women political prisoners after the 1979 Revolution. The most systematic type of
reported rape has been the rape of virgin girls who were sentenced to death by
execution because of political reasons. They were raped on the night before
execution. These reports have been substantiated by frequent statements from the
relatives of women political prisoners. On the day after the execution,
authorities returned their daughter's dead body to them along with a sum
considered to be the alimony. Reports state that in order to lose their
virginity, girls were forced to enter into a temporary marriage with men who
were in charge of their prison. Otherwise it was feared that the executed
prisoner would go to heaven because she was a virgin!
Years later, [Reynaldo] Galindo Pohl, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on
human rights, who had been assigned to examine human rights violations in Iran,
emphasized the following in his report: "Virgin women who are sentenced to death
are forced to enter into a marriage with a man. They lose their virginity before
execution. Concerning this matter, the special reporter for the commission on
torture would like to emphasize that rape is a form of torture."*
Nevertheless, up to now, no fatwa [edict] has been issued concerning this
systematic torture, and no documentation has been offered regarding its specific
cases. As we will see, proving rape is very difficult and often impossible. It
is even more [difficult to prove] in prison.
Nevertheless, it is known beyond a shadow of a doubt, that during the 1980s, the
rape of women political prisoners was prevalent. It was so prevalent as to make
Ayatollah Montazeri, who was Khomeini's deputy at the time, write the following
to Khomeini in a letter dated October 7, 1986: "Did you know that young women
are raped in some of the prisons of the Islamic Republic? Did you know that
swear words offensive to one's honor are commonly used during the interrogation
of girls?"
This reality contradicts what is inferred from Karroubi's letter which gives the
impression that only those women political prisoners arrested after the
post-June 2009 election protests have been raped. As if there is no precedent in
the past 30 years of the Islamic Republic. In his letter to Hashemi Rafsanjani
dated July 27, 2009, Karroubi writes the following without referring to previous
cases of rape in political prisons: "I have heard about this matter from those
who have sensitive posts in our country. I can identify these powerful
individuals, some of whom were part of our sacred national defense. These
individuals have told me that the events which have taken place in our prisons
are a catastrophe for the Islamic Republic. This catastrophe can turn the Shia
clerics' brilliant and unblemished history into a black and shameful adventure,
and would make many dictatorial regimes including the Shah's oppressive rule
seem fair in comparison. . . . Some of those detained have reported that some
individuals have raped detained girls with such force as to cause tears and
injuries to their sexual organs. On the other hand, the brutal rape of young
boys by some individuals has made these boys depressed and psychologically and
physically damaged. They have become recluses in their own homes. . . "
Since [the publication of Karroubi's letter], interviewees, officials and
political activists, who have sought to affirm or deny this issue, have limited
the question to the events that have taken place after the election. In this
manner, the rape of women political prisoners as a continuing form of sexual
torture has been reduced to an "incident." The fact is that this issue has a
long-term history.
It is a fact that proving rape and other forms of sexual abuse has always been
difficult. First, these acts take place surreptitiously and without possible
witnesses. The victim's shame or fear prevents her from reporting the case to
government officials. While it appears that women have the freedom to act, move
and complain to officials, in prison, where government forces and the individual
or the collective rapist become one, the victims of rape have no recourse. The
issue becomes more complicated when rape is used not only as a means of
domination, of satisfying sexual urges and disabling and vanquishing the victim,
but also as a means and method of torture in order to demean a political
prisoner, break her, extract confession and in sum vanquish her or the
organization, party or tendency to which the victim belongs. Under these
circumstances, it is incumbent upon independent and mass-based forces to present
a precise analysis of the nature of this type of rape/torture. This effort is
not possible without assistance from the victims.
It is the responsibility of human rights activist and especially women's rights
activists to review similar experiences in Bosnia and Sudan. We need to learn
from the methods by which the perpetrators of systematic rapes have been
exposed, and legally prosecuted for their crimes against humanity.
May the names of Taraneh Mussavi, Zahra Bani Yaghub, Zahra Kazemi and other dead
victims of rape-torture, come to life in a trial to justly prosecute the
perpetrators of these crimes.
August 14, 2009
*This paragraph was added a day after the original publication of this piece and
was based on a document which I came across in Mehdi Aslani's prison memoirs,
The Crow and the Red Rose.
