Mina Zarin`s speech in European Social Forum - Malmo - Sweden

About the Massacre in 1981 and 1988 in Iran

Our common pain is the many years of murdering, torture and execution which has taken away from us many comrades in the best years of their lives. Comrades of fate who remained true to their ideals and were full of hope and love to the people .Lovely friends who were killed by the Islamic regime.

Here and to-day I would specially give my respectful greetings and solidarity to the political prisoners, their relatives and to all freedom loving people of the world.

I am Mina Zarin, a former political prisoner of the Islamic regime of Iran. I have been living and witnessed and survived the massacres of 1981 and 1988. To-day I must speak about these massacres in Iran.

In the middle of June 1981 I was at the age of 19 years arrested in an accidental mass arrest. Only from the noise of breathing of the co-prisoners could you guess how many we were.By the arrest every body .had his or her face hidden by a big eye cover. On the field between the interrogation rooms sat hundreds of men and women and were one after the other sent to a torture room and lashed by a cable and tortured.

Then the prisoners were called to the court and sentenced after a few minutes, without possibility to defend themselves. The count of indictment was: Not accept of the Islamic regime.

At this time, i.e. summer 1981, every evening hundreds of political prisoners were shot because of their way of thinking, and we could - through the number of shots in the back of the head - guess the number of persons executed.

Since the Evin prison was full, the prisoners from Evin were by mass transport brought to Gheselhissar.

The prison in Gheselhissar was specially notorious for its disciplinary measures. One punishment was that during hours you had to stand on one leg, your head covered by veil and headscarf, and if you changed your leg, you were furthermore punished .

Since 1982 I and many prisoners were brought to Gohardasht in isolation. It was the first year that the prisons of Gohardasht was used as prison because of the very big cold (Siberia).

In this terrible place everybody can be taken whose personal views deviate from the publicly declared views of the government. Also by pure accident can you be taken to this imprisonment where during torture they force people to admit crimes they have never committed. The torture you suffer there will give you pains for your whole life - in the form of anxiety, persecution mania, and other psychological problems and grave health problems. Later in 1988 many people were tortured and executed in this terrible prison.

But we were not only in summer 1988, but in every minute and hour exposed to conditions unworthy for people. In order to describe this terrible crime, a thorough investigation is needed.

They had made it clear to us that they would not let us get out in good health. The government knew very well that after the war, there would be a national and international pressure for the release of the political prisoners.

In the massacres of 1988 about 5.000 political prisoners were executed.

In July 1988 all visits were forbidden and all television removed from the prison sections, we did not get any newspapers and the daily transmissions of the national radio per loudspeaker were stopped. Then they came into the hall and asked us our names, why we had been arrested and our religion. Furthermore they wanted to know if we recognised the Islamic republic of Iran, and if we were ready to participate in a public interview. After one month we learned that for that reason the prisoners of the Evin prison had to be hung. Every day in the prisons there were prisoners who were hung by armed groups of the regime, others were slashed five times a day and others were threatened that death awaited them.

The new method of murder in the summer of 1988 was death by cord (rope).. In the hall of the Gohardasht-prison hang the cords in twelve rows. After hanging of one group, the bodies were immediately brought through the back door into the yard and there taken to a container, when the container was full, were they transported to Khwaran where the bodies were buried in mass graves. These mass graves are still to-day a meeting point for the relatives of the executed prisoners, supposedly more than one third of all the prisoners were executed.

One who survived the Gohardasht-prison reported about the transport of the dead bodies and the mountain of shoes of the executed prisoners.

It is an absolute mass murder by the Islamic regime of Iran in the summer of 1988 where about 5.000 political prisoners were murdered.

But our common hope is the non oblivion of the experiences and efforts we made in our struggle for years and to-day's struggle for freedom and equality in Iran.

We fight for the total abolition of the oppression and murders of people.

Thanks and be strong

Mina Zarin