Iran June 1987: The Twenty Unforgettable Laudable

By Nasrin Faizi 

My name is Nasreen Feizi and I had spent nearly 10 years in the prisons of Evin, Gohardasht and Ghezzel Hessar in Iran under the mullahs’ regime.
It was June 1987 and we were in hall 14 of Gohardasht Prison. In those days all political prisoners had staged widespread rallies protesting the intense climate of crackdown and torture ruling inside the prisons.

The inmates in this hall were protesting the method used for the headcounts each morning, and the Revolutionary Guards in the prison had turned this into a type of psychological torture for us. Each night a number of the guards and torturers would enter the ward and instead of headcounts they would start interrogating and/or inspecting and searching the most private aspects of the women prisoners’ cells and belongings. As a result, a widespread protest movement began and finally 20 prisoners, including myself, were pulled out from the rest, and we were dubbed the elements behind the unrest. They kept us standing for 48 hours, and after long beatings they returned us to a ward of ordinary prisoners who were all Afghan nationals.

The hygiene conditions and supplies available in this ward was so dreadful, dirty and unbearable that we resorted to launching a hunger strike to force them to transfer us to another ward. This hunger strike began on June 5^th, 1987, and since this hunger strike was taking place in a ward of Afghan prisoners, it became known as the “Afghanistan hunger strike”. We were 20 different prisoners, all with different ages and various levels of education. However, what ruled amongst us was our faith and the hope of one day freeing our enchained people across Iran… We would play various types of games together, sing songs and … during the nights that we were on hunger strike. One of the games we played, and which many of us enjoyed, was “Personality”. One person would have a personality in her mind and the others would have to ask questions to figure out the identity. The questions had to be, “If this individual is a home, what kind of a home would it be? If it is a book, what kind of a book would it be? ... One day a prisoner by the name of Shahrbanu Attari (executed later) thought of Khomeini and the others began asking questions:

If it was a home, what kind of a home would it be?

With metal bars.

If it was a job, what kind of a job would it be?

Commander of shooting ranges for executions.

If it were a color, what color would it be?

Pitch black, darker than black itself.

If it were an adjective, what would it be?

Ruthlessness, collusion and destruction.

If it were clothing, what would it be?

The clothing of deception, dishonesty and fraud.

If it were an order, what kind of command would it be?

An order to commit genocide, and destroying an entire generation

If it was the future, what kind of a future would it be?

The annihilation of our country, Iran.

On June 20^th of that same year we were transferred from the Afghan general ward to solitary confinement, also belonging to Afghan nationals, where we continued our hunger strike. The “Afghanistan hunger strike” continued until July 6^th for a month. We ended our hunger strike only after our demands were met. Of those 20 prisoners, those 20 struggling women that I was in a hunger strike with, 17 of them were taken to the gallows in the 1988 massacre, and only three were able to survive.

In those days there were women who continued their struggle in the face of the crackdown imposed by Khomeini and the mullahs who are in power today. They never succumbed before this regime, and they were all executed in the thousands as they were bent on continuing their struggle to establish freedom for the Iranian people from the mullahs’ fundamentalism. Those 20 prisoners are now alive today in our hearts. They are very much alive, as their organization, the PMOI, is celebrating its 50^th anniversary. They are alive in the thousands of Iranian women inside the country and abroad. They are the heirs of the struggle launched and kept alive as so many were executed in 1988 defending freedom in the face of the fundamentalists ruling Iran. And now, thousands of Iranian women are continuing the path they started for their nation’s freedom, to one day establish all out freedom and democracy in Iran.