In Commemoration of All Murdered, Exiled, and Detained Writers
By Hassan Fartousi
Somalilandsun – Throughout history, a few professions have been oppressed. These eye-catchy professions include writers, lawyers, journalists, and teachers. These professions have at least one single element in common which is regarded as a hand weapon; namely ‘pen’.
Pens are also varied. Some might contribute, some might write down stuff for vain, and some others may open up hearts and unwrap life-costing stories which may be as devastative as nuclear bombs. Among these professions, writers are the main focus of the current article.
Nowadays, owing to the advancement of the twenty-first century, writers emerge as civil-political writers, web-loggers, authors, story, article, magazine, newspaper, film writers, etc. Basically, most of these skills make no or little financial revenue. Or may be to some of these skills owners, finance is no significant issue at all. Worse is that many of civil and political writers who critique and oppose to government dictatorship, oppression, and crackdown have been under surveillance of governments where democracy is not in place. The most obvious exemplar is Iran’s government. Iran’s security forces usually make arrestments without warrants or with hidden orders. In 1998 for instance, secret orders of death were issued by a couple of high-ranked clerics one of whom was Ayatullah Dori Najaf Abadi and executed by a group of security forces of the Ministry of Intelligence. These forces led by Saeid Islami (Imami) freely received a list of writers and civil activists whose lives must cease. Only in the year 1998, Iran’s intelligence forces murdered tens of writers and human rights activists. These figures such as Jahangir Foroohar, Laleh Eskandari, Pooyande, Panahi and many others were all murdered using various notorious tools and methods such as knife, and suffocation. In another case which took place in November 2012, Iran’s Security Forces ,with no warrant, arrested a web-logger called Sattar Beheshti at his residence in Shahriar, a suburban town in Tehran’s province on the charge of propagation against the national security through web-log and insulting authorities whereas he only wrote on human rights violations and democracy. They kept him in a non-standard custody center and tortured him to the extreme. After a few days, Sattar lost his life under persecutions in the custody center and was buried secretly in a graveyard without informing his family.
Today and especially after 2009 disputed presidential election, it has been clear to the world that Iran has applied much more violations and crackdowns on its oppositionists and dissents. This fact is also reflected in the website of the Swedish Migration Board which says Iran’s government keeps its abroad dissents under close surveillance. Thus the so-called ‘SUR PLACE’ writers and civil activist even in free states such as Sweden are not that safe and need to be more careful; let alone inside Iran.
By Hassan Fartousi
Ph.D. Candidate and Civil Activist
Sweden, January 2013
Best regards,
Hassan Fartousi
Ph.D. Candidate , Faculty of Languages and Linguistics
University of Malaya
+601 63454785
hfartousi13@yahoo.com
Authors of 3 Books: Writing Made Easy, Writing Research Proposals, and English in Control 1.
http:// www.englishlinguistics.net
http:/www.hassanfartousi.wordpress.com
Advisory Board member of the International Journal of Applied Liguistics and English
Editorial Board member of the World Applied Science Journal (ISI and Scopus-cited)
Editorial Board member of World Science Publisher Journal
