'Never Again' by Farhad Babaei

If freedom could sing a song,

tiny,

tinier than a bird’s throat.

Ahmad Shamou, Iranian poet (translated by Sholeh Wolpé)

‘It has been just over a year since the slogan ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ became the shortest and simultaneously the sincerest song expressing the desire of Iranians for a freer society. A song Iranians carry on their lips as they continue fighting a ruthless regime and its security forces.

With this short text, I would like to pay tribute to all the women and men sitting in prison today in search of freedom and civil rights. It is dedicated to the memory of those whose voices have forever been silenced by the bullets of totalitarianism.

In September 2022, Mahsa Amini, only 22-years-old at the time, died as a result of a brutal crackdown by Iran’s morality police. Another young woman, Armita Geravand recently fell into a coma after protesting the mandatory Islamic headscarf and died from her injuries in October 2023. In the period between these two crimes, security forces in Iran killed, imprisoned, and harmed many more people. Some of them were raped in prison and committed suicide upon release. The secret police subsequently intimidated their families, and the authorities did not allow them to organise the traditional funeral procession following the burial.

Iran has become, perhaps, the saddest country in the world in a matter of months. Watching the death toll increase every day and the ensuring collective mourning of an entire nation, is one of the most bitter experiences I have gone through to date. Day after day, victim after victim, protest after protest in the streets across the country.

At night, people expressed their intense discontent by chanting for freedom from the windows of their homes. Without any hesitation, the police fired at the windows to intimidate them. The Iranian dictator hid in his palace the whole time, watching as his mercenaries kept him in power through constant bloodshed.

Niloofar Hamedi, a 31-year-old journalist, was one of the first to report on the brutal treatment of women by the police and on what happened to Mahsa Amini, whom she visited at the hospital and whose family she interviewed. Almost immediately, Hamedi was detained by the security forces and was sentenced to a year in prison without any trial. In October 2023, she was sentenced to five years in prison for publishing this information.

Shortly after the death of Mahsa Amini, the initially scattered protests suddenly turned into a large movement united by the slogan ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’. However, these protests were in a different spirit to those in 2017, 2015, 2007, or the student protests in 1999. This time, they were led by the generation born after the turn of the millennium, the so-called Generation Z- youth capable of throwing away all fear in their call for freedom. Within a few days, this group of young people managed to create a vast network which gave rise to the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ movement, demanding basic human rights, taken for granted in other parts of the world. At the same time, defying the compulsory wearing of the hijab is a ‘no’ vote to a corrupt, repressive regime. Young Iranians gradually realised that the rejection of the compulsory hijab would only represent the beginning of a great struggle, the very essence of which is the cry ‘No to dictatorship!’. Just as Patricio Aylwin, Chile’s first president since the ousted Augusto Pinochet, shouted ‘Nunca más’- ‘Not anymore’- at a packed stadium in the capital Santiago.

In my opinion, after decades of struggle against the theocratic regime and thousands of Iranian lives lost during the last 46 years, this ‘big no’ may represent the beginning of a new era of freedom struggle gradually eroding the pillars of dictatorship until finally, the terrifying stronghold of totalitarianism collapses.

Iran finds itself in the grip of a regime that has intertwined religion and politics, creating a monster that survives only through repression, censorship, and crimes. I consider this to be a huge historical tragedy, not far from a war in its impact on society. Iranian workers are forced to permanently work overtime or have multiple jobs, still finding it difficult to make ends meet. Women have no chance to legally defend themselves in en environment of Islamic law and in a regime which greatly favours men. Artists are constantly haunted by nightmares in the form of censorship or prison. Writers wait months or even years for a permission to publish a book if they get it at all and their work has not been banned outright. I experienced it firsthand. Me and Iranian families, Iranian workers, writers, artists, students, and even schoolchildren. It is reminiscent of a civil war a repressive regime fights against its own citizens. It is beyond comprehension that the Iranian regime has allowed poisonous gas to be emitted in girls’ schools, making it impossible for them to go to school. This crime was a response to the ongoing protests, intended to intimidate and induce obedience to the dictator again. Life in the Middle East and in Iran sometimes takes on forms that seem incomprehensive, even unbelievable. Yes, the world is a lonely place which is even lonelier for people living in dictatorship, war, or prison.

The Islamic government in Iran uses religious faith as a weapon to quell any calls for greater freedom. It is reminiscent of the Middle Ages, right in the 21st century, and, moreover, in a country which bears several thousand years of civilisation and culture. It strikes me how much the current rulers of Iran resemble medieval priests from the time of the Inquisition. Likewise, striking similarities could be found with the communist period in the eastern part of Europe.

In totalitarian and communist countries, any protest or criticism of the policies of the Supreme Leader, any non-conformist idea, imagination, sentence, or line of text is considered a crime. A person who dares to explore freely within themselves is covered a criminal and their life becomes worthless. If the establishment decides to silence them forever, they expect that the rest of society to consider it natural. One regime abuses religion to this end, another political ideology.

One of the key tools on which governments based on a particular political or religious-political doctrine rely to maintain their power is censorship. In dictatorial regimes, it penetrates all areas of society, including the minds of artists and ordinary people, where it metastasizes like cancer, eating away and gradually suffocating the human spirit.

In his book The Spirit of Prague, Ivan Klíma describes the functioning of communist censorship in great detail and with precision. Almost everything he wrote in this context was directly experienced by my and my writer and artist friends. Fear of security forces, serial murders and mysterious disappearances, secret underground art performances, book publishing in samizdat, underground discussions about banned books or films.  The author explains that intellectual activity is impossible in totalitarian regimes. The individual willingly adapts their thinking, regardless of what is really going on inside them, to the official template. This creates inhibitions and limitations that do not allow one’s personality to fully develop. Thus, the space in which human life and mind move are constantly narrowing. Ivan Klíma quite accurately describes the pattern followed by all totalitarian governments: through censorship and repression, they suppress individual freedom and create a blunt mass with an identity of their own. And a person without an identity has nothing to say.

Therefore, I consider the movement for freedom, formed in Iran, and led by women, to be an attempt to defeat this suppression of individual identity and an attempt to break up the case in which women have been locked by the totalitarian regime.

One of the symbols that heroic struggle will break out of this case and defeat conformity is undoubtedly represented by Narges Mohammadi, the imprisoned Iranian Nobel Peace Prize laureate. She hasn’t seen her children in years and hasn’t had the opportunity to watch them grow up. Although she has been tortured and intimidated by the regime for many years, her voice has never died down and can still be heard just as clearly.

Totalitarian regimes and dictators, in their various incarnations, replicate George Orwell’s novel 1984, and what Orwell envisioned and wrote in his novel, we have experienced, or are experiencing under communist and totalitarian regimes around the world. In his book Exorcising Terror which recounts the trial of Augusto Pinochet, Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman says, ‘In the coming years, we must gradually liberate every single place where Pinochet left his curse’.

I think that history has shown us that freedom, like a spring of water, always finds its way and that Iranian women and men will finally succeed in breaking this curse with their slogan ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’. Iranians have a long, gradual road ahead of them, many things need to change fundamentally, for example in the areas of culture and civil liberties. The curse of dictatorship will have to be removed from the country step by step. I don’t have a clear and precise version of the future, but I know and am sure that this song of freedom will win in the end. People will win personal freedoms and civil rights, mothers and fathers will not fear the deaths of their children, Iranian women will have the same rights as men, underground books, films, and music will come out of their hiding places and bear witness to their audience about the bloody, dark period of the past. We will gather, we will read, listen, and freely pass on our art to each other. Outside, behind the door, there will be no one waiting to arrest us as soon as we go out. Not anymore. There will be no one waiting at the door to detain us.

With respect to all Iranians who have not been afraid to stand up to the Iranian Islamic regime and are fighting for their civil and human rights.

And with respect to all writers, artists, and political prisoners in Iran and everywhere in the world who have lost their lives or are imprisoned at the hands of religious or other ideological dictatorships.'

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The original article was translated from Persian to Slovak by Jozef Vrabček.

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