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Marina Nemat: The Power of Voices

From 1982 to 1984, I was a teenage political prisoner in Evin Prison in Tehran. I was tortured and raped and watched my friends suffer and many of them die. So many innocent young lives devastated or lost. But the world went on, as if nothing had happened. We felt abandoned and forgotten in Evin.

On Thursday morning, March 25, 2010, a beautiful sunny day, I stood in Auschwitz Concentration Camp in Poland and looked on a narrow road sandwiched between two rows of redbrick, two-storey buildings. Unlike the flimsy wooden barracks I had seen in other camps, these were well built and looked quite sturdy. Many tour buses were parked in the parking lot, and there were tourists from all ages and nationalities everywhere. I was on a trip organized by the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Centre for Holocaust Studies. Birds sang in the pale sun, and the clear voice of our young tour guide, Anna, who was knowledgeable and professional, streamed through my headset — but I wasn’t listening. The bricks of Auschwitz were almost identical in colour to those of Evin. I reached out and touched them, and tears blinded me. We had just seen piles of thousands of the shoes of the victims of Auschwitz, and I remembered that in Evin, guards had taken away my white and red Puma running shoes and had given me rubber slippers instead. Where were my shoes and the ones of my prison friends? Had they been destroyed? We entered a barrack, and I looked into a bright, average-sized room with a wooden table in the middle and a few chairs around it. Anna explained that this room was used for arbitrary trials, and most of the prisoners tried here were sentenced to death and executed in the courtyard behind the building. In Evin prison, the Sharia judge who had condemned me to death had probably sat in a similar room and drank tea as he passed on verdicts. My survival was a miracle, but not everyone was as lucky as I was.

Iran’s political prisons, including Evin, are still quite operational. People are tortured and executed in Iran on a daily basis. When atrocities happen, those who remain silent and don’t speak or act against evil become its accomplices. We cannot afford to wait for governments to bring about real change. I believe in the power of the individual. Each one of us can make the world a better place, even if only one small step at a time. We can create a ripple effect that will expand and eventually turn into a tsunami.

Sakineh Mohammadie Ashtiani has been condemned to death in Iran. There are many others who are languishing like her in their grave-like cells, maybe facing painful deaths. They are not alone or forgotten. Even if we don’t know all their names, we are with them. I do not believe in violence, but I do believe in the power of voices coming together as one. Let’s get our voices heard.

(Marina Nemat is the author of “Prisoner of Tehran.” Her second memoir, “After Tehran,” will be released this September.)

Siehe auch hier: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/30/iran-stoning-sentence-mohammadi-ashtani