On May 1, 2006, we – the radical students who later became “Freedom & Equality Seeking Students” and finally dismantled – decided to join the fired workers who were protesting in front of the Syndicate of Workers of Tehran and Suburbs Bus Company.
We were there with placards and slogans that had been selected by the group, and we thought that nothing was going to happen. Aggregation was performed and we, along with the workers, started raising the placards and chanting slogans. The police officers were careful and the IRGC intelligence agents took photos regularly, but there were no problems, and we believed that the aggregation was going to end with no problem.
As soon as some people who wanted to report on the gathering came, the police attacked and arrested them. Police beat up one of the protesters; some of his friends were arrested trying to help him. The person being beaten was Keyvan Rafiee, director of Human Rights Activists in Iran.
In those days, we did not have a good attitude about human rights activists. Their work, in our opinion, was a light action, but it was interesting that police were more sensitive about the probable reporting of aggregation than the aggregation itself. This was my first encounter with Human Rights Activists.
After December 2007 and the demise of the group – the Freedom & Equality Seeking Students, while our collective feeling was that the important media discriminated against reporting the arrest of more than 40 students, Human Rights Activists was among the groups that published news of our friends’ arrests regularly.
After my arrest, when I was put in ward 350, the conversations were about the arrest of human rights activists. All of them were arrested in 2010 and transferred to ward 2-A.
The arrest of our group in 2006 indicated that the security apparatus would not be satisfied until all human rights groups had been eradicated. After a few months of interrogation, many activists were confined to ward 350 with heavy sentences.
It was 2011, and I had been exiled to the Rajai Shahr prison. All the political prisoners were held in hall number 12 and were deprived of the use of a phone. This means that they had locked the room where the public phones were, and the prisoners could not communicate with the outside world except on meeting days. The authorities’ reason was clear: News about what was going on inside the prison should not be leaked out of it.
I met Behrouz Javid-Tehrani there. He was one of the prominent activists during the July 1999 uprising, and was one of the oldest prisoners in Rajai Shahr prison. A few days later, an anonymous prisoner of conscience who was harassed while being in detention was transferred to the ward. We wanted to spread his news to those out of prison.
In Rajai Shahr prison, because of the presence of old political prisoners and their communication with non-political prisoners, there were chances to buy a mobile phone, although it was very difficult and expensive to get one. However, the prison authorities installed jamming devices around wards to prevent any phones from connecting with the outside world. Thus, there was no possibility of sending news by the mobile phone. Once, we tried to break and disable the jamming devices by rock hooks, but this failed. The only possibility of using a workable phone would be by breaking down the door of the room that had phones, detaching one and getting it to work; but even a small possibility or a loophole in prison was worth the risk.
Behrouz discovered that it was possible to create a hole in the door to the room by breaking down the middle layer of the lower part of the door and bending the sheet metal; but the work needed to be done very quietly to neither wake up the prisoners nor the guards. During the night, Behrouz and another friend started the work while I acted as a watch guard. We worked on this for one or two nights, but finally we did it. Being the only one small enough to be able to enter the room by crawling, I soon found that the wood shavings on the floor were not a problem, but the extreme cold was. If I had been fully dressed for the freezing temperature, the small cavity space would not allow me to pass. I went crawling inside, turned on the lights in the empty phone room and found five or six telephone booths. I picked up the phone in one of the cabins, and there was a dial tone. I dialed the number I had been given, someone replied and introduced himself as Esfandiar, Jamal Husseini, former editor of HRANA.
However, after a few days, prison officials discovered what we had done and disconnected the phone. But this proved to be a lesson to me that there was always a way, a window, an aperture to freedom, and a prisoner knows better than anyone how to appreciate and find it.
Later after I had left Iran and arrived in Turkey, I decided to leave political activism behind for good. I realized that I could not imagine myself as a political activist from outside the country who was going to change anything within the Iranian society. I was certain that I would not be more active than occasional texts or posts on Facebook and mentioning my friends who remained imprisoned.
However, it is now about a year since the beginning of my activity in the HRANA as the editor of the agency dealing with anonymous activists. I am proud that I have tried to highlight the unique features of HRANA and, more importantly, of the timely, accurate and independent human rights reports with the aim of improving the situation. We operate independent of the government and independent of the government opponents too, avoiding any discrimination and political biases. We act as a window in the walls of the prisons and detention centers, remembering the forgotten, being the voice of the voiceless, the marginalized and the poor.
As an outside observer and today from within, I think the Human Rights Activists has been quite positive, honorable, and unique. These activists are not limited to names that are known but rather are a collection of anonymous reporters who were the narrators of distant and silent stories, the elites who, because of humility and the fear of repression, were never mentioned.
I believe that due to the development of communication tools, every citizen is able to record human rights violations. Thanks to the efforts and sacrifices of anonymous reporters, Human Rights Activists and HRANA will start the second decade of its life in better conditions.
