If anyone in the Netherlands realizes the atrocities taking place in Tehran’s infamous Evin prison, where fire raged and shots were heard on Saturday, it is Yasmijn Fataie (38). The Iranian-born was born in what many consider to be the ‘most notorious prison in the Middle East’.
“My father has been imprisoned for a total of more than thirteen years,” says the daughter of left-wing student activists, still high in her emotion from all the events. “Under the Shah and then among the Islamists. My mother was tortured while pregnant with me. She was blindfolded all the time. When I was born and she was allowed to take it off for a while, a woman with a Kalashnikov was standing next to her. I was immediately taken away from her. She didn’t know if she would ever see me again. I was eventually brought back to her, but she was not allowed to give me breast milk for a long time. There was also little light, little oxygen where we sat.”
Victims
It is unimaginable to outsiders, she emphasizes. “This is no ordinary prison. This is worse than any detention center you’ve seen on television that you think is awful. ‘Evin’ has modeled for the Guantanamo Bay detention camp and the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad.”
Officials say four people were killed and more than 60 injured after shooting and fires raged on Saturday, but critics fear many more casualties.
Evin Prison
Evin Prison is actually an asymmetrical complex of corridors carved into a rock. “It’s a maze, with lots of branches and small spaces. Some of the rooms where prisoners are locked up are two by two and a half meters in size. There can be just forty people. It’s so bad that people have time slots that dictate when they can sit or lie down because the lack of space simply means not everyone can do that. Rice grains are counted and then divided: you get thirteen per person, for example. So that’s how you live there. Often years. And then there are departments where people are interrogated and where torture takes place.”
She emphasizes: there are no criminals in ‘Evin’. “It is the political prisoners who are locked up there. The intellectuals, who must be broken not only physically, but also spiritually. It is a miracle that my parents survived. They were also lucky that they were not told. There is a good chance that this will happen, because whatever is done is to return converted prisoners later, but then to spy for the regime. To get information from and about others.”
To flee
When Yasmijn was eleven, the family managed to flee to the Netherlands. Her parents had already been off for a while, but then physically. Spiritually, they were still imprisoned.
„’Evin’ is the symbol for captivity of the mind. As an ex-prisoner you have to report weekly, for years. You are under surveillance, being watched by secret services. You don’t have a passport, you can’t work. In fact, you’re not supposed to survive. That you are dying out as a family. It was very hard when we left. You have to say goodbye to all your relatives at once, because you know that you will see them for a very long time or even never again. You are in a constant state of mourning.”
They eventually arrived in our country with trauma. As a child, she herself saw how death row inmates were hanged from cranes in Iran. “You could just see it from the car. Now terrible things are still happening. People are being burned. A cousin’s son, a 13-year-old boy, was recently arrested on the street and beaten up. What kind of danger could such a child pose? Nothing has changed in all those years.”
Although, the focus on what is happening in Iran is. The protests are not only increasing in the country itself, the number of demonstrations is also growing in other countries – such as in the Netherlands. Much needed, says Fataie, who spontaneously climbed onto the stage at Dam Square last weekend to tell her story to those present. “I have had sorrow for a long time, but now there is anger, fire. I see that in more and more people. Look at it this way: if they’re willing to burn one person there, they’re willing to burn everyone. That is why the world must rise. What happens there should affect all of us.”