A Closer Look Into Evin Prisons’ SECTION 209
// August 6th, 2008 // 2 Comments » // bahai, middle east
I just came across this blog post stating that the seven Bahai’s who where arrested in May are being held in solitary confinement in Section 209 of the notorious Evin Prison in Iran.
Here is list of interesting and very shocking facts about SECTION 209:
- Section 209 is known by most for its “political prisoners”. It is run by Iran’s various security services, and it houses prisoners who have somehow fallen afoul of some branch of Iran’s government or its religious authorities. To anyone but the Iranian government, they would be known as political prisoners.
- The number have dramatically increased in the last year and a half, it seems to have reached its highest population level since the 1980’s
- Inmates include students, journalists, bloggers, newspaper editors, human-rights activists and scholars and Bahai’s
- Few are charged with any crime, but huge numbers are locked away and often tortured
- Inmates face cruel conditions, including a form of solitary confinement known as the “white torture” (the lights of the windowless, empty cell are constantly left on, for months at a time). Beatings are not uncommon.
- Section 209 is famous for Zahra Kazemi, the Montreal photographer who was arrested while taking pictures outside the prison in 2003. Inside, she was tortured, brutally abused and then beaten to death.
- Since then attempts have been made to shut down the section due to its brutal and shadowy nature, however these attempts have failed and the section is still running in full swing
- Organizations holding prisoners in Section 209 do not fall under the authority of the elected Iranian government; they answer to the clerics who stand above the government, or to rogue factions within the security services and the Revolutionary Guards. Some are loyal to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and not to parliament; some are loyal only to the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei
- Prison authorities do not have the power to control what is happening inside Iran’s prisons. Various cell blocks are controlled by various organizations with varying agendas. The use of solitary confinement and ‘white torture’ isn’t necessarily authorized by the government; the factions doing this are pretty much close to the hard-liners and the supreme leader. The Intelligence Ministry is very involved in threatening families.
To give you a more vivid picture of the harrassment that its inmate under go, here a excerpt from Ahmad Batebi about his experiences Evin:
“The captors blind folded him and thrashed him with metal cables until he passed out, then rubbed salt into the wounds to wake him up, so they could torture him more, beat his testicles and kicked his teeth out. They held his face down in a pool of excrement until he inhaled it. They tied his arms behind his back and hung him from the ceiling. At other times, strapping him to a chair, they kept him awake night after night. He was played recordings of what he was told was his mother being tortured.”
One can only imagine what is happening at this very moment to the Bahai’s who know have been accused of having confessed to setting up an illegal organization with connections to a number of countries including Israel and they have received orders from them to undertake measures against the Islamic system.
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