By Jila Baniyaghoob<\/p>\n
Friday, 11 June 2010<\/p>\n
Shiva\u2019s birthday cake. The message reads:
\n\u2018Oh, if only freedom could sing a little song.
\nHappy Birthday, dear Shiva.\u2019<\/p>\n
==================<\/p>\n
You turned twenty-six yesterday, while you\u2019re in prison for the fifth time in your life. You don\u2019t seem to feel the slightest exhaustion. You were first taken to prison when you were eighteen, for attending a meeting. That same one-month prison experience made you closely aware of the violation of prisoners\u2019 rights. You are so deeply affected by the unacceptable conditions in prisons, where the defendants\u2019 right were ignored, that after freedom you told your mother you had decided to devote yourself to defending prisoners\u2019 rights. You said it did not matter at all what the prisoners\u2019 beliefs or thoughts were. What mattered was that they were all entitled to citizenship rights.<\/p>\n
Over the years, your mother has told the interrogators many times that they themselves chose this path for you. \u2018If you had not jailed her unjustly, merely for attending a meeting,\u2019 she\u2019s been telling them, \u2018she would never have thought of defending prisoners\u2019 rights. You turned our Shiva into a human rights activist.\u2019<\/p>\n
And you began your work the day after you were freed from prison. Soon, your fame had spread across all the prisons in Iran. All political prisoners were speaking of the courageous girl who knew no boundaries in defending prisoners, and would not discriminate among them because of their views or tastes. <\/p>\n
Prisoners would pass your phone number along to each other. Prisoners would call you from all the prisons in Iran. And your reports about the conditions of prisoners of conscience would introduce them to the people of your own country and the world. The more unknown and lonely a prisoner was, the dearest they would be to you and the more you would try to make them well-known.<\/p>\n
Having heard your name from each other, prisoners\u2019 families also would seek you out to share their grief with you. And you would patiently hear about their pains and make their voices heard to the best of your ability.<\/p>\n
You would defend human rights day and night, but no one knew about your activities. You were not concerned about fame. Maybe that is why you were little known until a year ago, when you were put in prison. Now, it was the others\u2019 turn to tell the world about Shiva.<\/p>\n
Indeed, who knows that in fact you were the first person to expose the outrageous conditions in Kahrizak prison [where several prisoners died under torture following the June 2009 elections]? It was three years ago when they started taking people they described as \u2018hoodlums and thugs\u2019 to that prison, keeping them in the worst possible conditions, and you began to expose what was happening in Kahrizak.<\/p>\n
You could not believe the atrocities that were committed at Kahrizak. You interviewed the families of dozens of Kahrizak inmates. You wrote dozens, nay, hundreds of reports about Kahrizak.<\/p>\n
But it was bizarre that even some human rights activists were not prepared to join your efforts. \u2018These are hoodlums and thugs,\u2019 they would say. \u2018They\u2019re indefensible.\u2019<\/p>\n
And in spite of your youth, you were startled by this argument. \u2018These prisoners are also human beings,\u2019 you would say, \u2018and entitled to a defendant\u2019s human rights.\u2019 <\/p>\n
But you would also use other arguments to convince such people. \u2018If we don\u2019t defend such prisoners\u2019 human rights today,\u2019 you would say, \u2018tomorrow the same fate would await others, including political prisoners. We must not allow this style of administration to be institutionalized in Kahrizak. We must not allow the Kahrizak style of torture to spread across prisons, with the claim that it would \u2018teach the hoodlums and thugs a lesson,\u2019 because if it does, it cannot be stopped in future.\u2019 <\/p>\n
You were right, dear Shiva. A few years later, Kahrizak was turned into a prison for university students, journalists and dissident citizens and the Kahrizak methods were applied to political prisoners.<\/p>\n
After the June 2010 elections, you and I were in the same cell in Evin prison\u2019s Ward 209 when Mr Karroubi exposed what had happened in Kahrizak. When we heard that, you were deeply saddened and said: \u2018If we had protested more strongly against what was happening in Kahrizak a few years ago, the likes of Mohammad Kamrani, Amir Javadifar and Mohsen Ruhol-Amini would not have been killed in prison today.\u2019<\/p>\n
Happy birthday, Dear Shiva.<\/p>\n
translated by Hossein shahidi<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Jila Baniyaghoob Friday, 11 June 2010 Shiva\u2019s birthday cake. The message reads: \u2018Oh, if only freedom could sing a little song. Happy Birthday, dear \u0627\u062f\u0627\u0645\u0647…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-279","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zhila.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zhila.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zhila.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zhila.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zhila.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=279"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/zhila.info\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zhila.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=279"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zhila.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=279"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zhila.info\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=279"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}