It was a year and half ago when Zahra called me and cried: “Mina, they want to hang my mother in two days!” I asked her to calm down and tell me what was happening. She said, “They have told us that we can meet our mother for the last time.”
We had endured to save Fatemeh’s life for a number of years; a number of years that I knew Zahra and her sister.
In the last days of our campaign to save Fatemeh’s life, we broadcast a number of programs from “The New Channel TV.” Around midnight on November 25, 2008, the International Day against Violence, while staying in a hotel somewhere in Germany to deliver a speech, I was following the two girls standing outside the notorious Evin prison; they were live, online. You could still see disbelief in their eyes: on the other side of the walls, the hangmen were preparing to kill their mother. Zahra was telling me that “there is a crowd of over 100 people gathering there… they are going to execute many people tonight,” she said. Miles away that midnight, from Germany, I could hear the cries, the calls for mercy. I could feel the anxiety.
Zahra and Farzaneh were shaking in fear. Zahra said that after killing ten people, the hangmen opened the gates and told the crowd: “It is finished now. You can collect the bodies at 10am!” A day later when I called her, she said, “Mina! I am with my mother!”
She couldn’t leave her mother alone in the graveyard.
Mina Ahadi
August 10, 2010
In memory of those whose innocent cries were unjustly suffocated in their throats by the noose called Islam.
Hello friends,
I am begotten of justified injustice in Iran. Here in the cage of my chest, love of life is a captured bird in the narrowest and most excruciating deathtrap; here in this body life is on its deathbed, unattended, dying in agony, whipped by the crooked holy men of justice of Iran. When you cannot find hope in this vast land of hopelessness, where can you take refuge? Yet I tell myself every life taken by this deadlystorm of injustice rises to the height of the sky, and falls down in rivulets to gently embrace the thirsty river beds.
Hello dearest Sajjad and Saideh,
I am Zahra, daughter of Fatemeh Haghighat-Pazhuh. Probably you have heard her name. You and I know each other for we share the same pain. Yes, I know your pain. I know your pain before you did: it is ten years that I bear this sorrow.
Dear ones,
I have wept with the heartbreaking cry of all prisoners under Ghesas and I will cry for each and every one who is to be taken to the gallows. Distance doesn’t blunt this cutting edge ; it is as if I know you and your mother, who are, like my innocent mother and I, trapped in the talons of these unjust men of justice in Iran. Not a day passes that I don’t wish to hear of the freedom and the exoneration of Sakineh and all those others like her on death row.
Dear ones,
I know your moments are filled with anxiety; I am familiar with your pain. Not only familiar – I am branded with the pain of the children, innocent and pure children of those sentenced to Ghesas, now and as long as I live. I know that a wish for their freedom in our society is a hollow gift to offer, yet I still wish for the freedom of all Sakinehs, Kobras, Fatemahs and Shahlas. Yes, when I think of a hard and merciless noose around my mother’s neck, I wish for freedom of all imprisoned mothers.
My dear ones,You and I bear a pain so heavy that it cannot be absorbed even by the endless emptiness of the Kavir. I wish there were a place to run to, a haven from the injustice of this beautiful land which, in the eyes of the world, is deflowered, smeared, poisoned by those men of evil. I hope in that short time left to save your mother, she finds freedom through the cries of all freedom-loving people who have rushed in to hold your hands.
I did not intend to add to your sorrow; I did not wish you to see me cry in my loneliness; I did not want you – who have your own unbearable pain – to cry for me too. I wish I was with you to give you my sisterly love, to show you our beautiful Sakineh’s star in the sky blinking at us. I wish the emptiness of my silenced heart would soon be filled with the cheerful cries of your mother’s freedom, filled with a life anew. I wish that the darkness could never feast on blown-out candles. It is true that our lonely cries do not reach far, but it is also true that injustice does not reign for ever.
It is more than a year that my innocent mother’s life was extinguished ; then there were Delaras and other women who flew from this painful cage; but this time with entirety of humbleness I ask of those who have heard the plight of Zahras, Sajjads and Saidehs to behold our broken hearts and extend their hands to our shaking hands which do not reach far enough in this land of imprisoned justice. Rush to spare Saideh and Sajjad from the same infinite pain of losing their mother the way my sister and I did.
Only a savage storm breaks the life inside of a branch, nothing else.
Be the morning breeze, embrace, and waken to life.
Zahra Hghyghat- Pazhuh
17 Mordad 89
8 August 2010
Note that this is a somewhat free translation, to capture the essence of the letter.
Translation: Ahmad Fatemi begin_of_the_skype_highlighting end_of_the_skype_highlighting
Editing: Maria Rohaly begin_of_the_skype_highlighting end_of_the_skype_highlighting
Distributed by the International Committee against Execution
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