IWAC’s Special Report at the End of the Present Iranian Year: Exploring the Air in the Post Public Pardon Era 

This report is dedicated to the memory of Sadegh Fouladi’Vanda, a young worker and socialist fighter, from Gachsaran, who was abducted by the security forces on Feb. 3, 2023 and, after 18 days of disappearance, found dead in one of the waterways of the town, with his hands tied, and an unidentifiable body due to the severity of torture. 

In the Feb. of a year that has left one of the bloodiest calendar pages in our collective consciousness and is now about to come to its end, there was so much hassle about what was to become shortly known as the “public pardon” pertinent to the issuance of a judiciary circular letter and preceded by the order of the supreme leader of the Islamic Republic for implementing a mass judicial pardoning operation for the Iranian political prisoners and numberless protestors mass incarcerated in Zhina (Mahsa) Movement demonstrations, estimated to be 20000 at least, by HRA, the Iranian human rights news agency (and despite that fact that unofficial numbers were much higher), supposedly implemented in Feb. to make a happy coincidence, in the eyes of the ruling class, with Feb., 1979 revolution in Iran which initially paved the way for them to establish their regime. Leila Husseinzadeh, a frequented political prisoner recently released, sarcastically described this judicial maneuver as “his highness’s pardon” in a brilliant and telling note about the “public pardon judiciary circular letter” and, in it, revealed her own first-hand prison observations in the course of this Movement, revealing the horrendous dysfunctionality of the instrumental reason and administrative capacity of prison management by the system, and there she also discussed the generationally destructive impacts that such a machinery of insufficiency leaves behind by criminalizing such a huge chunk of the very young and adolescent population, who form the premier frontline of the killed, suppressed, and incarcerated population among the protestors; she also gave an analysis of the increased politicization of prisons, turning them into more collective rebellious social corpuses, as headquarters of civil disobedience and collective act, and also of the increasing removal of the boundaries between inside and outside prisons, exemplified by the growing gatherings of protestors and families against the enforcement of the execution of Muhammad Ghobadloo and Muhammad Boroughani, two young arrested protestors, on Jan. 9, 2023, and subsequently, the transmittance of such protests to non-political executions and the suppression of the protesting families in front of the prisons such as the gathering of the families of the prisoners scheduled to be executed at Urmia Central Prison on Mar. 15, the same year; and, as a result, “public pardon” is introduced by her the process of the mass evacuation of the prisons from the political prisoners to administrate an ever-growing crisis for the regime, that is, the politicization of the prisons. 

To give some examples, the collective resistance and hunger strike of the prison-mates of Muhammad Mehdi Karami and Seyyed Muhammad Husseini in protest to the enforcement of their execution sentence as a clear show trial held out of the highest degree of regime’s resentment, vindictiveness, and fear-campaign over the case of the murder of Rouhollah Ajamiyan, a plainclothes basiji or state mercenary, who was shown in a photo recently went viral on social networks, holding a machine gun while actively participating in the massacre of the demonstrators; a collective act of resistance which was put to halt by the typical and all too familiar deception of prison authorities plotted against the noble and virtuous death-row inmate, Seyyed Muhammad Husseini; an executed protestor whose story of innocence in face of the utter villainy exerted against him can be confidently said to have left an unerasable bruise on the collective consciousness of the Iranians similar to that of Zhina (Mahsa) Amini’s death, a Kurdish young woman whose brutal murder by the morality police in Tehran caused the entire Movement in the first place, and also similar to that of Kiyan Pirfalak’s death, a nine year old boy gunned down by state forces while in a car with his parents. Another example is the collective resistance and riot of prisoners held then at Evin Prison, in Tehran, on Oct. 15, 2022, after the tragic intentional act of arson in this prison, which took place at the peak of Iran’s mass protests; still to this date, 3/19/2023, there has been no legally convincing and justifiable explanation by the government either about the perpetrators of this act or the extent and statistics of its casualties, even within the framework of the laws of the regime itself. Yet, the moving story of Touran Kabiri, the mother of two leftist political prisoners who had disclosed their firsthand experience of the prisoners bloody crackdown on that day, described by them as a “human catastrophe,” before being transferred to Rajayi’Shahr Prison with some other political prisoners imprisoned at Evin Prison at the time of the incident: “According to the testimony of Kaveh and Yashar Dar’al Shafa’s mother, on Saturday night, these two brothers and other prisoners at the same ward, witnessed through a window overlooking ward 7 and the site in which the arson attack was initiated that prison guards were shooting at will at prisoners who were falling on the ground one after the other. Ms. Kabiri’s sons had told her that prison agents used teargas and opened ceaseless fire at prisoners with bullets whose type they could not identify;” and not just this single incident indeed, but rather a series of prison riots and bloody crackdowns as in the case of Lakan Prison, in Rasht, on Oct. 9, 2022, in which the prisoners clashed with anti-riot guards following which, as reported by Persian BBC, Mehdi Fallah Miri, the Head Persecutor of Gilan Province, confirmed that “due to lack of proper medical care for the prisoners injured, some of them passed away.” This is nevertheless the statement of an official authority of the regime in whose lexicon, catastrophes are always underplayed and portrayed less severe than what they really are; and this incident, too, is still clouded with lack of any clear investigation or account. Another example is the riot of Karaj Central Prison on Dec. 20, 2022 that, as reported by Iran’s Human Rights Organization, took place at ward 4 in that prison where prisoners started a riot in protest to one of their cellmates being taken out to be executed and, while creating a blockade at the entrance gate of the ward against the prison guards, shouted slogans such as “death to Khamenei” [the supreme leader], and “down with the Islamic Republic” and “down with the dictator.” This was the prison in which some of the arrested protestors of the recent Movement were kept in detention as well. Prison guards use military ammunition at the prisoners to crackdown the riot, which results in the death of a 31 year old prisoner, called Mohsen Mansouri, and over 100 prisoners injured. In the same note by Leila Husseinzadeh, mentioned above, she refers to another similar case: “During the same days [at the peak of mass protests], some of the individuals arrested with the same political charges as my cellmates informed them that at Darab Prison (located in Fars Province) that a section of the prison had been set on fire, an incident that, according to my investigation, received no media coverage at the time.” 

And one must notice, in all such cases, a shadow of silence was cast upon the incident and all indicators of the severity of the catastrophe cloaked in secrecy in utmost clandestinity and muzzling witnesses by excessive measures of censorship and suppression, to the extent that it is as of yet not clear how many victims were involved in each incident; and in the same note, there is a discussion of the managerial incapacity of the system to administrate such a voluminous crackdown operation, with the following significant conclusion: “acting upon such a public pardon with such an explicit circular letter, above all, indicates the struggle for the economic-political administration of the judiciary system that is incapable of denying its crisis for achieving maximum suppression, in face of conditions that both capacity and integrity required to eliminate and kill, should logically wear out as the time goes by.” 

The analysis sketched above, which revolves around the problem of the fully intense and increasingly critical relationship between prison and politics in Iran, sheds light on certain aspects of the whole situation; most importantly, the disintegrated structure of the suppressive machinery that consists a wide range of components, from unidentified horrific security dentition houses implanted over the country to all sorts of security-backed court divisions and judges, to the entire prison complex of the country, plus its security-media branches and organization forces; such a complicated machine, however, portrays a cacophonic and insufficient structure which operationally appears disharmonious, decomposed, and fragmented; the same system perfectly described by the time-honored political prisoner, Keyvan Samimi, in this way: “the whole country is run tribally, any authority has his own say and only considers his own interests, the center cannot hold and sectarianism is evidently seen everywhere, all conducive to the fact that how decayed the inter-organizational or even intra-organizational relations are, and such a fragile cobweb can be torn apart with a few beats.” A phenomenon that makes itself all the more clear within the context of such massive crises as the chain poisoning attacks recently launched against all-girl’s dorms and schools (more accurately called the chain chemical attacks), and the subsequent bewildering responses of all sort of authorities, bathed in disharmony and delirium, to identify the perpetrators of such national-scale catastrophes, paired with endless self-conflicting and incommensurable comments made by the officials even over the most basic aspects of such an unprecedented and all-conclusive crises all addressed in a manner quite similar to the  belated, projective, and coverup-oriented security measures taken in response to a long sequence of surgically successive operations led by Israel at the heart of Iran’s nuclear activities which meets no security match when it comes to the very existential status of the regime; the public pardon, too, was carried out against such a background, in a year that, according to a recent report by HRA, the Iranian human rights news agency, was at all-time high in terms of human rights violation in Iran with 29688 citizens arrested over ideological reasons (a statistics that cannot be considered thorough due to the lack of field investigation access and extensive security pressure exerted to silence the surviving family members of the protestors arrested or killed); amidst all these discorded and chaotic operations, some prisoners do not consent to consent to the repentant content of the pardon and yet get released, while others do consent and stay in prison nevertheless and prisoners’ inclusion in the public pardon is left at the whim of the security and judiciary authorities. In a way, the whole process seems more like a confused and reactionary undulation of emptying and refilling prisons. 

Yet, regardless of the reasons behind “his highness’s pardon,” there are inescapable symbolic meanings and claims entailed in it; above all, the conquering pronouncement of the winning side in a formidable struggle over the fate of the captives, meaning that the “situation is maintained” (as said by the judge to Jina Modarres Gorji, the imprisoned Kurdish women’s rights activist, at her court session on Feb. 12, 2023, a court session that more resembled “consulting and punditry session from the view of the judge”.) The other meaning implied in this pardon is a gesture of forgiveness, waiving the divinely endowed axiomatic right of the state to take more draconian measures, as if in a shift in policies, where the ruler asserts his will to exercise tolerance and flexibility. Such implied symbolic meanings or gestures can be measured against what can be named the “ethology of suppression.” 

But, first, one should ask if, at the level of actual events in the field, that is, at a factual level, the “situation is maintained” as claimed. Let’s review; Zahedan, as one free-standing case, has not witnessed one single Friday without demonstrations organized following mass prayers, especially in face of the number of executions soaring up in that region and all kinds of security and propaganda threats, from assassination to the house imprisonment of the local Sunni religious leaders; that aside, on the International Woman Day, Mar. 8, there were demonstrations formed up in various places; as reported by Radio Farda, “different districts in Tehran, in addition to cities such as Karaj, Rasht, Sanandaj, Saghez, and others witnessed gatherings and protests of a group of women with such slogans as “Woman, Life, Freedom,” “the root of all turbulence, directs back to this governance,” “whether with or without hijab, revolution all that we have,” and “down with the dictator” both at day and night time, on Wed., the International Woman’s Day, in addition to singing protests songs collectively and distributing protesting manifestos.” The on the eve of the national celebration of the last Wednesday of the year [before the New Year holidays in spring, Nowrooz, which involved fire dancing and setting off fireworks], too, we witnessed a synthesis of protest and festivity and even clashes with the governmental forces; beside all this, there have been protesting acts of students at various universities, such as that of Tabriz Medical Uni., where students had a matinee protest performance and rallied on the campus on Mar. 7, in objection to aforesaid chain chemical attacks to all-girl’s schools and dorms paired with the highly populated and intense demonstration of the of Allameh Tabatabayi Uni. with the same purpose and on the same date; in line with that, the protest gatherings of the parents of poisoned schoolgirls in front of the schools all over the country, and, of course, the violent and suppressive response of the security agents shown in the recordings that went viral. Furthermore, there has been another nightly demonstration in Bukan, a Kurdish city, on Mar. 16, and in protest to the state-murder of Shirzad Ahmadinejhad, a citizen from Bukan who got killed under torture of IRGC interrogators at their Urmia intelligence division, whose videos were published by Kurdish media on social networks; These are, of course, political examples, and if one adds the economic protests to the mix, this list of examples would develop ad infinitum. For instance, the demonstration of the disability rights activists and disability welfare organizers in front of Planning and Budget Organization in Tehran in protest to the lack of budget allocation to this sector on Mar. 18; and, on the same day, the collective strike of the taxi drivers in Sanandaj in protest to the squalid livelihood conditions and basic expenses soaring up; besides, on Mar. 19, labor media reported that a number of the retirees and pensioners gathered in demonstration in front of Ahwaz Social Security Organization and in protest to their poor livelihood conditions and governmental failure in meeting their demands; these are only the most recent examples and next to them, there have been protest gatherings all over the country at the burial sites of the protestors who got killed in the course of Zhina (Mahsa) Movement such as the case of Sepehr Ismaili on Mar. 17, and a few days before that, speeches were delivered and protest gatherings were made in honoring the death of the victims of this Movement in various cities of Kurdistan, especially in Mahabad. Such memorial ceremonies were held to commemorate the martyrs of the revolution, such as Semko Mowloudi, Shomal Khadiri, Kobra Sheikheh, Fayegh Mam Ghaderi, Shouresh Niknam and the rest and there has been a similar memorial gathering of the surviving family members of those political prisoners who were mass-executed in the summer of 1988, buried in Khavaran, Tehran which was put to a halt by the intervention of the security forces, of course. In addition, there were recorded images going viral on social media on Mar. 16 from Hasanabad, in Sanandaj, at the burial site of Houman Abdollahi, another protestor killed in the course of this Movement, where people gathered in protest and shouted very sharp slogans against the head of the state himself; thus, factually speaking, if such an endless day-to-day chronicle suggest any situation that is “maintained and under control,” then woe to the time when the situation in Iran is let loose and tuned out of control.    

The current facts aside, the “ethology of suppression,” as mentioned earlier, too, has taken a path in recent time that fully repudiates all the implicated in “his highness’s pardon,” and this is exactly why it would be important to define and characterize the present suppressive ethology all the more emphatically and call it for what it is: the post public pardon era, or, briefly, “post-pardon era,” and reinterpret the functions of the suppression machinery against such a conceptual and symbolic background; interesting results will be obtained if one only traces its operation in two distinct areas, that is, among two segments of the population, i.e., the cultural (literary, media, artistic, and journalistic) community, and the other one, the surviving family members of the political prisoners and those protestors killed or arrested in the course of the Movement, which even if combined, would only represent the tip of the iceberg in comparison with the wider dimensions of suppression of all social layers; on Mar. 18, media published two video messages separately recorded to ask for help regarding the situation of a Kurdish political prisoner, Pejhman Fattahi; one is recorded by his wife, Bayan Fattahi, addressed to the human right organizations and German Parliament, and, most importantly, to the people of Iran, and the second one by his mother, Afsaneh Yousefi, in which she expresses her extreme worry about the fate of his son after eight months of complete lack of any update since his arrest, adding that no prison she refers to discloses any information about her son, thus beseeching the international organizations to intervene. Pejhman Fattahi, is a 28 year old young man from Kamyaran, who was arrested in Aug. 2022, in Urmia, and along three other Kurdish citizens. On the same day, social networks published the dismissal notice of Fatemeh Heidari, the sister of Javad Heidari, another protestor killed, from Iran’s National Cartographic Center. She had declared on her own social network account the following: “You axe me down, but I grow up green again! I was a governmental clerk; a few days ago, I received a letter notifying me that I was laid off (you could say the termination of my services!)…” Also, she writes to her brother’s murderers: “This is how wretched and lowly you all are; forget my job, I’d sacrifice my life seeking vengeance and justice for my brother’s blood.” In another news, Fa’ezeh Rahnavard, the sister of Majid’Reza Rahnavard, a protestor executed in Mashhad, was expelled from the university while passing her final educational semesters.  On Mar. 17, another tragic news is published; Muhammad Ismail Arabi, the father of the political prisoner, Soheil Arabi, passes away due to heart arrest after hearing that his son is sentenced to another period of imprisonment (Soheil is released on bail two days after that, on Mar. 19 from Rajayi’Shahr Prison, in Karaj); his was a simple worker under crippling pressure by the security forces over his son’s political activities; beside that, media reported the surviving members of Adinehzadeh family being summoned to the Revolutionary Court over their whistleblowing and follow-up’s after their son, Abolfazl Adinehzadeh, was gunned down in the protests in Mashahd; his father and sister had to attend the court on Mar. 7. Moreover, Farzaneh Bazrehkar, the mother of a killed protestor in Amol, Erfan Rezayi Navayi, was summoned to the court with the charge of “propaganda against the regime” and received threats by the agents of the Ministry of Intelligence. His mother wrote on her Instagram account that initially, intelligent forces had summoned her via phone contact twice, once on Mar. 15 and the second time, on Mar. 17. In addition, on Mar. 1st, Shirin Najafi, the sister of Hadis Najafi, one of the young women brutally murdered in the course of protests, had informed on her Instagram account to have been threatened to receive a 25 year long prison sentence, which was later reaffirmed by the media (even though there has been news of the other sister of this family to have been threatened to a long period of imprisonment as well); a day before that, close sources had disclosed to Persian BBC that the sister and brother of another protestor killed in the bloody nighttime massacre of Izeh, a Kurdish-settling town, that is, Milad Sa’idiyan’Jou, had been arrested and transferred to Ahwaz with all their social network accounts deactivated by the security forces. What should be added here is the security organizations summoning and threatening certain political prisoners who were released following the public pardon some of whom were reported by Iran Wire news agency, on Mar. 6, including Leila Husseinzadeh herself, Aliyeh Motallebzadeh, photographer and women’s rights activist, Hussein Rownaghi, civil activist, and Ismail Abdi, the former secretary of Teachers’ Union.   

And, when it comes to the cultural community, the situation is as horrendous and alarming; Arrests are daily and all over the country. Sepideh Ghloian, a labor activist and author, was released from Evin Prison after four years and seven months of imprisonment, and since she records a video of herself shouting slogans against the supreme leader without wearing hijab, she gets separated from her family and abducted on her way to Dezfoul, and transferred back to Evin Prison. Other than that, according to the report received by the Kurdistan Human Rights Network, Sadegh Samerehei, a well-known Kurdish teacher, writer and filmmaker from Kermanshah was kidnapped by the security forces from his home in Kermanshah, on March 7, 2023. Apart from them, a number of individuals also got arrested for spreading information or doing journalist work about the chemical attacks mentioned earlier. For instance, as reported by “Students’ Union,” Sarina Mahmud Salehi, animation student at Vocational Training Uni. for female undergraduates, in Karaj, was abducted by security plainclothes on Thursday night, March 2, 2023, after the news of chemical poisoning at the dorm of her university got released. After that, Seyyed Ali Pourtabatabaei, a journalist and chief editor of “Qom News” news agency, media advisor and lecturer was arrested in Qom on Sunday morning, Mar. 5, 2023. According to the news media, his Twitter page has since become unavailable. According to HRA, the Iranian human rights news agency, he has recently been investigating the chain chemical attacks, especially in Qom. Finally, on Mar. 19, media report the news of the arrest of Reza Pourja’far, an artist and actor from Azerbaijan, who was then transferred to an unknown location and similarly, his Instagram account got deactivated too. It was stated in some sources on social media that this arrest was related to chemical attacks as well. Besides these arrests, which most certainly do not represent all cases, there have been threat campaigns in operation to silence the conversation about these attacks via various bureaucratic and media apparatuses of the regime; for instance, on Mar. 7, the news outlet of the judicial system took a threatening tone in an announcement published online in which it made a warning against those who “disturb psychological security of society” by addressing these attacks. It is stated in it that “last week, an indictment has been issued against the managing editors of certain news agencies including Ham-Mihan, Roydad 24, and Shargh, and also aginst certain individuals such as Azar Mansouri [reformist politician], Sadegh Ziba’Kalam [Uni. political science lecturer], and Reza Kiyaiyan [actor] and a lawsuit has been filed in this regard.”    

And irrespective of the public pardon, many prison sentences are either issued or reaffirmed at the appeal stage against the political prisoners of the cultural community. Khabat Fadaei, the 29 year old popular poet and musician, Kurdish labor and civil activist, from Sanandaj, resident of Tehran, who, according to the report of Human Rights in Iran, was kidnapped by security officers in Varamin in Sept. 23, 2022 and in the course of the mass protests, was sentenced to six years of imprisonment by the first branch of the Revolutionary Court of Varamin, chaired by Judge Ashkan Ramesh, in Feb. 25, 2023. According to Kurdish human right news agencies’ reports, this popular artist was sentenced to one year in prison on the charge of “propaganda against the regime” and five years in prison on the charge of “membership in a group with the aim of disrupting the country’s security;” and, according to the penal accumulation act, this artist’s sentence comes to five years of enforceable imprisonment. Also, there is the case of Keyvan Mohtadi, a labor activist, translator, author and member of Iran Writers Association, who was arrested at his own place along with his wife, Anisha Assadollahi, in Apr. 2022, and initially sentenced to a total 6 years of imprisonment, five years for “conspiracy and collusion against national security” and one year for “propaganda against the regime; later, and according to his wife’s announcement on Tweeter, following the “emphatic order of the 36th division of the Court of Appeals,” he was excluded from the public pardon and his sentence got reaffirmed verbatim this Mar. and at the Court of Appeals, with a total five years of enforceable imprisonment. In another case, on Mar. 15, another journalist arrested in the course of mass protests, that is, Rouhollah Nakha’ee, who was also qualified to be included in the public pardon, was excluded from it by the direct interference of judicial authorities and sentenced to two years and seven months of imprisonment at the 28th division of the Revolutionary Court, chaired by Judge Amouzadeh, with the charge of “conspiracy and collusion against national security” and “propaganda against the regime.” Examples keep following, and the news of the arrest of Arzhang Davoodi was published on media on Mar. 16; a teacher and author who had served 20 years in prison and just got released on Mar. 7. The list goes on, and according to the latest reports on Mar. 13, another activist couple both are left unpardoned and receive a confirmed prison sentence at the Court of Appeals. According to the Dadban news website, based on the verdict issued by the 36th division of the Court of Appeals of Tehran Province and communicated to Kamyar Fakour, labor activist and poet, and his wife Sarvenaz Ahmadi, researcher and child rights activist; Fakour’s sentence was reduced to eight months of imprisonment and Ahmadi’s sentence reduced to three years and six months. In the early January, the trial court of the couple was held by the 15th branch of the Revolutionary Court, chaired by Judge Salavati, the unmistakable symbol of nefarious political sentences; on the 21st of January, 2023, this court sentenced Sarvenaz Ahmadi to a total of 6 years in prison. The sentence issued against him included five years for the charge of “conspiracy and collusion” and one year for the charge of “propaganda against the regime”; Kamyar Fakour was also sentenced to one year in prison in the same case. Finally, various media reported on Mar. 19, 2023, that Reyhaneh Taravati, the civil activist, backstage cinematographer and photographer had informed via a tweet that her prison sentence was reaffirmed verbatim at the Court of Appeals and that, according to the law, a total of five years of imprisonment in this sentence will be enforceable. She was initially put to trial by the 29th division of Tehran Revolutionary Court, chaired by Judge Mazloum, where she was sentenced to six years of imprisonment with such charges as “conspiracy and collusion against national security” and “propaganda against the regime;” the court in question had considered activities like “plotting a targeted activity in the advocacy of women’s movement in Iran” and “creating false demands among women by supporting the me-too movement” as evidence for such charges.  

These are, by no means, the only modes of suppression exercised against the cultural community in Iran. There are more “software-like” ways, if you will, involved as well, ranging from forced confessions and expressions of repentance on social media and confiscation of properties or forcing individuals to abandon social networks indefinitely to banning them from professional activity or leaving the country; for instance, on Mar. 14, and based on a circular letter issued by Deeds and Properties Registration Organization of Iran, tens of individuals, including a number of protesting artists were deemed unauthorized for transactions by the Public Persecution Office of Tehran, among whom on could read the names of such prominent artists as Mehdi Yarrahi, the popular singer and composer, Taraneh Alidousti, the globally acclaimed actress, and Asghar Farhadi, the Oscar-winning director, Keyhan Kalhor, the globally praised musician on top of the list. In addition, on Mar. 8 and in celebration of the International Woman Day, a number of young female dancers recorded a video of their collective hip-hop dancing performance in Ekbatan vicinity, located in Tehran which quickly went viral; however, after some days, both them and their dancing coach got arrested and in a video published on the Instagram page of their dancing coach, the same girls were forced to appear in front of the camera, fully converting their bodies and hair, and express their repentance and apologize over their performance bathed in fright and fear. Also, on Mar. 12, Reza Soleimani, a Bakhtiyari folkloric singer, who had sung out of solidarity in the memorial ceremony of Kiyan Pirfalak, the 9 year old child stated earlier who was gunned down in the course of protests, was forced to leave social networks by the pressure of the security forces. Before deactivating his accounts, he had to give an apologetic explanation to deny having any critical intention in the lyrics of his song against the security authorities who are the primary suspect in Kiyan’s murder.

The cases listed above can at best shed some light on partial corners of the suppression calendar only during this March and, in all actuality, is rendered limitless, but when they become categorized and accorded, the shady silhouette of the ethology of suppression, as if a sea monster monetarily lit by the thunders in a dark tempested night, manifests itself in a passing way. It would suffice to point out that there has been an unprecedented increase in the rate of the execution of prisoners, both political and otherwise, in the most politically restless regions of Iran that is, Kurdistan and Sistan and Baluchistan. To conclude, when “his highness’s pardon” is regarded in light of the ethology of suppression in the post-pardon era, it seems very destitute, and all those symbolic gestures and meanings potently inscribed in it melt into air when weighed against the day-to-day and all-encompasses accumulation of such felonious and suppressive facts, and then there is no more any sign of the “maintained situation,” nor of any normalized conditions, nor of the definite domination of the state over its dissidents, nor even of the claim of reconciliation of the two and the regime’s willing resignation from the exclusive right of exercising violence and taking draconian measures; at the end, “his highness’s public pardon” has been nothing but a short intermission in the course of a blindly targeting and comprehensive suppression. 

دیدگاه‌ خود را بنویسید

نشانی ایمیل شما منتشر نخواهد شد. بخش‌های موردنیاز علامت‌گذاری شده‌اند *

پیمایش به بالا
ارتباط با ما از طریق تلگرام