The ending half of the year 2022-2023 was an all-inclusive turning point for Iran, a unanimously endorsed fact, even by the most inner circles of the ruling class, naturally regarded as the final barricade and ultimate sensory organ reacting to any major change and destabilization in the dominant order; the nation-state gap is opened abysmally in a way that it does not seem possible for it to be mended without some bloody deliverance until any foreseeable future. The discrimination buildup which has deprived citizens, layer after layer, from any share or benefit in terms of social, political, and economic rights, powers, and participation, as if an onion being flayed and in form of a crouching coup beginning as early as in 1980’s post-revolution era, has brought the situation to an irreversible point at which, apart from an absolutely benefitted minority lined up around the regime, paradoxically the majority is converted into a marginalized minority by becoming successively excluded from all dominions mentioned above so much so that, today, there is hardly anybody left unexposed to this ostracism, un-excluded from relations and rentier spoils gathered up under the head of the state’s rule of thumb, so to speak, either based on gender, ethnicity, language, religion, political stance, social life-style or any other discrimination-bearing excuse. There is not much room left for courtesy and euphemism, in varying degrees of intensity and severity, the majority of the population is eliminated from the common grounds of citizenry; and, now, it is much less a discussion of the positive degrees of being privileged with rewards, rights, and access, but rather of the negative degradation in lacking all the above; and this is the reason why Iran is becoming an increasingly more uprising-predisposed society as a whole, a trend already touched on by such sociologists of note from Said Madani, a sociologist himself presently imprisoned for ever so many times, who formulates the social state in Iran, after the 100th day anniversary of the emergence of “Zhina (Mahsa Amini) Movement” and positions this uprising in between spontaneous riots and organized movements (hence, giving it the name, “uprising”) which offers the potential prospect of turning into a full-fledged movement, to Asef Bayat, the prominent Iranian professor of sociology, base abroad, and the theorist of social movements and revolutions in Iran and the rest of the Middle East, who recently gave an interview over the same topic, Zhina Movement, and stated the following: “With the emergence of the “people” as a subject, in form of an uber-collective in which class, gender, ethnic, and religious boundaries are temporarily etiolated in favor of a wider general uprising through which, it seems, that it is entering a sort of revolutionary episode;” from 2009 (and the rise of the Green Movement) to the economic uprisings of Dec. 2017 and Oct. 2019, and until now, marked by the mass uprisings of Zhina Movement in 2022-2023, which portrays an ever more intensified trend towards a nation-scaled comprehensiveness and the engagement of more social layers; in other words, the synthesis of the present conditions, put together, makes this vicious cycle of successive uprisings and bloody crackdowns inevitable until further notice; that is, the regime’s absolute unwillingness to make any concessions, and to retreat even one step away from any ground of conflict which has made the ruler-subject relation so antagonistic, ruptured, and extreme, in addition to the evidently deep-seated incapacity of the entire corpus of the opposition, based abroad, to organize protest movements inside the country towards any given change that mandates leadership quality and public mobilization, and the overall resultant of regional and international relations that has apparently ended up with a toxic balance in favor of preserving the status quo in all fronts, causing the sheer verbalized support of Western political figures for “Woman, Life, Freedom” (Zhina) Movement in Iran, and the parrot-fashioned repetition of the same slogan in official political events, in front of cameras, itself nothing but a flatulent alms paid in compensation for actively participating in establishing further the symptomatic equilibrium set in Iran and the region both; thus, there is neither any will to change on part of the state, nor the possibility of consenting or tarrying with the currently dominant yet intolerable situation by the ever-increasing discontented social layers, apt to revolt.
Consequently, in the political landscape, as far as it can be seen, there is not much escape from these catastrophic quivers, with their horrendous and massive individual and collective damages, in addition to all of its psychosocial consequences and human costs; one of the most critical aspects of such crises, in terms of human costs, is the refugees’ problem, those dissidents and citizens who, to put it simply, are captivated in the security net of the regime and thus forced to leave their own country on exile, most of whom, deprived of any other option, go to Turkey, hoping to move to a third country from there and get admitted as a (political) refugee. In a report on the same subject, published in Sept. 2015, Radio Zamaneh website announced the statistics of the total number of the Iranian refugees residing in Turkey to be 15 thousands; and on Jun. 22, 2022, the head of the Center of Afghan and Iranian Refugees in Berlin, Hamid Nowzari, gives and interview to VOA, where he describes the “conditions of the refugees in Turkey and Greece as horrifying and catastrophic,” adding that “the latest statistics of the Iranian refugees in Turkey demonstrate that, until the year 2020, at least 31 thousand Iranian refugees had applied for refugee settlement,” a statistic that, according to him, can have well surpassed 32 thousands refugee applicants given the outbreak of the pandemic in the first half of that year. However, the statistics quoted above dates back to a time prior to the emergence of Zhina Movement; an uprising whose most definitely underestimated arrestees’ statistics, estimated by HRA, the Iranian human rights news agency, published on Mar. 18, 2023, covering 2022-2023, is as follows: “the arrest of over 29.688 protestors has been recorded. At least, 617 individuals have been executed in this year.” The same agency also adds that it has “extracted its data from 13.631 recorded reports between Mar. 21, 2022, and Mar. 16, 2023;” in addition, Iran Follow-up Committee, a grassroots media exclusively covering the reports of the arrested protestors of Zhina Movement since its dawn, has published a report in Feb. 2023, by the name of “Those who Left, Those who Remained,” in which it investigates the situation of the arrested protestors after the issuance of the Judiciary Recent Public Pardon Circular Letter and within the course and context of the enforcement of this public pardon and its immediate consequences, a report organized by a prison-to-prison statistical study, and, in there, it informs of the release of many protestors and political prisoners along with many of such cases being announced closed; and yet, the uprooting and unprecedented waves of criminalization and proscription have victimized extensive spectrums of society, and all reports and evidence in hand suggest that, when put to test, the so-called “public pardon” by no means indicate any cutback in the severity of security response in the area of the suppression of the dissidents. More importantly, as far as IWAC’s target community, that is, the artistic, cultural, literary, and media, is concerned, not only has not such severity undergone any cutback, but also has been intensified and expanded even more and still in operation by following the same logic of comprehensive and indistinctive suppression; a fact that IWAC’s own detailed report of the end of the year 2022-2023 (in Persian calendar), i.e., a month after the announcement and implementation of the public pardon, testifies to along with many other sources and evidence produced from then on.
As a result, it is quite evident that by such developments would inevitably amount to the exponential increase of the population of the Iranian refuges in Turkey, with a major chunk of it belonging to the community in question; in the best-case scenario, and in the absence of any precise statistics, dependent upon the present reports, along with IWAC’s own investigations, tens of Iranian authors, poets, cinema and stage actors, artists, musicians and music-players, journalists and the have taken refuge in Turkey, and, in many cases, have spent years in there with the spellbound and unrealizable hope of being admitted as a refugee in any given Western country. Many of such refugees have submitted their case to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Ankara, Turkey, and despite presenting expansive and valid professional resumes, such as that of professional cinema and stage acting CV’s, and also despite having evinced that they had been monitored, threatened, or even their living places broken into by the mercenaries and agents of Iran’s regime in Turkey, and even despite having announced such violations on Farsi-speaking mass media, based abroad, still have been rejected by the organization mentioned above; there are also many other cases among the Iranian literary community who had waited for their refugee case’s admission by ICORN (The International Cities of Refuge Network which provides refugeeship for authors at risk), in certain cases for as long as seven to ten years, and, in most cases, despite having a valid and sufficiently documented case of refugeeship and authorship, both, still failed to be regarded as such and transferred to a third country. This is all while in the year 2022-2023, and by the outbreak of Zhina Movement, we had to witness the tragic case of the assassination of Muhammad Sha’bani, a poet from Shiraz, Iran, and refugee in Turkey, which is not wrapped in mystery anymore, along with many accumulated experiences as such that sufficiently establishes the fact that Turkey is the free maneuver field of the Iranian security forces, and that almost every single refuge-seeking dissidents fallen prey to the security arms of the Iranian regime and now residing in such a lawless and unsafe country as Turkey, are very seriously exposed to the threat of abduction and assassination.
This aside, these un-refuged refugees are constantly overshadowed by the horrendous risk of deportation to Iran. Just to review some more recent cases, there is Mahshid Nazemi, the sister of Pouran Nazemi, author and civil activist, and a former political prisoner in Iran who was recently released, posted a video on her own account, also reflected in Farsi-speaking mass media, informed of the possibility of being deported to Iran. As reported by a Turkish news agency website, mezopotamyaajans, on Nov. 14, 2022, informs that this political prisoner, residing in Izmir, and sentenced to execution by the Iranian regime, has been transferred to a removal center in her own district and is at risk of being deported to Iran. She herself had posted a video on social networks and explained the situation as follows: “Today, they called me from the immigration administration of the district where I live. They called me to sign a few signatures on my file. The day before, they threatened me in a car waiting in front of my house. I complained to the police about this. “I thought the police were calling me. I went to the immigration office in the morning and they put me in jail. I’m at the police station where I live now. They will take me to the Iranian refugee return camp.” In addition, on Dec. 15, 2022, another Turkish news agency, Yeni Yaşam, informed of the transference of 144 refugees to another removal center located in Muğla, city in southwestern Turkey; in this report, it is stated that “144 Kurdish refugees who came to Turkey in Marmaris district of Muğla were detained. It was learned that 60 of the refugees held in the Muğla Ula Removal Center were men and 41 were women, among them 43 children. It was stated that among the refugees there were children who were sick.” The same reports adds that certain “human rights activists in Iran are among those detained: Iranian Kurdish activist Hossein Manbari (Amanj), Shugar Mohammadi, Naser Kamangar, Arzoo Molanaei and their two children, Sabah Nikkhah and his wife Shallir, and their two children.” (Based on the IWAC’s follow-up, some of these refugees were finally released, some managed to flee Turkey to a third country, and some got deported). In addition, in a series of reports by Persian BBC, subsequently published from Mar. 21, 2023 on, the risk of the deportation of a large number of such refugees was informed; Zhinou Ebrahimi, a political refugee in Turkey, explains in a video published by BBC that her husband, Peyman Moghaddam, was sent to a deportation camp on Mar. 6 as a consequence to which, she herself and her children were left in a dithering situation. In addition, a refuge-seeking mother, Monir Naderi, says in a video published by the same news agency that she had fled from Iran due to child-molestation, sexual violation, and torture she had been faced with in Iran, and that she and her children had formerly been under the protection of the UN, but since 2018, when proceeding refugee affairs was submitted to Turkey’s police, resulting in many problems for this family and many other refugees in there. This refuge-seeking mother declares having five children, three of which underage and suffering from serious illnesses such as brain tumor; she also adds that, despite seven years of living in Turkey as a refugee, now her residential status is declared illegal by the Turkish government, and thus she and her children are now deprived of most basic citizen rights and access, including the right to work, and her children’s rights to receive education or even refer to medical centers (a phenomenon which, according to IWAC’s field investigation and that of other news agencies, is vastly in operation throughout Turkey and thus the so-called “illegal” Iranian refugees neither have the right to seek medical treatment at Turkish medical centers and facilities, even in case of suffering from severe illnesses or in case of any medical emergency, not to provide their children with their most basic rights, including the right to education, not can refer to any police station in case of being faced with any given problem); however, the same news agency, Persian BBC, has published voice messages recorded by some of the Afghan and Iranian refugees in Turkey in which they ask for immediate help. In that report, it is added that hundreds of Afghan and Iranian refugees residing in Turkey, whose refugeeship had been admitted by the UN, and who had been living in Trukey for many years, in wait for being transferred to a third country, are not rejected by Turkish police and their cases announced canceled. Many of them have been transferred to deportation camps and told that should expect to be deported to Iran soon. Many of them sat that in case of being deported to Iran, their lives will be at risk. Finally, in the most recent case, Peyman Mirzayi the political refugee in Turkey, has declared in a voice message published on social networks that it has been 23 days since he was arrested and moved to a removal center in Turkey, that is, Geri Gönderme Merkezi, and barred from the right to visit her family while being at the risk of deportation to Iran.
However, despite the accumulative catastrophes briefly sketched out above, and despite the increasingly worsening human condition of the refugees in Turkey, one can observe a curious wave of inactivity, indifference, silence and compromise spreading into the entire corpus of most Iranian human rights, literary, artistic, journalistic, and union, institutions and organizations that, by definition and self-acclaimed job description, are expected to fulfill most activities in this area; this is while the Iranian refuge-seeking authors, artists, and media activists are even deprived of a basic media coverage and notice and thus, this obnoxious landscape does not hold much more than a promise for the recurrence of the bloody destiny of Muhammad Sh’bani and his likes. For this reason, in IWAC, we have decided to publish a bilingual Far-Eng series of reports, by the title of “Reports from Exile,” so that, in case of having the consent of the individuals subject to these reports, we inform our media audiences of their exile conditions (in Turkey and elsewhere) so that, perhaps, by bringing this issue into media focus, eventually, the public conscience get defrosted and the liable and pertinent supporting institutions and organizations start fulfilling their basic tasks more effectively. At the end, it is worth mentioning that the reports from exile, mentioned above, is not the only measure taken by IWAC in this area and, thus far, precisely in correspondence with the collectively operational state, designated by IWAC’s very name, i.e., the Iranian Writers’ Action Committee, this agency has tried to create relational networks to engage institutes such as some divisions of Pen international and other figures and organizations involved in refugees’ affairs to prepare the ground for the collective departure of the refugees of the Iranian cultural community from Turkey and to a third Western country; an operation whose details will be published by IWAC in near future.
