IWAC – Follow-up report on Sepideh Gholian, labor activist, author, and freelance journalist from Khuzestan; she was released from Evin Prison after having served four years and seven months of imprisonment on Wed. Mar. 15, 2023, and only a few hours after her release, was abducted on her way from Tehran to Dezfoul, got separated from her family, and transferred to Even prison by the security forces once more. However, since her arrest right after being released, there have been some developments related to her situation as follows: on Apr. 11, 2023, the judiciary spokesperson commented on her case saying she failed to put the supreme leader’s “kind regard” manifested in his public pardon to good use and “insisted upon” committing her crime and thus got re-arrested. Later, in Farsi-speaking mass media, it was reported that she had released a response to the official statement of the judiciary spokesman from prison in which she wrote that hardly four hours since her release, she got arrested again with battery and physical assault and then got transferred to Evin Prison. She also added that she had been threatened to “rape” and declared “as long as the Islamic executioner state is reigning” she will not attend any court. The open letter written by her at Evin Prison’s Women’s Ward published in media is as follows: “In the name of the Rainbow God [referring to an expression used by Kiyan Pirfalak in a video where he demonstrated his hand-made and self-engineered paper boat which went viral on social media after he, a nine year old boy from Izeh, was brutally gunned down by the state’s security forces in the course of Zhina (Mahsa) Movement, leaving a profound traumatic bruise in Iranians’ collective conscious and caused lasting national and global mourning and protest]…We did not offer blood to end up compromising [another reference made to a slogan shut in the streets by demonstrators signifying their will to carry out the revolution to its ultimate end]! It was hardly four hours since my release from Evin Prison and only four hours since I got to witness the streets after “Woman, Life, Freedom,” while I had not even covered half of the way from prison to my hometown that I got arrested again on the road and sent to Evin Prison’s Ward 209. In this short interval, they left no assault or humiliation unpracticed against me. I was brutally beaten up; quoting themselves, I was to be “ass-slaughtered.” In the corridor of Ward 209, a man threatened to rape me. He said they would tie my hands and feet up and teach me a good lesson. And, actually, this “teaching a good lesson” to some tens of thousands of women of “Woman, Life, Freedom” Movement, does indeed enjoy a very special place both in the obscure chambers of their four decade long murderous conduct and in the course of seeking justice…But this is what is clear: our commitment still holds. “Freedom” is not given, but taken, and I, Sepideh Gholyan, still hold fast to the commitment I have made to the already fed up people of Iran: I will not go to a show trial chaired by someone who has signed the execution sentence of the revolutionary protestors and grant no legitimacy either to their concocted show trials or the sentence they issued and state it in the most unequivocal manner that as long as the Islamic executioner state is reigning, and as long as the “humble fountain-unearthers” [alluding to a famous politically charged and historically canonical poem by the great Iranian modernist poet, Ahmad Shamlou] and those who protest despotism are held as hostages of the Islamic state and their unjust trials, will attend no courtroom at all…with the hope of the fall of the Antichrist of the Time [referring to the supreme leader of the Islamic Republic who came to be called in Iranian protests both in Iran and all over the world as Zahhak, a mythical figure somewhat equivalent to the antichrist].”
