Pakhshan Azizi, a Political Prisoner Incarcerated in Evin Prison: "For the Central Authority, We Are Small, We Don't Count, but for Their Decrees, We Are the Heaviest and Greatest."

Pakhshan Azizi, a Kurdish political prisoner from Mahabad, who was arrested in Tehran last year and is now incarcerated in Evin Prison, has written a letter titled "Denying the Truth and Its Alternative," which Hengaw Organization for Human Rights has obtained. In it, she recounts her arrest and torture by security forces of the Islamic Republic of Iran, writing, "I was hanged by the interrogators many times."

The full text of this letter, published for the first time by Hengaw, is as follows:

Denying the Truth, and Its Alternative

From the tender years of childhood, she learned the struggle for survival through the stories and lullabies of a mother who had borne life's hardships to the very marrow of her bones. With her mother's soothing voice imparting the essence of life and freedom, she grew and matured.

For a long time, day and night blurred into one in her relentless quest to stay alive, to find a way of being, and beyond that, to discover the manner of being. On the peak of a scorching summer, about 20 people stormed in, wielding the state’s intimidation tactics, believing they had apprehended a terrorist (the same terrorist for whom public intimidation is one of the pillars!). With hands tied behind her back and a gun held to her head, the 17-year-old, who was seeing her aunt for the first time in ten years, was thrown to the ground along with three other family members. Her captors mounted upon her and her family with a smirk on their faces as a sign of power and triumph.

Scenes of the massacre and the tearing apart of thousands of Kurdish Syrian families passed before her eyes like a tragic film.

A race between life and death was underway. In extreme physical weakness, she clung to the walls of her solitary cell to keep from falling. The very walls of the cell where she had been detained in 2009 for the same charges "being Kurdish" and "being a woman".

She could hear her father's coughing from Ward 3, he had recently been operated on for a cancerous tumor and he had suffered a stroke, and she worried about the mental and physical state of her other two family members.

On the first day of interrogation, they offered to quietly settle everything without judicial proceedings!...

She was hanged multiple times during interrogation. They buried her ten meters underground and brought her out again, portraying her as socially desperate and as a failure. Historical memory is replete with this incident. From childhood, she had been branded as a separatist and as the second sex, never recognized as a citizen.  For the central authority, we are small, we don't count, but for their decrees, we are the heaviest and greatest.

Again, during interrogation, her social desperation and her failure were pointed out to her.

A human being is defined by their gender (the first dimension of their perception), their language, their culture and art, their management, their freedom and way of life, and, more generally, their ideology. When any of these aspects of life are destroyed, or aborted, there is no place left for a human life. If you abort the free will of a woman as a dignified human being, there is no place for a free life, and this signifies a decline from human-moral-political standards. When living according to one's own identity is stripped of its meaning, it takes a defensive form, thus leading to rebellion.

The chair is repeatedly beaten against. The insults, humiliations, and threats filled the room. She is in her worst physical and psychological conditions resulting from prolonged hunger strike and five months in solitary confinement (the most horrific white torture), alongside historical and identity oppressions. Tortures that are a tiny drop in the sea of history, the clenched fists of the interrogator as a statesman flaunting his authority each time, the shout that resounds, why do you deny the truth?!

The greatest social truth, that is, the woman, her identity, being Kurdish, life and freedom, has been denied, what truth and what denial?!

The authoritarian, gender-based, and religious fundamentalist mindsets are themselves the cause of the social, political, economic, and cultural crisis, and naturally, what is the cause cannot be the solution. It is the people themselves who have the necessary sociopolitical will and consciousness to overcome the crisis. Denying the truth of the women, Kurds, and all marginalized communities is to fall into historical distortion and the greatest denial of truth.

It is not only the Kurd who has issues; a greater issue is at play. The difference between the center and the margin is in one "K," symbolizing the denial of truth, and that denial is embedded in the center.

Erasing the problem statement instead of solving it can never be the solution. The annihilation of the collective potential of women and marginalized communities out of fear is a threat! Democracy and politics, however, should never fear the realities of a challenging society, rich in historical memory of genocide and denial.

In a cell she has been alone with for months, with frequent bleeding and continuous hunger strikes, her health is in critical condition. Besides wearing out her force in order to extract information, is there anything else being done there?! She repeats aloud to herself, a small drop in a vast sea whose flow is inevitable. She massages her legs to stand up. She rises, falls, it’s not unpredictable, we have started walking with these rise and falls. This is the meaning of our life, the pain that doesn’t kill, makes a human stronger. We have felt, lived, the life on the margin of existence and non-existence with all our being.

The first corpse she saw was Khadija, whose hands were tied by her husband and brother, and she was set on fire. She vowed never to stop defending women's rights. Thousands of women and children saw their men beheaded before their eyes in ISIS attacks, taken captive, and raped. The culture of rape that is imposed on women, mothers with infants at their breasts, whose milk had dried up. Barefoot children, hundreds of them, perished against the rocks of Shingal , which was reflected in all the world’s media. A crime against humanity that cannot be fully studied even by writing hundreds of books.

And elsewhere, in Kobani and... dozens of women and children charred, burned in Turkish airstrikes on Rojava, their bodies torn apart by ISIS attacks.

She wakes up, unable to stand, vomits, a historical vomit.

Forcibly seated, the threats, and humiliations resume. "Why did you go to Syria? Why didn’t you go to Europe?!"

The question is repeated, revealing a clear attraction and pull towards the West. Are they talking about their dreams, or are they being drawn toward what they long for?!

After the failure and frustration of your 2009 case due to the stifling political-social atmosphere, I distanced myself miles from my homeland (where I had the embrace of a mother). The meaning of life had become meaningless. I left to go to a place that was mine, too (as you said, Syrian Kurdistan is ours, Turkish Kurdistan and Iraqi Kurdistan are ours). So I didn’t go anywhere apart from my place and my own! The beginning of a new chapter for the Middle East, especially working in war refugee camps, which could be the greatest ethical and conscientious service for a community that had been oppressed for years. An aid worker duty that, by crossing borders, becomes revolutionary, were you also there?!

The voice rises, whoever is there, is a member of the PKK?!!

A humanitarian aid worker approach beyond oppression was adopted with a non-scientific, objectivist view devoid of essentialism. Labeling this as organizational, based on a few photos (in the height of the revolution, you see weapons in the hands of women, the elderly, and youth in every home, neighborhood, camp), is your wrong understanding of the issue.

I believe in revolutionizing people's mentality and realm of senses first, and pursuing structural changes as the next step. Within the revolution, naturally, characters are built and formed. Betrayal and heroism become more prominent in fulfilling social-political responsibilities because they take place in the heart of the social issues. But your work is different. Adopting a democratic and systematic approach and rebuilding an ethical-political society within civil and humanitarian activities leads to more tangible solutions with higher practical value.

Local differences must be accepted; this does not equal separatism.

The system for revolutionizing mentality leads its own way. Democratizing society through democratizing the family to overcome gender bias, democratizing religion to overcome religious bias (not anti-religion), democratizing all existing institutions to prevent authoritarianism, and this is a shared theoretical construct without falling into the trap of dictatorship and cleansing the authentic traditions of the region’s nations, which are a significant part of their identity and existence.

All my activities and efforts have been in the direction of serving and fulfilling my historical duty towards my lived experiences and historical suppressions. I firmly believe that the right path to achieving a democratic society is essentially through adopting a democratic approach to construct an ethical-political society where people themselves deliberate on social issues, make them their concerns, and find solutions. Maximum people’s participation in solving society’s problems will ensure social cohesion and the way out of the crisis, and this is the essence of living with the feminine knowledge that achieving democracy will lead to achieving freedom.

Pakhshan Azizi

July 2024 Evin Prison