In
Iran's Women's Prisons, Injustice and Atrocity
by Abigail R. Esman
Special to IPT News
March 23, 2017
|
|
|
|
Share:  
|
  Be the
first of your friends to like this.
 On a warm day last
April, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe dressed her toddler Gabrielle, kissed her
parents goodbye, and set off to catch her flight back home to London.
She never made it.
Instead, Islamic Revolutionary Guards apprehended the then-37-year-old
at Tehran's Imam Khomeini airport and transported her to Iran's infamous
Evin prison, where prisoners are routinely tortured and women subjected
regularly to sexual abuse and rape.
In September, the dual British-Iranian citizen, who had been visiting
her parents in Tehran before being apprehended, was sentenced to five years
imprisonment on vague "national security charges."
To date, no evidence has been produced to substantiate the charge. Her
family believes it stems largely from her work as an executive with the Thomson-Reuters Foundation,
whose mission, to "stand for free independent journalism, human
rights, and the rule of law," is not wholly compatible with the
Iranian regime. Employees of charitable organizations are also a frequent
target of Iranian officials, who often accuse them of being spies.
In the meantime, her daughter, who has British but not Iranian
citizenship, remains with her grandparents, while Zaghari-Radcliffe's
British husband, Richard Ratcliffe, continues to fight from the UK for her
release.
Iranian arrests of dual-nationals are not uncommon – the current
government does not recognize the second nationality of its citizens – and
arbitrary arrests on trumped-up charges of spying are a signature of the
regime. In addition, women, both Iranian and dual-nationals, increasingly
are being targeted as they speak out against the misogyny of their rulers.
As the Women's Committee of the National Council of Resistance of Iran
(NCRI) observes, "Under the mullahs' rule in Iran, women
are supposed to stay home and therefore, having any kind of political or
civil rights activity is considered a serious crime for women and evokes
greater retaliation by the government."
Zaghari-Ratcliffe has felt that retaliation. For nine months, she
withstood agonizing conditions in solitary confinement: "Every day and
every second I would submerge more and more in an ocean of doubt, fear,
threat, loneliness and more than anything mistrust," she wrote in a letter to her husband earlier this
month. "... My wails would go unheard in that tiny, dingy, cold,
grey cell ... In solitary, there was a moment when I realised that
there is a level of pain that I hadn't experience before, a pain thousands
of times longer, more overwhelming than child birth, without a happy
ending."
But prison conditions for women, who endure the same forms
and level of torture as male prisoners, can be even more horrific. They are
raped, groped, and subjected to other forms of sexual abuse. Their genitals
may be forcibly subjected to invasive "searches." Even
their fellow female prisoners can pose a threat: except at Evin, where
prisoners are segregated according to the nature of their crime, women
prisoners are held together regardless of the charges against them.
Consequently, political detainees can be housed "amongst ordinary and
often dangerous inmates," the NCRI reports.
But Evin, where most political detainees are incarcerated, is in every
other way far worse than most other prisons. Women are thrown immediately
into solitary confinement, where they will remain for months before being
released into an overcrowded, vermin-infested women's ward. And it is at
Evin that some of the most horrifying torture takes place, particularly
against political prisoners. The NCRI report describes women detainees hung
by their hands and feet, subjected to repeated cigarette burns, and
suffering beatings severe enough to cause internal bleeding. They may be
threatened with rape or execution and, as at all Iranian prisons, denied
communication with family or even an attorney.
Conditions are even worse at Qarchak Women's Prison, where a single hall
holds 600 beds for 2,000 prisoners, most of whom therefore sleep on the
floor, according to Al-Arabiya. In addition, the NCRI
notes, "there is no good drinking water. The prisoners who [can] not
afford to buy mineral water have no option but to drink salty water."
And regular inspections of women's genitals in the name of
"security" can be violent, resulting in severe injury. Those who
dare protest are subjected to physical torture, or placed in solitary confinement
with a "psychologically disturbed prisoner," reports Al-Arabiya.
Added to this are the abysmal physical conditions of women's prisons
overall, which receive a miniscule portion of the overall prison budget.
Most are therefore situated in repurposed warehouses and other abandoned
buildings. Some lack walls or roofs. At others, AIDS, hepatitis, and other
infectious diseases are rampant, the possibility of contamination made
worse by lack of ventilation in the wards.
Yet despite the disease, the abuse, and the injuries that result,
political prisoners – male or female – are generally denied access to
medical care. Some have gone blind as a result of their treatment. At Evin,
Zaghari-Ratcliffe reportedly is having trouble walking, considered
suicide, and recently collapsed when finally permitted to visit the prison
clinic.
None of this is particularly new. Iran has a long history of abusive
treatment of women prisoners, reaching back to the 1980s when virgins were
routinely raped before being executed, a practice that became
"systematic," according to the British Foreign Policy Centre.
Often, such rapes were justified on religious grounds, based on Quranic
verses that describe virgins as inherently innocent. In other cases, female
political prisoners were married off to their jailor rapists or even
lawyers in exchange for avoiding execution. Such practices continued,
according to several reports, well into the 1990s and later.
Moreover, the misogynistic nature of Iranian society makes women
especially vulnerable to psychological torture. The Foreign Policy Centre
report describes a history of women forced to choose between
"confessing" to promiscuity, describing often invented details of
their sex lives to their families or even on television, or serving
sentences for political crimes they had not committed. Given the possible
repercussions women can face for sexual promiscuity – honor killings among
them – many have chosen prison. Those who do not, frequently now live, even
after their release, in continued fear of the vengeance of family and
community.
|
Nazanin
Zaghari-Ratcliffe and family.
|
Yet even these kinds of choices do not seem to have been made available
to Zaghari-Ratcliffe, whose husband provides continuing reports online on her condition.
Moreover, because Iran does not recognize her British citizenship, she has
had no access to UK consular services, and the British government can do
little to help her. Diplomatic pressures may not matter anyway. In 2011,
Iran executed a Dutch-Iranian woman despite assurances to
the Dutch government that her life would be spared.
Nonetheless, in her March 14 letter to her husband, Zaghari-Ratcliffe
described her determination to fight back, despite "my shattered
dreams and their broken, empty promises....We shall overcome this pain.
Today freedom has got one day closer."
Abigail R. Esman, the author, most recently, of Radical State: How Jihad Is Winning Over Democracy in
the West (Praeger, 2010), is a freelance writer based in New
York and the Netherlands. Follow her at @radicalstates.
|
Print
Send
RSS
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment