NEW YORK – “I have tried to defend the
legitimate right of every person in this world … to live freely with
full civil rights. With all these miseries and tragedies, I have never
used a weapon to fight these atrocious crimes except the pen,” wrote
Hashem Shaabani, a young Iranian Ahwazi Arab poet from an Iranian
prison. On Jan. 27, he was hanged along with 14 other prisoners, accused
of “waging war on God.”
Radio Free Europe reported that he had been sentenced by an Islamic
Revolutionary Tribunal. Dozens of other Ahwazis shared Shaabani’s fate.
There have been demonstrations in Iran against government discrimination
against its Arab minority with regard to employment, housing and basic
civil rights.
Repression against Ahwazis has been brutal. Human Rights Watch has
called on Iranian authorities to allow independent international media
and human rights organizations to investigate allegations of rights
violations in Khuzestan Province, where most Ahwazi Arabs live. It is in
the southwest and is rich in oil and gas.
Iran’s government discriminates against anyone who is not Persian,
says Taha Amjad, a spokesman for the London-based European Ahwazi Human
Rights Organization. It is telling that although Kuzhestan is rich in
oil and gas, its people are among the poorest in the country, with very
low literacy levels.
Joe Stork, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch, states:
“The high number of reported arrests and killings in Khuzestan Province
in recent years, combined with the information blackout, suggests that
the government has terrible things it wants to hide.” On Feb. 5, Freedom
House, a human rights organization, reported that Shaabani was
subjected to torture and interrogation while in prison.
President Hassan Rouhani has not been able to stop executions since
he assumed office last year. Ahmed Shaheed, the U.N. Special Rapporteur
on human rights in Iran, and Christof Heynes, the U.N. special
rapporteur on extra-judicial, summary or arbitrary executions, urged the
government in January to stop adding to the number of hangings. Both
experts claim that at least 40 persons were hanged in the first two
weeks of January.
In all of 2013, 625 people were executed, including 29 women and
several political prisoners, accused of “Moharabeh,” considered by many
to be a political charge dressed up as a religious offense.
Iranian journalist Amir Taheri says Shaabani wrote that former
President Hashemi Rafsanjani eliminated more than a dozen writers and
poets and that the worst wave of executions — more than 80 intellectuals
killed — happened under former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami. It
is a sad time when Iran, a birthplace of humanity’s great and more
revered writers and intellectuals, decides instead to kill its poets.
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