Mina Mohammadian was executed on February 29, 1987, on political charges. She was held in solitary confinement for eleven months prior to her execution. During that period, she went through forty interrogation sessions, during which she was subjected to the most horrendous tortures. She was repeatedly raped by the regime's Guards. She was 22 at the time of her execution - Woman, Islam, & Equity
Having caught her husband, a drug addict, trying to rape her 14 year old daughter from an earlier marriage Fatemeh Haghighat Pajuh killed him. Both her daughters testified to the accuracy of her version of the fatal incident. In the crazed male-centred theocracy of Iran where the word of women has little value, proving rape is almost impossible. Often the raped rather than the rapist is punished for the ‘morality crime’ of being raped.
Despite calls from her daughters to the International Committee against Executions to press for increased international support against the state decision to kill their mother, it ended in despair. While public pressure had on occasion in the past mobilised sufficiently to stop imminent executions, this time the government was not for turning. Fatemeh Haghighat Pajuh was executed in Evin prison earlier this week.
In an act of gross insensitivity, the day before the state killed her, her daughter was instructed by prison authorities to bring the birth certificates of both her and her sister to the prison because their mother would be executed the following day.
On the day of her execution 9 other people were put to death by the Iranian state. Already this year the country has carried out 216 executions. According to Amnesty International’s figures for last year only China surpassed Iran in carrying out executions. Children as young as 12 have been sentenced to death in the country. There are currently 139 juveniles on death row. 17 alone were executed last year. People are often hanged in public from cranes mounted on lorries. These spectacles might well make the mullahs go rigid with excitement but the terror they infuse throughout society is considerable
Amongst the range of offences for which a person may be put to death is that of adultery, one of the country’s many ‘morality crimes.’ Gay people face a similar fate. Apostasy too leads to the noose. There is no god but god, our god, and if you believe in another, or worse none, we will kill you. Such are the deleterious effects of religion on the already rabid minds of the body politic. In its defence the government says it is carrying out Islamic law. Not the type of justification likely to win sympathy outside the ranks of religious maniacs.
In Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita In Tehran, a sense for the sickness of religion is acquired when the story is narrated of a woman in prison who told of the rape of a young girl by her male guards. The rationale of those who raped her was that only virgins go to Paradise. By depriving their victim of her presumed virginity they would decide her passage to the next world. Upstanding religious people no doubt who would have closed their eyes during the act and thought only of goats. The idea of deriving sexual pleasure from divinely assisted penetration would never have entered into the godly minds of such pious people.
Fatemeh Haghighat Pajuh, the latest but not the last female victim of the hateful men of god.
Appalling! Once again Theism and its mutant offspring the religious fanatic show us where theocracy leads. This is the real abomination.
ReplyDeleteAnthony thanks for an insightful and informative article.
ReplyDeleteSome times we are so raped up in our own petty shortcomings we fail to see the suffering of others.
There is no other animal on earth that treats their kind, with such cruelty, as humans treat, ( mistreat ) other humans.
Despicable and disgusting.