Tehran: Political prisoner Maryam Akbari Monfared, has shared a letter from inside her “hell-like” prison, after completing 13 long years in jail, local media reported.
47-year-old Maryam Akbari Monfared was arrested in 2009 on charges of being a supporter of the People’s Mojahedin Organisation of Iran.
Maryam, is a mother to three daughters. She has been separated from them since her arrest, and the regime has also been accused of killing her three brothers and a sister in the 1980s.
In a letter she shared at the beginning of her 14th year in exile in Semnan Central Prison, Maryam Akbari Monfared wrote, “This is not a story you read, the bloody suffering of only one person out of 85 million.”
“As of December 29, 2022, 13 years have passed since I was separated from my four-year-old Sarah and my two 12-year-old daughters on that winter midnight,” Monfared wrote in her letter, the Independent reported.
“Without giving me a chance to say goodbye to my loved ones, they took me to Evin prison to give some explanations, and made the ridiculous promise that ‘you will return to your children in the morning.’
“This is not a 4,000-page story, but the pure reality of a life under the domination of fascists who imposed it on us while we refused to give in. On this side of the bars, in the dark desert of torture and oppression, as far as one can see – even where one cannot see – there is just vileness and brutality,” she added.
“Torture and brutality are severe on this side of the bars, in the dark desert (and the eye can see it even if it is blind), and this is despicable and brutal! This is a silent documentary about the oppression of women whose heart cannot bear to hear the story of one of them. Not to mention that we have to live with hundreds of people like these tortured models, and feel their suffering with our whole being.”
“13 years and I see dozens of children and hundreds of teenagers and young men of my daughters age and I pat their heads and faces with sympathy for them, and I also talk to them, and my anger intensifies; Because of their silence and loneliness, I roar in their defense against everyone in the Darkworshipers’ Council!”
In her letter, Monfared also shared a message of solidarity with protesters currently demonstrating against the regime in Iran following the death of a 22-year-old woman, Mahsa Amini, in the custody of Iran’s morality police.
“To my daughters and sons, who are bravely on the streets … I say: if you are arrested, do not trust the interrogators even an iota,” she wrote.
“To the grieving families … I say that I share in their grief too. I hold their hands from here and stand shoulder to shoulder with them, stronger than before, for justice.”
“With the news of every protest and every uprising, and with the sparks of this rebellious flame, the hearts of women whose only hope of freedom is to break these iron gates are filled with hope,” she added.
