beyond picket fences

seaofgreen:

July 9 marks the 11th anniversary of the uprising of Iranian university students that began in the dormitories of the University of Tehran and spread to several campuses around the nation. It shook the foundations of the Islamic Republic and demonstrated that, despite the vast purges of progressive faculty that took place in the 1980s under the guise of “Cultural Revolution” and the hardliners’ tremendous efforts to control students’ political activities and very thoughts, the universities’ grand, decades-old tradition as centers of resistance to oppression survived. Tehran Bureau

Photo: Ahmad Batebi on the cover of The Economist, July 17, 1999, during the Iran students protests. Shortly after this cover, he was arrested, tortured, suffered a partial stroke and spent almost eight years in prison.

During his interrogation he was blindfolded and beaten with cables until he passed out. His captors rubbed salt into his wounds to wake him up, so they could torture him more. They held his head in a drain full of sewage until he inhaled it. He recalls yearning for a swift death to end the pain. He was played recordings of what he was told was his mother being tortured. His captors wanted him to betray his fellow students, to implicate them in various crimes and to say on television that the blood on that T-shirt was only red paint. He says he refused.

He was sentenced to death for “creating street unrest”. But after a global outcry, the sentence was commuted to 15 years in jail. He speculates that his high profile made it hard to kill him without attracting negative publicity. For two years, he was kept in solitary confinement, in a cell that was little more than a toilet hole with a wooden board on top. He was tortured constantly. Only when he was allowed to mingle with other prisoners again did he begin to overcome his despair.

Read his amazing story and eventual escape from Iran on The Economist and NYTimes.