Narges Mohammadi, the human rights activist who was last year awarded the Nobel Peace Prize while held behind bars in Iran, has exposed the ‘barbaric’ abuse, beating and isolation meted out to Kurdish women and children held in the country’s notorious Evin prison.
The revelations refer to a brief 2018 encounter which the Nobel Laureate had with a group of other female prisoners in Evin, typically held in isolation from other women. Ethnic Kurds and other political prisoners are regularly held, tortured, denied medical attention and executed at the notorious detention centre. In a secretly-conducted audio interview subsequently released to the news website Iran Wire, Mohammadi recalled how the Kurdish women and their children were singled out for particularly harsh treatment, allowed only an hour of outdoor exercise per week.
“The conditions were dire—no sheets on the beds, just a mattress, pillow, and blanket,” she said. “These children had nothing, not even toys. We proposed purchasing toys for them, but the prison authorities refused.”
Nonetheless, other prisoners were gradually able to offer support and solidarity to the women, singled out for further abuse on the basis of their Kurdish identity. “Despite being denied contact, Kurdish women gradually established clandestine communication with other prisoners,” Mohammadi recalled. “This bond extended to sharing cosmetics and receiving support from political prisoners who provided food, toys, and candy for Kurdish children.”
The human rights activist, who is detained for running an organisation protesting Iran’s use of the death penalty, witnessed Kurdish women being beaten in front of their newly-born children. She said:
“One of them named her child Abdullah upon his birth. The first was a boy, and the second, a girl named Jenan, was born in March. One night, I heard a commotion in the corridor again, and I rushed over. I witnessed them taking Jenan’s mother away and beating her. She was heavily burdened, unable to walk properly, and I watched from the top of the stairs, tears streaming down my face. The authorities confiscated the baby’s belongings, usually brought by a loved one, and when they took the mother away that night, they returned her the next day. They didn’t allow her to stay in the hospital.”
The detention of children alongside their mothers is an issue of particular concern in a country where child detainees as young as twelve have been subjected to ‘flogging, electric shocks and sexual violence’, according to Amnesty International.
“When they arrived here, the children were emaciated… devoid of vitality. One child, Fatemeh, was particularly frail and listless,” Mohammadi said. “Her mother would often embrace her… The moment the mother stepped away, she would wail as if scorched or fallen from great heights. She couldn’t bear to be separated from their mothers even for a moment, as a result of the bombings, fleeing, destitution, hunger, and loss of family. The father is dead, and she was always crying.”
Mohammadi further recalled older children being forcibly separated from their mothers, leaving a void which “couldn’t be filled by anything”, as well as particular conditions of isolation during the coronavirus pandemic. More broadly, female protesters and activists held in Evin Prison and other correctional facilities suffer in extremely poor conditions, including limited access to drinking water, fresh air, squalid hygiene, and other degradations of basic rights. Prisons are overcrowded and can only provide water in the showers for two days a week, resulting in hair loss and fears of lice, according to reports by human rights activists.
The prison administration does not provide cleaning products for self-hygiene, toilets are not cleaned, and most prisoners are already suffering from infections. As a form of punishment, prison guards refuse to let inmates use toilets, this results in kidney issues. Meanwhile, poor ventilation causes disease to spread rapidly.
But clandestine solidarity with Kurdish prisoners is not the only way in which women held in the detention centre have resisted their treatment. Last year, seven female activists detained in Evin held a sit-in protest, announced by Mohammadi, on the anniversary of the protests that erupted after the death of 22-year-old Jina ‘Mahsa’ Amini in the custody of the country’s morality police.
In a statement at that time, the detainees said: “It has been one year since Jina Amini was killed by agents of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The deep grief and anger we feel at the loss of our fellow citizens in the streets and prisons, the brutal suppression of protests, the arbitrary arrests, torture and imprisonment of those who dare to speak out, weigh heavily on our hearts. Despite these challenges, we remain steadfast in our determination to continue our struggle until we achieve victory.”
