The news coming out of Iran are getting scarier and more horrible by the hour.
Latest on the table: widespread use of rape against men and women arrested during the recent demonstrations protesting Ahmadinejad's electoral coup.
Numerous reports and news on this topic have been leaking
here and
there for a while now, but many, myself included, had a
hard time taking those as seriously as we should have. After all, there is no well known history of using rape as a political weapon in Iran, and plus, these people call themselves the "Islamic Republic", they send the police on the streets to make sure people don't even see each other's flesh, how could such a heinous label as raping prisoners ever stick to the
Holy Republic of Islam?
But then again, it does stick, as it turns out, and quite strongly so too. The latest, most official and most loudly blown whistle belonged to Sheikh Mehdi Karroubi, former Speaker of the Parliament and one of the three Presidential candidates who supposedly "lost" the recent elections to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's "landslide victory", or mor accurately, his electoral coup.
In
a letter to Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani [Note: under the pressure of censor, the original letter has been removed since it first appeared on Sheikh Karroubi's webpage. Here is a
link to a full translation on a pro-Mousavi weblog], former President and current Head of the important political body, Assembly of Experts (aka the Expediency Council), Karroubi has spoken of frequent rapes in prisons, committed by the guards and torturers against both male and female prisoners. The picture is quite grim, violent and frightening as he paints it, and it will certainly fly harshly in the face of many Iranians, fundamentalists and reformists alike.
Karroubi's letter describes violent rape that has in many cases led to grave injuries and even death of the victims during the last couple of months, and it demands the authorities to take this situation seriously and do something about it.
But will the authorities do something about that, you may be asking. I personally doubt they will. The ethical burden of such a fact would be unbearable for the regime. The moral dissonence it would introduce between the two Islamic Republics, the one that is here on a mission of saving the world from decadence and moral corruption, and the one that kills, tortures and rapes its own people to keep a couple of petty tyrants in place, is just too wide a chasm for any psyche to handle and stay intact, and these people have given us ample evidence to prove that while their psyche may have many attributes, healthy and robust are not one of those.
So here we are, at the dawn of a new era in Iranian politics and history, dealing with an astonishing historic paradox. On the one hand we are witnessing the unprecedented rise of democratic thinking and politically mature collective behavior on behalf of the people, while on the other side of the same coin lies the most devastating and unusual criminal activities conducted by any Iranian governments in its few thousand years of history.
We are all too anxious to learn what may yet unfold from this point on.
Zizek's cat is now in a free fall straight into the depths of the abyss, clawing anything clawable on its way down, yet at the same time chanting to istself repeatedly, "so far so good, so far so good..."
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