[ Bahareh Hedayati, an Iranian women’s rights and human rights
activist who has been arrested and imprisoned several times, was last
arrested on October 11 amid the protests that started after the death
of Mahsa Amini in the custody of morality police]
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THE REGIME MUST FALL: BAHAREH HEDAYATI’S FULL LETTER FROM EVIN
PRISON  
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Bahareh Hedayati
December 18, 2022
IranWire
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_ Bahareh Hedayati, an Iranian women’s rights and human rights
activist who has been arrested and imprisoned several times, was last
arrested on October 11 amid the protests that started after the death
of Mahsa Amini in the custody of morality police _

Bahareh Hedayati, IranWire

 

Hedayati was a founding member of a petition for women's rights in
Iran known as the One Million Signatures
[[link removed]] campaign for
the repeal of discriminatory laws against women that was launched in
2006. Four years later she was sentenced to nine and half years in
prison for “propaganda against the regime”. She was also arrested
and sentenced to four years and eight months in prison for
participating in a peaceful rally to condemn the downing of Ukraine
International Airlines Flight 752 by the Revolutionary Guards in
January 2020. In total she has already spent seven years in prison.

In 2012 Hedayati was awarded the Edelstam Prize
[[link removed]] for outstanding
contributions and exceptional courage in the defense of human rights.

Now, in a letter from Evin prison about the ongoing nationwide
protests in Iran, Hedayati writes that a revolution is the only choice
for fighting the Islamic Republic.

Below is the complete text of Bahareh Hedayati’s letter from Evin
prison.

***

This is the umpteenth text that I am writing and I cannot finish it.
My sentences are so overflowing with anger that I am afraid it will
mangle my logic. But controlling your anger when a 22-year-old man is
hanged for blocking a street to protest is tough, or perhaps
impossible to do, especially anger at a government that has blocked
the vital highways to an ordinary and honorable life for the people
and especially for the women of this land.

THE REVOLUTION IS INEVITABLE

To argue that the Islamic Republic is the enemy of this land, of this
nation, has been redundant for a long time. The nature and the fate of
this government is decay and it must go. Getting rid of this criminal
government is bound to be costly and fraught with danger, but there is
no other way but to pay this cost and face up to the dangers because
this power structure is unable to recognize new social forces and to
assimilate them within itself. In other words, there is no chance that
the existing regime can extricate itself from the situation that has
emerged, because neither can a tiny part of the protesters’ demands
be fulfilled within the present system, and nor can the majority of
the people waive any of their demands.

The government cannot fulfill these demands because all possibilities
and mechanisms for flexibility within the power structure have already
either been eliminated or have lost credibility. And the people cannot
forgo their demands because these demands are tied to their normal,
everyday lives. No matter how we look at them, these demands are
legitimate, undeniable and self-evident. As a result, these demands
are now confronting the power structure itself, which is going to
crumble whether they are fulfilled or they are resisted. Therefore,
revolution is inevitable.

WE MUST BE ON GUARD AGAINST UNCONTROLLED VIOLENCE

By its nature, a revolution is a perilous and violent affair. So,
although forbidding violence is practical up to a point, insistence on
absolute avoidance of violence is the same as forbidding the
revolution itself, meaning canceling the revolution, denying the
necessity of bringing down the existing power structure and of
arriving at a new social covenant.

What has been going on in the streets in the past few months is the
strongest argument that we have in response to those who are still not
convinced that the Islamic Republic must be brought down or argue
against it. But we have to say to those who believe that this is a
necessity that although — unfortunately — a revolution is not
devoid of violence, we have to keep a red light on to warn against
uncontrolled violence.

When it comes to violence — besides the moral issue that might
genuinely be disturbing to some — the more important issue is the
stability of Iran after the collapse of this regime. Therefore, the
kind of violence that would start and sustain a cycle of revenge after
the downfall of the regime must be avoided because it would threaten
the stability of Iran and the survival of the government that is borne
from the coming revolution.

WE, THE 1980S GENERATION, WERE THE LAST TO TEST THE POSSIBILITY OF
PEACEFUL CHANGE

No impartial observer can accuse the Iranian people of impatience or a
propensity to violence because, in these past decades, the collective
minds of Iranians have repeatedly tried every possible way to
peacefully change the existing situation, but each and every time
these methods have been blocked by the ruling totalitarian regime.

We, part of the generation of the 1980s whose lives were spent in war
and under relentless ideological indoctrination, and whose adolescence
and youth came during the so-called reform period, are perfect
examples of those who tried to find the last possible outlets for
change. We even agreed — mistakenly — to gamble on the social
capital accumulated through the Green Movement [the name for the
protest movement of 2009-10 – IranWire] under the illusion that
fulfilling some of the people’s demands — normalization of
relations between the government and the world and its inevitable
consequence, namely the government’s compliance with modern rules of
governing — would make the lives of our fellow Iranians better
without violence.

At every juncture, however, the government was adamant about
continuing its wrongful ways. We did everything to prevent violence,
but this fear of violence both backfired and gave rise to a
misunderstanding. It backfired because it gave the appearance that no
action in the streets is acceptable and the reformists, following this
misinterpretation of avoiding violence, virtually stopped protesting
in any shape or form! It was a misunderstanding because the government
came to believe in the illusion that we were afraid for our lives and
even our former friends imagined that the policy of avoiding violence
was the same as compromising with power! But both these ideas were
illusions.

Explaining why both friends and enemies were under such an impression
requires extensive discussions at another time, but suffice it say
sociopolitical upheavals revolve around the forces that they release
from within themselves, not prescribed guidelines and advice.

GREEN MOVEMENT’S TRENCHES OF RESISTANCE FELL

Before all these tests, the greatest political experience of our
generation, the Green Movement, met defeat despite all our hopes and
sacrifices and despite giving birth to a precious political identity
that, if nothing else, was a few steps ahead of the previous
generation that was contaminated by political Islam.

Not only were some of us killed, but many, many of us were sent to
prison. We were not only suppressed but we were also forced to accept
the last remnants of political Islam within ourselves when we trusted
reformist leaders and Mir-Hossein Mousavi personally as allies of the
movement. This was clear from our slogans. At that time our trust was
not unjustified, but, more importantly, we had no other choice.

Nevertheless, as long as the movement survived in the streets, we of
the Green Movement were the victors of this coalition. As long as the
streets were ours, it was we who defined the movement and its demands,
and Mousavi and the reformists followed us. But when the movement was
suppressed and we were forced to take shelter in our homes, the
trenches that we had left undefended were taken over by the
reformists’ interpretation of the movement, gradually, but more and
more with the passing of the years.

THE MORAL DEFEAT OF MIR-HOSSEIN MOUSAVI

Only a few months ago Mir-Hossein Mousavi put the last nail in the
coffin of the political identity that “we”, the 20-somethings, had
built a decade earlier with our blood and toil. Cut off from reality
and using the Shah-Khomeini duality, he defended the organized and
continuous crimes of Khomeini’s regime with an undeniable clarity
and called the man who bloodied and set on fire a region or perhaps
the world and condemned the women of this land to hijab slavery an
“ever-awake soul”.

He did not even glance at young supporters of the Green Movement to
see that he owed them his new political life over the past decade,
young people who, at a critical political juncture, welcomed him as an
ally of the Green Movement to achieve a peaceful transfer away from
Khomeini’s regime, or at least for a fundamental change in the
totalitarian elements that had been established firmly within the
existing system based on the reactionary principle of the Guardianship
of the Islamist Jurist.

Without the Green Movement and with only his previous political
identity, Mousavi’s views would have been as important as the views
expressed by Ahmad Tavakoli and Ali Akbar Velayati in the introduction
to their painting book or the views expressed by government ministers
in the first decade after the revolution. Unlike them, Mousavi was
elevated by the young people’s movement in 2009, but he turned his
back on them to renew his fealty to his “Imam”. Mousavi was the
purest, the most resolute and the sincerest person who carried the
reformist project to its logical conclusion. The political failure of
this movement in achieving its goals aside, Mousavi has now signed a
declaration of the moral defeat of the movement with his “ever-awake
soul” remark.

OUR UNDERSTANDING OF REFORMS WAS DIFFERENT

The generation of the 1980s did not shrink from sacrificing our lives
to change things, but in the end the movement’s defeats outweighed
its victories because of the existing realities, the repression, the
absence of planning to manage change, the inescapable coalition with
the reformists and the general preference for finding the least
dangerous way to bring about change.

The problem with the reformists was and is that they want to save and
strengthen the regime at the same time that they want to bring about a
series of low-risk changes, while, in my view, reforms meant
fundamental changes by peaceful means to the point where none of the
totalitarian foundations of the regime remain. This, of course, was
going to bring about a final confrontation. Therefore we should have
anticipated the need to mobilize forces and to organize so that when
the existing structure fell apart or became inactive we could arrive
at a totally new social covenant.

This was my understanding of reforms as a student activist who had
been sentenced to 10 years in prison. At the same time I witnessed the
dying of the movement in the streets. My friends and my
comrades-in-arms emigrated one after another, and institutions,
networks and organizations were shattered by the repressions and
frustration and helplessness as a result of defeat, the enemy’s
success and the suffocating environment that infiltrated every aspect
of the lives even of those who were nominally not in prison.

NO ISLAMIC ARROWS IN THE QUIVER OF TODAY’S MOVEMENT

Today’s hope-inspiring movement has no Islamic arrows in its quiver,
and this is clear from its slogans. This generation of protesters has
not resorted to any religious or pseudo-religious concepts to tell us
what it does or does not want, and this is a great achievement. This
was a completely spontaneous style and demeanor that emerged from the
common wisdom of the protesters.

One reason for this achievement is that the current movement was
completely spontaneous and did not seek coalition partners from within
the existing political structure because they have absolutely nothing
to do with each other — unlike the Green Movement that was a form of
unwritten coalition with elements within the political structure of
the Islamic Republic even though some of these elements might have
been rejected by the regime.

The difference between these two movements is also clearly visible
from their goals. The defining goal of the Green Movement was to make
fundamental reforms when overthrowing the Islamic Republic seemed an
exciting but remote prospect. The defining goal of the 2022 movement,
however, is the overthrow of the regime, and its advantage has been
its ability to express this goal without stammering and without any
hesitation.

REFORMISTS HAVE NO CONNECTION WITH THIS MOVEMENT

When we say again and again that the reformists and fundamentally the
paradigm of reformism are not in charge of the current movements, are
not helping them and are not active in them, this is not because of
the resentment and rage over their record of collaboration with the
regime. This is only an explanation of the new paradigm that has
emerged since 2017 and has its own specific exigencies. One is that
the identity of reformism, its agents and its constructs cannot
survive in the new paradigm because they belong to the previous
defunct one, unless they accept the core goal of the new one, i.e. the
overthrow of the Islamic Republic, in which case they are no longer
reformists.

THE 2022 MOVEMENT SHOWED THAT HIJAB IS NOT A CULTURAL CATEGORY

The second important achievement of the 2022 movement, a global
achievement, relates to the question of hijab. This movement is moving
in the same direction as the global paradigm concerning women, but at
the same time it has also emerged to challenge those within the
movement who have been trying to normalize hijab. This movement
against hijab has risen after years of a movement — I do not know
what to call it — that has tried to normalize hijab or to present it
as a cultural element.

This group has even succeeded in convincing a number of international
organizations to recognize “World Hijab Day” as an international
day to celebrate the invisibility of women’s bodies without giving a
thought to the consequences of this invisibility for a woman’s
everyday life, her intellectual life and even her fate. This is a
perfect example of what we are talking about when we speak of the
extreme difficulty of translating problems in non-Western countries
for Westerners.

This movement, part of which believes that it is anti-colonialist,
covers its ears — in a manner that happens to be colonialist —
when a Middle Eastern woman of Muslim descent speaks against hijab,
and, from outside, accuses those of us who are living in this
situation of Islamophobia. In other words, I, a Middle Eastern woman,
have no right to even cry over the inferior position that hijab has
condemned me to because, according to the “progressive” rules
issued in the West by its intellectual circles, this cry of pain under
a historical injustice that hijab has imposed on me is the same as
fear of Islam and nobody has the right to fear Islam.

And since Western intellectuals are facing the problem of the failure
to integrate Muslims into their own society, since they cannot believe
that a phenomenon like hijab can create a chain of oppression, of
degrading women and of self-alienation without having anything to do
with capitalism, and since they is used to seeing everything through
the prism of capitalism and cannot understand anything beyond it, they
believe that a Middle Eastern Muslim woman has no right to say
“ouch” because they are afraid that their own mental
contradictions and inconsistencies would be revealed!

The 2022 movement rose with the burning of headscarves and its second
important achievement was to call on all those Western intellectuals
to see the reality.

Its third achievement deserves notice even though it is still somehow
fragile and relative. In this movement, convergence within the
framework of the territorial integrity of Iran carries a lot of
weight, meaning that the danger of separatism among various ethnic
groups who live in this land has subsided to some degree. This, of
course, does not mean that we are now suddenly hearing all the voices
that we have not heard for many decades, but it cannot be denied that
the feeling of solidarity and of sharing the same destiny has been
strengthened under this movement, and we can hope that once we leave
the Islamic Republic behind it is possible to arrive at a new covenant
that guarantees both the integrity of this land and the rights of
ethnic groups and minorities.

MY GENERATION WAS REBELLIOUS AND SELF-SACRIFICING BUT BLIND IN TERMS
OF POLITICAL INTUITION

To conclude, I want to turn to a sentence by the great German
philosopher Immanuel Kant — even though referring to him is beyond
my limited scientific wherewithal.

Kant believes that intuitions (perceptions) without concepts are
blind. As such, I can say that the political intuition of our
generation was somehow blind. I count myself as belonging to a part of
the student movement in the 2000s whose political experience was
limited to the farthest possibilities offered by that period and that
had no adequate grasp of concepts such as overthrowing the government
or revolution.

Despite the fact that this generation passionately and conscientiously
rose up against everything it had inherited, it still lived and
thought within a paradigm whose main focus was change, and,
occasionally, improving the situation. The emergence and the
development of paradigms are so influenced by historical factors that
perhaps we can say they have little connection with the will of
activists who are born and grow up within them.

I can only testify that my generation was honest, defiant and
self-sacrificing. My generation was born in a container where every
ideological ingredient was prepared to turn us into soldiers ready to
die for the Supreme Leader, but it rebelled against everything it had
inherited, armed with the honor and awareness it had gained.

TODAY’S YOUNGER GENERATION WILL DECIDE IRAN’S DESTINY

Our experience was deficient because the world in which we lived was
deficient, but today, with the same enthusiasm and the same
conscientiousness, we have pinned our hopes to the younger generation
of the 1990s and 2000s, and we will not spare any help or support we
can give them to fulfill our common wish for freedom, justice, the
downfall of the tyranny and to save Iran.

Both our experience and that of today’s younger generation are tied
to the streets. Today’s young Iranians have brought their political
demands into the streets and have embodied these demands in the slogan
“Woman, Life, Freedom” and the calls for the overthrow of the
regime.

This committed generation has raised the flag of freedom, has defined
its very own political identity, and it will decide Iran’s destiny.

What we hope is that opposition groups can come together around vital
ideas like democracy, secularism, social justice, the mother tongue,
territorial integrity and rights such as freedom of assembly to
facilitate the passage from the existing corrupt situation to the next
milestone.

Hoping for freedom!

Bahareh Hedayati

December 2022

Evin prison

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