Geneva, Aug. 01, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence issued an appalling assertion of oppressive hate propaganda in opposition to the persecuted Baha’i spiritual minority yesterday, 31 July, in an try to justify the raids on the houses and companies of 52 Baha’is throughout Iran and the arrest or imprisonment of 13 people.
The Ministry of Intelligence issued a proper assertion in regards to the strikes—which got here after weeks of escalating stress on the Baha’is—and claimed the arrests had been in opposition to members of the “Baha’i espionage [political] party” and that these arrested had been “propagating the teachings of the fabricated Baha’i colonialism and infiltrating educational environments” together with kindergartens. The point out of kindergartens is an obvious pretext for the focusing on of a quantity of Baha’is who’re preschool lecturers.
The Baha’i International Community rejects these absurd and preposterous allegations as outright fabrications. What the Iranian authorities is doing is concurrently an act of gross oppression and a brazen instance of the worst type of hate speech.
Thirteen people—amongst them Mahvash Sabet, Fariba Kamalabadi and Afif Naemi, previously half of the neighborhood’s management and prisoners of conscience who every spent a decade in jail—had been arrested through the raids. One is being held in solitary confinement in Evin Prison and the whereabouts of the opposite two are unknown.
“We are outraged that a significant number of Baha’is, among them Mahvash Sabet, Fariba Kamalabadi and Afif Naemi, have been detained again in Iran,” mentioned Diane Ala’i, Representative of the Baha’i International Community (BIC) to the United Nations. “And it is even more galling that the Ministry of Intelligence is trying to portray these individuals as agents of foreign powers trying to undermine Iran’s security. The Ministry’s statement is utterly incoherent and self-contradictory and the allegations are clearly absurd and baseless. Iran’s authorities, rather than dealing with the challenges of their country, instead direct their attacks on innocents and try to stoke religious hatred.”
“Iran’s government has for more than 40 years alleged that Baha’is are spies for foreign countries but, in all that time, has failed to produce a shred of credible evidence. Now they are reduced to attacking kindergarten and daycare teachers as a threat to national security,” Ala’i added.
Sabet, Kamalabadi and Naemi had been members of a bunch of individuals referred to as the “Yaran,” or “Friends” of Iran, which till 2008 served as an off-the-cuff management of the Iranian Baha’i neighborhood. All seven of its members had been arrested in 2007 and 2008 and jailed for a decade. The Yaran tended to the essential pastoral wants of the neighborhood—Iran’s largest non-Muslim spiritual minority—and did so with the information and acceptance on the time of the Iranian authorities. But the Yaran was disbanded because of this of their authentic arrests and has by no means been regrouped or reestablished. The implied statements by the Ministry of Intelligence, that they’re half of a so-called “core members” of the Baha’i “espionage party,” is due to this fact completely false in each sense.
The raids and detentions come days after 20 Baha’is in Shiraz, Tehran, Yazd and Bojnourd had been arrested, jailed or subjected to residence searches and business closures, and lower than a month since 44 others throughout Iran had been additionally detained, arraigned or imprisoned. Twenty-six people among the many 44, who had been in Shiraz, had been sentenced to a mixed whole of 85 years in jail.
More than 100 Baha’is have due to this fact been focused in Iran over the previous few weeks.
Mahvash Sabet, who wrote poetry throughout her decade in Tehran’s Evin Prison, which had been shared throughout her incarceration and later revealed in English underneath the title “Prison Poems,” was acknowledged in 2017 as an English PEN International Writer of Courage(hyperlink is exterior).
“We are very concerned by reports that Mahvash Sabet, the winner of the 2017 PEN Pinter Prize for an International Writer of Courage, has once again been detained in Iran,” mentioned Daniel Gorman, Director of English PEN. “We will continue to monitor the situation closely.”
Fariba Kamalabadi, a developmental psychologist, was arrested in 2008 and additionally spent a decade behind bars. In 2017 the United States Commission on Religious Freedom acknowledged and championed her as a spiritual prisoner of conscience(hyperlink is exterior).
Afif Naemi, an industrialist who was additionally arrested in 2008, spent a lot of his 10-year jail sentence in in poor health well being but was denied the medical remedy he wanted. He was launched in 2018 alongside the opposite members of the previous Baha’i management group.
“Detaining these Baha’is demonstrates the senseless cruelty of the Iranian government in its systematic campaign to persecute the whole community,” Ala’i mentioned. “Mahvash Sabet, Fariba Kamalabadi and Afif Naemi are symbols of resilience in Iran, renowned across the world for their courage as prisoners of conscience, and no one will believe the Iranian government’s excuses for attacking a helpless, peaceful community. But this unrelenting and escalating psychological warfare sets the stage for added persecution of the Baha’is in the weeks and months ahead.”
