[A-List] Congress Hears Testimony on Serious Situations of the Baha'is in Iran and Egypt

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

On 8/4/07, Sabri Oncu <sabri_oncu at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Yoshie:
>
> > I find it difficult to imagine either of you joining the Mojahedin,
> > the largest organization on the Left at the time of the revolution,
> > also the organization that moved to the overthrow of the Islamic
> > government the fastest
>
> You don't need to join Mojahedin to get killed in Iran. The only weapon I have
> ever used has been a pen, and if you use such a weapon effectively, you can get
> killed in Iran. Why do you think I got kicked out of Turkey, because I was
> using some other weapon?

According to Tortured Confessions: Prisons and Public Recantations in
Modern Iran by Ervand Abrahamian (University of California Press,
1999), "The Mojahedin attempt to overthrow the regime in June 1981 set
off waves of repression," leading to 7,943 executed by June 1985, of
whom 6,472 belonged to the Mojahedin (pp. 129-130), with several
thousands more executed in 1988, the majority of whom were also
members of the Mojahedin (see Chapter 5).  So, most of the martyrs
were Mojahedin.  That is in part because the Mojahedin was truly the
largest organization on the Left at that time, but also because the
organization turned to open insurrection and armed struggle, which
also coincided with the early days of the Iran-Iraq War (22 September
1980–20 August 1988) when Iraq was on the offensive, and the
organization eventually went over to the Iraqi side.

Not all leftists perished, though.  Some left Iran; others suffered
imprisonment and torture and recanted their belief; yet others managed
to melt back into the general public and lived in the political
closet, so to speak, as "just Muslims."  This last group has probably
exercised a certain social and cultural influence over subsequent
class and social struggles in the Islamic Republic, but their history
has yet to be written, for obvious reasons.

> > Then again, I didn't know either of you 25 years ago!
>
> You should have seen me 25 years ago: I was young and restless, not to mention
> all those females who were keenly interested in me.
>
> Ahhhh, ahh!
>
> Time flies.

I missed out on that.
-- 
Yoshie