"I want to share one point that helped me a lot. And I shall thank two friend that shall remain nameless. They told that when I am in the prison and there is a lot of pressure on me, one of the ways to release that pressure is to think that I am outside of the prison and I am telling it as a story to other people. And they told me, you should stand in front of a mirror (unfortunately we didn’t have mirror there) or sit and imagine somebody is sitting in front of you. And then start telling it in the third person. Telling that story while you are living that story. That helped me release a lot of pressure. And that helped me, to talk about the traumas I faced during imprisonment. This talking helped me to change all these horrible experiences to memories that looked like a movie. Rather than something that I lived. It reduced the traumas to stories, to a movie that I watched. Unfortunately, a lot more people are going to experience what I experienced or a lot worse than that. This one thing was one of the greatest things that helped me during my time in the solitary confinement." "That might help them to."
“Because I was worried that they are after me, I gave the guy a false name. I didn’t have any identification with me, any information with me. I didn’t even tell my parents I was leaving, I told my parents I was going to Zandjan to visit my friends and was going to come back in a couple of days. So I got there, I got to the guy. When we were crossing the border, he looked at me and told me: ´Look at that line.´ It looked like nothing. ´That’s the border line.´ I remember the first time I was leaving, I was very emotional. Very, very emotional. It was very hard. The second time? I couldn’t be happier. Things happened in that two years, less than two years, that changed my red crying eyes to a happy smiling face. I remember I called my parents. When I passed the border, I turned on my phone and told my parents: ´Just don’t worry. I am in Turkey. I am safe now.´”
“I was not physically tortured that much. Again, with an asterisk. They injured my right ear, it was bleeding for a while. I had a lot of cots all over my body. They shocked me with a shocker one time for half an hour. But again, I know that people were tortured much, much more, the torture I went through was minimal. But worse than physical torture is mental torture. I remember once my interrogator left me in my cell for 24 days, 24 days in solitary confinement that you don´t see anybody, you don’t hear anybody, you are not even allowed to knock on the door.” “I knew about that technique. I knew that when they want you to talk a lot, and they want to get something out of you, they deprive you of hearing anybody, from talking to anybody.” “I had a lot of poems memorised back then. I remember after 24 days the interrogator took me to the interrogation room.” “And he was like: how do you feel? And I was like – you know what? I really feel like reading you a poem. He said – yes. Sure, read me as many poems as you wish. He was waiting for me to start talking and he knew that when I start talking, it will be really hard for me to stop. So throughout that he might be able to get something out of me. I remember that I read him poems for hours and hours and hours. Until he got tired and he got frustrated so much that he kicked me back to my cell.”
“I was in a lot of those protests. But after a while I stopped going to protests, I was going to court instead. To take pictures of names of people who were arrested. For many months one of my hobbies with my mum was to go to prison to ask about my court case, while I was actually taking pictures of the names of the people who were arrested.”
“They were arresting people in thousands. So they didn’t have any option than posting their names on the door. They were always a lot of people watching, they had to remember the names… I remember that I had a really old Motorola phone with a very bad camera. I went there and acted like I am talking on the phone, while I recorded the name list for quite a while to make sure that I can get all those names down. After 2009 election everything changed in the country. People were getting arrested right or left. The government started killing people. The last time the government openly killed people was in 1988, if I am not mistaken. Than they also killed a lot of people in the prisons. But since 2009 they actually started killing people. It was something that my generation were not expecting to see. We were not expecting to see bullets, when we are walking in silence on streets asking about the results of the election. But everything changed. Relation between government and opposition changed. It brought new hopes, it shattered some ideas and ideals. Since than we have seen that the movement has grown into what it is today. A society, that is looking for change. A society that knows what they want and what they hate the most. A society that right now I think is the most secular society in the Middle East.”
"I wasn’t praying in prison. I was a political prisoner, I was defiant and I was like – you can’t do anything to me. It was before the 2009 election so I was kind of sure that I am going to leave the prison soon and even if they are going to keep me in prison, nothing very bad is going to happen to me and I am eventually going to be released. So I was not really paying attention to the mandatory praying system in the prison. One of the prisoners, he was like a year or two older than me, he was in prison for killing his sister. Smashing her head with a stone and then burning her body, because they found out that she had a boyfriend or they were suspecting that she had a boyfriend. So, he was in my cell and I remember, he started scorning me, why I am not praying. The whole time I was thinking – you killed your sister. And you are telling me that I am a bad person because I don’t pray the daily prayer? At the same time it was an eye-opening experience for me. It was a world so far away from my experience to that point, that it kind of shaped how I looked around me and how I worked in the future. It was one of the moments… I wholeheartedly think that this guy has done a horrible, horrible, horrible thing. And I don’t think there is a conscientious person in this world that can justify what he has done. But still I am here and he is questioning my integrity and my personality because I don’t do the daily prayer."
Evan Alireza Firoozi was born in 1989 in southeastern Iran, graduated from high school in Tehran, and started studying at the University of Zanjan in 2008 . He has been interested in social and political issues since he was young, writing a blog and going to watch protests. In 2009, he was arrested for the first time for defending a female classmate who faced sexual harassement by the dean of the university. In 2009, the country held presidential elections, the results of which were challenged by mass protests of citizens. The regime‘s response was harsh, with violent repression of protests and mass arrests. Evan worked with a human rights organisation and participated in monitoring of the arrests. In the same year, he was sentenced to an unsuspended sentence for the first time, attempted to flee the country and after being detained at the border went straight to the notorious Evin prison. He spent six months there, much of it in solitary confinement. After his release in 2010, he renounced his political activities, but nevertheless entered prison for another six-month stay. In 2011, he fled the threat of further years in prison and went via Turkey to the US. There, he studied information technology at the University of California, Berkeley, and now works in the field of facilitating access to information and secure communications.
