Program host: Shahin Pooya
We come together again. We shout out loud again; neither the passage of time nor the passage of life, and until the day we remain, let us not let the dust of life cast a shadow over our historical memory. Let us not let the memory of our comrades who were drowned in their own blood at the hands of the ruling hill farmers be forgotten.
Those who hanged and shot thousands of men and women in prisons, those who handed over thousands of young girls and boys to death squads, those who consider the oppression and persecution of the people as a guarantee of the survival of their disastrous regime, those who want the killing of thousands of men and women to be forgotten, should know that the mothers, fathers, wives, children, sisters, brothers, and the masses of the people whose children were handed over to death squads in the prisons of the criminal rulers of the Islamic Republic will never forget this brutal crime and will never forgive its perpetrators and perpetrators. Those who hope that with the passage of time, these horrific criminals and this deep social wound will be forgotten, should know that we neither forget nor forgive these crimes.
We welcome you, dear friends, supporters, and comrades, to the 24th Stockholm Conference on the Killing of Political Prisoners in the 1960s. Twenty-four years ago, when the Iranian Political Prisoners in Exile Center held a conference in Stockholm for the first time, a large number of figures sitting in this hall today, that year and all these years, with a firm belief in the right to life for humans, accompanied and kept pace with us, did not let the killing of political prisoners in the 1960s, this horrific crime against humanity, be forgotten. Together, we have created a history and record that is full of enlightenment. Together, we succeeded in discussing and discussing many of the dark corners of the prisons of the Islamic Republic and the killing of political prisoners in the 1960s and its effects on various social issues in the presence of eyewitnesses and experts in various political, social, literary, and artistic fields.
In these twenty-four years, Iranian society has gone through very bitter events, and the rights movement has also lost a number of militant mothers who were the foundations of this movement. In these years, we have witnessed the rise of fathers and mothers who were never willing to forgive the perpetrators of this horrific crime. We, too, continue on our path, determined to stand by our covenant with our comrades who were imprisoned in the dungeons of the Islamic Republic. We will never, even for a moment, stop fighting against the integrity of the Islamic Republic and fighting to build a new society free from prison, torture, execution, and class oppression.
The justice movement, in recent years, has lost many mothers and fathers whose lives were spent in prisons and in the struggle to find the burial place of their loved ones and to seek justice for them. In the most recent such incident, we lost Maryam Lotfollah Nejadian’s mother with all the pain in her heart on August 19th of this year. Maryam’s mother was the deceased mother of Habibollah Lotfollahi and the sister of the three deceased, Yadollah, Fathollah and Hossein Lotfollah Nejadian, and the mother of our comrade, Shakib.
The program of the 24th conference on the killing of political prisoners in Iran will consist of two parts; in the first part, Bahram Rahmani will conduct a “research study of the situation of the families of the deceased prisoners,” Fariborz Fakhari will perform pieces with the soprano, and then Nasser Mohajer will address “Reviewing the Policy of Violence in the 1957-67 Years.”
In the second part of the program, Gisio Shakeri will perform the play “Nightmare” directed by Khosrow Shahriari, Zhaleh Ahmad will compare the prisons of the two monarchical regimes and the Islamic Republic, and Majid Nafisi will discuss prison letters.
We will have a twenty-minute break between the two parts of the program.
This year’s program will be broadcast live, as in previous years, and this time it will be broadcast simultaneously to Iran via Channel One TV.
Now, let us remember and applaud for a minute in honor of the thousands of fighting men and women who were imprisoned in Iranian prisons, their fighting and suffering mothers and fathers who are no longer with us, and also in honor of the mothers and fathers who, despite all the hardships and old age, have still kept the flag of struggle and justice high in Iran.