The Suffering Continues

A chilling insight into the treatment of women dissidents in Iran (via b&w):

A leading Iranian pro-democracy and women's activist, who was jailed on trumped-up charges last year, has revealed how the clerical regime cynically deploys systemic sexual violence against female dissidents in the name of Islam.

Roya Tolouee, 40, was beaten up by Iranian intelligence agents and subjected to a horrific sexual assault when she refused to sign forced confessions. It was only when they threatened to burn her two children to death in front of her that she agreed to put her name to the documents.

Perhaps just as shocking as the physical abuse were the chilling words of the man who led the attack. "When I asked how he could do this to me, he said that he believed in only two things - Islam and the rule of the clerics," Miss Tolouee told The Sunday Telegraph last week in an interview in Washington after she fled Iran. [...]

The world's attention is currently focused on Iran's nuclear ambitions under its hardline president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who came to office while Miss Tolouee was in prison. But inside Iran, she says, little has changed.

"Sometimes the regime seems a bit better, sometimes a bit worse, but for the people of Iran, the suffering continues," she said.

Comments

[Dom]

Nothing in this story really surprises me, and I've heard of worse coming out of Iran, and I expect worse from any country ruled by a Theocracy. But I'd be a little careful about news coming out of "people who fled Iran" and just happened to end up at a press conference in Washington. Is there a PR firm behind her? Remember the "incubator story" during the first Gulf War?