Letter from Pakhshan Azizi: Concealment of truth and its alternative

Pakhshan Azizi wrote a letter published by Bidarzani on 27 July. In her letter, Azizi details the violent manner in which her and her family were arrested by security forces, the torture she endured during her detention, and her political stances and activities.

Pakshan Azizi was sentenced to death on 23 July and Sharifeh Mohammadi on 4 July. Both women were subjected to severe torture and inhuman treatment during weeks of detention.

Azizi wrote: “She pressed her hands against the walls of her womb to keep from falling, resisting the abortion drugs. From childhood, she grew up learning how to be, with the voice of a tormented mother teaching lessons of resistance and life: I will bind you until you get used to it, so that as long as I am alive, you won’t die in captivity.
A war is raging between life and time!

He gripped the wall of the cell to keep from falling. For a long time now, he had lost track of night and day in his struggle to survive, to find a way to exist, and beyond that, to determine how to exist. With the government’s method of intimidation and twenty weapons hovering above their heads, believing they had captured terrorists (the very same terrorism of which public intimidation is one of the principles!).”

Azizi continued: “A human is human through their gender (their first perceptual dimension), their language, culture and art, management, way of life, and in general their freedom and ideology. When any of these dimensions are aborted in life, there is no place left for a human life. If you abort a woman’s will as a human and her
self-esteem, there is no room left for free life, and this means a decline from human-moral and political standards. Where life with one’s own identity becomes devoid of meaning, it takes on a defensive form and life enters the stage of rebellion.

Various insults, humiliations and threats are resumed in the worst physical conditions resulting from repeated hunger strikes and identity-historical pressures. A silence of several months that becomes a cry: I am not a terrorist. The clenched fists of the interrogator, who as a statesman flaunts his authority each time, are pounded, a voice that becomes a shout, why are you denying the truth?!

You have denied the greatest social truth, namely woman and her identity, being Kurdish, life and freedom, which truth and which denial of truth?!

Denial, annihilation, assimilation, the same policies that have systematically led to the worst social harms and consider any search for truth as opposition to itself and struggle against the other, and with those same policies again, one is interrogated and a process that is nothing but a vicious cycle (futile)!

It criminalizes being indebted to the people and performing social-moral services outside the boundaries of the nation-state, and creates scenarios (repeatedly threatening other scenarios to undermine social trust!) Unaware that democratizing a society is accomplished outside the boundaries of the nation- state, and constructing an ethical-political society is an activity towards moderating and complementing incomplete state policies.”

The letter ended with the following words: “Neither Sharifeh Mohammadi nor I, along with the other women on death row, are the first or the last to be condemned solely for seeking a free and honourable life. However, without sacrifice, freedom cannot be realized. The cost of freedom is substantial. Our crime is linking Jin and Jiyan to Azadi (Women and Life to Freedom).

I am her. She is me. But I am a mere drop in the ocean. You are the ocean. Our flow is inevitable. We are unconcealed.”