a letter from Evin Prison

Politics and Morality are at Their Historical Peak of Banalization

Pakhshan Azizi, a political prisoner sentenced to death in Iran, criticizes the pressures surrounding her case in a letter from Evin Prison, Tehran, while simultaneously explaining her positions on war, Kurdish rights, separatism, and the role of the people in the future of the Middle East.

For a long time, I had chosen silence. In a place where your hands are tied, where your situation—like your history—is on the edge, and the slightest word may take your life, your state of being becomes your language. When they call your human identity into question, one must cry out: I am still alive, I am breathing, and I am still standing exactly where I ought to be.

Nothing has changed, except for the interference of certain self-interested individuals and so-called political figures who, from both inside and outside the prison, for personal or organizational interests and devoid of political morality, have set out to eliminate and marginalize me.

Some have ridden the wave in line with top-down politics in the name of „the people“; some in the name of an organization that has authorized the slaughter of my history; some disconnected from their shared history; some for the sake of purging; and some in the name of defenders and lawyers who have vacated their positions because their humanity was only as great as their endurance.

It is here that one must say:

When you are silent, you require a definition. And yet! It is not you in silence, but the interlocutors flowing through life who bring forth such a definition of you that, as long as your life remains, you take even heavier steps under the heavy shadow of this silence.

I have been imprisoned for 3 years and have spent 2 years under an unjust and tyrannical sentence. As far as I am aware, I am the only female political prisoner sentenced to death whose sentence has been upheld four times so far, and not once has my sentence been overturned or broken.

Until now, no „stay of execution,“ as it is being spoken of, has been notified either to me or to my lawyer, Mr. Raisian. Furthermore, a stay of execution does not mean the sentence has been revoked.

During these few years, both I and my family (like many others sentenced to death) have passed through hard and complex times. A family of dignity, all of whom were imprisoned and served time simply for standing with Kurdish culture. It is as if my family had to declare they were not „authentic Iranians“ to become heroes; as if my family had to declare what I hadn’t done and that I hadn’t been a social worker, so that my head would go to the gallows and the slogan „No to Execution“ in favor of a specific organization or group claiming it would fill the ears of the prison!

The lawlessness [in Iran’s judicial system] is something we are naturally aware of; and from my own case, I know what hands were behind the scenes and what political games they played and won inside and outside the prison! What side issues were manufactured!

I do not find it strange, for I know my history by heart. These two or three years were a repetition of my history. Remaining under the most severe pressures, threats, and intellectual and ideological violations from the detention process until now, inside this very political prison, is an exact reminder of the marginalized history of my Kurdistan.

I have no friend, no friend other than myself; even though sometimes ignorance, self-interest, and self-denial have caused disruptions and splits within it that lead its history astray; I have seen it with my own eyes.

The passage of time will prove that I have no friend other than myself. Naturally, this does not stem from absolute victimhood; it comes from knowing our place and our base in a firm and steadfast manner. That same history to which I will never turn my back.

If there is to be a life, I shall live it honorably; and if it is decided that,

Simply for seeking my rightful rights as a border dweller, a marginalized and eliminated person who desires my own culture and self-governance (certainly in rejection of separatism, a classic and reactionary position with which we have always been branded and condemned), I am to receive such an unjust sentence. I stand by the declaration of my position.

For this reason, once again, simultaneously with an analysis of the existing political situation, and regarding my conviction under the labels of separatism and warmongering, I want to declare my decisive and clear positions in my own words, right here. Therefore:

Issues related to the Middle East are not only related to the policies of the reactionary states of the region; rather, the situation we face has a hundred-year history that began with World War I and the subsequent division of lands in the territory of the Middle East, and it continues. The ongoing war is an extension of that same division of land. Our share of our land, our resources, and our oil is less than the share stolen by Western and Eastern states. This is a war that has engulfed the Middle East for years. They have plundered its oil, stolen its minerals, and drained its lifeblood to maintain the circulation of capital that began here. They want their share of the

Capital of a people whose values ​​and resources they have pillaged for years, and whose breath they have cut off with sanctions for years. People are suppressed in the region in the name of nationalism, sexism, and heterodoxy, experiencing the peak of massacre; people living in poverty, their hands empty, having endured homelessness, searched through garbage, and rented out their wombs. Now these stolen capitals are launched into the air and explode with warheads, while the people crawl even deeper into poverty. They now want to complete the unfinished work of the First and Second World Wars in a Third War; by what method and with what strategy?!

It is not clear!! Wars that the people did not start, and whose end is not for the people. The history of the last hundred years is the history of politics and morality being dragged into banalization in the name of the „nation-state,“ and its mental shrapnel rages within the policies, movements of the people, and politicians in the same manner. The role of the people is merely used as an excuse for further suppression, elimination, and accelerating the process of purges.

As I have previously declared, I do not agree in any way with the war started by the capitalist systems of the United States and Israel and the violation of my country’s soil; and especially the Middle

East where the fires of war have not faded for a hundred years. And I strongly condemn the targeting of any places such as the Minab school, hospitals, relief forces, and universities, which, according to international law, under any pretext, is considered a war crime. Children whose right was life, not death!

I have not been and am not a member of any specific organization, and I have been entirely a social worker. Of course, given the location where I worked (Rojava, Syria), I have had collaborations in certain places, but this in no way implies my membership.

As a social worker, I served for years in a refugee camp in Syria (under the worst sanitary and living conditions) that had been attacked by ISIS; necessarily, in a Syria that has been at war for years and whose corners are violated daily, claiming my membership based solely on a photograph is truly a pure mistake.

I do not and have never agreed with separatism, which in today’s time is a classic and reactionary position; however, I see achieving the rightful rights of my society, defined within the territory of Iran and through the creation of a federation in my country, and even the dream I hold in my head, namely a confederation in the Middle East, as a natural matter in the

process of global social changes, and this is the only way to shorten the hand of global capitalist forces in the region. As a Kurdish woman, I see the preservation of the culture and history of Kurdistan, Iran, and the Middle East as a historical-human responsibility within which I am defined. I do not and have never considered separatism, for which I have been condemned since the beginning of history, to be a solution.

I believe that for the establishment of fundamental peace, the best method of diplomacy is negotiation with the people; those who have nothing, the protesters and opponents who simply want an opportunity.

How can the global capitalist system set out to support my history, groups, or even my own individual self, when throughout my entire history there has been denial and erasure from their side as well, except for the purpose of exploitation and using me as a pawn to accelerate the process of political purging and nothing else?

I am not involved in any state political games or the games of statesmen, because the position of social work runs parallel to states; this is a completely scientific and academic position, and my work is with the people and not states.

From was not the beginning, have been organizational. An independent individual and a social worker. I believe in cultural work and deep work on social harms so that the sweeping away of the historical debris of such wars and the peak of political-moral banalization, which I have experienced with my skin, flesh, and bones, may be carried out more seriously in work with the people, in the depths of society, for the sprouting of mental buds for choosing life and not death. This also requires the creation of popular and independent institutions.

I am the one who dies for the sake of life, not the one who lives for the sake of death.

And to whoever has defended me with these positions and the knowledge they had of me, whether inside or outside the prison, from my suffering family and my lawyer Mr. Raisian to my comrades, I shake their hands and I am grateful for their pure intentions, regardless of differing thoughts and perspectives.

Pakhshan Azizi, Women’s Ward of Evin, June 9, 2026

Source:

Instagram page of Hydra Media Iran

www.instagram.com/hydra.media.iran

Translated by:

Roud Collective

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