 |
| Ruzbeh Saadati |
I am a child of a village. Our people are Shafi’i Muslims and Turkish. We have lived through layers of discrimination and humiliation—starting with the absence of basic infrastructure like roads, gas, and schools in our village, and extending to the everyday insults we endure in the cities. Even in the interrogation rooms of Tabriz, the guards found ways to demean us. I remember one waking me at two or three in the morning, saying, “Don’t sleep like Omar”—a sentence that made sleep impossible, replacing rest with unease.
In 2013, while imprisoned in Ahar, a small city in Iran’s East Azerbaijan Province, I refused to take part in the mandatory group prayer. The ward officer responded by sending me to the prison yard and threatening, “İndi səni şiə elərəm”—“Now I will make you a Shiite.” He stormed toward me, face red with fury. It was the Turkish activists who stepped between us, bearing the weight of responsibility. Apparently, the officer was determined to grant me paradise—by force if necessary. An hour later, I was called into the guardroom. There, in the prison director’s office, handcuffed, I was beaten by the duty officer and a soldier. The scar left by the handcuffs—an imprint of defiance—still sits between my eyebrows.
