Remembering Is Fighting and Not-Forgetting Is Resisting.

“No to Execution”; A Joint Statement by the Children of Prisoners Executed in the 80s

The wheels of the Islamic Republic’s execution machine have never stopped turning. This time, Saleh Mirhashemi, Majid Kazemi and Saeed Yaqoubi. How many other dear souls are sitting these days waiting for the day of their execution?

Execution does not only take the life of one person. It also takes the lives of the families, relatives and friends of those executed. We, the children of those executed in the Islamic Republic in the 1980s, know the pain of executions and mass graveyards, violence and denial, missing bodies and state repression and persecution, even as we mourn. This repetitive horror story must end. We shout: “No to execution.”

We stand as sisters and brothers with the fathers, mothers, wives and children of all those executed these years, especially the newest members of this long list, Saleh Mirhashemi, Majid Kazemi and Saeed Yaqoubi. This suffering is the suffering of us all.

Being faced with executions is a multilayered emotion for us and for all those who have experienced the execution of a loved one, or in the case of the signatories of this statement, a father or a mother. On the one hand, it brings back the sadness, pain and anger that we have lived with for years, and on the other hand, it reminds us that since the beginning of the Islamic Republic of Iran, execution has been the most important means of creating fear, hopelessness and a sense of desperation among the people. We are against executions for any reason and pretext.

Remembering is fighting and not forgetting is resisting. We stand side by side and are bound together by fate. Until the day of the trial, until the spring.

A group of children of executed prisoners in the 80s.