Iran is not the best place to be in right now.
Execution in
public has become a regular thing to do…and watch as if it is some kind of a Shakespearean street show! Recently for the first time
the arm of a thief was cut in front of the public eyes (imagine the kids!) in Shiraz, a city that has
peace loving people and the place that gave birth to many artists and poets.
The currency has been devaluated drastically during the past few months. Power to
buy (is this a correct term to use?!) has declined considerably.
Since last presidential elections many activists have been taken to prison,
making other people scared to do anything and many have fled the country, so
there are less people to criticize the government and the ones who have been
freed are now closeted and try not to do anything for the sake of their
families' safety.
The rate of road fatalities seems to have increased (if possible!).
Many
other horrible things have happened since I’ve come here last August. A classroom in a small town
had caught fire, resulting in the death of two very young girls and injuring
many others.
And two days ago, the news of arresting about 15 journalists came
out.
I remember about 7 years ago, when the idea of becoming a journalist first got into my head, I was telling everyone that yeah, I’m going to become a journalist, and I’m going to do this, and I’m going to do that and all that stuff! And then, one of our family friends, with a grin on her face (not to mock me, just to be frank with me) bluntly told me “A journalist…in Iran?!” and that was when it hit me that how stupid my idea was. It is hard to be a journalist in Iran…you can’t write about all the things you want, you will get censored, you will be limited to the topics that you want to write about, there are a lot of topics that girls/women are limited to write or interview about.
Back then, I wanted to become a sports journalist! Because I was crazy about soccer. But it would’ve been impossible as women are not allowed to attend matches in stadiums (one of the reasons is that male spectators are “foul-mouthed” and it’s not a suitable atmosphere for ladies! Although, many argued that the ladies’ presence in stadiums would make men behave themselves! But the more important issue was that many clerics said women shouldn’t watch men with shorts THAT live! I mean seeing it on TV was OK but seeing it first hand in the stadium, even from yards away was poo-poo!), let alone go to trainings or whatever to get interviews and first hand news! And it’s getting worse every day! In recent years, there were talks of even stopping showing wrestling on TV because the wrestlers aren't dressed properly!!!
Anyway…I just wanted to give you a gist of how awful things were. And back at that time, a plane carrying 40 journalists had suspiciously crashed in Iran so…that was what you could expect after becoming a journalist…dying in a fatal crash!
After the presidential elections back in 2009, everything got even worse. Quite the opposite of what president Khatami had done and given freedom of speech that had never been seen before in Iran, journalists in 2009 were thrown in jail and newspapers were shut down and… you can imagine the rest (or not!). Many journalists fled the country in fear of getting arrested and started working abroad in other networks and newspapers but they couldn’t speak as freely as they wanted to because their families were kind of “hostages” back in Iran. They weren’t actually arrested or anything, but as it says in the link I am going to share at the end of this post, they were harassed and taken for questioning.
Now in the latest raid, many were arrested while they were at their homes. I was reading a piece by Masih Alinejad, one of the journalists who has fled the country, on Facebook that said how one of the journalists was arrested in front of his mother. It’s really heart breaking. I imagined my own mother and how she would’ve felt if something like that happened to me or any of my siblings, and the hair on the back of my neck stood up!
Everything is getting worse. I don’t know where they are taking us but it’s not a good place!
One of my friends who had recently been to Iran and back, the things she was saying were unbelievable. I couldn’t believe that it's only been a few months since I’ve left and things have got this bad. She was telling how the foreign money dealers and currency exchanges were closed in her city and they were illegal unofficial dealers in the streets who were selling foreign money, especially American dollars, and she said that it was illegal to buy from those dealers and if caught, not only they would've taken away the money you had bought, but also would've fined you three times the amount you had bought!!! Of course, I know where this kind of behavior is coming from. Now with the sanctions, there is less money coming into the country, therefore they are trying to control the amount of dollars that people are taking away with them from Iran.
Not only the price of dollar has tripled, but the amount they allow for travelers to buy has fallen from $1000 to $300!!! I mean, even if you have the money to buy it, what can you do with $300 when you leave the country?! You would starve! And to make things worse, as far as I know, they only sell this amount to those who are going to visit the “holy” places, like Mecca or places like that. For those who are traveling for pleasure the amount is a big fat zero…zip…nada…nothing!
I usually digress a lot! The point of this entry was to say how sad it is to see all these journalists arrested without any legitimate reason. Guardian says they were accused of cooperating with foreign media like BBC but many speculate the main reason was to scare the journalists’ society and prepare them for the upcoming presidential elections, so that they wouldn’t even dare to write anything unpleasant (of course from the government’s perspective) and you can imagine how sad this makes me, an Iranian girl who dreams of becoming a journalist. There! In that sentence alone, I used 4 tabooed words! Girl, journalist, and to put Iran and dream in one sentence!
Iran needs a miracle. But it helps if more people are aware of what’s going on, in that now miserable place. My beloved.
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