15 Year Old Iranian Boy Tells Of Prison Rapes, Ordeal After Joining Iranian Opposition Movement

There really isn't anything to add to this story that comes from Times Online:

Iranian boy who defied Tehran hardliners tells of
prison rape ordeal

The 15-year-old boy sits weeping in a safehouse in central Iran, broken in
body and spirit. Reza will not go outside — he is terrified of being left alone.
He says he wants to end his life and it is not hard to understand why: for
daring to wear the green wristband of Iran’s opposition he was locked up for 20
days, beaten, raped repeatedly and subjected to the Abu Ghraib-style sexual
humiliations and abuse for which the Iranian regime denounced the United States.
“My life is over. I don’t think I can ever recover,” he said, as he
recounted his experiences to The Times — on condition that his identity not be
revealed. A doctor who is treating him, at great risk to herself, confirmed that
he is suicidal, and bears the appalling injuries consistent with his story. The
family is desperate, and is exploring ways of fleeing Iran.
Reza is living
proof of the charges levelled by Mehdi Karoubi, one of the opposition’s leaders,
that prison officials are systematically raping both male and female detainees
to break their wills. The regime has accused Mr Karoubi of helping Iran’s
enemies by spreading lies and has threatened to arrest him.
The boy’s
treatment also shows just how far a regime that claims to champion Islamic
values is prepared to go to suppress millions of its own citizens who claim that
President Ahmadinejad’s re-election was rigged.


Reza’s ordeal began in mid-July when he was arrested with about 40 other
teenagers during an opposition demonstration in a large provincial city. Most
were too young even to have voted. They were taken to what he believes was a
Basiji militia base where they were blindfolded, stripped to their underwear,
whipped with cables and then locked in a steel shipping container. That first
night Reza was singled out by three men in plain clothes who had masqueraded as
prisoners. As the other boys watched, they pushed him to the ground. One held
his head down, another sat on his back and the third urinated on him before
raping him.
“They were telling us they were doing this for God, and who did
we think we were that we could demonstrate,” Reza said. The men told the other
boys they would receive the same treatment if they did not co-operate when
interrogated the next day.
Reza was then taken outside, tied to a metal pole
and left there all night. The next morning one of the men returned. He asked
whether Reza had learnt his lesson. “I was angry. I spat in his face and began
cursing him. He elbowed me in the face a couple of times and slapped me.” Twenty
minutes later, he says, the man returned with a bag full of excrement, shoved it
in Reza’s face and threatened to make him eat it.
Reza was later taken to an
interrogation room where he told his questioner he had been raped. “I made a
mistake. He sounded kind, but my eyes were blindfolded. He said he would go look
into it and I was hopeful,” Reza said.
Instead, the interrogator ordered
Reza to be tied up and raped him again, saying: “This time I’ll do it, so you’ll
learn not to tell these tales anywhere else. You deserve what’s coming to you.
You guys should be raped until you die.”
He was subjected to further brutal
sexual abuse — and locked up for three days of solitary confinement.
Reza
was then forced to sign a “confession” in which he said that foreign forces had
told him and his friends to burn banks and state media buildings. He was told to
identify as the ringleader a 16-year-old friend who had been so badly beaten
that he was in hospital.
“I was shaking so much I couldn’t even hear what
they were saying,” said Reza. “I just signed whatever they put in front of me
without looking at it. I was scared they would rape me again.”
The next day
Reza and other detainees were transferred to a police detention centre, where he
was held for a further week.
On the third day, police officers entered the
cell in the middle of the night, blindfolded him and led him to the toilet,
where he was again raped. “My hands began shaking, my legs were weak and I
couldn’t stand up properly. I fell down and smashed my head hard on the ground
to try and kill myself. I started screaming and shouting for them to kill me. I
just couldn’t bear it anymore. I hated myself,” he said, weeping at the memory.
The following morning he was summoned by a police commander, who asked why
he had been screaming the previous night. When he explained, he was asked to
identify his rapist. The boy said he had been blindfolded, so the chief
commander hit him and accused him of lying. He was forced to sign a letter
admitting he had made baseless accusations against the security forces.
Reza’s ordeal was far from over. He was taken with about 130 other prisoners
to the city’s Revolutionary Court, where they were herded into a yard. The judge
told them that he would hang those who had violently resisted the Islamic
revolution and read out the names of ten teenagers, including Reza. The message
was clear: if they continued to say they had been raped they would be executed.
The judge sent them to the city’s central prison, where Reza was handcuffed
and held in a small cell with six other boys for ten more days. In the evenings
officers beat the boys and taunted them with the words: “You want to cause a
revolution?.
Periodically, the most senior officer would take the boys away,
three at a time. “When they returned they would be very quiet and uneasy,” Reza
said. When his turn came he and the others were led into a small room and
ordered to strip and have sex with each other. “He told us that with this we
would be cleansed — we would be so shattered that we would no longer be able to
look at each other. This would help calm us down.”
After 20 days Reza’s
family finally secured his release on bail of about £45,000 — and with a final
warning that he should say nothing about his treatment. His brother said: “A
friend of mine who is a guard in the prison where Reza was being held had told
me he was ill. The night he was released he was crying uncontrollably; then he
broke down and told my mother everything.”
The family persuaded a hospital
doctor they knew to treat him, despite the danger to herself. She has treated
his physical injuries and given him antibiotics and sedatives but cannot perform
an internal examination. Reza is deeply traumatised, terrified of being returned
to prison and barely sleeps.
The doctor told The Times that other detainees
had suffered a similiar fate. “We have many cases in the hospital but we can’t
report on them. They won’t let us open a file. They don’t want any paperwork,”
she said.
Drewery Dyke, an Amnesty International Iran researcher, said that
Reza’s case was “consistent with other reports we have received in terms of the
severity of disregard for human dignity, the unrestricted abuse without any
recourse to justice, the involvement even of judicial persons in rape abuse and
the denial of the basic right to healthcare”.
Reza, at least, survived to
tell the world his story. The 16-year-old friend he had to name as the
ringleader has since died in hospital from his injuries.