Tonight, Wednesday, 18 March 2009 (28 Esfand 1387), grief and disbelief have paralyzed the entire Persian blogosphere. My fingers are trembling on the keys as I write this: for the first time since blogging began, a blogger has died behind bars and it happened today inside Evin Prison (Global Voices Advox).
Omid Reza Mir Sayafi was not a party politician or a street militant. He was a gentle 29-year-old writer whose passion on his blog Rooznegar (rooznegaar.blogfa.com) was classical Persian music, poetry, and Iranian cultural heritage. Before he was locked inside Evin six weeks ago on February 7, he told Reporters Without Borders that out of all his blog posts, barely two or three were political satire, and that he was "a cultural blogger, not a political blogger" (Blog Herald). Yet Branch 15 of the Tehran Revolutionary Court sentenced him to two and a half years in prison for "insulting Khomeini and Khamenei" over a couple of satirical lines questioning regime funding for Hezbollah in Lebanon (Committee to Protect Journalists).
How Evin Prison Killed Omid Reza Mir Sayafi Today, 18 March 2009
Eyewitness testimony from imprisoned physician Dr. Hesam Firoozi: Dr. Hesam Firoozi, a fellow political prisoner and medical doctor inside Evin who tried desperately to save Omid Reza in his final hours today, got word out tonight that Evin's prison clinic staff failed to provide basic emergency care and refused to transfer him immediately to an outside hospital while his life slipped away (Center for Human Rights in Iran).
Prison doctors accused a dying 29-year-old of "faking it": Omid Reza's defense attorney, prominent human rights lawyer Mohammad-Ali Dadkhah, revealed tonight that before his death Omid Reza repeatedly begged for medical help for severe depression and physical distress, "but the doctors there didn't take this seriously and said he was faking it" (Committee to Protect Journalists).
Six weeks from a blog post to a grave: Handed heavy sedatives by the prison dispensary while facing threats of a second trial for "insulting Islam," Omid Reza survived barely forty days inside Evin before being carried out in a body bag (FIDH).
The First Blogger on Earth to Die in Prison
Six years ago, in April 2003, the Islamic Republic became the first regime on earth to jail a blogger when it arrested Sina Motalebi. Tonight, on 18 March 2009, the Islamic Republic claimed an even darker world record: Omid Reza Mir Sayafi is the first blogger in human history to die in prison for what he wrote online.
Think back thirty years to 1979, when Iran's revolution promised liberation and leftist intellectuals dismissed free speech and constitutional protections as "bourgeois Western traps." Look where that road led: to a 29-year-old lover of Persian music dying on a cold stretcher in Evin Prison two days before Nowruz because a Revolutionary Court judge could not tolerate two sentences on a blog. Tonight Omid Reza's mother is setting out black mourning cloth instead of a Nowruz Haft-Seen table — and none of us who write in Persian will ever forgive his killers.
