From October last year to this October “at least 2,230 people have been executed in Iran, including 54 women, 47 political prisoners and four children,” the No to Executions Tuesday campaign reported Oct. 13. Organized by prisoners, the campaign’s weekly hunger strike has taken place for 142 weeks, expanding to 66 prisons.
“No human being should become a victim of the gallows,” the group states. Their goal is “for a free Iran, far removed from torture and executions.”
The reactionary capitalist regime in Iran has increased the pace of executions, fearful of the deepening hatred for its rule in the wake of the torture and slaughter of thousands of protesters in January. The regime has stepped up arrests of teachers and other union activists, and sentenced to being whipped some who publicly oppose its repression.
The Human Rights News Agency reports that more than 10 oil workers from Petropars, in the mostly Arab province of Khuzestan, received 74 lashes with a whip for protesting their firings after their employment contracts lapsed.
“You flogged our colleagues in order, as you imagined, to intimidate the vast number of colleagues in the oil industry who have been made unemployed,” the Council for Organizing Protests by Oil Contract Workers stated Oct. 11. “When the anger of oil workers erupts, no savage and repressive force will be able to withstand it.”
“Under the shadow of war, repression and executions, our livelihoods have been destroyed more than ever,” they wrote a week earlier. “The executions must stop immediately.”
Sheikh Abdul Hamid, the central leader of the Baluch, an oppressed nationality based in Sistan-Baluchistan province, has also been speaking out against the death penalty.
“Imprisonment and execution are not the solution,” Abdul Hamid told hundreds at Friday services in Zahedan Oct. 9. “The scale of executions being carried out in the country today is unprecedented in the history of Islam.”
“These executions only widen the gap between the people and the governing authorities,” he said. “Violence and executions breed resentment and hatred.”
Oppressed nationalities — Baluch, Kurds, Afghans, Arabs and others — disproportionately face execution by the regime, mostly for drug and other criminal offenses. But the number of those executed on trumped-up political charges is growing.