Hundred Days of Solitude

Haleh Esfandiari has spent hundred days in solitude and may spend more. Kian Tajbakhsh has spent hundred days in solitude and may spend more. Nothing is known from the fate of Ali Shakeri. “Solitude” is a punishment that those who love Iran must endure as a historic fate. They say Haleh is just skin and bones. She looks as if her soul has left her body. Nothing is left from that active Haleh who drank a cup of coffee for breakfast, ate a bowl of yogurt for lunch and always performed her daily exsercises, never leaving her work. We pray that the news we receive are false. But how can we stay calm? Nobody knows what is happening to her. Her attorney is unaware of her condition just as we are. They do not allow Esfandiari to be visited by her attorney. Her old mother who lives near the Evin Prison is also unaware of her condition just as we are. Her mother, who can at any moment leave us is unable to see her lone daughter, who is now 67 years old. She has endured hundred painful days of solitude. She is originally Austrian, but after marrying Haleh’s father found Iran to be a heaven and never left, even during the revolution and the Iran-Iraq War. She is probably thinking to herself, why is she treated such in a land that she loves?

Kian Tajbakhsh has been seen after spending one hundred days in solitude with an unshaved and wrinkled face. They say in order to prepare him to appear on the staged confessions show on television, he had to be grimed like movie actors so that he can read over their already-prepared statements of confessions. They wanted to convince the public that Tajbakhsh is in a decent condition. In reality though, he has been thrown away like trash.

All those who have experienced solitude of this sort know how it feels. They know Haleh’s and Kian’s solitude is like a gray cloud; its depressing; it is mixed with nightmare reeks of death – though it is not death! The solitude turns death into a “wish.” And where death is a wish, life is a nightmare. We must pray for those in solitude like Kian and Haleh. Is the hundred day of solitude that is imposed on Kian and Haleh a misunderstanding or is it a sign that some people are unable to separate their friends from their enemies out of their sheer ignorance? These two, whose days in solitude have surpassed one hundred are friends, not enemy. Have they remained friends after tolerating the heavy weight of solitude and loneliness? Iran’s security apparatus is an enemy-producing factory. They feed the factory with friends through different pipes and receive enemies from the other end. The factory’s production has been like this for many years.

Haleh’s and Kian’s solitude has reached one hundred days. But really, how long has been the Iranian people’s solitude? Let us together count our lonely days and nights and calculate how much hardship we have endured inside and outside the country in order to keep ourselves alive in this wasteland of solitude.

The solitude of Haleh and Kian, both of whom were friends to a moderate Islamic Republic, reached one hundred days. Calculate the number of days the Iranian people have been in solitude.