They Pulled Out My Teeth for Edification

He walks with difficulty, and still displays signs of torture. His front teeth are missing. He says they were pulled out with pliers when he was being tortured. His morale though, is not bad. He says, “The days in prison were the hardest days of my life.” In the middle of our conversation, his mobile phone rings. A calm and young voice is on the line, the voice of a “child missing his father.” He says, “It was Karou, my seven-year-old son. His permanent stutter started when armed security agents raided our house in Marivan to arrest me.”

Social activist Ahmad Baab spent a total of 195 days in prison, for 165 days of which he was subjected to the harshest physical and psychological torture. Last week, the Human Rights Reporters Committee released a report detailing the savage treatment of this Kurdish political prisoner.

In an exclusive interview with Rooz, Ahmad Baab discussed some other aspects of his experience before and during his imprisonment.

In this interview, Ahmad Baab revealed that the interrogators threatened him with sexual abuse. He says, “They said we would do to you what we did to others in Kahrizak.”

Read the interview below.

Rooz: What were you charged with?

Ahmad Baad (Baab): Let me tell you about the first few days after my arrest in Marivan. The evening of the day I was arrested, only five minutes after we reached the intelligence ministry’s office, personal interrogations began, before they even took my information, because I had been arrested before. From the first moments, they accused me of conspiring with anti-government Kurdish parties and disrupting public order by mobilizing people against the Islamic Republic.

Rooz: Did you accept the charges?

Baab: No, because they were absolutely baseless. I had spoken about wildfires and a gathering to protest the unemployment crisis in Marivan with Radio Farda and a Kurdish satellite channel. They presented the audio files of my statements as evidence. As is obvious from the content of the interviews, my statements were only about social issues. That first night one of the interrogators said, Ahmad Baab cannot be reformed, pull out his teeth to teach others a lesson. They tied my hands and covered my eyes and then three people beat me violently with punches, kicks and wide military belts. Then they held my arms and used pliers to pull out my front bottom teeth. Even though my body was already covered in blood, they continued beating me and broke my ribs. I wasn’t able to even talk or moan. They put me in solitary confinement in that condition. The area of the cell was equal to a military blanket. I spent the first night thinking that I would die from bleeding.

Rooz: Mr. Baab, are you planning on continuing your activism? What request do you have from human rights organizations?

Baab: I ask all human rights organizations and the media to focus on the catastrophic situation of political prisoners. You have no idea what is happening inside the prisons. What happens in Iranian prisons, especially in provincial areas and particularly in Kurdistan, is a calamity. I will certainly continue my human rights activism.