This is a statement from students of Amir Kabir Technical University, Tehran.
We Will Become Liberated Without Violence
Today, while writing this declaration, we are ashamed of not being in prison and we are disgraced not being under your torture. We are suffering to see that our friends, who together were practicing day and night lessons of passive resistance and nonviolence, are in solitary confinement in your prisons under the most savage physical and mental torture.
Until yesterday Mehdi Habibi, Abdollah Momeni, Amin Zadeh, Ameri Nasab, Hojjat Sharifi, Arash Hashemi, Bagher Oskooi, and others were one with us in peaceful protest. Now their days and nights are spent in the dark prison cells that have borrowed darkness from your conscience. We will continue the path that we started together with them and in honor of them. We will never forget the promise we made to each other, that one has only to tolerate—not instigate—the violence in order to achieve peace. We tell you, as they do, that your sickle is rusted!
As you uselessly try to muffle my song,
I will sing stronger than ever.
We tell you that we will counter your readiness and eagerness to inflict pain with our strength for tolerance of pain. We will balance your power of imprisonment, torture, harm and hurt with our moral strength and we will without an ounce of hatred. However, we will never let you proudly attack and lash us, and smile victoriously at the sight of our bloodied bodies.
We are talking to YOU!
Imprison us, torture us, and extract confessions from us. Expel, imprison, exile and even execute our professors. Destroy and set fire to our houses. Make us bloody and drag us in our own blood to your torture chambers. Beat us and leave our bloodied bodies alone. We will endure and will never hate you! We will never slap your face. When you stab our side, we will never swear at you. When you throw us out from the third floor, we will answer your violence with tolerance. We will continue to tolerate pain and torture until your acts of cruelty, past and present, returns to haunt you! This is our campaign. We see freedom in nonviolence and you see power in violence. We swear that we will stand with no violence against your power, even in the face of your torture, stabs and lashes.
In pursuing freedom, we will never take arms, we will never assassinate, we will never torture. We know well that violence is bad, assassination is ugly, and torture is painful. We have learned patience and tolerance in our doctrine. There will be an ease after every hardship.
We will campaign with our honesty, our clean conscience and our minds. Our campaign is the tolerance of your torture. We will wait and tolerate the pain so long that we make your conscience, darkened for the last few decades, wake up from ignorance.
We will tolerate pain but not complain, suffer torture but not shout. We will continue until the world testifies to our innocence, and until your black conscience testifies to your cruelty. Then your nights will be filled with nightmares of your own torture cells, nightmares of the lashes you inflicted on our tired bodies, and you will not rest any more. Be certain that tomorrow, even if you are still in power, you will not be able to spend your nights without nightmares reflecting on the muffled cries and open wounds of the youth of this land.
We will tolerate pain until your conscience arises from its poisoned slumber and until you are obliged to yield to the people to relieve your guilty consciences. Tomorrow, at the time of the people’s victory and when you have fallen from the pedestal of power to the dark well of disgrace, we will be there to welcome you and show you again that we abhor violence, we do not even hate you, our torturers, and we will forgive you without any reward. Although we will never hate you, we can not forget you because the wounds you have inflicted will never heal.
We will continue to campaign without violence in order to prove to the world that violence should not be responded by violence, and cruelty is not the proper answer against cruelty. We would like to show that violence, in any shape or form and under any cover up - torturer or tortured, oppressor or oppressed - is condemned. We will become liberated without violence!
Islamic Society of Students of Amir Kabir Technical University (Tehran/Iran)
July 2003
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