Photo: Abdorrahman Boroumand Center
Farzad Kamangar
فرزاد کمانگر
2010 · 16 years ago
- Taken
- 9 May 2010
- Age
- 35 years old
- From
- Tehran, Tehran
Kept on this phone only. Nothing is sent.
Their life
Farzad Kamangar, known to his friends as Siamand, taught for twelve years in Kamyaran, in Kurdistan, the last of them at the town's Kar-o-Danesh vocational high school. He sat on the board of the Kamyaran branch of the Teachers' Union until it was banned, worked on the editorial board of Ruyan, a cultural and educational monthly, served on the board of a local environmental society, and joined Human Rights Activists in Iran.
He believed in peaceful civil resistance and shunned violence. A cellmate remembered the softness in his feelings and in his writing, and how much he wanted to help children who had been shut out of education. In prison he kept writing; in his last weeks he wrote a letter to imprisoned teachers.
Everyone will know that a teacher is a teacher, even if his path is blocked by the selection process, imprisonment and execution. The teacher has been awarded his name and honor by his little fish and not by herons.
How the regime took them
He was arrested in Tehran in 2006, where he had come for his brother's medical treatment. Over the next years he was held in Tehran, Kermanshah and Sanandaj, and in his letters he described being flogged, beaten and given electric shocks. In February 2008 a Revolutionary Court sentenced him to death for 'enmity against God' over alleged membership of a Kurdish armed group; his lawyer said the trial lasted ten minutes.
He was hanged in Evin Prison on 9 May 2010 with Shirin Alamhouli, Ali Heydarian, Farhad Vakili and Mehdi Eslamian, without notice to his family or his lawyer. They were buried in secret, and the families were never told where. (The Tehran prosecutor named the group as PJAK; Amnesty International reported the charge as membership of the PKK.)
