Word: savak
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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REZA BARAHENI has every reason to write angrily about repression in Iran. One of that country's best known poets and a former professor of literature at the University of Teheran, Baraheni was imprisoned and tortured for 102 days in Iran's notorious Komite because SAVAK, the Shah's secret service, believed his writings were subversive. Fortunately, Baraheni was well-known outside Iran, and international pressure finally forced SAVAK to release him. He is now living in exile in the U.S., trying to publicize the evils of the Shah's regime...
...Iran, leaving the reader to imagine for himself the effect on the rest of the people. The Shah's agents--many of them trained by the United States and equipped with techniques and weapons developed in the U.S.--are everywhere in Iran; many of them operate overseas, giving SAVAK a global reach...
...that the presence of free-speaking Americans in the institutions with which Harvard is involved will help Iranian students come into contact with ideas that would otherwise be banned in Iran. But Baraheni argues convincingly that Harvard's presence merely lends the regime respectability without altering its repressive nature. SAVAK's agents do not stop outside the classroom door simply because the professor is American; Iranian participants in Harvard's Iranian projects are as liable to harrassment as the rest of their countrymen...
...essay called "Prison Memoirs," is that there is very little a writer can offer his torturers. He writes alone, so there are no names to give the torturer; his books are evidence of his crime against the regime, and he has no other acts to confess. The SAVAK's torturers demand that the intellectual recant, publicly renounce his work, deny the validity of his writing. Baraheni writes...
...Baraheni's memoirs of prison leave us wondering--as they are meant to do--what became of the others in the Komite. What of the women who sang to keep up the spirits of the other prisoners? What of the man under torture because SAVAK's agents found an unread copy of "The Communist Manifesto" in his room? Like Baraheni, they have nothing to confess, nothing to offer their torturers but a denial of their existence...