Kazemeini-Boroujerdi to Khamenei: It is as if you do not live in this country

To the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution and the Marja of political Islam, eminence of the magisterial religion, Mr. Ali Khamenei,

Peace be on those who follow enlightenment,

This is the eighth letter that I have written and presented to you, during my eight years as the prisoner of the absolute Supreme Leadership. I write to you, as the child of the Almighty, as one of the imprisoned, the suffering, who have been dealt the justice of the Islamic Republic in Iran.

I am the defenseless and wholly interdicted individual whose conditions you are most certainly aware of, as every ruler is informed  about the conditions and secrets of his country via their intelligence agents, and governs based on the public needs. I doubt however that you are aware of the real statistics and demographics of the country, as anyone who sees your speeches on the state run television, is shocked at the things that you say; it is as if you do not live in this country and have no real knowledge of the accounts and records. You have explained away the current rampant absurdity and aberration in the face of the sanctions, in such a cavalier and unconcerned manner, that many countries wished that they were in our place!

Of course, you were correct when you said that international sanctions could not accomplish a damn thing! Not only because you and your cronies and support system in general, suffered no setback; your provinces of Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Bahrain also weren’t bothered, because they blatantly looted and pillaged the God given wealth and natural resources of our defenseless nation and laughed their way to the bank, while stripping them of their economic independence and their will to think freely.

You have filled these thirty five years of contemporary history with your disgrace and deceit; and the names and memories of the sons of Iran have been written in blood which is the legacy of an antiquated dictatorship that operates in the dark ages.  

Your Eminence, at the time of the transfer of power from the Shah to you, bread was one rial; now it is two thousand rials. So, based on this, one can deduce the rest of the situation that the people of this land face, deprived of even their daily bread. Presumably for the rest, when your most cherished founder, took over from the Shah, he made a series of fundamental commitments, vowing heaven on earth.  Ironically, that promised eden is now in the hands of a small percent of the ruling elite, whose families and friends lord over us. And the real proprietors of this divine land are reduced to destitution, desperation, rampant ill health, inexplicable and suspicious deaths, addiction, suicide, prostitution and much more; they live in agony. Your track record is steeped in oppression, censorship and violence and even someone like me who hails from a most reputable ancestry, am forced to spend years in prison, just for eulogizing on that which my fathers before me communicated. My refusal to jump on the bandwagon of the materialist and profane clerics, has placed me in ball and chains of cruelty and my youth, my health and my life, has been lost in your prisons, where I am constantly and actively detained without either any medical care or legal representation. I will be killed defenselessly, enduring savagery. 

Though this document will never reach you, as it shouldn’t, it will reach the conscience of the world at large, and it will be logged and sealed in the annals of time.

Seyyed Hossein Kazemeini-Boroujerdi

May 2014

Evin Prison - Tehran, Iran
Translated and edited by: Banafsheh Zand