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Hossein Ronaghi in an undated photo
Photo:
Hossein Ronaghi Instagram
Iranians “love life. We love living, and we don’t want to die,”
Hossein Ronaghi
told us in April. “But we’ve chosen freedom, and that may be the cost that one has to pay for freedom.” Mr. Ronaghi, 37, is now unreachable in Iran’s notorious Evin Prison, and the news isn’t good.
Mr. Ronaghi is an Iranian blogger and free-speech activist, and in a brave op-ed for these pages a year ago he described Iran as “a country of repression, censorship and violence.”
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The Iranian government subsequently accused Mr. Ronaghi of acting against national security, propagating against the Islamic Republic, and possession of alcohol. He freely admits the last charge. Under these charges he faces some five years in prison and a brutal public lashing. Authorities released Mr. Ronaghi on bail in March after we and other publications wrote about his ordeal.
Last month protests erupted in Iran after
Mahsa Amini,
22, died while under arrest for allegedly violating Iran’s Islamic dress code. The protests have since spread, and the regime’s violent crackdown has intensified. The regime threatened Mr. Ronaghi to stay silent, but “he did the opposite” and spoke out online and in interviews, his longtime friend
Laleh Roudi
tells us.
Mr. Ronaghi narrowly escaped violent arrest on Sept. 22 but turned himself in two days later. “He refuses to run away from the country and doesn’t want to jeopardize friends or family by having to hide him,” Ms. Roudi says. The reports of what happened next are all too common in the Islamic Republic.
From prison Mr. Ronaghi called his mother and said, “‘I can’t talk now; they’ve broken my legs’ and then the connection was cut,” his friend
Masoud Kazemi
told the Washington Post.
Other reports about Mr. Ronaghi’s condition come from those imprisoned with him. Ms. Roudi says one person described him “being dragged to the infirmary with a visibly broken leg,” while another saw him vomiting blood. He has been deprived of legal counsel since Sept. 24. “The Islamic Republic intends to kill my brother Hossein,” the blogger’s brother Hassan tweeted Friday.
Mr. Ronaghi had already endured some six years in Iranian jails, and prior torture left him with serious health problems. Ms. Roudi said he has now embarked on a hunger strike in prison. Mr. Ronaghi described to us this spring how a prior hunger strike exacerbated his ailments—but it was “one of the few ways” a prisoner could “show this resistance.”
Reuters reported Wednesday that at least 201 civilians have been killed since the protests began, citing numbers from the nonprofit Iran Human Rights. Mr. Ronaghi’s life is among those that hang in the balance.
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Appeared in the October 15, 2022, print edition as ‘A Journal Contributor Suffers in Iran.’
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