Women Political Prisoners In Tehran’s Evin Decry Lack Of Care
A group of 16 female political prisoners have issued a statement to decry the crowded prison wards and the dire health conditions in the notorious Evin prison in Tehran.
A group of 16 female political prisoners have issued a statement to decry the crowded prison wards and the dire health conditions in the notorious Evin prison in Tehran.
In their letter released to media on Monday, the prisoners said that considering the spread of the new covid-19 variant in the prison and lack of enough room for quarantine areas, the inmates are in danger.
They denounced a lack of proper attention to their health conditions, noting this is not the first time that health conditions for the prisoners have been ignored in the women's ward at Evin and other prisons, including Qarchak prison near the capital. “What has worsened the situation these days is the daily increase in the number of female prisoners while the Covid-19 is spreading."
Rights defender Narges Mohammadi, one of the signatories of the letter, said earlier in the month that authorities put the lives of female prisoners in danger by refusing to protect them from Covid despite new cases. Mohammadi, who has been transferred to the Women’s Ward of Evin Prison after a recent open-heart surgery, said that some of the inmates have tested positive for Covid while several others have developed symptoms but have not been tested.
Ill-treatment of political prisoners and activists at Evin and other prisons such as Qarchak is not limited to denying them necessary healthcare. Sepideh Rashno, an anti-hijab protester who is reportedly held at a ward run by the IRGC at Evin, had to be taken to hospital to check for internal bleeding symptoms resulting from torture before her ‘forced confession’ was aired on state-run television last week.
The crisis which has seriously affected the everyday lives of the majority of the city’s nearly 600,000 population in the past few days, has been attributed to the critical depletion of the water in the Ekbatan Dam reservoir, with zero inflows.
With nothing in the pipes, water for drinking and other purposes is now being distributed by tanker trucks. Iran’s Red Crescent has also been distributing bottled water in the city.
A month ago, during a visit to Hamedan, capital of a province of the same name, President Ebrahim Raisi ordered the related authorities to solve the city’s water problem within two months.
In recent years, many cities across the country have been scenes of massive protests to the authorities’ mismanagement of water resources, harmful dam building, and politically motivated diversion of rivers that have devastated agriculture and drinking water sources. Also, there is rising temperatures and sand storms, expert attribute to global warming.
in July 2021 big crowds protested in over a dozen cities and towns in the southwestern province of Khuzestan where at least 700 villages were receiving regular supplies of water by tanker trucks.
In July 2021, Protests over water shortages in Khuzestan lasted for more than a week and it spread to several neighboring and nearby provinces including Chahar Mahal-Bakhtiari, Esfahan, Lorestan, and Bushehr.
Later in November water protests in the city of Isfahan, the capital of the central province of Esfahan, turned into anti-government unrest. Security forces cracked down on protesters with heavy handed tactics and many were injured by shotgun pellets.
Earlier this month, a large group of people in the city of Shahrekord in southwest Iran held a protest rally after nine days with no piped water. Officials said the problem stemmed from the recent flash floods in the region and the lack of any water treatment plant for the province. Water has been cut in Shahrekord, and four other cities due to the recent floods and increased water turbidity.
Ironically, despite a dam-building craze in the past 30 years, most of the water from this summer’s exceptional monsoon rains was lost in plains and deserts.
Iran is in the midst of a long drought that has become worse in the past couple of years. Ninety-seven percent of Iran’s land is arid or semi-arid.
The rapid growth in demand for water has led to severe depletion of available sources. The annual renewable water availability per capita reached a crisis level in 2021. Studies by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) indicate that by 2040 Iran is likely to face a severe water stress level.
Several human factors, experts say, are contributing to the worsening situation: population growth, industrial demand, mismanagement of water resources including allocation to water-intensive industries, and planting many water-intensive crops including rice and sugarcane.
Steel mills are particularly blamed for draining available water resources. Most of Iran's largest steel factories are in arid regions such as Esfahan, Yazd, and Kerman provinces despite the very high water usage in steel production.
Critics blame Iran's development model, or lack of one, in the past few decades and unbalanced sectoral growth for much of the water crisis in the country.
Iran is also among the ten countries in the world that extract most groundwater and a hotspot of land subsidence induced by groundwater withdrawal.
