The Massacre of Protesters Will Not Block the Path to Freedom
The Islamic Republic repeated, on a vast and horrifying scale and within barely two weeks, all the crimes it has committed over forty-seven years of its bloody domination. As was feared, “the regime filled the prisons and graveyards with protesters.”
By cutting off every means of communication from the internet to text messages and telephone lines, the government massacred the people driven to desperation in total darkness; they labeled those killed as “rioters” and “enemies” and paved the way for the continuation of an all-out war against the people. They abducted the wounded from hospitals, buried the dead in secret, piled corpses upon corpses in warehouses and stored them in trailers, and sent bewildered survivors searching for their loved ones among heaps of bodies. They arrested thousands (children, the elderly, and the young alike) added to the tally of enforced disappearances accumulated over these forty-seven years, and, by continuing a policy of intimidation, sought to silence the witnesses to these crimes, including medical staff. Under the suffocating atmosphere and enforced single-voicedness, the regime recorded all this in its own media as a triumphant spectacle.
This reign of death has plunged a grieving and wounded society into such shock that it seems as if a fundamental change in the existing order by the will of the people is impossible. The horrific scale of the regime’s crimes has opened the way for exploitative powers to conceal their own bloodstained colonial histories behind the mask of “savior” and to take their share of the bloodshed and the people’s uprising. Undoubtedly, those who tie the dream of freedom to military intervention seek to build their edifice upon the ruins of this land. The inevitable fate of the people is not to choose between the ruling reaction and exploitative powers and their agents. The history of uprisings, of repression, and of rising again has shown that the strength and will of a people driven to desperation by corruption, discrimination, and inequality will not disappear; it will organize consciously and impose itself upon the holders of power and capital. It is the people who determine their own destiny.
The Writers’ Association of Iran, which for years has insisted under repression by the authorities on the right to freedom of expression without restriction or exception and has always stood alongside freedom-seeking people, will, with all its strength, remain the voice of the repressed and the freedom-seekers until all those who ordered and carried out the regime’s crimes are subjected to a popular and fair trial. The Writers’ Association of Iran calls on freedom-loving writers and like-minded institutions around the world not to take their eyes off Iran for a moment and to be the voice of the protesters, the survivors, and the detainees.
Writers’ Association of Iran
28 January 2026
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