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asher553Before I join in the celebrations over the long-awaited dispatch of Osama bin Laden, it's only appropriate to mark the passing of a man whose life enriched the world. Iranian activist Siamak Pourzand - father of the activist Banafsheh Zand-Bonazzi - took his own life last Friday.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/may/1/longtime-iranian-dissident-kills-self-to-prove-his/
'A leading Iranian dissident has killed himself in what appeared to be a final act of defiance against the Iranian regime that had nearly ruined him.
Farsi-language websites reported over the weekend the death Friday of Siamak Pourzand, an 80-year-old journalist and essayist who was one of his country’s leading political and cultural writers before the 1979 revolution that later brought a theocratic regime to power.
After the revolution, Mr. Pourzand became one of the main writers affiliated with Iran’s domestic secular opposition in the 1990s.
According to his children, Mr. Pourzand jumped from the sixth-floor balcony of his apartment in Tehran, where he has been under house arrest for the last five years.
“My father was a secularist, and he believed the culture of Iran needed to be safeguarded from the religious revolutionaries in 1979,” said his daughter, Banafsheh Zand-Bonazzi in a phone interview Sunday. ...'
Banafsheh-Jaan, I am weeping with you.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/may/1/longtime-iranian-dissident-kills-self-to-prove-his/
'A leading Iranian dissident has killed himself in what appeared to be a final act of defiance against the Iranian regime that had nearly ruined him.
Farsi-language websites reported over the weekend the death Friday of Siamak Pourzand, an 80-year-old journalist and essayist who was one of his country’s leading political and cultural writers before the 1979 revolution that later brought a theocratic regime to power.
After the revolution, Mr. Pourzand became one of the main writers affiliated with Iran’s domestic secular opposition in the 1990s.
According to his children, Mr. Pourzand jumped from the sixth-floor balcony of his apartment in Tehran, where he has been under house arrest for the last five years.
“My father was a secularist, and he believed the culture of Iran needed to be safeguarded from the religious revolutionaries in 1979,” said his daughter, Banafsheh Zand-Bonazzi in a phone interview Sunday. ...'
Banafsheh-Jaan, I am weeping with you.
