who fled as a refugee to Australia says she has been threatened with reprisals for criticizing the Iranian govern-ment’s arrest of her sister, whom she says has been jailed for five years for being a Baha’i.
Rosa Vasseghi, who lives in Melbourne after gaining asylum in 1999, says she and her family have received repeated threats since speaking out over the plight of her sister, Rozita, who has been held in solitary confinement since her arrest in March.
Rosa said Rozita Vasseghi is being held in a detention center run by the Ministry of Intelligence after being convicted of “teaching against the regime, taking action against national security and insulting religious sanctities’’ for distributing CDs about the Baha’i faith.
The International Federation for Human Rights is campaigning for Rozita’s freedom, saying the conditions in which she is held are “so appalling” that she is in “an extremely weakened state” and her condition is “very serious.”
“Her only crime is being a Baha’i,’’ says her sister, who said she herself was imprisoned and tortured for her religious beliefs before escaping Iran in the 1990s.
She said Rozita’s arrest followed a trip she made to Australia in 2008, where they were reunited for the first time in 11 years. “It was after she came to
Australia they accused her. She was accused of being a spy and insulting Islam because she traveled overseas,’ Rosa Vasseghi told The Australian.
Rosa said for the first three months her sister has been in a cell with no mattress or blanket. Their 70-year-old mother had been able to see Rozita three times for a few minutes at a time. On the last visit, two months ago, the mother barely recognized her daughter as she had lost so much weight, was in intense pain and could barely walk.
Rosa Vasseghi said when she had been talking on the phone to her mother two weeks ago, a man’s voice had cut into the phone line and told her: “One day it will be your turn. Your time is also coming.” On a second occasion she had been told: “We will get to you, too.”
Rosa Vasseghi is the author of eight children’s books and a non-fiction book published last year about the detention, torture and rape of women prisoners around the world.
She says after the book’s publication, she received a phone call from a man with an Iranian accent calling from within Australia, who said: “We will stop you. I am going to catch you and rape you.”
“I was very shocked. I didn’t expect that to happen here in Australia,’’ Ms Vasseghi said.
