Part of memoirs of General Yusuf Forootan

The suicide of a female guerilla

Selected by Faezeh Sasanikhah
Translated by M. B. Khoshnevisan

2024-2-13

There was a lady in prison who was a member of the Fadai guerrillas and her behavior was very strange; even though she had been pardoned twice, she was still attached to them. For the third time, when she was imprisoned, due to having a murder case, her punishment was heavy, and she was certain that she would stay in prison for a long time. One day, when she felt very bad, she was taken to the hospital and then her stomach was photographed due to internal bleeding. We saw that she had eaten a collection of pins and clips and various other items in order to commit suicide. For prisoners, especially this type of people, it is dangerous to carry some items with them; they even take their glasses from some prisoners, because they might use them to commit suicide.

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A conversation with Amooei

Amooei[1] was one of the Tudeh party prisoners and a well-educated and polite person. He was an officer under Razmara[2] who was arrested because of his assassination. When I saw him, 43 years had passed since his imprisonment and he was 62 years old. He himself said: I am a prisoner of two regimes. He said with regret: With the victory of the revolution, when the story of the release of the prisoners happened, I was also free for a while, during this time I got married and had a daughter, my daughter is very small, my heart goes to her.

I wanted to see Amooei and ask his opinion as a member of the Tudeh party about the letter of the Imam (may God bless his soul) to Gorbachev and the delegation that went to the Soviet Union. I asked him, "What do you think about this matter?" He cried for about twenty minutes on that day and could not control himself. I comforted him and said, “cry to calm down”. I also brought him a glass of tea. “Why are you crying?” I asked after he calmed down a bit. He answered: "You don't know, we gave our whole being to the party and it didn't do us any good." I asked: "What is your opinion about this letter of the Imam to Mr. Gorbachev?" After he calmed down, he said to me: "You don't understand who this Ayatollah Khomeini is, many people don't understand what a great and majestic personality he is." I said: "How?!" He said: "First of all, it is as if he is walking in the corridors of the Kremlin Palace today and [sees] all the events there." Certainly, in the near future, as the Ayatollah has predicted, the communist system will collapse. Secondly, I don't know this lady, I know Dr. Larijani and Ayatollah Javad Amoli, but I don't know this lady and I don't know what kind of person she is, but let's just say that the East and the West spent billions of dollars for more than 250 to 300 years to say that Islam has enslaved women and destroyed their human rights, etc. But Ayatollah Khomeini, with a simple move like a professional chess player, moved a piece and checkmated both East and West in the political game of the world and made the world understand that Islam respects women's human rights more than the East and the West, and this freedom that exists in the culture of Westerners and Easterners is a hundred percent lie about women and is meant to take advantage of the female gender. Of course, I introduced Mrs. Dabbagh and said that maybe she is more of a guerrilla and warrior than you, and he continued: "It is really interesting, I didn't know, I really feel proud...". I said: "She is one of the guerrillas during the revolution. In Paris, when we protested [the] hunger strike, she brought herself there that this expresses the spirit of struggle and special of this woman. He said with surprise: "I like it! East and West tried for more than two hundred years to say that Islam is anti-woman. I feel national pride that the Imam, with a beautiful trick, like a strong chess player, was able to checkmate them by moving his ordinary soldiers. He also spoke briefly about the Nepp plan and then gave a detailed description of how the October 17 revolution in Russia was won and said: When the October Revolution took place, three groups were the main leaders; a group of feudalists [known as] Soviet khans. Some were also moderate, whose main symbol was first Trotsky and then Bhutto. Another group was the military and modernists, of which Stalin and Lenin were part of this group and from the Nepp plan. Force, power and weapons were their plan and Professor Nepp was a famous person in their hands. Lenin and Stalin were famous executioners who succeeded by killing some thirty million people.

Source: Samavi Masumeh, Memoirs of General Yusuf Forootan, Tehran, The Center for Islamic Revolution Documents. 1398 (2019), pp. 239, 242.