COLUMN: Dying to leave the party

Imagination is free.

So imagine you are at a friend’s party. You are all dancing, men and women together. Maybe you have been drinking. Now imagine that while you are dancing you hear police sirens and a few minutes later there is a noise in the hallway. Suddenly officers burst through the door to arrest you.

Hard to imagine, isn’t it? It is hard for you to imagine because the government here in Ireland doesn’t care about your party. It doesn't matter to them if you drink alcohol or not.

But in Iran it is a very different story. Having a party in Iran, whatever the occasion, is a risky business. Because there is a strong possibility that the police will come to your house and arrest you and everyone else there.

And it is not only the police you have to worry about. Various forces have been created by a government that sees its duty as being to monitor the behaviour of its citizens. Some people accept money to spy on their neighbours.

If they learn of someone having a party, they report it to the police or one of the other agencies.

Partying in Iran is accompanied by so much risk and stress. In some cases it can cost you your life.

For example you are at a party when agents rush in. In order to evade their capture you decide to jump from the window of the house to escape. But so desperate are you that you fail to realise just how far the fall is.

This happened to a young man in Mashhad – one of the big cities in Iran – fairly recently. The party was being held on a Thursday night and the police forces decided to raid it under the pretext of it being “mixed” and because women there were without their hijabs.

Rather than be taken by the marauding police officers the man decided to take his chances from the sixth floor of the complex he was in.

Mashhad’s biggest newspaper is called Quds. It reported that the police force had entered the property on the back of calls from neighbours.

“A young man who was trying to escape fell from the sixth floor,” according to the paper. “This party was a mixed party with alcoholic beverages served.”

The deaths of young people attending parties as a result of police raids is not uncommon and has happened in many different cities in Iran.

While many gatherings are targeted because they are allegedly mixed – men and women together - the Iranian police and other government security agencies have also been known to attack celebrations attended only by women.

After the revolution of 1975 in Iran numerous institutions were established to uphold public order. Committees were formed first and then the ‘Basij’ bases – voluntary paramilitary organisations operating under the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.

Systematic violence has become part of the Iranian police, their goal to create fear and panic in society.

This brutality against the people of the country has prompted numerous sanctions by western countries.

But the state violence continues. And such is the terror the police instill that some are literally willing to risk death rather than arrest.