I was visiting relatives in Iran when the January slaughter began

Irene Shirazi* planned a pleasant trip to her home city of Tehran to visit relatives when the horrific events of January began to unfold.

'Just bodies upon bodies' – Watch this story on TVNZ+

Before the internet shutdown in Iran began, I had a feeling that it was going to happen. Protests had been going on for more than a week, starting in the grand bazaars of various cities, and they showed no sign of stopping.

It was Thursday night, January 8, and I was in Tehran to to visit relatives before returning to New Zealand.

At 8pm that night and the next, people fed-up with the dire economic situation as well as five decades of living under an oppressive dictatorship, were planning to go out and protest against the government, and the government knew. When we started getting calls from family and friends in other cities and suburbs that their internet was going out, I knew that my guess had been correct.

You see, I, like most people living in a safe country like New Zealand, envisioned an internet shutdown as something immediate. Someone pushes a button, and suddenly an entire country is plunged into darkness. But it’s gradual. City by city, area by area, the internet starts to weaken, until it finally flickers out.

Before it was gone, I managed to send an email to my parents in New Zealand telling them that I loved and missed them. Then, we were cut off from the world. All 90 million of us.

After severing links to the outside world, they stopped internal calls and messaging too. Every night, once it was dark, landlines and mobile calls failed to work, effectively cutting everyone off from each other.

Then, they began their slaughter.

IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps) fired into crowds of protestors with military style weapons, killing indiscriminately. Protestors were shot at close range, beaten with batons, and sprayed with tear gas. The “Supreme Leader” Ayatollah Khamenei declared on State TV that these protestors were terrorists, and that there was no other way to deal with them.

In just 48 hours, more than 30,000 people were murdered.

A neighbour who made it back from the protests said that bodies lined the blood-stained streets, most of them young people, teenagers and 20-somethings, who wanted freedom, but were met with bullets. A doctor friend managed to call, and although not wanting to reveal anything over the phone out of fear, said that the hospitals were full of the dead and wounded. Regime forces had started patrolling hospitals, he said, looking for people with gunshot wounds from the protests. If found, they would either arrest them, or finish them off.

Families had to look through piles of corpses, and were then being asked to pay money in order for the bodies of their loved ones to be returned to them. For every bullet found in the body, they had to pay more.

I was fortunate to be staying with a family member who lives in an apartment in a sort of gated community. I felt safe there but it was disturbing knowing what was happening one or two kilometres away.

Next, in true hypocritical, dictatorship fashion, after purposefully blocking every communication channel for regular people, the IRGC themselves sent out a text that was received by every registered phone with a sim-card inside Iran. It advertised their very own pro-regime protest, complete with a time and place.

After ensuring that the world wouldn’t be able to see the Iranian people demanding freedom, they released propaganda footage of their own manufactured protest to the world.

But Iranians didn’t back down. Videos of the protests and the subsequent murderous crackdown by the IRGC started to make their way out of the country, and it was only when I managed to leave and regain access to the internet that I saw these. My heart burned with pride and anguish as I watched the bravery of my people. I saw the videos and statements from the European Union, from Australia, and other countries who stood with us.

By then I was back in New Zealand, having managed to return two weeks early via a ticket that my parents sent to the embass. And it tore up my soul to see how minor the response from New Zealand had been.

This is the country I’ve been proud to call my home since I was a small child, arriving here with my family who were hoping for a brighter, better future.

As the internet has started to weakly connect, the horrors from inside Iran make their way to us. To the grieving, anxious families outside of the country, some finding out that their own relatives have been killed or detained.

A message in a group chat from my mother’s old university year level came through the other night, translated below.

“My brother was feeling terrible (when I called). One of the workers at his company had their 15-year-old child taken [by regime forces]. They said they were taking the kid to write a statement [that he wouldn’t protest again].”

“They returned the kid’s corpse. They’re butchering everyone.”

For 47 years, the Islamic Regime has oppressed and terrorised Iranians. They have stripped citizens of their dignity, of their autonomy, and of basic freedoms and rights. They have pillaged, and raped, and bled Iran dry, while lining their own pockets, and sending their own families and children to the Western countries that they claim to hate so much.

The Iranian people have had enough, and the regime knows it. No matter what they try to label the protestors, no matter how much propaganda they produce of their supportive minority, they know that their power is slowly slipping through their fingers, like the sand in an hourglass.

Wounded protestors are not just being taken from hospitals. People are being kidnapped from their homes. If they’re not murdered right away, they’re usually thrown into prison after a sham trial, tortured for false confessions, and sentenced to be executed.

And yet, in the past few days, news has arrived that protests are starting up again, with brave students standing firm on their university campuses, calling for freedom.

The past month has been a living hell for Iranians in New Zealand. We are far away from our homeland, and our family members back in Iran. Every day, each one of us wakes up and goes to work or school, having to pretend that everything is normal, when it’s anything but. The worry and helplessness consume us.

Even 15,000 kilometers away, in New Zealand, there are Iranians who have family and friends killed in the massacre. A family friend’s brother-in-law was kidnapped in the middle of the night, with no clue given as to his whereabouts, other than 30 second calls just to say that he’s still alive.

Given the sheer amount of loss and pain, it is completely understandable that many Iranians feel incredibly upset and angry at the slow statement of condemnation towards these killings from politicians and the government of New Zealand.

I appreciate that this week Foreign Affairs Minister Winston Peters has introduced a travel ban to New Zealand for Iranian ministers, but other normally outspoken politicians have been silent – a silence that is deafening to Iranians.

* Author's name has been changed to protect her identity.

'Just bodies upon bodies' – Watch this story on TVNZ+