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Six months for implying that the president was a homosexual. This was the real icing on the cake. I received this sentence for the picture of a young man kissing Ahmadinejad, which someone else had tagged on my Facebook wall.

My only reaction to the sentence was to laugh it off publicly and dismiss it as a bizarre judgment passed by an irrational government. I saw it as part of the regime’s attempt to discourage other freed prisoners from speaking out. The explicit message was that anyone could be subjected to the same sentence if he or she dared to talk about the horrors of prison.

My sentence has made me more determined to speak out against the injustices committed by the Islamic regime. I believe I have a duty to be the voice of the hundreds of journalists, students, civil rights activists, and even mullahs who oppose Khamenei’s tyrannical rule and still languish in Iranian jails in the hands of Rosewater and his colleagues.

· · ·

My motorcycle cabbie Davood called me a few days after my release, on the day I arrived in London. He told me that as soon as he had heard the news of my arrest, he’d changed his cell phone number and moved back to his hometown of Tabriz, where he now works as a shop assistant and tries to keep his head down. Rosewater had lied. Davood was not arrested after me. However, in January 2010, Davood saw two Basij members arresting a young girl for wearing too much makeup, and he rammed into them with his motorcycle. The Basijis called for help, and Davood was caught and taken to the local prison, where he was badly beaten and spent a few days in a cell with a group of ten student activists. Their cell had been designed for solitary confinement, so they had to sleep in shifts and had no privacy when they used the toilet in the cell. Davood’s cellmates begged him not to complain about the situation because the last time they’d complained, two of the young students were taken to another area of the prison, where drug smugglers and thieves were kept. That night, the two students were gagged by the thugs and raped repeatedly. The thugs even used soda bottles and screwdrivers to hurt the students further. The convicts had been promised by the police that “if they taught the students a lesson,” their sentences would be commuted.

This was not the first time I’d heard such a story. Rape has become a form of punishment in the Islamic Republic. Many Iranian refugees in neighboring countries and around the world have had similar experiences, and I’m sure many young, proud Iranians are too ashamed to come forward to tell their stories. Davood was released a month later. “What kind of regime does that to the educated people of their country?” Davood asked me on the phone. “It’s become so difficult to live in this country, Mr. Maziar. People are getting poorer, and even the little freedom we used to have is almost gone.” Davood sounded frustrated, and a bit tipsy. When I asked him if he was still drinking, he answered that getting drunk on homemade vodka with his friends was his only solace.

In an ironic twist of fate, his retired Revolutionary Guard father is helping Davood’s younger brother leave the country so he will not have to serve in the military. “My father says this regime is not worth fighting for. I wasted two years in the military, so my father is trying to sell everything he has to send my brother abroad.”

Like many people of his generation, Davood was disheartened by the violent suppression of the green movement in Iran. But, of course, the movement was later rejuvenated in January 2011 after the overthrow of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, the Tunisian dictator, and, a month later, of the Egyptian despot Hosni Mubarak by pro-democracy young Arabs. These actions revived the protests in Iran, and thousands of young Iranians once again gathered on the streets of Iran, calling for the removal of Khamenei. Davood told me, “Our slogan was ‘After Mubarak and Ben Ali, it is the turn of Seyyed Ali’ ”—that is, Ali Khamenei. “I was really depressed