Dissident marks those left behind

[attach]6295[/attach]Salman Sima was torn when he received news of his release from Evin Prison in Tehran, where he had been jailed after the protests following the disputed Iranian election of June 2009.

“After they told me ‘you are free,’ at first I was happy, but I missed my close friends in prison,” he says. “ It’s the worst feeling — you are happy but you are sad.”

The 28-year-old North York resident is now free to attend university in Canada, but he cannot forget that many of his friends continue to languish in jail.

In June Sima attended a silent vigil for them in downtown Toronto organized by Amnesty International.

“When you are in a free country you are responsible for the person who is in prison,” said Sima.

Sima’s ordeal started on June 12, 2009 when Iran’s authorities claimed victory for the country’s incumbent rulers, prompting disbelief and protest among many Iranians. The government reacted with a massive crackdown of civil liberties, arresting over five thousand activists in the ensuing months.

At the time, Sima was an industrial engineering student at Tehran Azad University where he ran a newspaper criticizing the government and helped organized seven massive protests.

The government arrested him in November and cast him into solitary confinement at Evin Prison.

Sima occupied his time in jail by exercising and carving the V-for-victory sign on the walls with a stolen pencil, he says.

Things came to a head when a security officer assaulted him, Sima says. He launched a hunger strike that forced his release in February 2010.

He eventually escaped to Turkey in September 2010, arriving in Canada in May 2011.

Today Sima is enjoying the good life in North York — tasty food, the freedom to call his family when he wants, and the opportunity to improve his English so that he can eventually study economics, he says.

But he is still viscerally connected to the suffering in the country of his birth.

“I think most of the world forgot the human rights abuses in Iran. I want to give attention to abuses in Iran and I want to do something about my friends, the prisoners.”