PEN America, along with a group of organizations that support cartoonists and artists, has condemned the violent arrest of Atena Farghadani, an Iranian cartoonist currently being held in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison for attempting to hang one of her drawings on a wall near the presidential palace.
Farghadani’s lawyer, Mohammad Moghimi, said she was violently arrested on April 12 by intelligence officers of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and sustained facial injuries that were visible during her arrest.
On April 13, Farghadani was attempting to post some of her caricature artwork in public on a wall on Pasteur Street in Tehran, near the compound of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, when she was detained by security agents from the IRGC. According to information Atena shared with her husband (when he visited her in prison on April 21) and passed on to her lawyer, she was initially taken to a so-called “safe house” run by the IRGC and was severely beaten. She became unconscious after being struck several times on her nose and head.
Cartooning for Peace issues the full statement.
Cartoonists Rights spotlights Atena Farghadani in Iran and Zehra Ömero?lu in Turkey.
Was just reading about the widow of a slain writer who said- paraphrasing as it is not in front of me at the moment- the most dangerous profession in the world is being a poet, for only that gets one murdered in this day and age. In this century, one would have to add to that: cartoonist. Really stinks that this will not be covered more in the media.
I know it won’t happen, yet it would be nice if the most famous cartoonist still working- Jim Davis- would use some of his good will to have the orange cat comment on this, but then I forgot, the feline doesn’t belong to him anymore.