IN SEPTEMBER 1992, I was visiting a friend in Frankfurt. We went for a walk and had a few beers. On the way back we passed the ground flat where Dr Abdolrahmaan Ghassemloo (assassinated on 13 July 1989) had stayed. When we got back to his flat, my friend's eyes were full of tears. He listed more than twenty people who had been present at one time or another at his place in recent years. They were no more alive. Some had died from natural causes. Most had been assassinated or the circumstances of their deaths were suspicious to say the least. My friend's name was also on the so-called assassination list and he became a little sad when he told me - clumsy as he is - how impossible it is to carry out the detailed instructions given by the German police to increase his chance of survival should they come for him. In London, I have also friends and distinguished colleagues who are on the hit list...

Ayatollah Kohmeini's fatwa became a precedent to condemn and carry out threats against writers all over the Muslim world. Taslima Nasrin managed to escape from Bangladesh, but others in Egypt, Turkey, Algeria and Sudan were not so lucky. As far as the treatment of writers is concerned there are countries at this very moment, other than the Islamic Republic of Iran (IF, I), with more imprisoned writers, but none has such an unenviable record in imposing coercion and intolerance in the name of God, of people at large and of the underpriviledged of the world. Few has assumed power as a result of the legitimacy provided by a historic revolution and carried out such a brutal suppression of the resistance, which tried to preserve the ideals of that revolution. We have no doubts about the nature of the Nigerian junta and the fact that it will go sooner or later, but a list of thousands and thousands of executed political prisoners in the post-1979 revolution (the first long list containing 10,231 executions was compiled and published by Mojahedin-e Khalq in September 1984 covering executions since June 1981) is gradually forgotten because the regime has managed to accomplish the job of crushing the resistance and no longer have to kill on the same scale inside Iran ...

How can one expect a regime to respect international and other sovereign countries' laws if it does not adhere and respect its own laws and resorts to extra-judicial measures which are explicitly approved by the officials and dignitaries of the Islamic Republic of Iran? A well-publicised example is the torching last August of Morgh-e Amin bookshop and publications company in Tehran by a gang of anonymous individuals and threats against staff members because Morgh-e Amin had published a certain book, the publication of which was, nevertheless, approved by the Ministry of Guidance...

I would hesitate to conclude by drawing up specific measures to counter the terrorism of the ]PI. After all, as the Letter 134 begins: 'we are writers'. We are neither the opposition to the regime nor its adversary, but as Ahmad Shamloo put it, 'its negation'. Khomeini did warn us when he proclaimed: 'Break up these pens'. The regime suspected that the pen will prove to be mightier than the sword and the Iranian writers have done enough to confirm that cultural resistance, imagination, ability to laugh, sexual awareness and appreciation of life, are the main threat to the empire of death.