More than four years after her arrest in Iran and three days after her return to France, the anthropologist Fariba Adelkhah returned to Sciences Po, surrounded by her support committee and a very moved community of teacher-researchers and students , Friday October 20.
A specialist in Shiism and post-revolutionary Iran, she was arrested, like her companion, Roland Marchal, in June 2019. Sentenced to five years in prison in May 2020 for endangering national security, she had benefited from a “temporary release” in October 2020, before being incarcerated again in January 2022 and released in February 2023, without having the right to leave Iran.
On the sidewalk of Rue Saint-Guillaume, the researcher at the Center for International Research (CERI) witnessed the taking down, by the director of Sciences Po, Mathias Vicherat, of the banner bearing her image which had adorned, since the summer of 2019, the first floor of the establishment.
Slim figure, short hair, hands crossed on her chest, Fariba Adelkhah presented herself in front of a packed amphitheater. She sang a song in Persian telling the story of two windows built into a wall who cannot hold hands even though they are very close.
“Don’t make me a fighter or a revolutionary. I am a researcher »replied the Franco-Iranian to a student who expressed her deep admiration. “I had been doing this job for thirty years when I was arrested. I spent entire nights blackening sheets of paper to say what the research was so that my interrogators would understand that I was not the spy they had in mind.”continued the anthropologist, who is keen to “dialogue with everyone, as is the tradition at CERI”.
“I fight for my job”
“I did not have torturers in front of me, but human beings. I had no demands and I still don’t have any. I fight for my job”insisted the ex-prisoner, who had led a hunger strike for forty-nine days at the beginning of 2020. Fariba Adelkhah explained to her jailers that the actions carried out by her support committee were not directly for her: “People fight for principles, that’s France. »
Mathias Vicherat saluted the one who never “given in to the temptation of renunciation out of despair”, going so far as to be elected as a representative of the inmates of her prison. Once passed “astonishment and indignation”his confinement marked “an awareness of how academic freedom was increasingly threatened, flouted, trampled underfoot”affirms the one who is leading a working group on the subject with around ten universities and whose proposals will be submitted in December to the association of establishment presidents, France Universités.
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