EHe was visiting the capital with his parents and his brother. Autumn is a good season in Tehran. We are moving away from the summer furnace and the great cold is still far away. She was 22 years old, was not interested in politics, rather in the singers of the time. Mahsa Amini came from the small town of Saqqez, in Iranian Kurdistan (northwest), a socially conservative region.
That morning of September 13, she had taken the metro to central Tehran and was walking along a park. She was wearing her “Islamic” headscarf: the theocracy in power has imposed it since 1983. Passing by, a morality police van calls out to the young woman: her headscarf is put on incorrectly – perhaps too far back. Mahsa Amini is embarked and then taken to a police station. A few hours later, she is transported to the hospital, in a deep coma. She died on September 16. She is buried in Saqqez on the 17th. There was no autopsy. Dead for a strand of hair, in the splendor of her 22 years?
The authorities evoke a heart problem. Her parents, who came to the hospital, are sure that she was hit. They talk about streaks of blood running down his temples. In their brutal simplicity, these are the facts. But this unexplained death, except that it followed an arrest for “improperly” worn scarf, this death of a young woman who, until this autumn morning, seemed in good health, will trigger the storm. Dictatorships are always surprised. There comes a time when the little footnote news, just one infamy among many others, turns into a detonator – the overflow which multiplies the courage of part of the population tenfold and causes the explosion. The regime is challenged as it has rarely been.
days of rage
For twenty days, in the four corners of the country, Iranians, women and men, have been demonstrating by the thousands. Schoolgirls, students, Iranian women burn the “veil” in the middle of the street. In the most conservative regions, they free speech and their hair. The universities are mobilized and, here and there, strikes break out. This youth, born under the Islamic regime, defies the violence of a repressive machine that does not hesitate to shoot into the crowd and disfigure teenage girls with truncheons. The deaths number in the tens, the arrests in the thousands.
Over these days of rage, the slogans have evolved. From the denunciation of the “Islamic” headscarf, we moved on to the condemnation of the “Islamic” regime. Never has a protest movement lasted so long since the Iranian revolution forty-three years ago.
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