She visited the capital with her parents and her brother. Fall is a good season in Tehran. We move 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.
This morning of September 13, she had taken the metro to go to the center of Tehran and she walked along a park. She wore her “Islamic” scarf: power theocracy imposed on her since 1983. Passing by there, a van of the Police of manners challenges the young woman: her scarf would be bad – perhaps too much back. Mahsa Amini is embarked then driven in a police station. A few hours later, she was transported to the hospital, in a deep coma. She died on September 16. She is buried in Saqqez, 17. There was no autopsy. Dead for a wick of hair, in the splendor of her 22 years?
The authorities evoke a heart problem. Her parents, who came to the hospital, are sure she was struck. They talk about blood -stricken along his temples. In their brutal simplicity, these are the facts. But this unexplained death, except that she followed an arrest for “improperly” scarf carried, this death of a young woman who, until this autumn morning, seemed healthy, will trigger the storm. Dictatorships are always surprised. Comes a moment when the little news of the footnic, just an infamy among so many others, turns into a detonator – the overflow which increases the courage of a part of the population and causes the explosion. The regime is challenged as it has rarely been.
days of rage
For twenty days, around the country, Iranians, women and men, demonstrate thousands. Scoliers, students, Iranian women burn the “veil” in the street. In the most conservative regions, they release speech and their hair. The universities are mobilized and, here and there, explodes strikes. This youth, born under the Islamic regime, brave the violence of a repressive machine which does not hesitate to shoot in the crowd and to disfigure teenage girls with batons. The dead are counted by dozens, arrests by thousands.
Over these days of rage, the slogans have evolved. From the denunciation of the “Islamic” scarf, we went to the condemnation of the “Islamic” regime. Never a movement of protest has lasted so long since the Iranian Revolution, forty-three years ago.
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