Two Iranian journalists, Niloofar Hamedi and Elaheh Mohammadi, both aged twenty years, risk life prison. Their crime? They were among the first to tell the story of Mahsa Amini – this other 22 -year -old woman who died on September 16 for “inappropriate” sail in the Islamic Republic.
The two journalists were accused, a few days ago, of working for the CIA, that is to say to be spies in the balance of the United States, the number one enemy of theocracy Iranian. The absurdity of the charges speaks volumes about the panic and the desire for revenge experienced at the heart of the regime. As with each inner difficulty, we come out the worn speech of external manipulation. The revolt caused by the death of Mahsa Amini has not finished shaking the Islamic Republic – and revealing the true nature of this regime.
Because a wick of hair exceeded her veil, Mahsa, visiting Tehran with her parents, was arrested by “the police of morality” on September 13. Detained for three days, she will not survive the reserved lot. Transported in a deep coma to the hospital, she died on September 16.
nearly 300 dead
Since then, Iran has been boiling. From one city to another of this vast country of 85 million inhabitants, the regime is challenged daily. Youth, academic and university, is in the street, faced with the repressive machine of theocracy in power. With the sympathy of a good part of the opinion, the movement has lasted for almost six weeks – repeated demonstrations day by day. The Islamic Republic has rarely experienced so long challenge.
She faces a revolt against the imposed greyness of an “Islamic” order which forces women to wear a veil, in a way and not from another. At the risk of their lives, the Iranian women burn, tear off, tear this mandatory veil. Power replies as it has always done – by repressing: to date, nearly 300 dead, including around twenty adolescents; Thousands of injured; some 14,000 arrests.
It is good time that the Islamic Republic, born from the 1979 Revolution, has lost all the originality of a regime which, exception in the region, left, at its beginnings, a margin for political debate. Over the years, tests and wars (often imposed from the outside, it is true), the Islamic Republic has become a military tyranny. 1999, 2009, 2017, 2019, at each challenge – political, economic or social – it has only one response: it kills. In the columns of our colleague on the 1, the political scientist Farhad Khosrokhavar speaks of “thanatocracy”: a regime which “intends to reign by death and by the fear of killing”.
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