Murderous repression by a desperate regime
A wave of anger and grief has swept through the country in the ten days since the young Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini died in the custody of Iranian morality guards. Some Iranian women have videoed themselves cutting off their own hair, posting clips on the Internet to illustrate the depth of their sorrow. Cutting one's hair was a mourning ritual in ancient Iran.
Mahsa was twenty-two years young. She had come to Tehran with her family from the small town of Saqqez in Kurdistan province at the beginning of autumn, hoping to enjoy a few days off. The capital proved her undoing in the cruellest of ways. Photos show Mahsa to have been a beautiful young woman. Did her beauty give the morality police reason to arrest and intimidate her?
Six people – two men and one woman – were involved in her arrest. "I am just visiting," Mahsa told them, "let me go." But her plea fell on deaf ears. Mahsa was loaded into a vehicle belonging to the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance and taken to a prison. Less than half an hour after her arrest, during which she fainted, she was admitted to hospital. What happened to Mahsa in this horrible detention centre during those thirty accursed minutes?
"Mahsa, a young Kurdish woman, arrested for violating the veiling law in the open street, is in a coma in hospital." As soon as this was announced, the news spread like wildfire across the Internet. Sometime later, a doctor who had examined Mahsa said the young woman had not shown any vital signs on her admittance to hospital.
Secret burial prevented
Three days after her arrest, Mahsa was dead. Her remains were taken to Saqqez, the town where she was born. Fearing a crowd, the security forces had planned to bury Mahsa in the evening or at night, but her relatives refused. On the following morning, all access roads to Saqqez were sealed off to keep mourners from neighbouring communities from arriving in solidarity.
Doctors across the country called on their Tehran colleagues to declare publicly what had really happened to Mahsa. But the government threatened the radiologists, neurologists, neurosurgeons and emergency physicians who had treated the young woman that anyone offering a medical opinion on Mahsa's CT scan would lose their medical licence.
Some doctors received death threats. An eyewitness arrested together with Mahsa said that the Kurdish woman had protested against her arrest in the patrol car and was beaten as a result. Eyewitnesses in the detention centre said: "When Mahsa was brought here, she was in very bad shape, she was completely debilitated. Her cries for help went unheard, and when we tried to assist her, the officers jumped on us and beat us up. Mahsa was also struck in the process. Finally she collapsed unconscious."
After Mahsa's death, the government announced that she had a heart condition and had suffered a heart attack. Mahsa's father vehemently refuted this version of events: "There was nothing wrong with my daughter. She was killed." Mahsa's mother added, "They murdered my angel."
Doctors examining photos and videos of Mahsa Amini available on social media conclude: "Considering the visible injuries on Mahsa's face and the fact that blood was coming out of her ear, there is no way that heart failure was the only reason for her hospitalisation. Such injuries are indicative of severe physical violence." Independent doctors who have since viewed the report on Mahsa's brain and found blood in her lungs see this as proof that she received severe blows to the head, in clear contradiction to the official statement.
Horrific catalogue of victims
People have met with violent deaths in Iran's prisons for years. Zahra Kasemi, an Iranian-Canadian photojournalist, was arrested in 2003 during student protests. She had been reporting outside the notorious Ewin prison on a gathering of relatives of protesters imprisoned there. Arrested on the orders of the Tehran prosecutor's office, she was murdered during questioning.
Iran's security forces have been using unlawful force, killing dozens of people, and injuring hundreds more.
Hadis Najafi, 22, was killed on 21 Sept in Karaj after security forces fired birdshot at her in close range, hitting her in the face, neck & chest. #مهسا_امینی pic.twitter.com/Zn5TdJ0rOt— Amnesty Iran (@AmnestyIran) September 26, 2022
A medical doctor working for the Iranian Ministry of Defence, who performed an autopsy on Zahra Kasemi's body, stated at the time that her death had been caused by violent blows and had resulted from a skull fracture and a broken nose. Moreover, she had been raped before her death. The doctor in question went into exile in Canada a short time later.
Another example of the violent deaths met by prisoners detained in Iran is provided by the events surrounding the electoral fraud protests of 2009, which also saw unrest in Kahrisak prison at the time. Five prisoners lost their lives there. More than 920 people are held in the facility, which was designed for two hundred inmates. According to the Iranian Rapporteur Committee on Human Rights, prisoners are denied their right to go to the yard; visits to the toilet are only allowed once a day and food rations are very small.Prisoners are beaten on arrival at Kahrisak; each inmate has less than one square metre of space. Practically unknown hitherto, the prison gained notoriety around the world after the five deaths came to light. One inmate reported that it was customary to wet prisoners' bodies before torturing them so that the pain caused by the beatings with hoses or cables would penetrate deeper.
The young doctor Zahra Bani-Yaghoub became yet another victim of the Iranian prison system; she died in a detention centre in Hamadan. On an autumn day in 2007, Bani-Yaghoub, engrossed in conversation with her fiance, was strolling through a Hamadan city park, when she was arrested by the paramilitary Basij militia and handed over to the custody of the local prosecutor's office. Forty-eight hours later, her relatives, who had gone to the military stationed in Hamadan to inquire about Zahra's welfare, learnt of her death.
The death of the young anti-government blogger Sattar Beheschti in 2012 also made headlines worldwide. Beheshti died only four days after his arrest of pulmonary haemorrhages, liver, kidney and spinal cord injuries. When his relatives enquired about the cause of death, they were told: "Shut up. This is none of your business."
Despite these facts, it is impossible to assert that all prisoners in Iran are tortured. But it is safe to say that all those who have died in Iranian custody died as a result of severe torture. And so it will have been in the case of Mahsa Amini.
Women's ongoing struggle for their rights
For 43 years, Iran's women have taken to the streets across the country against compulsory veiling and for their rights, and have been opposed by the police as a result. In Tehran, the first major women's march against forced veiling took place on 8 March 1979, International Women's Day, just two weeks after the victory of the revolution. The peaceful gathering was met with thugs from the Islamic government that had just taken office. This was despite the fact that unveiled women had played a key role in the struggle to overthrow the Shah's regime, side by side with veil-wearing women.
Over the years an increasing number of Iranians have begun using the Internet. Not a day goes by without a new video appearing documenting cases of girls and young women being arrested because, according to the official interpretation, they were not properly veiled. Often, these short films show how brutally officers behave when arresting women. Only in a few cases have bystanders succeeded in freeing potential victims from the clutches of their captors.
Now, however, Mahsa Amini's arrest and death have sparked unrest and outrage on an unprecedented scale. News of her death had barely broken when the hashtag #MahsaAmini, proudly shared on Twitter, broke the record with ten million retweets. Before long, it went around the world, and Mahsa's likeness was posted millions of times. In Iran, women protested the death of the young Kurdish woman by removing their headscarves in the streets, some of them setting their veils on fire.
Right now, many campuses and roads across Iran are echoing to the determined footsteps of those demonstrating against the prevailing violence. Women artists, athletes and other prominent civil society leaders have reacted angrily to the state's brutal actions. Beyond the country's borders, Canadian author Margaret Atwood and Palestinian-American supermodel Bella Hadid condemned Mahsa's death, while international news broadcasts have given prominent coverage to her murder and the unrest it has sparked.
With their slogans, the demonstrators are challenging every aspect of the Iranian government. The latter is deploying all its forces to suppress the street protests and university unrest: in addition to the military, Basij militias and plainclothes officials, it is even using snipers to target cornered protesters. All these state actors are represented, while numerous protesters have been injured or even lost their lives. The number of those arrested by the security forces is even greater.
Detention centre video tampered with
Meanwhile, the government's sophisticated propaganda apparatus is not standing still. It is churning out false reports, allegations and rumours at breakneck speed. Now it is said that Mahsa Amini suffered from epilepsy, lung and brain complications. It has even been alleged she underwent brain surgery at a younger age. Her relatives reject all these claims.
The edited video of Mahsa in the detention centre released by the officials has convinced virtually no one. The relatives of the deceased asked the responsible authorities in vain to hand over the passages cut out of the video to them. Even so, the short film shows that Mahsa was dressed according to sharia regulations. As a result, those responsible now claim that she dressed differently after her arrest – an absolutely baseless allegation. The officers who arrested Mahsa should have had body cameras on, but they were not wearing them that day.
Iran's rulers have responded to all these inconsistencies by cutting off the Internet, then reducing its speed, because they want to make it difficult or impossible for those using social media to disseminate information. And yet the Internet is bursting with videos showing clashes between police and demonstrators: short film sequences taken by citizens with mobile phone cameras, showing the desperate situation in which the regime, armed to the teeth, finds itself.
But it is not necessary to capture the excessive police violence in Iran on film. A nation of eighty million people has been experiencing it live for decades.
© Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 2022