Blinken is in Türkiye to try to calm Ankara’s anger

A French-Iranian academic, who returned to Paris last month after being detained since 2019, said the protest movement that erupted in Iran last year had transformed the country outside of prison as well as inside.

Fariba Adelkhah was finally allowed to leave Iran in October, after a 4 1/2-year ordeal that began with her sudden arrest in 2019 and years spent in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison. But there she was able to witness the courage of her fellow prisoners, including Narges Mohammadi, winner of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, since the launch of the “Woman … Life … Freedom” movement.

Responding to questions from Agence France-Presse, the Franco-Iranian researcher stated that the protest movement that took place in September 2022, following the death of the young Iranian Kurd Mahsa Amini, “changed Iranian society, but also the prisons. ”

Amini died on September 16, 2022, at the age of 22, 3 days after she was arrested by the “moral police” in Tehran for wearing an ugly hijab.

Her death sparked an unprecedented wave of popular protests, in a challenge to the rulers that the country had not seen for many years, and the demonstrators raised the slogan “Zen, Zendaki, Azadi” (Woman, Life, Freedom).

Hundreds have been killed on the sidelines of the protests, including dozens of members of the security forces, while thousands have been arrested, according to human rights organizations. The judiciary announced the execution of death sentences against 7 of those convicted in cases related to the movements.

Adelkhah (64 years old), an anthropologist specializing in the Shiite sect, says that among the inmates in the women’s section of Evin prison there are human rights and environmental activists, trade unionists, political opponents and representatives of religious minorities, who often different points of view, but “this… The issue brought us together,” he said.

She said: “Political prisoners often sang together, in a show of defiance… That movement (changed Iranian society as well as prisons).”

The researcher was stopped on June 5, 2019 at Tehran airport, where she was waiting for the arrival of her partner, Roland Marchal, who intended to join her. She said that the agents, elegantly dressed as her, asked her “with great respect” to accompany them, and after a few hours she was subjected to her first interrogation, with her face “against the wall”.

This was followed by several interrogations, during which she confirmed that she had not been beaten. She says: “That interrogators use beatings to get answers is something that often happens to men, but during my detention I never heard of this happening to women.”

For her part, Nobel Peace Prize winner Narges Mohammadi reported that women are exposed to sexual violence in prisons.

“Psychological humiliation”

Fariba Adelkhah stated in this regard that “the absence of physical violence does not prevent continuous psychological humiliation”.

She was sentenced to 6 years in prison; 5 of them for “conspiracy against national security” and one for “spreading false propaganda” against the Islamic Republic

She was released in February under an amnesty issued after spending more than three and a half years in prison or under house arrest under the supervision of an electronic bracelet. Eight months after this decision, Tehran returned her passport. This allowed her to return to France.

As for Roland Marchal, the researcher specializing in Africa, arrested on the same day as her, he was released in March 2020 as part of a prisoner exchange between Paris and Tehran.

Adelkhah said with a smile, “I still can’t understand what was wrong with me,” after years spent “behind a wall,” during which she went on a 50-day hunger strike and left exhausted.

Paris has repeatedly used the expression “state hostages” to describe its situation and that of other French citizens detained in Tehran.

The researcher states that during her work in Iran she respected “three red lines”, which are: “the revolution”, “Islam” and “the status of the supreme leader”. These are three extremely delicate issues. this has left her vulnerable to accusations of appeasement with Tehran, which she denies.

But he stressed that “the regime criminalizes non-criminal acts and in the end we all become opponents in its eyes.”

“you are so Beautiful!”

He said that the slogan “Woman… Life… Freedom”, which confused the Iranian authorities, also reached inside the prison, where women are usually uncovered, but are forced to wear a headscarf when a man enters their section or when they are transferred to the hospital. Adelkhah recalled that after the movement began, “hardly any women wore the hijab anymore” when a man entered.

The family of Narges Mohammadi said on Friday that prison authorities prevented the activist and journalist, who suffers from heart and lung problems, from being transferred to hospital due to her refusal to wear the hijab.

In a letter from prison published on the Nobel Prize’s official website on Tuesday, Mohammadi described the mandatory hijab as “the main source of control and oppression in society, aimed at preserving tyrannical religious rule and ensuring its continuation.”

Mohammadi was arrested 13 times and sentenced to a total of 31 years in prison and 154 lashes, and has been in prison since 2021.

Adelkhah says she has made prison “a space of battle, challenge and protest par excellence,” where she has received “more listening ears than if she had been outside.”

Adelkhah was still in Iran when the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Mohammadi in early October, and she remembers the “smiles” and “lightness” on the faces of passers-by on the street.

Although massive popular protests under the slogan “Woman… Life… Freedom” have become extremely rare, and while the government has canceled daily protests by suppressing the slogan “Woman… Life… Freedom… the Islamic Republic is forced to concede… on many issues,” he said, both on the streets of Iran and in its prisons. “(The protest slogan) has become part of Iranian culture,” she said.

She says: “Now when you meet women who don’t wear hijab on the street, which didn’t happen before, they say to each other: (How beautiful you are)!”