Girls who mysteriously fall from a roof, mass rapes, mutilated bodies, thousands of missing people. “The crimes of the Islamic Republic of Iran are not limited to murders, to shooting people to death like they did with my sister. "They have the power to do much more harm to people," and in particular to women, says Afsoon Najafi, who on Tuesday collected the Sakharov Prize for freedom of conscience in Strasbourg as a representative of the Women, Life, Freedom movement that emerged in Iran in following the death of Jina Mahsa Amini, arrested by the morality police for not wearing the Islamic veil “correctly.”
We can define them as activists, although on September 21, 2022, the fateful day when her sister, the influencer Shirin Najafi, shocked by the news, took to the streets in Karaj to protest, the only thing she said in the last video she published on TikTok was that he would be happy when “everything changed.” No slogans for women's liberation, although that is what so many Iranians long for, especially young women, who through the Internet have access to a world that their government denies them.
An hour later, 22-year-old Shirin was dead. Five days had passed since the murder of Mahsa Amini, it was the fifth known case of protesters killed by police. It took them days to get the authorities to let them see her body. They tried to make them believe that she had died of natural causes, but she had six bullets in her body.
Afsoon, 32, took to the streets to denounce what happened and ask for justice. She has been arrested several times – “oh, we have all been since the protests began,” she says, downplaying it, although 14 months after the outbreak of the revolt the strength of the popular movement has weakened – and faces a 25-year sentence. of prison for inciting other young people to demonstrate. This summer, she left her country. She knows that the regime could locate her, but she is not worried, she says in an interview with La Vanguardia and other European media.
“I didn't leave because I was afraid. I left to have a voice outside of Iran, to raise my voice for others. "If I went to prison, I wouldn't be able to speak from there," he explained this Tuesday through a Farsi interpreter at the doors of the European Chamber, from where he has made his voice explaining to politicians and the international press the atrocities committed by the Iranian regime, particularly against young people and women, leaders of the largest protest movement that has emerged in the country in the last 50 years. In their case, they often not only pay with death but are also brutally raped.
Remember, for example, the case of Nika Shahkarami, a 15-year-old girl who disappeared in Tehran in the first days of the protests. “She was kidnapped and raped for several days, we don't know by how many people. Then they killed her, they cut her stomach, intestines and uterus so that it was impossible to know how many times they had raped her. What was left of her body was thrown from the top of a building,” she concludes.
The version of the Iranian authorities was very different: "They say that she saw the security forces, she was afraid and started running, that she ended up in a dead end, she went into a building and, because she was terrified, she fell." There were numerous contradictions and inconsistencies in the official story and her family did not give up. The news of her death sparked a new wave of protests. The regime, he recalls, tries to prevent families affected by disappearances, deaths or torture from contacting each other and it is difficult to obtain information, he explains.
For now, they have released some 90,000 people who were detained during the first months of the protests, but according to the Iranian activists invited to Strasbourg this week, there are “thousands” of more people whose whereabouts are unknown. “There are many people detained whose names we do not know. There must be a serious campaign to put pressure on the regime to end the kidnappings. If the European Union and the rest of the international community coordinate, they can put pressure on Tehran to reveal the names of the political prisoners remaining in jails,” Najafi claims. “The time has come for them to stop shaking hands with the representatives of the Islamic Republic of Iran,” she claims, determined to use to the end the voice they tried to silence by killing her sister and other women.
