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, as they did to my sister. They have the power to do much more harm to people", and especially to women, affirms Afsoon Nasafi, who on Tuesday collected the Sakharov Prize for freedom of conscience in Strasbourg as a representative of the Women, Life, Freedom movement, which arose in the ' Iran following the death of Jina Mahsa Amini, arrested by the morality police because she did not wear the Islamic veil "correctly".
We can define them as activists, although on September 21, 2022, the fateful day when her sister, the influencer Hadis Najafi, shocked by the news, took to the streets in Karaj to protest, the only thing that he said in the last video he published on TikTok that he would be happy when "everything changes". No slogans for the liberation of women, despite the fact that this is what so many Iranian women long for, especially young women, who through the internet have access to a world that the Government denies them.
An hour later, 20-year-old Hadis Najafi was dead. Five days had passed since the murder of Mahsa Amini, it was the fifth case that had been made public of demonstrators killed at the hands of the police. It took days to get the authorities to let them see the body. They tried to make them believe he had died of natural causes, but he had six bullets in his body.
Afsoon Nasafi, 32, took to the streets to denounce what had happened and demand justice. She has been arrested a few times - "oh, we've all been since the protests started", she says dismissively, although, 14 months after the outbreak of the revolt, the strength of the popular movement has weakened – and faces a 25-year prison sentence for inciting other youths to demonstrate. In the summer, he left his country. She knows that the regime could locate her, but she doesn't care, she says in an interview with La Vanguardia and other European media.
"I didn't leave out of fear. I left to have a voice outside of Iran, to raise my voice for the rest. If I went to prison, I wouldn't be able to speak from there", he explained on Tuesday through a Persian interpreter at the doors of the Eurochamber hemicycle, from where he left his voice explaining to the politicians and in the international press the atrocities of the Iranian regime, especially 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 for it with death, but before that they 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. They then killed her and cut out her stomach, intestines and uterus so that it could not be known how many times she had been raped. What was left of the body was thrown from the top of a building", he concludes.
The version of the Iranian authorities was very different: "They say that he saw the security forces, got scared and started running, which ended in a dead end, as he got into a building and, because he was afraid, he fell". There were many contradictions and inconsistencies in the official account, and his family did not resign. The news of his death sparked a new wave of protests. The regime, he recalls, tries to prevent families affected by disappearances, deaths or torture from getting in touch, but it is difficult to get information, he explains.
For now, they have released about 90,000 people who were arrested in the first months of the protests, but, as reported by the Iranian activists invited to Strasbourg this week, there are "thousands" more people missing. "There are many people arrested, but we don't know their names. There needs to be a serious campaign to put pressure on the regime and put an end to 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 who remain in prisons", claims Afsoon Najafi.
"The time has come for them to stop supporting the representatives of the Islamic Republic of Iran", she claims, determined to use until the end the voice they tried to silence by killing her sister and other women.
