Right in the center of Tehran, the capital of Iran, glitters a spectacular monument that was completed in the early 1970s in honor of the 2,500 years of the Persian Empire. In 1979, when the ayatollahs staged a coup d’état and instituted the theocracy, which still rules the country today, the 45-meter-high building, which until then had been called the Memorial to the Kings, was renamed “freedom tower”.
The name was strategically chosen to mark the end of imperial Iran. As if this had any direct relationship with that “freedom” that the young people celebrated in the streets of the country, in the heat of the revolution commanded by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
The Iran that emerged from those acts is a country marked by censorship, torture, persecution, arbitrary arrests, assassinations. Iran, whose main monument pays tribute to freedom, does not tolerate anyone who dares to try to experience what it is to be free.
The most recent example comes from the sentence to five years in prison of a couple who dared to dance to Torre Azadi (the so-called tower of freedom). The video showing the smiling couple and their synchronized movements was posted on social media in November last year, in the context of demonstrations over the death of Mahsa Amini – a 22-year-old girl who died at the hands of the police after being arrested for having if he refused to cover his hair, as required by Islamic law.
Astiyazh Haghighi, 21, and Amir Mohammad Ahmadi, 22, were sentenced to five years in prison on charges of crimes “against national security” and “propaganda against the government”. Astiyazh and Amir’s crimes were daring to experience the freedom of dancing in the open air on a Tehran night, with the monument that bears the name of Freedom as the backdrop.
The couple’s Instagram accounts, by the way, may serve as justification for yet another series of retaliations. Astiyazh couldn’t care less about the strict rules of the ayatollahs. He poses without a veil and tries to live, at least in the photographs, an experience of freedom that the Iranian regime denies its citizens. No update, your Instagram account remains a monument to a youth that tried to dodge one of the most brutal regimes on the planet. The lack of an update serves as a reminder that its owner is in prison.
Independent reports speak of the conviction of at least 763 Iranians for the “anti-revolutionary” protests. Many (or all?) were beaten and tortured. Human rights organizations operating in the country report that the couple of dancers are among those who were shabby in the dungeons of the regime.
Since hundreds of protests erupted in Iran as a result of the brutal violence the regime has used to repress people who have taken to the streets to defend women’s rights, the regime has further intensified the mechanisms of repression. As a lesson, sentenced to death, in lightning trials, a number of protesters. Among those who were hanged in the public square are an actor, a doctor, a rapper, a barber… There are no restrictions on class or function.
It doesn’t hurt to remember that in Iran, hangings are scheduled in a public square with the call for the population to gather in crowds to watch the morbid spectacle. It does not hurt to remember that in Iran, hangings do not take place on scaffolds — that structure where the condemned with a rope tied around his neck falls into a gap and quickly dies as a result of the injury caused by the impact of his own weight.
Iran has a very unique way of killing its convicts. Use cranes to lift victims off the ground. Instead of the person dying immediately, he agonizes. He suffers before the eyes of an audience that also receives a lesson. “You can hang here if you betray the values of the revolution” (follow one disturbing record of a hangingbut only click if you really want to see something so horrendous).
In January, the Iranian ambassador to Brazil, Hossein Gharibi, was received by the Minister of Human Rights, Silvio Almeida. gharibi posted a record of the meeting and the broad smiles of both, on their Twitter account. In Farsi he wrote that the dialogue with Almeida was excellent in order to establish a “collaboration and exchange of experiences in human rights”. At the end of his message, the Iranian said that “political abuse and double standards are the great enemies of the promotion of human rights”.
The version of the encounter is by Gharibi. Almeida never expressed himself about the event. But it would be interesting to know if this “collaboration and exchange of experiences” is for Iran to become more like Brazil, or if it is for Brazil to become more and more like Iran.
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