Dhis is an obituary. And the obituary is for you, Jina. “Jina, love, you are not dying. Your name will become a symbol,” it says on your tombstone.
I want to call you Jina, life. Jina, as your mother calls you, as she kneels by your grave, weeps, throws herself on the piled earth, calls your name as a rose from your grave tatters in her hand.
Your Kurdish name, Jina, which gave way to Persian Mahsa because the authorities didn’t tolerate Kurdish names. And that name Mahsa written on your birth certificate, your ID card and your official papers, even in the international media reports about your death and beyond your death. What do names mean? And what life do you live if you are not allowed to be who you are?
The horror will bury me alive
In the video of your funeral at Aichi Village Cemetery in Saqqez, shared thousands of times on social media, people chanted “Death to the dictator.” They sing a song that was written after Saddam’s poison gas attack on the Kurds in Halabja. They sing: Don’t leave me alone tonight, the horror will bury me alive.
What is known about your death: On September 13, you and your family were in Tehran to visit relatives. You were out with your brother Kiarash when you were stopped by the police just after six. Whereby the police have to be more precise, after all, these are not traffic or security police, but the Islamic moral police. What seems like an invention from a dystopian novel has been a reality in Iran since 1979. The police forcibly separated you from your brother. Your headscarf doesn’t fit properly, they said. You are taken to the police station for a “re-education measure”. According to reports, your head was banged against the car window. So your brother made his way to the police station, where other relatives of imprisoned women were also waiting. There were screams from the building. The relatives pounded on the door and police officers attacked them with batons and tear gas. The women said someone had been killed inside. An ambulance left the yard. Your brother made his way to the hospital.
They say you were brain dead when you got to the hospital. They say you went into a coma. CT scans of your head show: broken bones, bleeding, cerebral edema. The authorities speak of a heart attack. Your death was declared on September 16th. You were only 22 years old.
I would like to tell you more about you here, dear Jina. I would like to quote girlfriends, neighbors, your cousin, your brother, your mother. I would raise you here, share your dreams and doubts, celebrate your life, the person you were. I read somewhere that you ran a fashion store for women. You look elegant in the photos shared on social media. In every picture you wear lipstick (which I like, I like wearing lipstick too).
Maybe all you have to do is watch this video of your mother at your grave to get an idea of the chasm your assassination is creating in the lives of your loved ones. What destruction dictatorships, in this case the Islamic Republic, the theocracy, terror state, state of murderers and criminals cause in the lives of individuals.
In Iran, your death drives people onto the streets. Dear Jina, the women cut their hair – an act of mourning, they burn their headscarves. Female students in Tehran are screaming: women, life, freedom. The human rights organization Hengaw reports that seven people were murdered, 450 injured and 500 demonstrators arrested in the Kurdish regions.
The authorities also harass your family. Your family refuses to give the state broadcaster a scripted interview. The authorities want to bury you at dawn, quietly and secretly. Your family refuses. Your father says to the mullah who wants to say the prayer: “You killed her because of your Islam. Because of two strands of hair! And now you want to pray, aren’t you ashamed?” The Kurdish author Behrouz Boochani writes that in the West people hardly care about the protests, the fight of women against the headscarf contradicts their own orientalist ideas. And with all the talk about feminist foreign policy, where is feminist foreign policy when you need it? May the fine words be followed by deeds. Photos of President Raisi with his gang of criminals on the way to the UN General Assembly are circulating in the media.
Dear Jina, may justice be done to you. May your murderers be judged. May you remain their last victim. (Note that lesbian activists Sareh Hamedani and Elham Chubda are awaiting execution). And above all, dear Jina, may you not be forgotten. “I was shot at while I was being blessed / My smile was stoned to death,” says a poem by Kurdish poet Meral Simsek. “I was a woman/ I was many/ I wasn’t”.
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