Iran International
Government manipulation of information about the killing of teenage girls during protests and forcing families to make confessions, have outraged many in Iran.
Chief of the Alborz Province Justice Department, Hossein Fazeli, claimed Thursday evening that 16-year-old Sarina Esmailzadeh had jumped from a neighbor’s rooftop and killed herself and her death was unrelated to protests. “The deceased had a history of overdosing with pills to kill herself.”
Fazeli also claimed that Sarina’s mother, uncle, and young brother had gone to the prosecutor’s office to complain about the social media reports that said she had been killed in the protests.
Less than a day later, on Friday, state media released a video showing Sarina’s mother (now disputed by people who say she is not her mother but an actor) denying that her daughter was killed in the protests and saying she had a history of attempting suicide in what appeared to be an interview in which a reporter tried to lead her with his questions.
The 16-year-old YouTuber died on the way to hospital after being severely beaten in the head with batons at while protesting the killing of Mahsa Amini. She had joined a protest in Karaj, a large city half an hour from the capital Tehran, on September 21. Her injury and death were verified by Amnesty International.
Sources close to the family have said on social media that over 50 security forces were present at her funeral, presumably to prevent a protest, and did not allow anyone to take video at the cemetery. The reports say security forces removed all the photos and condolence messages on the wall of her home only a day after Sarina’s funeral. They also say the family have not been allowed to hire a lawyer and are under pressure to say she committed suicide.
But few may believe the official account of the happy, intelligent, social-media savvy young girl’s death, or even the purported “confession” of her mother, after seeing her daughter’s posts on social media before her death.
“You tell me not to swear profanities at the authorities? … How is it that suddenly a syndrome afflicts everyone to make them jump from heights to kill themselves?” one of the unbelieving Twitterati wrote quoting the judiciary official’s claims. He was referring to similar claims made about another teenage protester, Nika Shakarami, whose whole family have been under great pressure to deny her death in the protests.
Authorities claim Nika also jumped from a rooftop after taking part in protests on the same day that Sarina did. Nika’s aunt and uncle were both arrested earlier this week and forced to corroborate the suicide script.
Nika’s mother, Nasrin Shakarami, however, has bravely resisted all pressures. She told Iran International Thursday that the authorities’ claims were “ridiculous”. “It’s not the first time that they deny the truth.” According to her, not only her brother and sister but also some of her nieces and nephews are facing arrest. “There is no use talking to the authorities. They bully us and want us to repeat their account of the incident.”
Teenage girls killed by Iran's security forces during recent protests represented some of the best among Generation Z, concerned about their society and their own future. “We all know what’s it like in Iran. What do people in any country want: welfare, welfare, welfare,” Sarina says in one of her videos but goes on to add that she and her generation have to worry about much more. “There are these restrictions for women, like compulsory hijab … We can’t even go to a stadium [to watch football],” she says after mentioning that the economy is in ruins.
Sarina, an accomplished student who spoke English and French, talked about her daily life, studies, and her aspirations in her social media posts. In one of her video blogs made during a visit to a historical mosque the youngster criticizes the government for failing to protect the country’s cultural heritage and highlights a graffiti, written by religious hardliners, that says women best stay at home and raise children.
In a video she is seen in a car singing along to Hozier’s Take Me to Church. ‘My homeland feels like being in exile,” her last post before going to the protests on her Telegram channel said.
Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in his first reaction to the ongoing unrest Monday blamed the United States and Israel for ‘plots’ and said the youth were drawn to the streets as a result of what they saw on social media. “With some punishment such people can be made to understand they are mistaken,” he said.
“This generation who are leading everyone now were raised by millennial mothers whose rights and feelings were constantly trampled upon by their families, schools, and the society,” another Twitterati wrote, suggesting that the millennials who were better aware of their rights raised their children not to relent to the same pressures.
Nothing displays the rebelliousness of Generation Z in Iran better than a video that went viral on social media last week. In the video protesting girls who have ditched their headscarves in a secondary school in Karaj, the same city where Sarina lived, are seen kicking out an education ministry official who came to threaten them with expulsion and convince them to "behave themselves".
The spokesman for Iran’s Reform Front, Abolfazl Shakouri-Rad says a bipolar situation has taken shape in Iranian politics and reformists have been left out of the political debate by both the hard-line government and the protesters who do not want an Islamic government.
“Reformists cannot do anything but sit on the fence and watch what is going on,” he said in an interview with the pro-reform Fararu website, adding that “the two main players in the bipolar game are fighting each other at the expense of the society. In the meantime, we Reformists do not know what is happening, what the future is going to look like and whether the current situation is going to serve the nation’s interests.”
It is not only Shakouri-Rad who is talking about a bipolar situation in Iran. Former Majles Speaker Gholam Ali Haddad Adel, a close relative of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has also expressed concern about the formation of a dangerous bipolar situation in Iran during a conference with hard-line commentators to seek a way out of the current crisis which has claimed at least 150 lives.
Haddad Adel was quoted as saying on October 4 that “The Iranian society is rapidly moving towards bipolarity, with radical hardliners on the one side and another group of people who disagree with them 100 percent.” This bipolarity is so much visible in the streets that many observers believe that the two the confrontation between the two poles might put the final nail in the Islamic Republic’s coffin.
The fact that both hardliner Haddad Adel, whose political positions are aligned with the ultraconservative Paydari Party, and Shakouri-Rad, a leading reformist figure agree on the existence and the nature of this bipolarity reveals the sensitive situation Iran and its people have been experiencing during the past three weeks.
The murder of Mahsa Amini in the custody of Iran’s notorious morality police turned into the largest antigovernment uprising in Iran’s modern history.
Shakouri-Rad said in the interview: “It was not only Mahsa’s death that led to this uprising. Her death only flared up the fire of accumulated dissatisfactions over the government’s performance.” He also said that the issue of hijab in the center of the event brought Iranian women and youths to the streets hoping for a change in their lifestyle.
He observed that even some of Iran’s conservatives are moved by what has happened, particularly because the way the government handled the whole episode.
Referring to the leading role of Iran’s youth in the protests, he said that most of the members of his own group, the reformist Unity of Nation Party are youngsters between 15 to 25 years old.
“This is a generation that believes it can achieve its demands only through shouting it in the streets. They do not believe in elections,” he said, but he did not mention that ruling hardliners made elections meaningless by allowing only their candidates to run.
Shakouri-Rad added that the gap between the government and citizens has widened as people have lost trust not only in the government but also in the Iranian media which can only echo what the government says. Meanwhile he acknowledged that foreign-based media including the Iran International TV have taken the lead in shaping public opinion in Iran.
“At the same time, social media posts criticizing the Iranian governments are ‘liked’ by thousands of Iranian users. Despite the restrictions imposed by the government, more Iranians are now-a-days on social media,” he said.
Shakouri-Rad maintained that this degree of dissatisfaction has always existed in Iran, but it has become stronger and more visible.
The politician concluded that “the current situation of political bipolarity is extremely dangerous, but we as reformists cannot even convince those who belong to the reform camp. People voted for us in several elections since 1997 but we did not have an eye-catching achievement. The younger generation no longer believes in us and as a result of that we have been marginalized in Iran.”