Fariba Adelkhah: The “Woman… Life… Freedom” movement brought about change in Iran and its prisons
A French-Iranian academic who returned to Paris last month after being detained since 2019 said that the protest movement that broke out in Iran last year had transformed the country outside the prison as well as inside it.
Fariba Adelkhah was finally allowed to leave Iran in October, after a 4-and-a-half-year ordeal that began with her sudden arrest in 2019 and her spending years in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison. But there she was able to witness the courage of her fellow prisoners, including Narges Mohammadi, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize this year, since the launch of the “Woman… Life… Freedom” movement.
In response to questions from Agence France-Presse, the French-Iranian researcher said that the protest movement that took place in September 2022, following the death of the young Iranian Kurdish woman, Mahsa Amini, “changed Iranian society, but so did the prisons.”
Amini died on September 16, 2022, at the age of 22, 3 days after she was arrested by the “moral police” in Tehran on the grounds of wearing a bad hijab.
Her death sparked a wave of unprecedented popular protests, in a challenge to the rulers that the country had not witnessed for many years, and the protesters raised the slogan “Zen, Zendaki, Azadi” (Woman, Life, Freedom).
Hundreds were killed on the sidelines of the protests, including dozens of members of the security forces, while thousands were arrested, according to human rights organizations. The judiciary announced the implementation of death sentences against 7 of those convicted in cases related to the movements.
Adelkhah (64 years old), an anthropologist specializing in the Shiite sect, said that among the detainees in the women’s section in Evin Prison were activists for human rights and the environment, trade unionists, political opponents, and representatives of religious minorities, who often had different viewpoints, but “this… The issue united us,” she said.
She said, “Female political prisoners often sang together, in a show of defiance… That movement (changed Iranian society as well as the prisons).”
French-Iranian Academy Fariba Adelkhah during a ceremony at the Institute of Political Studies in Paris, October 20, 2023 (AFP)
The researcher was stopped on June 5, 2019 at Tehran airport, where she was waiting for the arrival of her companion, Roland Marchal, who intended to join her. She recounted that elegantly dressed officers asked her “with a lot of respect” to accompany them, and after a few hours she was subjected to her first interrogation, with her face “against a wall.”
This was followed by several interrogation sessions, during which she confirmed that she had not been beaten. She says: “That interrogators resort to beating to extract answers is something that often happens to men, but during my detention I never heard of it happening to women.”
For her part, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Narges Mohammadi reported that women are exposed to sexual violence in prisons.
“Psychological humiliation”
Fariba Adelkhah said in this regard that “the absence of physical violence does not prevent continuous psychological humiliation.”
She was sentenced to 6 years in prison; 5 of them for “conspiring against national security” and one for “spreading false propaganda” against the Islamic Republic
She was released in February under an amnesty issued after spending more than three and a half years in prison or under house arrest under the supervision of an electronic bracelet. Eight months after this decision, Tehran returned her passport to her. Which allowed her to return to France.
As for Roland Marchal, the researcher specializing in Africa, who was arrested on the same day as her, he was released in March 2020 as part of a prisoner exchange between Paris and Tehran.
Adelkhah said with a smile: “I still cannot understand what was wrong with me,” after years she spent “behind a wall,” during which she went on a hunger strike that lasted 50 days and left exhausted.
Paris has repeatedly used the expression “state hostages” to describe its situation and the situation of other French nationals detained by Tehran.
The researcher says that in the course of her work in Iran, she adhered to “three red lines,” which are: “the revolution,” “Islam,” and “the status of the supreme leader.” These are three extremely sensitive issues that made her vulnerable to accusations of appeasement with Tehran, which she denies.
But she pointed out that “the regime criminalizes non-criminal acts, and in the end we all become oppositionists in its eyes.”
“how beautiful you are!”
She recounted that the slogan “Woman… Life… Freedom”, which confused the Iranian authorities, reached inside the prison, where women are usually uncovered, but they are obliged to put a veil on their heads when a man enters their section or when they are transferred to the hospital. Adelkhah recalled that after the movement began, “almost no woman wore the hijab anymore” when a man entered.
Narges Mohammadi’s family reported on Friday that prison authorities prevented the activist and journalist, who suffers from heart and lung problems, from being transferred to the hospital because of her refusal to wear the hijab.
In a letter from prison published Tuesday on the official Nobel Prize website, Mohammadi described the mandatory hijab as “the primary source of control and oppression in society, aimed at preserving the tyrannical religious government and ensuring its continuation.”
Mohammadi was arrested 13 times, and was sentenced in total to 31 years in prison and 154 lashes, and she has now been in prison since 2021.
Adelkhah says that she made prison “a space of battle, challenge, and protest par excellence,” in which she received “more listening ears than if she had been outside.”
Adelkhah was still in Iran when the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Mohammadi in early October, and she remembers the “smiles” and “lightness” on the faces of passersby in the street.
Although the massive popular protests under the slogan “Woman… Life… Freedom” have become extremely rare, and while the government has canceled the daily protests by suppressing the slogan “Woman… Life… Freedom… the Islamic Republic is forced to concede… On many issues,” she said, whether on the streets of Iran or in its prisons. “(The protest slogan) has become part of Iranian culture,” she said.
She says: “Now when you meet women who do not wear the hijab in the street, which was not the case before, they say to each other: (How beautiful you are)!”
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2023-11-05 18:23:37
