Ten years and six months in prison for having… danced. Faced with an unprecedented popular mobilization which has been calling for more freedom in Iran since last September, the mullahs’ regime has once again fueled its repression this week by sentencing to imprisonment a young couple whose only crime was to have danced romantically in front of the Azadi tower in Tehran.
The Tehran Revolutionary Court has just ruled against Astiyazh Haghighi and her fiancé, Amir Mohammad Ahmadi, both in their 20s, Human Rights Activists News Agency reported on Tuesday. of the person with a storefront in the United States. The couple were arrested last November amid protests sparked by the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who died at the hands of Tehran vice police after being arrested for “wearing inappropriate clothes. “.
The dance, filmed and featuring Mme Haghighi not wearing a veil, an affront to the theocratic regime, had gone viral on Instagram. A woman is not allowed to dance in public in Iran. The duo was found guilty of “advocating corruption and public prostitution”, as well as “assembling with intent to disrupt national security”.
“By considering a dancing couple as a threat, the mullahs’ regime certainly sends a signal about its fragility and its flaws”, comments in an interview with the Duty France-Isabelle Langlois, director general of Amnesty International Canada, who calls on Saturday for a large rally in Montreal in support of the Iranians’ claims. After almost five months, the Iranian people’s cry for freedom is still heard in the streets of Tehran as elsewhere in the Islamic Republic, but it is increasingly at risk of hitting the wall of indifference in distant democracies, says Mme Langlois, as well as the collective Femme, vie, liberté MTL which also orchestrates the gathering.
“We need, here as elsewhere, a mobilization of the Quebec population as a whole in support of the resistance that is expressed in Iran and which needs to be supported everywhere to achieve its objectives,” she said. .
“The more of us there are, the more attention we will attract. It is the number that creates the pressure as much on the politicians and on the regimes, even the atrocious ones like that of the mullahs in Iran. And then, we want to send a message to the Iranian population, to tell them that they are not alone in their fight,” adds the activist.
“Flawless” support
On Wednesday, more than 480 public figures took up their pens to give their “unwavering” support to Iranians determined to bring down the theocratic regime in Tehran and thus bring democracy and freedom back to their country.
Novelist Margaret Atwood, former Canadian Prime Ministers Kim Campbell and Stephen Harper, former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, actor Richard Gere and Nobel Prize-winning Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievich are among the signatories. of the letter distributed by Freedom House. They believe that freedom must triumph in Iran to “relaunch the global wave of democratization that was so strong at the end of the 20th century.e century, but which weakened in the face of the authoritarian counter-attack”.
A victory for the protesters “would mean deliverance from a regime that denies free elections, freedom of speech, fair rule of law and personal freedom in areas as simple as the choice of clothing”, can we read in the statement.
Since the start of the protest last September, the government of Ebrahim Raisi, nicknamed the “butcher of Tehran” for his involvement in the death and execution of thousands of people in Iran over the past 40 years, has ordered the execution by hanging of four demonstrators. More than twenty of these opponents, arrested for taking part in protest marches, are still waiting on death row, denounces Amnesty International Canada. Capital punishment has become the new tool of the mullahs to silence the youth.
“What is happening in Iran is horrible,” says France-Isabelle Langlois. Simple gestures and demands, such as dancing in front of a public building, become acts of bravery that speak volumes about the determination and state of mind of the Iranian people. At some point, it’s going to crack, and we have to make sure everywhere in the world that it’s the regime that cracks before the population. »
And she adds: “We must keep in mind the beauty of these gestures in the face of the horror of repression and continue, with the means we have, to blow on these embers to be sure that the fire does not go out. not “.
With Agence France-Presse