The family of Mahsa Amini, the young Kurdish woman whose death at the hands of Iran’s thuggish “morality police” drew worldwide condemnation and touched off the biggest uprising against the regime to date, said on Tuesday that the regime is preventing them from holding a memorial to mark the third anniversary of her passing.
A “source close to the family” told Radio Free Europe (RFE) on Tuesday that her father Amjad Aminin was “summoned by intelligence officials in Saghez, in Iran’s Kurdistan Province and warned not to take any action to mark the occasion.”
The same source said security forces have been stationed outside the family home since last weekend and the family is being kept under close surveillance. The regime has also reportedly sealed the cemetery where Amini is buried to all visitors, including her relatives.
Another source said officials went so far as releasing water from a local dam to flood the roads leading to the cemetery, to prevent any sort of demonstration from taking place.
Mahsa Amini was a 22-year-old woman from Iran’s oppressed Kurdish minority who was paying a visit to Tehran in September 2022 when she was assaulted by the morality police for allegedly violating the hijab law. She was actually wearing a headscarf at the time, but the morality police decided she was wearing it improperly.
Amni was beaten, thrown into a van, and driven off to a detention center in Iran. She lapsed into a coma from her injuries and was taken to a nearby hospital, where she died on September 16, 2022.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) released a statement on Tuesday blasting the Iranian regime for suppressing Amini’s memory and committing “gross violations of human rights” to crush the protests inspired in 2022 by her murder.
The protest movement came to be known as “Women, Life, Freedom.” It swelled to enormous size and was ruthlessly suppressed by the regime, using weapons such as “murder, torture, and rape.”
“Despite widespread domestic and international demands for accountability, the authorities have praised the security forces for suppressing the protests, vilified protesters, dismissed complaints by victims and their families, and persecuted families of those killed and executed,” HRW noted.
The terror masters of Tehran learned nothing good from the protests. Instead, they doubled down on surveillance and oppression, the morality police became even more brutal, and women who objected to the mandatory hijab laws Amini was killed for allegedly violating are now subjected to harsh “scientific and psychological treatment.”
The regime in Tehran might have been able to stop Amini’s family from remembering her, but they could not stop the U.S. State Department, which issued a statement to mark the third anniversary of her “savage murder.”
“Mahsa’s name will never be forgotten. Her murder, along with so many others, is a damning indictment of the Islamic Republic’s crimes against humanity. The United States will continue to work with allies and partners around the world to ensure that the regime’s atrocities are met with accountability, justice, and resolve,” the State Department said.
France24 offered a more optimistic perspective on the anniversary, noting that for all of the regime’s bluster about enforcing the hijab laws more aggressively, more Iranian women seem to be violating it.
“There has clearly been a before and after, marked by profound transformations, particularly in urban areas. While the death of Mahsa Amini and the protests that followed did not trigger a political revolution, they did mark a societal revolution,” said historian Jonathan Piron of the Etopia research center in Brussels.
Other observers, including some women in Iran, said the “Women, Life, Freedom” protesters won the war, even if the theocracy never admitted defeat. Police and other officials have grown more likely to ignore dress code violations, even as fire-breathing theocrats in the Iranian parliament pass increasingly lengthy morality laws.
Parliament passed the strictest law to date in December, listing dozens of offenses and specifying brutal penalties for offenders, but President Masoud Pezeshkian – who ran as a reformer with some sympathy for the Women, Life, Freedom movement – refused to enforce it. Iranians noted he could not have disregarded the law without the tacit approval of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
The Iranian government does still oppress and disadvantage women in various ways through civil code and, while officials might ignore minor daily infractions that would have been punished with beatings before the Amini uprising, they will still act ruthlessly against women’s rights activists. The implicit bargain is that Iran women will be treated a little better than Mahsa Amini was, as long as they keep quiet.
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