A young and innocent girl was hunted down on the streets of Tehran. In her innocent dreams, Mahsa Amini never thought the entire Iran will rise up in her name.
The blows received by this young and lonely girl felt like they had been aimed at the entire Iranian people.
The blood that came from Mahsa’s ear was the blood of our Iran whose body is wounded and sick these days. Mahsa showed our desperate state. She reminded us that the nation is in danger. The women of our country are in chains and under strangulation. We were reminded that this could happen to all women and men of the country and that the government won’t be responsible.
Her mother said her name was a secret code. Even thinking of what the mother said and her prediction of events to come shakes us to our core. We see that in less than three days, Iran has risen to avenge her blood and demand national sovereignty.
The key to this code is solidarity of the Iranian nation and support of all groups and parties inside and outside the country for each other; and their support for the people’s movement against the authoritarian, misogynist and destructive government of Iran.
Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi’s declaration of solidarity with Mahsa’s family and two days of national mourning (Sunday and Monday) is an important action to alleviate those who, for forty years, have not received any empathy; no one has spoken of their pain.
Many of the valiant youth have been sent to death, each in their own way, by these guardians of hell without their families even finding an opportunity for their burial.
Nightly burial of victims in a securitized atmosphere and under the supervision of regime goons had become an ordinary matter. But Mahsa Amini broke this cycle.
Our Kurdish compatriots didn’t tolerate a lonely nocturnal burial for Mahsa.
Our country is one of civilization and history. Our people were full of happiness and poetry not long ago and their concerns was about the competition of their offspring in the classroom, their higher education and their marriage ceremonies. But they now live a catastrophe and have to be in a daily fight with the goons of the regime. They’d be lucky if they can make ends meet. Regret has become an inseparable part of lives of many Iranians. Many others have to live through separation from family, migration and life away from home. Others are so mired in poverty that they end up seeing suicide or drugs as a solution for their endless problems.
Those who are protesting are either killed or die in prisons to suspicious deaths.
Where in the world are youth buried overnight with cement poured over their graves? A nightmare for these hunters of humans is that grieving families would open up graves to see the bodies.
Navid Afkari, a valiant young man, was hanged to be a lesson for other protesters.
Haleh Sahabi received a blow in her father’s funeral but it was said that she had had a heart attack and was buried overnight. The same group beat Zahra Kazemi, Satar Beheshti and dozens of others in the head.
In demonstrations, if they were to attack with blows to the head, they wouldn’t kill enough people. This is why they resort to shooting instead. This is how they killed Neda Agha Soltan. Iran shed tears for Neda. For years, Iran has been shedding tears for hundreds of other protesters who were killed; tears for victims of nightly burials.
The country’s bankruptcy is obvious. Their plans include raiding of the country’s natural resources, destruction of the environment, wildlife, language and culture and leading the country to collapse. They have scary plans for the Iranian nation.
But the innocent dreams of Mahsa Amini have ruined these plans. She was not the easy victim they took her to be.
“Iranian nation” and the “great people of Iran” were the phrases last heard more than forty years ago from Iran’s national radio and television.
This is how the Shah of Iran addressed the people in an era where not every home had a TV or radio set and many also didn’t own TVs since they saw it as violation of the Sharia.
To be Iranian has always been a honor. But people haven’t felt it for forty years. This regime has left them worry after daily affairs so that they have no time for life, hope, joy and Iranianness.
But today everybody has a satellite dish at their home and people watch all sort of news media. They have internet at home and on their mobile phones and they now know that the secret to victory is solidarity and unity. The phrase “the Iranian nation” is hopeful, beautiful and powerful.
They want to close down the libraries of the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults so that the Iranians wouldn’t read and instead be raised on the ignorant version of the religion made up by the Mullahs.
The most influential book I read in my childhood was published by this same institute; it was a fictional story of earth being occupied by extraterrestrial forces.
This was a trilogy by the British writer John Christopher: The White Mountains, The City of Gold and Lead and Th Pool of Fire.
Even as a teenager, I saw the fictional story in the book as similar to the conditions of Iran. People from other planets had come and dominated more than half of the earth.
These Gods were called “tripods” in the story. They’d take free humans in slavery or hunt them for pleasure.
But the big plan of these space creatures was to destroy humanity as a whole.
This is similar to the plan that the regime has. It wants to destroy Iran and its great nation. But this trilogy had a happy ending. Youth from all over the world gathered to defeat the occupiers. They suffered a lot and many of them were killed but at the end they defeated the enemy and saved humanity and the world.
Mahsa Amini’s life was brief but it will prove memorable. She reminded us that the nation and homeland are under threat.
To commemorate the first victims of freedom at the outset of the Constitutional Revolution, Aref Qazvini wrote a most beautiful song 100 years ago.
“From the blood of the nation’s youth, tulips will grow,” he sang.
I console the Amini family and the great nation of Iran. The name of Mahsa Amini, daughter of Iran, will be the code for liberation of Iran.
