The People of Iran Making Their Voice Heard

Hungarian Conservative : It has been approximately three weeks since a twenty-two-year-old Iranian woman, Mahsa Amini, also known as Jina Amini or Zhina Amini, died in a Tehran hospital after she was arrested and beaten by religious morality police for not wearing the hijab in accordance with government standards. Within hours, women appeared in the streets, burning their hijabs and calling for justice. Days later, the protests spread and got larger. In towns and cities across Iran, schoolchildren have abandoned their classrooms to join the masses thronging the junctions and blocking streets. The brutality, however, did not cease.

On 20 September, Nika Shakarami, a sixteen-year-old, went missing in Tehran after telling a friend she was being chased by police. Her relatives were coerced into making false statements that she died falling from a roof. And now, reports are surfacing of the death of yet another teenage girl, Sarina Esmailzadeh, at the hands of the Iranian security forces.

Sixteen-year-old Sarina, who posted videos on YouTube, was killed when the security forces beat her with batons at a protest in Gohardasht in Alborz province on 23 September, according to Amnesty International. But the current acts if state violence are sadly nothing new—the people in the Islamic Republic of Iran have been oppressed ever since Shah Mohammad Pahlavi was ousted from power in 1979.

How Iran Became an Islamic Theocracy 

Political experts hold that the removal of the Shah of Iran in 1979 resulted from his secularisation of the country, which included implementing policies such as the Family Protection Act of 1975. This precipitated anger among the Shi’ite clerics, since it granted women more rights within the family. The new legislation also lifted a number of juridical family matters from clerical jurisdiction and handed them to the newly created family courts for settlement.

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