His face has illuminated a billboard in Times Square and been painted on murals in Paris and Berlin. He has been splashed on the Barcelona soccer team’s private jet and commemorated on T-shirts in the red, white and green colors of Iran’s flag. Vienna and Los Angeles have even named some streets after him.
Last year, at demonstrations across Iran and around the world, tens of thousands of men and women waved banners with her face shouting: “Say her name: Mahsa Amini. Mahsa Amini.”
Saturday will mark one year since the 22-year-old woman from Saghez, a small town in a Kurdish province in northwest Iran, He died in custody of the country’s morals. police over accusations of violating the hijab law, which forces women and girls to cover their hair and bodies.
His death in Tehran raged for months Protests across the country, led by women and girls. who removed their headscarves in defiance and demanded an end to the Islamic Republic’s rule. The uprising that bears his name, the “Mahsa movement,” became the most serious challenge to the legitimacy of Iran’s ruling clerics since they seized power in 1979.
Security forces responded with a violent crackdown, arresting thousands and killing at least 500 protesters. including children and adolescents, human rights groups have said. Seven protesters have been executed and even relatives of protesters have been attacked.
On Saturday, security officers invaded the neighborhood of Ms. Amini’s family home and prevented her parents from attending a memorial they had planned at her grave. Her father was briefly detained for questioning and released on Friday, according to Saleh Nikbakht, the family’s lawyer. To further prevent visitors from visiting Ms. Amini’s grave in Saghez, authorities imposed checkpoints along the road leading to the cemetery and intentionally opened a nearby dam to flood it, residents said on social media. .
But if Amini, in death, became a global icon, the young woman with brown eyes and long dark hair was also a daughter, a sister, a niece and a favorite granddaughter. In recent interviews, Ms. Amini’s father, an uncle, two cousins and a family friend described her as an unlikely candidate for global fame, a person whose story has resonated so widely and deeply precisely because she could be any girl. who lives and walks the streets. from Iran.
Amini was quiet, reserved and treated everyone around her with a kind of old-school courtesy, they said. She avoided politics and activism and did not follow the news. She didn’t have many friends and socialized mainly with her relatives, her relatives said.
Their mother was their best friend and biggest influence, they said, and the two cooked, walked and listened to music together. On the day of her arrest, while she was walking with her family in Tehran, she was wearing a long black robe that belonged to her mother and a headscarf. Her moral police arrested her on accusations of violating hijab rules.
“She was an innocent, ordinary young woman from a middle-class family who was just beginning to discover her adult path,” said Vafa Aeili, her 43-year-old uncle, who left Iran for Finland a few weeks ago. She “She was very curious, she always asked me questions, she always looked for advice on what to do, how to improve her studies and organize her work.”
Iran has He intensified repression against dissidents before the anniversary. of Mrs. Amini’s death with a new wave of arrests. Another uncle of his, Safa Aeili, was arrested in a raid on his home in Sanandaj last week. His father, Amjad Amini, has been questioned several times recently and pressured to cancel commemorations scheduled for Saturday.
Kaveh Ghorieshi, a Kurdish journalist from Amini’s hometown, whose family are old friends of his family, said security forces have taken steps to intimidate residents, openly installing surveillance cameras throughout the city and in the cemetery. where she is buried. Helicopters have been hovering over the city for days, said Ghoreishi, who is now in Berlin.
Ms. Amini’s parents issued a statement on their Instagram accounts In early September they said they planned to hold a “traditional and religious ceremony” at her grave on Saturday to honor their daughter, but asked that people “avoid any violence or reaction to violence.” As of Friday, they were still planning to perform the rite.
Ms. Amini was born into a Kurdish family of modest means but deeply rooted in its ethnic community and its traditions and cultures. Her parents were aware of the possible state discrimination her daughter could face as an ethnic minority. She was then given two names: Mahsa, for official documents, and a Kurdish name, Jina, which means eternal. That was the name everyone who knew her used.
The family was very united and had conservative values. Some members of Ms. Amini’s extended family are religious and observe Muslim practices such as prayer and fasting, but the faith was never imposed, said her uncle, Mr. Aeili.
Ms. Amini’s father worked for the state social security agency and retired about a year before her death. Her mother, Mozhgan Eftekhari, was a housewife known for her performances of classical Persian songs. Her parents lost their firstborn, Armin, at the age of 5 to food poisoning and lack of proper medical care, family members said. When her daughter was born, they were very happy and overprotective, Aeili said.
“When Jina was a child, she loved big dolls and I had to buy them for her if I took her shopping at the bazaar; It’s like she dreamed big from an early age,” her father wrote to the Times. “Jina had a very pure and kind heart. If you met her once and heard her gentle voice, you would never be able to forget her.”
Ms. Amini’s cherished memories haunt her relatives: how she always played a happy Iranian video clip when the family sat down to eat; her love of brightly colored clothing; and how she would timidly join in singing sessions at small family gatherings.
“Sometimes I forget you’re gone, I want to dial your number and tell you I’m devastated,” wrote her younger brother Ashkan, 19. on her Instagram page alongside Ms. Amini’s photo.
After graduating from high school, Ms. Amini was unsure about her career path and considered medicine, acting and even becoming a radio host, her family said. In fact, she earned a certificate in pharmacology, but she was not prepared to make a career in it. She tried different hobbies: playing the flute, hiking and playing volleyball.
In the months before her death, Ms. Amini worked at a women’s clothing store that her father had bought with his retirement pay. Her brother now runs the store.
He loved to travel but had never left Iran. He dreamed of going to Turkey and visiting Istanbul and the poet Rumi’s shrine in Konya, his uncle said. After years of taking and failing the college entrance exam, she had finally been accepted into a microbiology program at Azad University, in the Iranian city of Urmia, and would have started classes in the fall of 2022.
“What he liked most was hanging out and playing with all the babies and children in the family,” said his 27-year-old cousin in a telephone interview from Saghez, Iran, who asked not to be identified for fear of reprisals. . If there was one place where she came out of her shell it was at weddings, her cousins and her uncle said, where she wore long, colorful Kurdish dresses, curled her hair and danced hand in hand with her relatives. she.
Her uncle recalled giving her a notebook and recommending she take daily notes of her thoughts to help her find direction. In the months before her death, she surprised him by showing him the notebook with graphs and plans laid out, a blueprint of a life that could have been, Aeili said.
The Iranian government has said Ms Amini died while in police custody due to underlying medical problems. Her family has said that she had no health problems and that she died because the police beat her. A photo of Mrs. Amini in a coma in the hospital with blood dripping from his ear and tubes in his mouth went viral, further undermining the government’s narrative.
Nikbakht, the family’s lawyer, said no one has been arrested in Amini’s case because the coroner’s office rejects her family and doctors’ claim that she was killed by a blow to the lower part of her skull.
The US House of Representatives recently overwhelmingly passed “Mahsa Law,” a package of sanctions aimed at punishing Iran and its top leaders for human rights violations and limiting the country’s import and export of military equipment. It is not clear if the The Senate will take up it at a time when Washington and Iran have taken steps to calm tensions.
On Saturday, protests honoring Ms Amini in the year since her death are planned in more than 50 cities around the world, including Washington, New York, London and Sydney.
For members of the Amini family, the anniversary brings some comfort, as their daughter’s death has galvanized Iranians to seek change. But it also brings pain and regret.
They had traveled to Tehran that week in September to visit Ms. Amini’s aunt and buy clothes to stock the store. They had spent a week in the Caspian Sea, after which Amini had asked if they could skip the trip to Tehran and fly home instead, her uncle said.
“I will never forgive myself as the head of the family because I was the one who insisted that we go to Tehran,” his father said.
Leily Nikounazarcontributed reports.
