A year of protests and repression in Iran
Post Reports
The Washington Post
4.4 • 5.1K Ratings
🗓️ 20 September 2023
⏱️ 25 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Today on “Post Reports,” a look at what has happened to Iranians in the year since massive protests swept the country. We hear from family members impacted by the government’s harsh crackdown and how Iran’s repression playbook works.
One year ago, the death of a 22-year-old Kurdish woman, Mahsa Amini, in the custody of Iran’s morality police sparked what analysts have described as the longest-running, anti-government protest in Iran’s recent history.
In the months since, Iranian security forces have unleashed a harsh crackdown, killing at least 530 protesters, according to human rights groups. Yet far more common and far more difficult to quantify are the tens of thousands of family members and acquaintances of the dead, who have been pressured, arrested and harassed, or who have disappeared.
“I think that the government understands the power of grief and how powerful that can be to move people,” visual forensics reporter Nilo Tabrizy tells “Post Reports.”
One year after Mahsa Amini’s death, and after these protests began, Tabrizy shares the stories of what two families have endured amid an evolving movement and a regime’s exacting repression playbook.
Read more:
Their loved ones were killed in Iran’s uprising. Then the state came for them.
A year after Mahsa Amini’s death: repression and defiance in Iran.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This week, the U.S. and Iran reached a major deal. |
| 0:06.0 | They exchanged prisoners. |
| 0:08.0 | Iran released five U.S. citizens and the U.S. free to five Iranians. |
| 0:14.0 | The Biden administration also lifted a block on $6 billion in frozen Iranian oil funds, |
| 0:21.0 | all part of a diplomatic push to thought relations between the two countries. |
| 0:26.0 | But Iran is in another big moment. |
| 0:29.0 | One year ago, protests erupted across the country. |
| 0:35.0 | People chanted, woman, life, freedom, and death to the dictator. |
| 0:44.0 | The demonstrations were massive. |
| 0:47.0 | In the streets, in the universities, they were the most widespread protests in the Islamic Republic's 44-year history. |
| 0:55.0 | The government cracked down hard. |
| 0:58.0 | Still, people kept risking everything, calling for women's rights, better economic conditions, for regime change. |
| 1:06.0 | People like Javad Hadari. |
| 1:09.0 | Javad was a brother who's very close to his family. |
| 1:12.0 | Nilu Tabrizi is a visual forensics reporter for the post. |
| 1:16.0 | He's been described to me as having a lively personality. |
| 1:19.0 | There's a video that was shared of him dancing and just being joyful. |
| 1:24.0 | And being a regular person, I think a lot of Iranians can see themselves in their siblings in Javad. |
| 1:35.0 | Since these protests erupted a year ago, Nilu has been following the stories of regular Iranians who took to the streets and their families, including Javads. |
| 1:46.0 | He's from Ghazvine. He was out protesting. |
| 1:50.0 | And he was killed by security forces in the early weeks of the protest in September 2022. |
| 2:00.0 | Traditionally, if you were killed by the state, families were under so much pressure to keep quiet that they would not ever publicize the funeral. |
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