The 25-year-old fiancée of a protester killed in Iran’s January crackdown and the father of another slain demonstrator have died by suicide within days of each other, sources familiar with the cases told Iran International.
Aida Heydari, whose fiancé Abolfazl Soleimani Alamouti was killed on January 9, died on September 3, about eight months after his death. The couple had planned to marry this month, according to the family.
Abolfazl was killed by gunfire during demonstrations in Zibashahr, Qazvin province.
Danial Karimi, the father of 19-year-old Amir-Mohammad Karimi, also died by suicide on September 6. His son, a former member of Iran’s national junior taekwondo team, was shot dead during protests in Marvdasht on January 9.
The 19-year-old was later buried in the nearby village of Joonjan.
Karimi’s death prompted reactions from opposition figures and Iranians on social media. The office of Reza Pahlavi said seeking justice for Amir-Mohammad, his father and others killed in the protests was a “national and collective duty.”
“Let us stand by the families seeking justice and, with care and empathy, be a refuge and support for one another,” his office said.
In an earlier case, Farahnaz “Atefeh” Roozfarah, the mother of slain protester Saman Ebrahimpour, died by suicide on July 16 after months of mourning. The 38-year-old was buried in Shaft, Gilan province.
The suicides come amid mounting reports of severe psychological distress among relatives of protesters killed during the January uprising.
Maryam Shokrani, a journalist based in Iran, recently reported that Tahereh Jangjoo, the mother of slain protester Raha Bohloulipour, had developed severe depression and had survived at least one suicide attempt following her daughter’s death.
Documents reviewed by Iran International show more than 36,500 people were killed in a systematic crackdown on the January protests.
If you or someone you know is struggling with suicidal thoughts, seek help from a trusted medical professional or crisis service. In Iran, the Social Emergency hotline can be reached at 123. In the United States, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline can be reached at 988.
The format barely varies. A person holds up what they bought and names what it cost. Four eggs and a single sausage, 5 million rials, about $2.30. A soda and a packet of crisps, 3.5 million rials. Three small bags of shopping, 75 million rials, roughly $34, which is close to half a month at Iran's minimum wage of about $75. Then the line, in one version or another: I am very happy, because if I were not, they would execute me. And then they dance.
One man films his phone showing a bank balance of 2 million rials, under a dollar, and dances through the list of what it will not cover: the bounced cheques, the unpaid shop rent, the apartment rent, his wife's clothes.
A veiled woman holds up a few tomatoes, onions and potatoes and explains that she can no longer buy by the kilo, only a handful at a time, "but I am happy, because otherwise they call me a rioter or a traitor." She thanks the authorities and signs off warmly. Another woman does the same with six eggs and a tin of tuna.
Another man dances while captions scroll over him: the dollar at 200,000 tomans, no electricity, deep in debt, and a signed undertaking to the authorities not to engage in politics. The threat varies with the week's official vocabulary: some dancers say they would otherwise be branded a mercenary, a traitor, or a Mossad agent.
It reads, at first, as one more instance of a familiar thing, humor as a pressure valve under repression. That reading is not wrong, but it is not what is new here, and it misses what the videos are actually doing.
The Islamic Republic has a specific charge for describing the country's problems: siah-namai, "painting things black." It is used against journalists, economists and ordinary complainers to mean the deliberate darkening of a reality that is, officials insist, fine. The dance videos answer it precisely. They paint things white, so luridly that the whiteness itself becomes the accusation.
A man delighted by four eggs is not praising the government. He is holding its own demand up to the light.
To see why this is a break rather than a joke, it helps to recall Vaclav Havel's greengrocer, the shopkeeper in communist Czechoslovakia who puts the slogan "Workers of the world, unite!" in his window. He does not believe it. What the sign really says, Havel wrote, is: I am obedient and therefore have the right to be left in peace. The system did not need people to believe. It needed each of them to see everyone else pretending, so that pretending felt like the only choice. Its one requirement was silence about what the pretending was for.
The Iranian dancer is Havel's greengrocer saying the quiet part aloud while still holding up the sign. The compliance is performed, the smile is wide, the gratitude is offered. And in the same breath the coercion behind it is named: I am doing this because the alternative is a noose.
Coerced performance works only while the coercion stays deniable. Havel's greengrocer kept the system standing by leaving the reason unsaid. The dancer says the reason into the camera, and the sign in the window stops working.
Follow that to its end and the videos are doing something sharper than mockery. They are exposing a problem the state has made for itself.
When a government criminalizes complaint, it also empties praise of meaning. If unhappiness can be prosecuted, a happy citizen and a frightened one become impossible to tell apart.
The dancers are demonstrating this to the state's face: you can no longer know whether we are content, because you have made discontent a crime, and so our contentment tells you nothing.
This is the deeper significance of a format built entirely from the state's own words. Every accusation the dancers voice, siah-namai, rioter, mercenary, Mossad agent, traitor, is lifted from official language. The videos are assembled from nothing but the vocabulary the government uses to police speech, and turned into an instrument of it.
Linguists distinguish the message from the metamessage: what a statement says, and what it conveys about the relationship between the people speaking. Every one of these videos carries the same metamessage. I cannot tell you the truth, you know I cannot, and I know that you know.
The gap between "I am delighted" and "I am forbidden to say otherwise" is the entire content. Iranians read it without effort. The state pretends to read only the surface.
The videos are the latest move in a shift that has been accelerating, and each stage has done something different to the relationship between a sign and its meaning.
During the January protests, demonstrators in the western town of Abdanan scattered rice into the air, pouring away a staple that had grown scarce and dear. The gesture refused the frame the state wanted to impose on the unrest.
By throwing away the very thing they could barely afford, protesters were saying the anger was never really about the price of rice. The economy had triggered something larger: a rejection of the whole arrangement.
Then came the funerals. After the January massacre, families burying the dead replaced the state's mourning language, the Quranic recitation, the lamentation, the word shahid, "martyr," with another vocabulary entirely: wedding music, folk dance, verses from the Shahnameh, and a new word for their dead, javid-nam, "whose name will endure."
That was an act of authorship. The grief was real, and out of it people built a rival ritual language, deliberately cleansed of the religious symbolism the state relies on.
The price videos are the third move, and they are not the same as the funeral dances, even though both use the body and both use music. The funeral dance builds; it replaces the state's grammar with a sincere one of its own. The price video hollows; it takes the state's grammar and performs it as a corpse. One is about the dead and constructs a new language. The other is about the living and empties an existing one. A society that first refused the state's frame, and then authored its own, is now wearing the state's words as a mask.
It is worth remembering how far this has travelled. Dance is not merely frowned upon in Iran; it is effectively illegal, and the word itself is so freighted that the state, when staging its own approved versions, avoids it and reaches instead for the bloodless euphemism harakat-e mozoun, "rhythmic movements," a coinage that was itself widely mocked when it appeared.
During the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom protests, teenage girls were detained and pushed into filmed confessions for dancing in a Tehran neighborhood. The same act now circulates in its hundreds, filmed openly by people using their own names and faces, among them veiled women from households where dancing would once have been unthinkable on its own terms, never mind the law's. That is its own measure of how fast the ground is moving.
The trigger, as ever, is money. The rial has been setting records, passing 2,200,000 to the dollar, and on August 31 the judiciary chief Gholamhossein Mohseni-Ejei called protesters "mercenaries" and promised a firmer hand. But the videos are not really about eggs, any more than the rice was about rice.
They are about a population that has run out of permitted ways to say no, and has started saying yes in a way that unmistakably means it.
The phenomenon has acquired a name, taken from the line the dancers keep repeating: "If I'm not happy, they'll execute me." It is a joke a foreign viewer can laugh at and an Iranian cannot, quite. The Islamic Republic built a machine designed to hear only yes. It is now discovering that yes is what no has learned to sound like.
While two of those players are building new lives in Australia, thousands of kilometers from their families, having received citizenship there, the Islamic Republic's football federation has summoned their former teammates to record the state's account of the same events.
Farideh Shojaei, the federation's vice-president for women's football, has confirmed that a documentary about Iran's participation in the AFC Women's Asian Cup will be filmed at the camp. She described the purpose as completing the tournament archive and setting down part of the history of Iranian women's football.
The outlet Football 360 had reported earlier that the project belongs to a body outside football, and that most of the players who returned from Australia have no wish to sit in front of the federation's camera and recount what happened on that trip.
A camp that does not add up
The camp has pushed back the start of Iran's women's premier league by a week, and the federation's explanations for holding it have not been consistent.
According to Iranian media, when club coaches objected to the timing, Shojaei assured them the players would not be put under any football training load, because the point of the camp was to film the documentary. Later, explaining why a camp was being held outside a FIFA international window with no fixture ahead of the national team, she said it had been convened at the request of Marzieh Jafari, the national coach, to prepare the players.
Jafari does not currently hold an active contract with the federation. She is head coach of Khatoon Bam, the club that supplies the core of the national squad, which has just come through Asian Champions League qualifying and now needs to prepare for a new league season.
So a camp that has forced clubs to rearrange their calendars is attributed to a coach with no active federation contract, and was described to the objecting coaches as not being about training at all.
The version the state told first
The documentary is being made several months after Iranian officials gave their own account of what happened in Australia.
In the team's final days there, federation president Mehdi Taj claimed Australian police had separated the women from the men in the delegation and pressured the players into staying and claiming asylum. Esmail Baghaei, the foreign ministry spokesman, went further on television, accusing the Australian government of "taking members of the team hostage."
While those claims were being made in public, according to one club executive, money was being raised inside Iranian football to encourage the players to come home.
Alireza Babaei, chief executive of Chadormalou Ardakan, told a Football 360 live program that while the federation was working to bring the whole delegation back, its general secretary Hedayat Mombeini asked Chadormalou to pay 30 billion rials, about $15,000, for the women's national team. Chadormalou does not have a women's team.
According to Babaei, Mombeini also mentioned a payment of 50 billion rials, roughly $25,000, from the Gol Gohar club, and named Sepahan of Isfahan, a club that at that moment was weighing whether to continue fielding teams at all because of war damage to the steel industry.
In Iranian women's football, 50 billion rials from a single club is not a sum to be waved away. Afsaneh Chatrenoor, the national team forward who plays for Gol Gohar, was the premier league's leading scorer last season. She is also the player who sat across from Gholamhossein Mohseni-Ejei a few months ago and asked the head of the judiciary to help her find work for when her football career ends. At the top level of the Iranian women's game, the contracts of prominent players are still measured in a few billion rials.
What the tournament was always about
For the Islamic Republic's officials, the Women's Asian Cup in Australia was never only a football tournament.
Several members of the delegation applied for humanitarian protection from the Australian government during the war and after the killing of Ali Khamenei. Some later abandoned their asylum applications and returned to Iran under pressure from security forces on their families.
In those same days, Iranian officials were assembling their own version of events. They spoke of hostage-taking and of players being deceived, while simultaneously turning to threats, intimidation and financial inducements to get the asylum seekers back.
Now some of the same players who returned after that pressure are to sit in front of a camera, in a project belonging to a body outside football, and describe those days again.
It looks less like archiving history than like producing a state edition of it.
This time the Islamic Republic is not only constructing its own account of Australia. It wants the players inside the rewriting.
