– You do not have the right to choose yourself, and everything in life is affected by this. Since we were teenagers at school, we knew that talking to a boy is taboo, having a boyfriend is taboo, having sex is taboo. Going to a party is taboo. I think many of us, when we had our first kiss, felt fear of the possible consequences. The woman, who is in her late 20s, grew up with the strict rules that women have had to follow in Iran. She says that when the morality police came, and she was in her teens, the women she knew were scared in a completely new way. – Wherever you went out, you always had to look over your shoulder to check if the moral police were there or not. They could suddenly appear in front of you, so you had nowhere to run. She was 15 years old the first time they took her. At the time, the new arrangement was completely new, and she had not yet practiced what to say. Even more important, perhaps: what not to say. The woman says she has also experienced the police laughing at her, when an arrest caused her to have a panic attack. Photo: Morteza Nikoubazl/NurPhoto/Shutterstock / Shutterstock editorial That morning she had driven with her mother to the hospital, because she felt bad. On the way home, they stopped in a shopping street so that the mother could run an errand. Relaxed and tired, the teenager went into the sports shop next door to avoid waiting outside. Tricked into a police car A policeman and a policewoman walked in there. They wanted to talk to her, and demanded that she join them on the road. Their message was clear: she had broken the dress code. – We always had to wear long sleeves and long trouser legs. I followed both of these rules, she says further. The woman says it is common for people to show a bit of their hair when they walk in Tehran, even when wearing a hijab. Photo: WANA NEWS AGENCY / Reuters – I had the hijab scarf on my head, but you could see my hair. I think they said my shirt could be a little longer. That was all. The two police officers persuaded her to come out to the police car to sign a document, but when they got out into the car park she was forced to sit down. – I was only 15. I didn’t know what was happening, and I was very afraid of them. The policeman was standing there with a gun in his belt, so I followed them. – I got into one of the seats, and then they just started driving. I told them: “My mother is still out there! Where are you taking me?” – They replied: “Shut up, don’t lie to us.” You were alone in that store.” The older of the two women says she was taken into this hall one of the times she was arrested. The video shows Mahsa Amini signing about. On the way to the station, they arrested several other women, she says, from young to 40 years of age. They were led into a large hall, with perhaps 70 other arrested women. They were everything from teenage girls to pensioners. A woman sat nursing her baby. Inside, she had to wait until a family member came with other clothes, and she got to change into something they were happy with. Then she had to sign a sheet with fingerprints, her home address and other personal information, with a promise that she would never do it again. It was supposed to be one of many meetings with the morality police. Several times she was arrested, but other times she managed to escape on foot. Still, when she walks the streets of the Norwegian capital, she can be stunned by fear when she sees a white van on the road, or parked in an open urban garden. “We are going to die. It doesn’t matter” When Mahsa Amini was killed by the morality police last Friday, the people took to demonstrating throughout Iran. Among these are close friends of the other woman news has spoken to. – People are becoming braver and braver, because they are fed up with the current situation in the country. So there is no fear, says she, who is younger but also in her 20s. – Even among my friends it is said: “We are going to die. It doesn’t matter. We need to be free from this country.” This picture of Amini was taken shortly before the morality police arrested her. Now both the internet and the mobile network are shut down in Iran. President Ebrahim Raisi has returned after speaking at the UN General Assembly. The woman believes both of these developments will lead to violence escalating. – They record and video you, then they can arrest you. It’s not just arrests, they’re shooting people in the head, in the face, right now. After two days of silence, she finally got a message from her friends on Friday morning. They live, and they are safe. She herself moved to Norway in 2019 to study, but she left Iran for the sake of freedom – freedom of expression, for a better economy. “Are you connected here?” asks the woman’s mother. “Yes,” comes the reply. But the messages she sends on don’t go through. – In general, I had a normal life in Iran. I mean, I worked, I studied. Literally, life was normal for me. – But when I came to Norway and I compared the lives of Norwegian girls and other European girls in relation to me, I came to the conclusion that it was not normal. Hit her in the chest There is one meeting with the morality police in particular that she thinks about a lot, now that the strict rules are no longer “ordinary”. She was 20 years old and sitting in the park with some friends, when the police came walking. They thought that the uniform her friend was wearing was too short and showed too much. The hijab was fastened correctly, but the hem of the uniform went up a little higher than what the others were wearing. The discrepancy was enough to break the dress code, they said. When the policemen grabbed her friend, she, who now lives in Norway, tried to slow them down. – I wanted to talk to my friend to get her mother’s number, so I could call her and ask what we should do. – But the policeman hit me in the chest and pushed me away. Then they took her with them. The result was that the friend was allowed to leave the police station after a couple of hours. Before she was released, she was asked to sign that she would not wear such a short uniform again. She tries to reach the family members in Iran, but the messages do not reach them. The meeting with the moral police did not put a stop to their afternoon together: quite the opposite. – It wasn’t until I came to Norway that I thought of this as abnormal. But it was so traumatizing for me. We laughed about it, but still I can remember the feelings I felt. – I think it’s because we were young. You know how it feels to be 20. Everything was fun for us. But it wasn’t fun at all, when I look back on it now. “Tortured like Sepideh, killed like Mahsa” For those who have plans to return to the country, it is dangerous to come forward by name when criticizing the regime. It is nevertheless important that Iranian women tell their stories, says Iranian journalist and human rights activist Moloud Hajizadeh. – We have to talk about it outside of Iran, because people in Iran cannot say anything. Hajizadeh still has friends who are journalists in his home country, and says they have seen people being killed in the open street during the demonstrations. These have now gone on for seven days. Moloud Hajizadeh is an Iranian journalist and human rights activist. Photo: Håkon Eliassen / news – A friend of mine took a picture of the hospital in Tehran and wrote an article about Mahsa. Yesterday he was arrested. We don’t know where she is now. According to her, the biggest cause of violence against Iranian women is the Iranian regime. – They are tortured like Sepideh, they are killed like Mahsa. In total, at least 50 people have been killed in the demonstrations over the past week, reports the Oslo-based human rights organization Iran Human Rights.
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Two Iranian women in Norway tell about meeting with the morality police – news Norway – Overview of news from different parts of the country
