For those who knew him, Kianoush Sanjari was a polite, gentle man, deeply attached to Iran. At the age of 42, this human rights activist, blogger and journalist committed suicide on Wednesday, November 13, in protest against “the dictatorship” of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and “his allies”. In a message posted on X the day before, he wrote: “If by tomorrow at 7 p.m. [les prisonniers politiques] Fatemeh Sepehri, Nasrin Shahkarami, Arsham Rezaei et [le rappeur] Toomaj Salehi are not released, I will end my life in protest against the dictatorship of Khamenei and his allies. Let this be a wake-up call! Long live Iran! »
Despite this statement, the four prisoners were not released, and Kianoush Sanjari's desperate appeal provoked no official reaction in Iran. On November 13, at 7 p.m., he posted a photo taken from the balcony of a shopping center near Hafez Bridge in central Tehran, with these words: “My life will end after this tweet. But let us not forget that we give our lives for love of life, not for death. May Iranians wake up and defeat slavery! »
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The suicide of Kianoush Sanjari – whose successive arrests had raised public awareness – caused a shock wave on Iranian social networks, where many see it as a symbol of the impasse, despair and distress of opponents in Iran .
Accused of “propaganda against the regime”
Arrested for the first time at the age of 16, during the student protests of 1999, Kianoush Sanjari then spent several months in solitary confinement before being released. In 2007, after another arrest, he fled clandestinely to Iraqi Kurdistan, before obtaining political asylum in Norway, then in the United States, where he worked for the Persian service of Voice of America (VOA).
In October 2016, despite warnings from his friends and several NGOs, he returned to Iran to care for his elderly and sick mother. A few weeks later, he was arrested again and sentenced to five years in prison, six years suspended and a two-year ban on leaving the country for “assembly and conspiracy, propaganda against the regime and membership in an illegal group”.
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Released in March 2022 after three years of imprisonment, Kianoush Sanjari left Iran again, this time for the United States, but difficulties forced him to return to his country, where he was briefly incarcerated, in June 2022, before being released. In November 2022, in the midst of a wave of protests after the death of Mahsa (Jina) Amini, he was arrested again for his publications criticizing the Islamic Republic.
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