On March 8, International Women’s Day, a video uploaded to the TikTok social network shows five young women dancing to the global hit “Calm Down” in a residential area of Tehran.
In this video, they don’t wear a veil, but rather a crop top that reveals their bellies and dance in public. Three things that are prohibited in Iran. Although this video has gone viral and has gone around the world, for a few days the fate of these young women has been worrying.
apology video
On Tuesday, activist accounts claimed they were arrested, detained for two days and forced to record a video expressing their sorrow.
According to them, the authorities would have gone to the Ekbatan district, where the video was taken, to view the surveillance videos to identify the young women and find them.
The allegedly forced video shows four women, now veiled, taking turns apologizing. However, the authenticity of the video or the recording conditions could not be verified.
resistance symbol
As a show of support, many Iranian women have posted videos on social networks where they reproduce this choreography to this very song, which has become a symbol of resistance.
The Nigerian rapper Rema, behind the song, also wanted to send a message to these women. “To all the beautiful women who fight for a better world, you are an inspiration, I sing to you and dream with you”, wrote in a tweet.
Iran has been rocked for six months by large, heavily suppressed demonstrations sparked by the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini. This young Kurdish man had been arrested by the moral police for an alleged violation of the dress code for women.
Since then, the forms of mobilization have multiplied and diversified. “It is not a question of challenging the regime head-on with the slogan ‘Down with the dictatorship’, but of expressing the desire for freedom of the body. There is an intimate intertwining between existential freedom and political freedom,” Farhad Khosrokhavar, sociologist, explains to franceinfo and director of studies emeritus of the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS).
Last January, a couple of influencers were sentenced to 10 and a half years in prison by the Tehran Revolutionary Court for posting a video of them dancing in the center of the capital.
Source: BFM TV
