To those who knew him, Kianoush Sanjari was an educated and kind man, deeply attached to Iran. At 42 years old, 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: “Yes tomorrow at 7 pm [les prisonniers politiques] Fatemeh Sepehri, Nasrin Shahkarami, Arsham Rezaei and [le rappeur] Toomaj Salehi is 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 did not provoke any official reaction in Iran. On November 13, at 7 p.m., he posted a photograph taken from the balcony of a shopping center near the 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 the love of life, not for death. Let the Iranians wake up and defeat slavery! »
The suicide of Kianoush Sanjari, whose successive arrests had raised public awareness, caused commotion on Iranian social networks, where many see him as a symbol of the impasse, desperation and anguish of opponents in Iran.
Accused of “propaganda against the regime”
First arrested at age 16 during the 1999 student protests, Kianoush Sanjari 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 and then in the United States, where he worked for the Voice of America (VOA) Persian service.
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 of suspension from office and two years of prohibition from leaving the country for “meeting and conspiracy, anti-regime propaganda and membership in an illegal group”.
Released in March 2022 after three years in prison, Kianoush Sanjari left Iran again, this time for the United States, but difficulties forced him to return to his country, where he was briefly imprisoned, in June 2022, before being released. . In November 2022, amid a wave of protests following the death of Mahsa (Jina) Amini, he was arrested again for his publications critical of the Islamic Republic.
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