There are two types of resistance, says an activist in Tehran via an encrypted video connection. One can be suppressed, the other cannot. To test what type of resistance it is facing, the Iranian regime sometimes releases political prisoners on bail and then monitors them, the activist said. “Anyone who keeps a low profile will not have to go to jail again. But anyone who turns against the regime again will be severely punished.”
Iranian rapper Toomaj Salehi belongs to the second group, says the activist, who knows Salehi well and wants to remain anonymous for security reasons. The rapper was arrested in October 2022 for his fierce anti-regime music and participation in the mass protests following the death in detention of 22-year-old woman Mahsa Amini. He was held for more than a year, including 252 days in solitary confinement, the UN said. But when he was released on bail last fall, his resistance appeared not to have been broken.
On the contrary. Salehi immediately filed a complaint against the secret service for torture. He also published a video about his treatment during his arrest and imprisonment. In it he says, among other things, that his arms and legs were broken and that adrenaline was probably injected into him to keep him conscious so that he could feel the torture as much as possible. Despite that brutality, the rapper says proudly, he noticed that “70 to 80 percent” of the prison staff secretly support the uprising and are fans of his rap music.
“Even in prison, Toomaj continued to rap for his cellmates, despite the risks,” says the activist in Tehran. “He is not like many other activists, for whom resistance is something that you can pause. He is a full-time fighter with an extreme amount of courage.”
Capital punishment
For such types of resistance, the Islamic Republic always has an ultimate means of repression up its sleeve. On April 24, it was announced that Salehi, who was detained again after publishing his video message, had been sentenced to death by a court in Isfahan for “corruption on earth”, a vaguely defined charge that the regime often uses to get rid of opponents. clean up.
The verdict is all the more surprising because Iran’s Supreme Court had previously rejected that charge. The court in Isfahan subsequently sentenced Salehi to more than 6 years in prison last July, but after his re-arrest this fall, the same court suddenly claimed that the Supreme Court’s ruling was only an ‘advice’ and still issued a death sentence, Salehi’s lawyer told the court. BBC.
“Fortunately, no execution date has been set yet,” says Salehi’s uncle Eqbal Eqbali from Germany in a video call with NRC. “The lawyer has twenty days from the day of the verdict to appeal. He has good hopes, but in Iran the regime ultimately does what it wants. There is no functioning rule of law.”
The 67-year-old man has gray hair and is sitting in front of a full bookcase. He fled Iran in the 1980s and has not been able to meet his nephew, but since the verdict he has been speaking non-stop to the press, organizing demonstrations and lobbying German politicians. “Europe must put commercial and political pressure on the Iranian regime if it really wants to do something for the political prisoners. That’s the only way.”
It is already too late for nine other Iranians sentenced to death for their role in the 2022 protests, according to an April report by Amnesty International. In total, the Islamic Republic executed as many as 853 people in 2023, the highest number in eight years, according to the same report. This increase is mainly due to the tough crackdown on drug criminals (more than half of those executed) by the arch-conservative government of President Raisi.
But there is also a hardening of repression in Iran in many other respects. For example, Human Rights Watch documented increasing state violence against ethnic minorities such as the Kurds and the Baloch, which played a central role in the 2022 uprising. The Iranian parliament also passed a draconian new hijab law last fall. Women who are dressed ‘inappropriately’ can be punished with up to ten years in prison. Previously, the maximum prison sentence for this was two months.
In order to get the women who have removed their headscarves en masse since the 2022 protests back into line, the regime also announced ‘Operation Nour’ in April (nour means ‘light’ in Persian). “Since then, there have been many more police in squares and at metro entrances,” says the activist in Tehran. “If you don’t wear a hijab, you will be taken away. In practice, they often release you after a day or two, unless you resist.” The latter applies, for example, to Dina Ghalibaf, a student who reported on X that she was tasered and assaulted during her arrest, and ended up in the infamous Evin prison.
Is it a coincidence that Operation Nour began the same weekend that Iran fired drones and missiles into Israel? “If you put the pieces of the puzzle together, you see a connection,” says the activist. “The attack on Israel, the increased executions, the extra moral police on the streets: these are all ways in which the regime tries to convey that it is powerful. And in the meantime, the Iranian people are becoming increasingly poor.”
More radical and raw
The contrast between that poverty and the show of power of the Iranian elite is precisely the subject around which Toomaj Saleh’s music revolves. ‘Iran’s most famous rapper’, as BBC Persian calls him, comes from a very political family, lost his mother at a young age and says he worked in a steel factory. Compared to singers like Shervin Hajipour, who won a Grammy last year for his protest song Baraye and was sentenced to three years in prison in March, Salehi is even more radical and raw.
His biggest hit is the song Soorakh Moosh (Mouse Den), for which Salehi was briefly jailed in 2021. In it, he advises all accomplices of the Iranian regime abroad – he names lobbyists, journalists, directors and athletes, among others – to “collect their dollars and buy a mouse hole” in which to hide. “I’ll piss on your Oscar if you’re not on the side of the people,” Salehi raps. “If you cover your eyes, your hands are soaked in blood.”
During the massive protests of 2022, Salehi presented himself as a rapper of the revolution. In the song Meydoone Jang (Battlefield) he calls on his fellow citizens to take to the streets. “Come on, something is missing without you. It’s time to attack without fear,” he raps in a video clip that is plastered with images of the protests. “This is the day we settle scores with dictators. We see the light from this hell. No oppression, law, or execution can stop us.”
The song appears just before his arrest Faal (Divination). In the music video, Salehi sits at a table in the desert in a white outfit. Opposite him sits a man dressed in black who represents the Iranian regime. The man drinks a cup of coffee and lets Salehi look into the coffee grounds to read his future. “Your omens are drenched in blood and anger,” raps Salehi, who prophesies that a long line of ayatollahs and other regime henchmen will be punished by the ordinary Iranians they have oppressed all these years, including “a woman whose crime was she let her hair blow in the wind.”
Courage is contagious
Salehi’s strength, according to the activist in Tehran, is that he managed to encourage various layers of society to resist with his texts. “Everyone knows his numbers, from students to taxi drivers to market traders,” says the activist. “His music gives people courage, and that is exactly why the regime wants him dead. They know: courage is contagious.”
But fear is just as much. According to the activist, the extreme repression – more than 500 demonstrators have been killed and around 20,000 arrested since the 2022 protests – has meant that little is left of the hope of the time. There is no question of demonstrating and more and more women are starting to put on their headscarves again. Not everyone’s resistance is as unbreakable as Salehi’s.
Whether the activist himself has learned something from Salehi? It remains silent for a moment. “I often think about the song Sheen”, that’s what it sounds like. “It starts with the sentence: ‘a person is nothing without freedom.’ If you really let that sink in, you realize that an unfree life is not a life after all. Then you don’t have to be afraid of anything anymore.”
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