«This is the result of life in this country… What can we say?». You cannot see the face of the speaker, but it is enough to hear his voice and see the images he takes: in a video circulating on social networks, the destruction of the family home of the Iranian climber Elnaz Rekabi is denounced. The young girl first came to prominence last fall when she competed bareheaded, without a headscarf, in South Korea at the Asian Sport Climbing Championships.
In the video, also shown by one of the dissident sites, Iranwire, we see the demolished house and several medals thrown on the ground. Rekabi’s brother, Davood – also a climbing champion and indeed the one who introduced his sister to the sport – crying in the rubble is also filmed.
It is unclear when the demolition took place. The sensational gesture of Rekabi, in South Korea, had had a worldwide resonance and had been read as support for the protests that began in mid-September, in the country, over the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, after the arrest by the police of the morale for not wearing his hijab properly. Rekabi, when she returned to Tehran, had released a statement considered by many to be suspicious, in which she explained that the hijab had fallen off her “inadvertently”.
Today the Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, addressed a thought to Iranian women: «We cannot pretend not to see what has been happening in recent months to the women and young people who demonstrate in Iran. Eroding spaces of freedom or preventing women and girls from accessing work and education – and here I am thinking above all of Afghanistan – means placing a mortgage on the future of those countries. There is no future without the recognition of fundamental freedoms and without the guarantee of equal dignity among all human beings”.