On July 14, 2020, Kurdish language teacher and civil society activist, Zara (also Zahra) Mohammadi was sentenced to 10 years in prison by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Courts. Zara was first arrested in her hometown Sine (also known as Sanandaj), in the Kurdistan Province of Iran, on 23 May 2019. Prior to her arrest, she had been subject to several lengthy interrogations by Iran’s Intelligence Organization of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. She was later released on bail in December 2, 2019, after some six months in prison, where she said she endured Kafkaesque interrogations and was tortured to make false “confessions.”
What was Zara’s ‘crime’? Teaching Kurdish, her mother tongue. The 10 year verdict was precisely calculated by the Islamic revolutionary judge: each year of teaching was punished by a year of imprisonment.
In a video shared on her Instagram page after the verdict, Zara described her crimes as “teaching her mother tongue, distributing chocolates on the street for International Mother Language Day, and helping the victims of flooding in Luristan.” Defending her activities as “humanitarian,” she called on the court to provide any evidence documenting that she had worked for any purposes other than empowering marginalized members of Iran’s Kurdish minority and teaching her mother tongue.
