In Paris, several hundred people took part in a rally in Place de la République, waving numerous Iranian flags and placards with slogans such as “Women, life, freedom”, according to the count of an AFP journalist.
“I think there is a real revolution and I think they will come to freedom,” Mahtab Ghorbani, 39, a writer exiled in France for five years and one of the organizers of this gathering.
In Toulouse, they were about 150 to parade. Armed with Iranian flags, the demonstrators formed a human chain while chanting “Women, life, freedom”, noted an AFP journalist.
In Lyon, around 250 people, according to the Rhône prefecture, answered the call of the Collective of former students of Lyon and took part in a march starting from Place Bellecour. They held up placards “Solidarity for freedom”, “We are all in revolt”, “
For the demonstrators in the capital of Gaul, it is a question of “telling” the French government to “put pressure” on the Iranian regime.
“We want France to think more about human rights than economic interests,” Saeed Shafiei, 47, a member of the Collective, told AFP. For this Franco-Iranian doctoral student at the Institute of Political Studies (IEP) in Lyon, “the Iranian diasporas in France must give energy”, to those who have been fighting for “43 days” against a “totalitarian and repressive”, “murderer of more than 200 Iranian brothers and sisters” but above all that “foreign powers act”.
In Iran, since the death on September 16 of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian Kurd, the protest, led in particular by women, has not weakened. Mahsa Amini died three days after she was arrested in Tehran by morality police who accused her of breaking the Islamic Republic’s strict dress code.
To the initial slogan of “women, life, freedom” were added, over the course of demonstrations, however harshly repressed, slogans openly directed against the Islamic Republic founded in 1979.
