Germany – Süddeutsche Zeitung, November 01, 2024
There it was again, the silence on the phone that Mariam Claren dreads so much. No answer from her mother on Whatsapp, just a few days after the German-Iranian Jamshid Sharmahd was executed in Iran on Monday. What happened to her mother this time? Did they put her back in prison or even in solitary confinement? The constant fear has been there for four years. Since October 16, 2020, when the messages on Whatsapp stopped for the first time and her mother Nahid Taghavi was arrested in Iran.
At the age of 17, Taghavi went to Italy, where she studied architecture. She came to Germany in the 1980s and has held German as well as Iranian citizenship since 2003. She was arrested in Iran on October 16, 2020, and her daughter in Germany only found out about it two days later. She became skeptical when messages to her mother went unanswered. So Taghavi’s two brothers went in search of their mother and found a note in her apartment stating that Nahid Taghavi had been detained. “The first contact with her was only two weeks after her arrest,” Claren recalls. Her mother was able to talk to her brother on the phone for ten seconds.
Iran repeatedly imprisons dual nationals in order to exert pressure on their home countries
Today, the 44-year-old is sitting in her apartment in Cologne. Her mother is under house arrest with electronic shackles in her second home in Iran. Nahid Taghavi fought against the headscarf, for women’s rights and against the Shah’s regime. Today she is a political bargaining chip. The verdict: she had carried out propaganda against the state and founded an illegal group to endanger national security. After a show trial, she was sentenced to ten years and eight months in prison. The Islamic Republic repeatedly imprisons dual nationals, such as Nahid Taghavi, in order to exert pressure on their home countries.
What this power play looks like in its worst form was demonstrated at the beginning of this week when the execution of the German-Iranian Jamshid Sharmahd became public. Germany had previously repeatedly warned Iran of the possible consequences of his murder. The Mullah regime did not care, Jamshid Sharmahd was executed anyway.
“What does that mean for us?”
“I would never have thought that a German citizen could be murdered by the state,” says Mariam Claren. Claren was close friends with the daughter of Jamshid Sharmahd, who was killed. Together, the two women drew attention to the fate of their parents in Germany, going from ministry to ministry. “Now, after the execution, you naturally ask yourself: What does this mean for us? Is there even a plan, was there ever a plan to release the Germans? The protection that my mother thought she had because she is German is now gone,” she says resignedly.
