A search online shows people questioning if she even existed, at the same time that video of U.S. Republican congressman Thaddeus McCotter condemning her rapists and murderers pfarrerstreccius.blogspot.com/2009/07/thaddeus-mccotter-speaking-on-taraneh.html went into circulation. British newspaper The Guardian, always careful in sourcing its reports, lists her on its Faces of the dead and detained www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2009/jun/29/iran-election-dead-detained.
The Iranian regime became notorious in the 1980s for raping young Baha’i women before shooting them, on the grounds that executing a virgin was against sharia. Likewise, more recently, the Iranian-Canadian photojournalist Zahra Kazemi was reportedly raped during the beatings that led to her death. The idea that a young woman would suffer like this in detention is no stretch. Rape as a tool of intimidation through abuse has long been practised in Iran’s prisons.
For now, the Iranian government has managed to censor most reports coming out of the country, as well as, for domestic consumption, questioning the whole basis of the protests after the election. Exactly what the reactions were to Hashemi Rafsanjani’s criticisms at the Friday prayers on July 17 www.asharq-e.com/news.asp?section=2&id=17590 is still unknown, but they were very pointed remarks, and must have stung their targets in the regime’s leadership. The debate, while concealed from us behind official bluster and threats of trials for demonstrators, is still very active.
Amid all this, Taraneh remains an enigma, and one compounded by her sharing a last name with the losing presidential candidate, Mir Hossein Mousavi. Some bloggers questioned her existence: plaridel.wordpress.com/2009/07/25/is-the-taraneh-mousavi-story-a-hoax; another iranian009.blogfa.com/post-34.aspx provided anonymous biographical details.
My own view is that she was a real person, and her photo was not appropriated, if only because there was nothing to gain from faking her existence after the Neda Agha-Soltan killing had already provoked outrage.
Initially, I was bothered by what I have to term martyred sex-symbols: beautiful young Iranians who achieved brief fame in western media, to be forgotten as interest faded and the next crisis grabbed the headlines. But the deaths of these photogenic young people seems to have done something that no amount of pleading or explication has done before: they have made the Iranian people human to the outside world. It is one thing to speak of attacking or nuking a regime. It is another matter to do that to a nation whose young people have bled for values not far from our own, and whose names are known.
Iran is still in a grim condition, and posing grim problems from a western standpoint. But there is, after three decades, a sense in outside countries that Iran is not solely a theocracy, a menace or even a regime. It’s a nation of people, and not all of them seek spiritual or armed conflict with the rest of the world.