The Murder of Jina Twice Over: Persian Chauvinism, Western Complicity, and the Pathology of an Erasure
7 March 2026
What was missing in Geneva was not passion, nor applause, nor the usual upholstered indignation of the international human-rights circuit. What was missing was truth. Not the decorative truth of slogans translated for Western comfort, but the inconvenient one: that Jina was not “Mahsa,” that Jin, Jiyan, Azadî did not fall from the sky, and that a revolution born in Kurdish pain was repackaged as a safe Persian-national fable. This essay is about that second murder—of a name, a language, a people—and about the vulgar ease with which both Iranian dissidents and their Western admirers colluded in the erasure. Geneva praised freedom. It forgot who first paid for it.
The 2026 Geneva Summit for Human Rights and Democracy, while draped in the sanctimonious aesthetics of global solidarity and the high-minded rhetoric of universal liberation, functioned as a sophisticated laboratory for the erasure of Kurdish identity and the strategic appropriation of a radical revolutionary movement. Beneath the high-wattage spotlights of the international stage, prominent Iranian dissidents and their Western hosts engaged in a performative act of linguistic and political sanitization that borders on the pathological. By systematically stripping the slogan Jin, Jiyan, Azadî of its Kurdish origins and transforming the martyr Jina Amini into the sanitized, state-approved “Mahsa,” the summit participants did more than simply ignore a minority; they actively reinforced the same ethno-nationalist framework that has historically justified the suppression, militarization, and execution of the Kurdish people. The summit was a site of Persian chauvinism and Western complicity, demonstrating how the uniform Iranian identity touted by dissidents remains a weapon of state-supporter violence, whether wielded by a cleric in a turban or a monarchist eyeing a crown.
The Linguistic Colonization of a Revolutionary Cry
The most visible act of appropriation at the 2026 Geneva Summit was the repetitive, almost rhythmic, invocation of the slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom.” While presented as a universal manifesto for democracy, this English translation—and its Persian counterpart, Zan, Zendegī, Āzādī—serves a specific, insidious function: to sever the movement from its radical genealogy and its rootedness in the Kurdish freedom struggle. The slogan Jin, Jiyan, Azadî did not emerge from a vacuum of generalized Iranian discontent; it is the distilled product of four decades of specific, organized Kurdish resistance against multiple occupying states. Rooted in the political philosophy of Jineology and the theoretical framework developed by the Kurdish freedom movement, the slogan represents a rejection of both the patriarchal state and the specific “internal and external patriarchal colonization” of Kurdistan.
By presenting “Woman, Life, Freedom” as the primary identity of the movement without acknowledging its Kurdish provenance, speakers like Masih Alinejad and Alice Teodorescu Måwe participate in a form of intellectual and political theft. This is not a mere matter of translation; it is an act of linguistic colonization. In the Kurdish language, the words Jin (woman) and Jiyan (life) share the same root, signifying a profound ontological connection between female liberation and the vitality of the community—a nuance that is utterly lost in the sanitized Persian and English iterations. When the Geneva stage echoes with the translated slogan, it effectively mutes the voices of the women in Bakur, Rojava, and Rojhelat who formulated this cry as a direct challenge to the nation-state models that the Geneva dissidents largely hope to inherit and re-impose, rather than dismantle.
The hypocrisy is particularly acute when Western hosts, such as MEP Alice Teodorescu Måwe, frame the movement as a “manifesto” for the future of Iran while their own governments continue to criminalize the very organizations from which the slogan originated. Måwe’s description of courage as a “footnote to fear” reveals the Eurocentric “diplomacy of comfort” at play: for the Kurdish women who birthed this movement, their struggle is not a footnote, but the main text written in blood. Thus, the Geneva Summit becomes a space where the aesthetics of Kurdish resistance and struggle are consumed as a commodity, while the actual Kurdish activists are marginalized, jailed, or targeted by the same geopolitical interests sponsoring the event. This appropriation is a form of epistemic violence that erases the struggle of Kurdish women who turned death into a weapon of resistance at Jina’s funeral in Seqqiz.
The transition from Jin to Zan is not a neutral shift in vocabulary; it is a shift in power. By adopting the Persian translation as the “official” version, the Iranian opposition in exile signals its commitment to a Persian-centric state where the Kurdish language remains a “minority” tongue to be translated or tolerated, rather than a primary site of revolutionary thought. This linguistic erasure is the first step toward political erasure, allowing the dissidents to claim the “unity of the Iranian people,” as if there is only one people within the imperial borders of Iran, while ignoring the specific, dignity-demanding aspirations that have defined Kurdish politics for a century.
Jina versus “Mahsa”
The summit’s central narrative revolved around the figure of “Mahsa” Amini, a name that has become globally synonymous with the 2022 uprising. However, this name itself is an artifact of state-mandated erasure, a legal mask forced upon a Kurdish family by a regime that refuses to recognize Kurdish identity. Jina Amini was a Kurdish woman from Seqqiz, and her family and friends knew her by her Kurdish name, Jina. The name “Mahsa” was a bureaucratic necessity, a Persian label required by the National Organization for Civil Registration, which bans names deemed “unorthodox” or “foreign,” including many native Kurdish names.
For the speakers in Geneva to insist on using “Mahsa” while omitting Jina is to align themselves with the naming laws of the Islamic Republic they claim to oppose. This refusal to Say Her Name—her real, Kurdish name—is a performance of Persian chauvinism that sanitizes the victim to make her more palatable to a centralized Persian nationalist narrative. By stripping Jina of her Kurdish identity, the dissidents at the summit suggest that her ethnicity was “irrelevant” to her murder, a claim that ignores the systemic reality of discrimination where Kurds comprise only ten percent of the population but often nearly half of the political prisoner population.
Jina’s death was not a generic tragedy; it was a Kurdish tragedy. She was arrested in Tehran by the morality police who targeted her not only for her “improper” hijab but also, as witnesses suggest, because her Kurdish accent and her province of origin marked her as a subaltern who could be treated with extrajudicial brutality. To erase her Kurdishness is to erase the motive of the crime. The dissidents at the Geneva Summit, by centering “Mahsa,” attempt to relocate the heart of the revolution from the periphery to the center, thereby maintaining the dominance of a Persian-centric “national” identity. They treat Jina as a “national” martyr while ignoring the fact that her death struck a chord in a decades-long movement among Kurds against the killing of Kurdish women specifically.
The erasure of Jina is a strategic choice designed to facilitate a “unified” front that does not have to reckon with the demands of the Kurdish people for self-determination. If she is “Mahsa,” she belongs to everyone; if she is Jina, she belongs to a history of Kurdish resistance that the Iranian center has always viewed with suspicion, suppression and fear. By sanitizing her name, the Geneva speakers like Alinejad ensure that the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement is seen as a struggle for civil rights within a unified Iran, rather than a decolonial struggle for the liberation of Kurdistan. While Alinejad used the summit to name “generic” martyrs like Muhammad Jabari—the 20-year-old firefighter—to bolster a unified narrative, Jina’s specific identity was sacrificed to make her memory safe for a centralized nationalist agenda that views Kurdish dignity and self-rule as a threat.
The Uniform Iranian Identity as a State Weapon
The rhetoric of a “unified Iranian identity” championed at the 2026 Geneva Summit is a historical continuation of state violence rather than a departure from it. As established in my article, “Trading the Turban for a Crown,” there is a “unified reflex” shared by both the current theocratic regime and the pro-Pahlavi monarchists: the violent, scorched-earth suppression of the Kurdish people in the name of “territorial integrity.” This reflex is rooted in the early 20th-century state-building projects of Reza Shah, whose emphasis on building a “uniform nation” through military-style leadership effectively shifted the nature of Iranian nationalism from a domain of independent political activity to a top-down state-led project.
The construction of “national” identity in Iran has been an increasingly problematic task because it necessitates the erasure of the multi-ethnic and multi-cultural structure of the society. Both the Pahlavi monarchy and the Islamic Republic have refused to recognize the legitimate rights of ethnic groups like the Kurds, Arabs, Balochs, and Turkmen, perceiving their demands for autonomy as instruments of “separatism.” When dissidents on the Geneva stage speak of a “brave Iranian people” standing ready to leap together, they are invoking a homogenized identity that has historically been used to justify the execution, marginalization, and militarization of Kurds. This toxicity was vividly illustrated by the testimony of Marzieh Hammed, an Afghan born in Iran who described being treated as “temporary, repressible, and invisible.
This centralized nationalist ideology creates a continuum of suppression where the “uniform Iranian identity” acts as a weapon. The Pahlavi regime’s division of Kurdistan into unviable administrative units attached to adjacent provinces was a calculated move to deprive the region of its territorial and political unity. The Islamic Republic continued this policy by treating Kurdish provinces as “security zones,” subjecting them to higher rates of arrest, torture, and execution. When Masih Alinejad and other dissidents use the Geneva platform to call for a “unified fight” for “all Iranian women’s rights,” they are effectively asking Kurds to once again set aside their specific national and cultural grievances for a “greater” Iranian imperial cause that has never truly served them.
The Unified Reflex
The 2026 Geneva Summit provided a platform for narratives that conflate the struggle for human rights with the preservation of a centralized state structure. This is evident in the alignment between the rhetoric of contemporary dissidents and the historical policies of the Pahlavi dynasty. Both frameworks prioritize “tamamiat-e arzi” (territorial integrity) over the lived reality of the various ethnic nations within Iran. When Reza Pahlavi, who is frequently promoted by these circles, refers to territorial integrity as his “absolute red line,” he is signaling to the Kurdish community that any move toward genuine self-determination will be met with the same state hostility that characterizes the current regime. Pahlavi’s dismissal of Kurdish demands as “baseless and vulgar” and his decree that “territorial integrity” is a “red line” is a promise of future violence. This is echoed by Saeed Bashirtash of the far-right 7 Aban Front, who labeled Kurdish parties as “war criminals” who will be “tried in court.”
This shared reflex manifests in the way the summit participants framed the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement. Rather than viewing it as a federation of struggles—where the Kurdish struggle against ethno-nationalist erasure is a central pillar—it was framed as a monolithic “Iranian” struggle led by the center. This framing allows the dissidents to appeal to Western audiences by presenting a simplified “good vs. evil” narrative (The Iranian “People” vs. The Regime), while obscuring the complex internal hierarchies and racism that the Kurdish movement actually challenges.
The “unified reflex” is also visible in the silence regarding the militarization of Rojhelat. While the summit condemned the Islamic Republic’s brutality, it did not address the specific state of exception that exists in Kurdish regions, where the presence of the IRGC and the Ministry of Intelligence is a permanent, pervasive feature of daily life. By failing to differentiate the Kurdish experience of the regime from the broader “Iranian” experience, the summit participants effectively erased the disproportionate violence directed at Kurds. This is not an accident; it is a continuation of a century-long policy of treating the “periphery” as a threat to the “center.”
The Reality of Suppression
While the dissidents in Geneva received awards for their “courage” and “manifestos,” the Kurds in Rojhelat were facing an intensified campaign of state terror that far exceeds the national average in its brutality. The statistics from late 2024 and throughout 2025 provide a devastating contrast to the performative solidarity on the Geneva stage. By November 2025, human rights organizations documented over 1,500 executions in Iran—the highest figure in decades—with Kurds accounting for at least 231 of those victims. This disproportionate share of victims, given the Kurdish population size, underscores the regime’s use of the death penalty as a tool to specifically intimidate the Kurdish community following the Jin, Jiyan, Azadî uprising.
In November 2025 alone, Iranian security forces carried out sweeping arbitrary arrests of Kurdish activists and ordinary citizens, often holding them incommunicado and denying them access to legal counsel. The Ministry of Intelligence and the IRGC targeted anyone deemed a dissident, leading to waves of enforced disappearances. This reality of state-sponsored kidnapping and murder is the backdrop against which the Geneva Summit’s “celebration of democracy” must be viewed. The summit’s failure to center these specific, ongoing Kurdish atrocities is a moral failure that exposes the shallow nature of its advocacy.
The execution of Kurdish prisoners like Mohammadkarim Moradi and Reza Rasaei—a protester from the Yarsani faith executed without prior notice to his family—serves as a stark reminder of the “unified reflex” of the state. These men were not just “Iranians”; they were members of marginalized communities whose specific identities made them targets for the regime’s most lethal forms of repression. When the Geneva speakers speak of “Mahsa” as a symbol of all Iranians, they erase the specific religious and ethnic marginalization that led to the execution of people like Rasaei, whose arrest in 2022 during protests in Shahriar was followed by years of dubious legal proceedings and final secrecy in his execution.
The Western Mirage and the West Coast Bikini
The appropriation of the Kurdish movement is not limited to Iranian dissidents; it is enabled by a Western host culture that prefers a “sanitized” and “glamorous” version of feminism over the grit of mountain resistance. As noted by observers and the foundational critique established in my text, there is a fundamental disconnect between the performative activism of the diaspora—often characterized by Pahlavi-aligned women on the West coasts of the U.S. using the movement for social status—and the lived reality of Kurdish women who pioneered the struggle.
The defining truth of this movement is that Jin, Jiyan, Azadî was started by Kurdish women, in a Kurdish city, after a Kurdish life was taken away by the state. It was not a product of the affluent diaspora or the “Pahlavi women in West coasts of the U.S. in bikinis” who now use the slogan to garner applause at summits. This contrast highlights the profound hypocrisy of a “democracy summit” that elevates figures who have never faced the barrel of an IRGC rifle while silencing those who are currently being executed in prisons like Dizelabad or Orumiyeh.
The Western media’s fascination with Kurdish female fighters—often depicting them as “glamorous pistol divas”—further co-opts their identity, creating a “static and summative signifier” that strips them of their political depth and the poetic way Kurdish culture views itself. In Geneva, this co-option reaches its peak: the Kurdish woman is used as a mascot for a revolution, while her name, her language, and her political demands for self-determination are systematically excluded from the platform. The “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement as presented in Geneva is a mirage—a projection of Western and Persian liberal desires that refuses to reckon with the anti-state, and pro-Kurdish roots of the actual uprising.
The Kurdish Exclusion
During the summit, speakers like Masih Alinejad and Leopoldo López emphasized the concept of “Autocracy Inc,” a strategic alliance between Iran, Venezuela, Russia, and China to suppress dissent globally. While the analysis of transnational repression is valid—highlighting how the Iranian regime hunts critics abroad through kidnapping plots and assassination attempts—the speakers used this framework to further homogenize the “Iranian” struggle. By framing the conflict as a global battle between “Autocracy” and “Secular Democracy,” the specific internal colonial dynamics within Iran were once again sidelined. López’s appeal for dissidents to become “brothers and sisters” regardless of history functions as a shroud, concealing the distinct, localized traumas of the Kurdish people under a blanket of national uniformity.
The summit participants voiced extreme frustration with the United Nations for giving the Islamic Republic seats on human rights boards, yet they themselves practiced a form of exclusion that mirrors the regime’s own. They criticized the regime for its “war on women” but remained silent on the regime’s specific war on Kurdish women, such as the death sentences handed to Pakhshan Azizi and Verisheh Moradi in 2024 and 2025. Pakhshan Azizi, a Kurdish political prisoner, was sentenced to death in July 2024 on charges of “armed rebellion against the state” after being denied access to a lawyer and family visits during four months of interrogation. These women represent the true vanguard of the Jin, Jiyan, Azadî movement, yet their names and their specific Kurdish political affiliations were largely absent from the high-level addresses in Geneva.
This selective solidarity demonstrates that for the Geneva dissidents, the Kurdish question is only useful as a rhetorical flourish. When the reality of Kurdish political resistance—which often involves decentralized, grassroots, and even armed struggle—clashes with the dissidents’ desire for a “peaceful,” “unified,” and “centralized” transition to a new Iranian state, the Kurdish voice is immediately suppressed. The “transnational repression” narrative thus becomes a way to appeal to American and European security interests while avoiding the uncomfortable truth that a truly democratic Iran would require a radical redistribution of power away from the Persian center and toward the marginalized provinces like Rojhelat and Baluchistan.
Historical Continuity of Centralist Nationalism
To understand the hypocrisy of the Geneva Summit, one must look at the long history of Iranian state-building, which has consistently relied on the “othering” of the Kurds. Since the Constitutional Revolution of 1906, contested conceptions of nationhood have existed in Iran, but the state has consistently trended toward a homogenizing understanding of identity. Successive governments, whether monarchist or religious, have refused to recognize the multi-ethnic structure of Iranian society. This is not merely a political choice; it is a structural necessity for a centralized state that fears the territorial and political unity of Kurdistan.
The Pahlavi era was defined by “military-style leadership” that aimed to do away with ethnic, linguistic, and religious diversity completely through assimilation into a homogenized “Iranian” identity. This legacy is what I refer to as “the Crown,” and it shares a “unified reflex” with “the Turban”—the Islamic Republic’s use of religious identity to achieve the same homogenizing goals. The dissidents in Geneva, by invoking “Woman, Life, Freedom” as an Iranian-only slogan and “Mahsa” as an Iranian-only victim, are simply the latest iteration of this project. They are trading the turban for a crown, but the head underneath remains committed to the same centralized, ethno-nationalist ideology.
The “uniform Iranian identity” is a weapon because it denies the legitimacy of any identity that cannot be subsumed into the “national” whole. This is why the demand for a “uniform nation” during Reza Shah’s reign (1925–1941) necessitated the establishment of a state-led project that suppressed independent political activity. Today, the dissidents at the Geneva Summit are attempting to recreate this state-led project in exile, using the “Woman, Life, Freedom” slogan as their primary tool of co-option. They are building a “democratic” vision that is fundamentally anti-democratic because it excludes the very people who started the revolution they claim to lead. History provides a reliable roadmap for how the central state reacts to Kurdish autonomy during power transitions: In 1941, the transition of power led to the betrayal of local agreements and the summary execution of Kurdish leaders to crush autonomous movements. In 1979, following the revolution, a jihādist war was declared against the Kurds, using “hanging judges” like Khalkhali to conduct mass executions. Throughout the 1980s, the state utilized the Iran-Iraq war as cover to militarize Kurdish lands and wage scorched-earth campaigns against political opposition.
The Specificity of Kurdish Marginalization
The erasure on display in Geneva is particularly egregious because it ignores the empirical reality of Kurdish life in Iran. Kurdish people comprise only about 10-12% of the population, yet they are among the most impoverished and face the most severe internet restrictions and security crackdowns. In 2025, while the Geneva Summit participants were enjoying the “diplomacy of comfort,” Kurdish kolbers (cross-border porters) were being shot and killed by direct fire from the IRGC. In July 2025 alone, six kolbers were killed and six injured, most of them in the Senna Province border region.
This violence is part of a broader pattern of state brutality that targets Kurds not just as protesters, but as Kurds. The mass arbitrary detentions in 2025—which saw at least 822 Kurdish individuals arrested in the first half of the year—reflect an enduring state policy of repressing dissent and intimidating minority communities. These detentions are often accompanied by reports of torture or coerced confessions, and arrestees are denied access to lawyers and family. By failing to mention these specific atrocities, the Geneva Summit participants allowed the Iranian regime to maintain its “security” narrative, while the dissidents maintained their “unity” narrative. Both narratives require the silence of the Kurd.
Furthermore, the “uniform Iranian identity” touted in Geneva ignores the distinct differences between the Kurdish and Iranian accents and the systemic discrimination that flows from these markers of identity. Jina’s brother told the police they weren’t from Tehran when he pleaded for mercy, yet his plea was ignored because being “not from Tehran”—being from Kurdistan—marks a person as inherently suspicious in the eyes of the state. To erase this aspect of the story is to perform a profound act of Persian racism that sanitizes the state’s violence.
The Moral Necessity of Restoring Jina
The 2026 Geneva Summit was a masterclass in ethno-nationalist erasure. By sanitizing Jina into Mahsa, and Jin, Jiyan, Azadî into “Woman, Life, Freedom,” the participants performed a profound disservice to the movement they claimed to champion. They reinforced the “uniform Iranian identity” that has served as a prerequisite for Kurdish slaughter for over a century, proving that their vision for a “New Iran” is one where the Kurdish people remain a subaltern class, their language marginalized and their history rewritten by the center.
There can be no genuine “Woman, Life, Freedom” without the restoration of the Jin, Jiyan, Azadî from which it was stolen. To speak of democracy while erasing the Kurdish roots of the revolution is a contradiction that borders on the pathological. The dissidents at the summit must be put to shame for their willingness to trade the radical potential of a multi-ethnic, decentralized uprising for the comfort of a centralized nationalist narrative that mirrors the exact same ethno-nationalism they claim to be fighting.
The lived reality of the Kurds—the 231 executed in 2025, the kolbers shot on the border, and the activists like Pakhshan Azizi and Verisheh Moradi facing the gallows—demands more than performative applause in a Swiss ballroom. It demands an unapologetic recognition of Jina’s Kurdish identity and an end to the “unified reflex” of the centralized Iranian state. Until the “crown” and the “turban” are both recognized as symbols of the same exclusionary project, the cry of Jin, Jiyan, Azadî will remain an unfulfilled promise, a revolutionary spirit held hostage by those who fear its true, radical meaning. For any Iranian opposition to claim legitimacy, it must satisfy three critical demands for accountability: First, a commitment to federalism and a radical rejection of the centralized model that facilitates ethnic suppression. This must include the implementation of monitored safe corridors to protect refugees from military strikes. Second, the recognition of Kurdish identity and language, demanding an official end to the sanitization of Kurdish figures and names. The world must fund initiatives to preserve Kurdish language and history against systemic erasure. Third, a rejection of racist, centralized rhetoric and a definitive break from “red line” ideologies. International observers must be deployed to ethnic fault lines, such as the Urmia-Piranshahr-Mehabad triangle, to prevent the localized massacres that follow central power shifts.
The mountains of Kurdistan remember Jina, even if the stages of Geneva choose to forget her. Remember: Jin, Jiyan, Azadî was started by Kurdish women, in a Kurdish city, after a Kurdish female life was taken away by the state. It was not started by Pahlavi women in the West coasts of the U.S. in bikinis. Any movement that seeks to inherit the future of the region must start by honoring the names banned by the regime and centering the liberation of the very people who first dared to chant those three miraculous words. Until then, the Geneva Summit remains nothing more than a theater of appropriation, a gilded cage for a revolution that belongs to the mountains.
