Mr. Ali Khamenei,
Stop the killing of innocent people.
The blood of hundreds of thousands of Iranians grants no legitimacy to the Islamic Republic.
Blood does not create authority; it only deepens the fracture between state and society.
I never wished to address you directly. Not because I lacked words, but because I know that speaking to a leader who has, for years, refused to hear the voice of society does not alter his worldview or decisions. I write today because, as these lines are being written, the internet in Iran has once again been shut down — not to protect people, but to conceal nationwide, spontaneous protests and to continue repression in darkness.
Cutting communication is not a sign of strength. It is an admission of fear.
The more people are killed, the broader the demand for justice becomes. Every drop of blood creates dozens of new voices. Violence does not silence society; it multiplies it.
At the beginning of the 1979 revolution, blood was spilled and families were told it was for the future flourishing of Iran. Many, despite their grief, accepted the death of their loved ones as sacrifice for the nation. But today, what narrative remains?
A generation has been born and raised in the ruins of your decisions and those of your ideological allies. This generation has seen neither prosperity nor dignity, neither hope nor a future. It sees the world, compares, and lives every day with humiliation, poverty, and systematic blockage. It has been deprived of the most basic human rights and offered no horizon.
When a young person is killed today, what should their family say?
That their child lived under oppression, endured poverty and humiliation, saw no future for themselves or for their country, went to the streets for human dignity and for Iran — and was killed not by a foreign enemy, but by a government that claims to rule that very country?
Your rule has pushed society to the breaking point.
I write not as a distant observer, but as someone who has paid a personal price. I am a former political prisoner and spent three years incarcerated in Evin Prison. The wounds inflicted on my life by the structure of the Islamic Republic are not merely personal; they reflect a collective injury. If I were in Iran today, I would unquestionably be among the young people in the streets rising against you and against a system that has exhausted every moral justification for its existence.
Our pain is shared. And this pain cannot be erased by internet shutdowns, by labeling protesters as “rioters,” by lies, or by bullets.
As a human being who has suffered under this structure, my final words are simple:
Stop killing the youth of this country.
Return the administration of Iran to its people the rightful owners of this land, not its captors.
Written amid the nationwide protests across Iran.
Paris
