Back in Tehran, the regime tried to buy off Ms Soltan’s parents by promising them a pension if they agreed that their daughter was a “martyr” killed by foreign agents.
Her mother, Hajar Rostami Motlagh, was outraged. “Neda died for her country, not so that I could get a monthly income from the Martyr Foundation,” she said. “If these officials say Neda was a martyr, why do they keep wiping off the word ‘martyr’ in red which people write on her gravestone? … Even if they give the world to me I will never accept the offer.”
Soon afterwards, government supporters desecrated her grave…
Six months on, it is obvious that Ms Soltan did not die in vain. The manner of her death, and the regime’s response, has shredded what little legitimacy it had left. She helped to inspire an opposition movement that is now led by her generation, which a systematic campaign of arrests, show trials, beatings, torture and security force violence has failed to crush, and whose courage and defiance has won the admiration of the world.
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