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100 days after the death of Jina Mahsa Amini: Tehran in crisis
A protester holds a photo of the dead Kurdish Jina Mahsa Amini in Berlin.
Annette Riedl/dpa
December 25, 2022 at 5:15 am
The death of Jina Mahsa Amini in police custody has shocked people across the world and has plunged the Islamic Republic into the biggest political crisis in decades. What have the protests achieved so far?
When the young Iranian Kurdish girl Jina Mahsa Amini was dying in a hospital for 100 days, many people in Iran were already suspicious. A photo showing the 22-year-old with a ventilation tube and eyes closed in an intensive care unit in the capital Tehran is spreading rapidly.
Many people already assume that Amini must have suffered violence after his arrest by the moral guards. The notorious morality police had taken the student away just three days earlier because of an ill-fitting scarf. She dies, and the day after her death, anger and grief erupt into a first manifestation. Starting in Amini’s home province of Kurdistan, the protests are spreading like wildfire across the country.
Three months of protests and civil disobedience
For more than three months, people from different walks of life and generations have been demonstrating against the repressive policies and system of the Islamic Republic. The security apparatus reacted with extreme severity, more than 500 protesters have already been killed, according to human rights activists.
Protest supporters sometimes defend themselves violently. Even though street protests have subsided somewhat recently following the government’s actions, many pundits and observers are now talking of a revolutionary movement.
Fatemeh Shams, an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania, in the United States, describes the protests as the biggest challenge to the core of the current regime and its ideology in the last 43 years. She sees a lot of resentment behind the demonstrations. I don’t think they realized how much they had lost touch with real society, with real people, with the new generation. And being confronted with this was a huge shock for her.
Street protests are accompanied by creative protest and civil disobedience – protesters, for example, push mullahs’ turbans, fill public fountains with fake blood or stain posters of influential statesmen with red paint.
Political leadership in Tehran follows an iron course
The Islamic Republic’s leadership continues to take a hard line against the protesters. In Kurdish areas, for example, the Revolutionary Guards and the notorious Basij militias used live ammunition in armored vehicles to fight the uprisings. Numerous prominent athletes, artists and actresses who sympathize with the protests are summoned, interrogated and arrested. Tehran talks of a foreign conspiracy and blames its archenemies, the US and Israel, for the crisis.
Politicians from the reformist camp, like former President Mohammed Chatami, are trying to criticize the government’s repressive course. But many young protesters reject even more moderate leaders as men of the system. No words of reconciliation can be heard from the political leadership itself.
There is a misconception among Western politicians that reformist parties fought for women’s rights. This is wrong, says Shams. She points out that a law establishing the notorious Morality Police was passed under Khatami.
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International reactions and solidarity
From the outset, the protests were accompanied by a broad wave of international solidarity. Above all, the large Iranian community abroad supports criticism of the government’s course and demands for a change in Iran’s political system.
Many Western governments abroad have accepted a deterioration in bilateral relations with harsh criticism of Tehran. Negotiations to revive the nuclear deal that would have barred Iran from building a nuclear bomb remain on hold.
executions as a deterrent
The execution of two protesters in December provoked widespread criticism and dismay in Iran and internationally. Human rights activists see the executions as an attempt to quell protests through deterrence. However, the fast-track verdicts also met with strong rejection from parts of Iran’s religious and traditional strata.
Even most of the country’s traditionally religious population is shocked by the brutal violence in the name of Islam, explains expert Shams. Islamic preachers in Iran also condemned the executions.
Today we are facing a regime that is visibly unpopular with the most diverse social classes, the new generations of the country, women and the majority of male citizens, says Shams. However, she criticizes the protest movement’s hopes for a quick change in the system. If they completely shut people up this time and let the world get away with it, it would shake civil society to its core, because basically people had nothing left to lose.