The protests in Iran, sparked on September 16 by the death of young Mahsa Amini in police custody, lasted less than two weeks to mourn their Black Friday: the September 30 massacre in Zahedan in the province of Sistan and Balochistan in the south-east of the Country in which the security forces killed 66 people according to Amnesty International “35 according to official figures”. That day, police opened fire on a crowd in what authorities describe as an armed attack on Police Station No. 16, the headquarters of the Iranian Armed Forces to quell “heavy rioters and anti-revolutionaries.” Almost a month later, on Friday, Tehran announced the dismissal of the Zahedan police chief and the head of the 16th police station for “bad practices,” the official IRNA agency reported.
Those firings could be a first concession to the protesters by leaders “whose mentality was that giving in to public demands is a slippery slope that can lead to bigger demands and ultimately their downfall,” pointed out Sina Toosi, an analyst at the center for International Policy in Washington (CIP), in a document published in World Politics Review on September 26, when Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had already downplayed the protests: “There are few,” noted . Other figures linked to the regime tried to discredit the protesters by assimilating opposition to the veil requirement with debauchery and sexual promiscuity.
Those words sound far away now. Given the demonstrations sparked by the suspicious death of 22-year-old Amini, three days after he was arrested in Tehran for wearing the veil incorrectly, “it is clear that the regime is concerned,” lawyer Mani says per E -Mail from the USA. Mostofi, Iran expert at the US human rights consultancy Miaan Group.
“What makes these protests historically significant is the broad base of support they have across regions, classes, ideologies, genders and ethnicities. We see protests in all provinces, from small towns to big cities and from Kurdish to Baloch and Persian regions. Various social movements have participated in Iran: women, students and workers. In this sense, the state is facing a new and formidable resistance,” analyzes the expert.
The big question is “whether we are facing a sustainable movement towards democracy,” says Mostofi. “The Islamic Republic is trying to prevent popular anger from turning into an organized effort to change the system. They didn’t just suppress the protests through arrests and violence [al menos 253 personas han muerto en la represión, según Iran Human Rights]Instead, they arrested activists and civil society leaders who did not attend. No one thought this would take longer than six weeks. It has taken so long because the movement has massive support and a certain clarity of purpose. So if local leaders, organizations and resources can be found, it will continue.”
According to Mostofi, this is the fear of the Iranian authorities; that these protests, which the regime had predicted, are fleeting and will ultimately hasten its downfall. For some voices in the diaspora, like the Iranian journalist and activist Masih Alinejad, exiled to the US, Iran is already experiencing at least “a feminist revolution”. According to experts such as the Iranian historian Ervand Abrahamian, who also lives in exile, the number of protests does not justify this statement. In a country of 85 million, numbers like the more than 10,000 protesters who visited Amini’s grave on Wednesday, according to official media, do not appear to be sufficient Abrahamian critical mass to overthrow a regime.
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In a recent interview with the BBC’s Farsi language service, this historian explained that a revolution “requires the presence of millions [de manifestantes], not isolated protests, and strikes by the petty bourgeoisie and industry. You don’t need a leader to overthrow a system, but you do afterward. Turning the protest into a revolution will depend on the level of stupidity of the leaders of the Islamic Republic in the next year or two.”
The Iranologist Raffaele Mauriello, a professor at Allameh Tabataba’i University, notes by telephone from Tehran: “To speak of revolution in Iran at the moment is a fantasy.” He characterizes the demonstrations as “a movement of civil disobedience that today does not threaten state authority”.
the weight of fear
A survey of nearly 17,000 Iranians by the Netherlands-based Iran Attitude Measurement and Analysis Group in March this year indicates greater dissatisfaction than protester numbers reflect. Extrapolating the data from this study, 88% of the Iranian population define democracy as a “fair or very good” system. 67% of respondents considered “a religious legal system” to be “fairly or very badly” and only 28% described it as “good”.
The repetition of demonstrations in Iran in recent years also points to a growing rift between the Iranian state and some of the country’s population, a trend that the repression of these protests is deepening, the experts cited agree. For the political scientist Ali Alfoneh, “the three pillars” of the credibility of the Iranian political system are “weakened”. These pillars are “the role of the head of state as mediator between man and God; the elections, which are rigged but guarantee a certain level of popular representation; and economic prosperity and security.” In Iran “few Iranians today regard Ayatollah Khamenei as an intermediary between man and God; excessive vote rigging has significantly reduced voter turnout and the president [Ebrahim] At best, Raisi received 30% of the votes. The population is also suffering from economic difficulties,” says the expert, who sees the most likely future scenario as Iran evolving into a covert military dictatorship of the Revolutionary Guards, the arm of the armed forces created to protect the theocratic system.
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