6 December 2022 12:08 am
Mass anti-hijab protests erupted in Tehran after Mahsa Amini was arrested and subsequently murdered for having refused to wear Hijab, which Iran had made it mandatory way back in 1983.
The death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman after being arrested by the morality police over breaking Hijab rules in September unleashed mass protests in Iran, the largest ever since 2009; the latter erupted when the regime rigged an election in favour of Supreme leader Ali Khamenei backed hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
This time around, protests are a rejection of the Islamic theocracy as a whole, spreading out from traditional hotbeds of universities to factories and Kurdish minority areas. Hitherto unheard villages in the countryside have been engulfed in fervent.Protesters chanted ‘women, life and freedom’ and death to the dictator. Murals of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic republic have been torched. Khomeini’s ancestral home was set on fire. His niece, a dissident critic is in arrest after she urged the international community to cut ties with the Iranian regime. In the meanwhile, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps are liberally machine-gunning protestors, while feared Basij civilian militias are abducting dissidents.
In Qatar, the Iranian football team refused to sing the national anthem. Protesters earlier demanded its disqualification from the world cup. In the meanwhile, the regime, and its spokespersons, like the Iranian Ambassador in Colombo who was quoted in the Daily Mirror recently, have blamed the Americans and the West for instigating the protests. The usual hackneyed playbook of every despotic regime.
Iran’s clerical regime is a medieval relic foisted upon a people, which, as most opinion polls suggest is the Arab world’s most progressive and least anti-semitic. Since the twin revolutions of Islamists and secular leftists toppled the modernist, but the oppressive regime of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in 1979, Mullahs have gradually tightened the grip and wiped out the non-Islamist opposition in systemic purges, finally capturing and Islamizing the regime.
In 1983, Khomeini imposed mandatory hijab for women. Basij, a civilian paramilitary hounded the regime opponents, and morality police enforced an Islamic dress code in public. After a brief bout with reforms under reformist president Mohammad Khatami in the 2000s, Iran recessed to its authoritarian originals, when the Mullahs and regime hardliners, robbed an election in 2009, leading to mass protests. The two defeated presidential candidates are still under house arrest.
The mass disqualification of election candidates by the cleric-run Guardian Council has betrayed the farce, resulting in mass boycotts of elections recently.
Ebrahim Raisi, the ultra-conservative who was favoured by Khamenei was elected president in the 2021 election- after the Guardian council disqualified all the prominent progressives. He won barely 18 million votes out of 28.9 million in an election where the turnout was only 48.8%. The regime is finally rattling, and fear is mounting that the protests are reaching a point of an armed uprising. Civilian paramilitaries have been overwhelmed by the scale of protests, while morality police have retreated from the streets.
However, terror is probably the only thing the regime is capable of, and a descent into violence would in effect play into its hands, though the regime itself is keener to avoid the eventuality as its latest concessions imply. According to the Attorney General, the morality police has been abolished and the regime is reviewing the mandatory Hijab laws. Yet, for the protesters, this appears to be too little too late, and many vie for the end of the clerical regime.
The Iranian regime is devoid of any semblance of popular legitimacy at home. It’s a destabilizer of the region; from Lebanon to Iraq and Palestine, the Revolutionary Guard-affiliated proxies have wreaked chaos and targeted Western interests. Parasitic organs, have held their host countries hostage, be it in Lebanon, Iraq or Gaza. However as the Iranian regime is murdering its own citizens, its proxies have been somewhat subdued. Israel and Lebanon recently agreed to exploit oil in their disputed sea area, and Bahrain, whose Shia majority is regularly instigated by Iranian agents against the country’s Sunni rulers, recently normalized relations with Israel. Syria, where Islamic Revolutionary Guards played a major role in Bashar al Assad’s regime’s fight against Islamists, is now preferring its deep-pocketed Gulf neighbours to Iran.
Meanwhile, Washington, while expressing solidarity with Iranian protestors is holding back in more active measures that could target regime actors who are complicit in habitual terror against their people. The reticence is in part due to the Biden administration’s wanting to conclude the nuclear deal with Iran, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which the Trump administration abandoned. Since then, Iran has enriched its uranium well above the limit for peaceful purposes and is believed to have enriched uranium for eight to ten nuclear bombs.
However, the internal characteristics of the regime matter in its relationship with the international community. Unaccountable authoritarian regimes such as Iran are fickle and hard to trust. Though a nuclear deal may provide for a short-term moratorium of enrichment, it would also provide legitimacy for an illegitimate regime.
A democratic Iran would one day be the most influential and indeed most progressive state in the Middle East. Again, those characteristics are imprinted in nations, and cannot easily be implanted as the recent failure and success of the Arab spring would reveal.
However, Iran stands today deformed, and defiled by a medieval theocracy, which murders its people to force women to wear a veil. That regime is an aberration and an abomination.
Follow @Rangajayasuriya on Twitter