Uncertainty is setting in in Iran. It concerns the form that the protest movement that has developed since September can take, as well as the future of the morality police, whose dissolution was announced on Saturday.
As the AFP news agency recalls, it was the morality police who arrested Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian Kurd, on September 13 in Tehran, the capital. She was accused of not respecting the dress code of the Islamic Republic, which requires women to wear the veil in public. His death was announced three days later. According to activists and her family, Mahsa Amini died after being beaten. But the authorities linked his death to health problems, denied by his parents. Her death triggered a wave of demonstrations during which women, spearheads of the protest, took off and burned their headscarves, shouting “Woman, life, freedom”. Despite the repression that left hundreds dead, the protest movement continues, also supported by men.
“A maneuver to demobilize”
“The morality police (…) have been abolished by those who created it,” Attorney General Mohammad Jafar Montazeri announced on Saturday evening, quoted by the Isna news agency on Sunday. “The best way to deal with the riots is to pay attention to the real demands of the people”, most of them related “to livelihoods and economic issues”, declared, for his part, on Sunday, the spokesperson for the presidency of Parliament, Seyyed Nezamoldin Moussavi, quoted by Isna.
The announcement of the abolition of the morality police was greeted with skepticism by Iranians on social networks, one Internet user fearing that his role would be taken over by another structure, another recalling the social pressure exerted within even families. The journalist Wassim Nasr, abounds in this direction on Twitter. “No, the Iranian regime is not wavering because the morality police are going to be disbanded. It is only a maneuver to demobilize,” he wrote. “The regimes of the genre have no taboos, it is part of the range of political and security choices,” he adds.
Protesters demand regime change
Whatever the future of this morality police, the current mobilization in Iran goes beyond this problem. As explained in the Parisian Mahnaz Shirali, sociologist and author of the book “Window on Iran: The cry of a gagged people”, this suppression must already be confirmed. But “the demands of Iranian society go further. It does not only demand the abolition of a police force or that of the wearing of the veil, but the departure of a whole regime”.
A call for mobilization has also been launched for the next few days. Protesters called for a three-day strike and a mobilization in Azadi Square, Tehran, on Wednesday.
Doubt has already arisen about the statements announcing the abolition of the morality police. The Attorney General’s remarks have not been confirmed by the Interior Ministry, according to Reuters. State media even recalled that the attorney general does not oversee the police force. According to the state television channel Al Alam, the prosecutor’s remarks do not clearly say that the morality police will be dissolved.