Protests have swept through many streets of Tehran this week. /
President Raisi says he will not tolerate more “chaos” and the Army accuses foreign “enemies” of encouraging the demonstrations
The Iranian regime is taking a step forward to quell the protests in which thousands of people are calling for the end of the compulsory use of the hijab and show their anger at the death of a young Kurdish woman at the hands of the Morale Police. The formula is already known and involves mobilizing his followers, treating the protests as a conspiracy orchestrated from abroad to end, silencing the internet and applying maximum repression. The authorities summoned their own after Friday prayer to march through the main cities of the country in support of the use of the veil for women and against the mobilizations “encouraged by foreigners.”
Ebrahim Raisi needed a week to respond to the most serious mobilizations that Iran has suffered in the last three years and that have left dozens of dead and hundreds of wounded and arrested. The president sent a direct message to the protesters to tell them that “chaos is unacceptable” in the Islamic republic. The president lamented the “double standards” applied to his country since “every day, in different countries, including the United States, we see how men and women die in police stations, but there are hardly any reactions in the media with this type of violence”.
These words were accompanied by a statement from the Army that is “willing to confront the enemies” and that dismisses the riots as “desperate actions of the enemy’s diabolical strategy to weaken the Islamic regime”, which means that they blame the escalation of tension between Israel and the United States. One of the usual strategies of the ayatollahs’ regime is to attribute all evils to foreign interference, which exists and is intense, avoiding any exercise of self-criticism.
From Washington, President Joe Biden expressed solidarity with the protesters and his Administration issued a license to relax sanctions on Internet services in Iran with the aim of “supporting the free flow of information.” This public announcement also served to give arguments to the regime when it comes to seeing the foreign hand in the mobilizations.
no leaders
For a week now, the protests have spread from Iran’s Kurdistan to fifty cities in the country. Mahsa Amimi was 22 years old and Kurdish, she traveled to Tehran to visit relatives and lost her life at the hands of the Morale Police, who arrested her for not wearing the veil correctly. The agents assure that she suffered a heart attack, but the family denounces that the body showed signs of ill-treatment.
Three years ago, Iranians took to the streets en masse to protest rising prices, and the regime responded harshly. Now they do it to request the end of one of the regulations in force since the creation of the Islamic republic, such as the use of the hijab, and they meet again with the same reaction. In 2019, the anger was quelled by the security forces and fatigue and fear took over some protesters without a leadership capable of confronting the ayatollah system. On this occasion something similar happens and, from Tehran, the journalist Fereshteh Sadeghi recalls that “the Islamic republic is still here, a protest without leadership is incapable of overthrowing the system.”