Black-clad women in Iran’s Sistan-Baluchistan Province on Friday joined nationwide protests sparked by Mahsa Amini’s death, in what a rights group called a “rare” move in the staunchly conservative region.
Online videos showed dozens of women on the streets of the provincial capital, Zahedan, holding banners reading: “Woman, life, freedom” — one of the main slogans of the protest movement that erupted in mid-September.
“Whether with hijab, whether without it, onwards to revolution,” women dressed in body-covering chador garments chanted in videos posted on Twitter.
Photo: AFP
Women-led protests have swept Iran since Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian of Kurdish origin, died following her arrest in Tehran for an alleged breach of the Islamic republic’s dress code based on Shariah law.
Security forces have killed at least 448 protesters, with the largest toll in Sistan-Baluchistan on Iran’s southeastern border with Afghanistan and Pakistan, Oslo-based Iran Human Rights (IHR) said.
“It is indeed rare,” Iran Human Rights director Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam said of the protests by women in Zahedan, which has seen men take to the streets after Friday prayers for more than two months.
“The ongoing protests in Iran are the beginning of a revolution of dignity,” he said. “Women and minorities, who have for more than four decades been treated as second-class citizens, are empowered through these protests to come out to the streets and demand their fundamental human rights.”
Baluchi women were among the “most oppressed” in Iran, and their protests were the most organized since demonstrations broke out across the country, Amiry-Moghaddam added.
Scores of men also took to the streets again on Friday, chanting: “We don’t want a child-killing government,” footage posted online by activists showed.
Security forces were seen opening fire with bird shot and tear gas on male protesters in Taftan, a locality in Sistan-Baluchistan, in a video published by IHR.
At least 128 people have been killed in Sistan-Baluchistan during the protest crackdown, IHR said, adding that it is the biggest death toll recorded in 26 of Iran’s 31 provinces.
More than 90 of them were killed on Sept. 30 alone — a massacre that activists have dubbed “Black Friday.”
Those protests were triggered by the alleged rape in custody of a 15-year-old girl by a police commander in the province’s port city of Chabahar.
Analysts said the Baluchi were inspired by the protests that flared over Amini’s death, which were initially driven by women’s rights, but expanded to include other grievances.
“Iran’s Baluchi minority face entrenched discrimination that curtails their access to education, health care, employment, adequate housing and political office,” Amnesty International said on Tuesday.
“The Baluchi minority have borne the brunt of the vicious crackdown by security forces during the uprising that has swept across Iran since September,” Amnesty said in a statement.
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