Mon, Jan 23, 2023 page3

• Protests in Iran continue despite brutal crackdown

  • AFP, PARIS
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  Despite a slackening of street activity in the face of a brutal crackdown, Iranian protesters are still challenging the Islamic theocratic regime four months into their movement, observers said.

  There have been fewer daily street protests nationwide since November, as the authorities seek to quell the protests with methods including capital punishment, which has already seen four protest-related executions.

  However, the anger unleashed by the death in mid-September of Mahsa Amini, who had been arrested for contravening the Islamic republic’s strict dress rules, has not subsided and at a time of economic crisis, still poses a potential threat to the Iranian regime.

  

  A UGC image posted on Twitter on Oct. 26 reportedly shows an unveiled woman standing on top of a vehicle, as thousands make their way toward Aichi cemetery in Saqez, Mahsa Amini’s hometown in the western Iranian province of Kurdistan, to mark 40 days since her death, defying heightened security measures as part of a bloody crackdown on women-led protests.

  Photo: AFP / UGC

  The protests have taken on different forms, notably including strikes. Mass street actions continue in some regions and there have been tentative signs of division within the regime.

  “With the number of protests diminishing since mid-November 2022, it appears that a stalemate has set in, with neither the regime nor the protesters’ side being able to overwhelm the other,” said Ali Fathollah-Nejad, an expert on Iran at the American University of Beirut’s Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs.

  “Despite the relative decline in the number of protests ever since, it is worth recalling that revolutionary processes usually entail phases of both relative calm and uproar,” he said.

  “Now, with a dramatic loss of the value of the Iranian currency since the turn of year, economy-driven protests could be expected, which as past shows could quickly turn political,” he said.

  The enqelab.info site, which monitors the extent of protest activity, said while the number of street protests has decreased, the number of strikes and other acts of dissent, such as writing slogans or damaging government banners, has increased.

  “The nationwide uprising is alive, though the manner through which people are expressing their dissent has transformed due to the authorities’ lethal crackdown during the fall,” it said in a statement.

  PROTESTS NOT OVER

  At least 481 people have been killed in the crackdown and at least 109 people are facing execution in protest-related cases, in addition to the four already put to death, Norway-based non-governmental organization Iran Human Rights said.

  The protests began as a movement against the obligatory hijab rule for women, but rapidly became a challenge to the entire system, calling for an end to the Islamic republic created after the 1979 ousting of the shah.

  “Protests have not stopped in the face of the violent crackdown,” said Roya Boroumand, cofounder of the US-based Abdorrahman Boroumand Center rights group.

  “They have certainly subsided... We are also seeing cases of extrajudicial killings and, naturally, citizens are more cautious,” she said.

  Nonetheless, actions were continuing, including regular street protests in the vast, but impoverished southeastern region of Sistan-Baluchistan, strikes by oil workers and protests marking death anniversaries of protesters, she said.

  One notable example was a protest this month outside the walls of Rajaishar prison in Karaj near Tehran when rumors emerged that inmates Mohammad Ghobadlou and Mohammad Boroghani were about to be hanged over the protests. Both men are still alive.

  “These protests, whether they subside or not in the short term, are not over,” Boroumand said.

  “They have changed the narrative that the Islamic republic has imposed over several decades regarding who Iranians are and what they want,” she said.

  In the face of the challenge there has been little sign the leadership under Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is ready to offer meaningful concessions and it could yet ratchet up the repression further.

  DISTRUST

  Khamenei, in a widely commented move this month, named former Tehran police chief Ahmad Reza Radan to be commander of the national police force. Radan is a hardline figure seen as having played a key role in the suppression of 2009 protests over disputed elections.

  Meanwhile, the crackdown on the protest movement has only increased Iran’s isolation from the West, with talks on reviving the 2015 deal on its nuclear program in deep freeze.

  Iran is also furious that the UN, at the instigation of Western countries, has launched a fact-finding mission into the crackdown.

  Simultaneously, Iran has been increasingly running into the arms of Russian President Vladimir Putin, similarly isolated by the West over the invasion of Ukraine.

  Kyiv and the West accuse Iran of supplying Moscow with cheap drones to use in attacks on Ukrainian territory.

  However, some analysts detect the very first signs of fissures emerging over how to handle the protests within the regime, which, despite all the bloodshed, has yet to employ its full arsenal of repression.

  In an extraordinary development many observers are still at a loss to fully explain, Iran this month executed former deputy minister of defense Alireza Akbari, who had gained British nationality after leaving his post, on charges of spying for the UK.

  Cornelius Adebahr, non-resident fellow at Carnegie Europe, said the “unexpected verdict” might point to a “power struggle” within the elite over how to deal with the protests.

  Akbari was seen by analysts as close to Supreme National Security Council Secretary Ali Shamkhani and other figures who have argued for some moves to address protesters’ grievances.

  “Although no apparent cracks dividing the establishment could be observed four months into the protests, there are signs of fissures,” Fathollah-Nejad said, describing the execution as “another sign that distrust has set in among regime insiders.”
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