A man pulls out a police motorcycle which is set on fire during a protest over the death of a young woman who had been detained for violating the country’s conservative dress code, in downtown Tehran, Iran. AP
Iran is on the edge — protests have rocked the country for the past six days after a 22-year-old woman died while being held by the morality police for violating the country’s strictly enforced Islamic dress code.
The death of Mahsa Amini, who had been picked up by Iran’s morality police for her allegedly loose headscarf, or hijab, has triggered daring displays of defiance, in the face of beatings and possible arrest.
The protests have also caused fatalities with Esmail Zarei Kousha, the governor of the northwestern Kurdistan province, telling reporters on Tuesday that three people died “suspiciously” during “illegal protests” in recent days, according to state-affiliated media.
In street protests, some women tore off their mandatory headscarves, demonstratively twirling them in the air. Videos online showed two women throwing their hijabs into a bonfire. Another woman is seen cutting off her hair in a show of protest.
Many Iranians, particularly the young, have come to see Amini’s death as part of the Islamic Republic’s heavy-handed policing of dissent and the morality police’s increasingly violent treatment of young women.
At some of the demonstrations, protesters clashed with police and thick clouds of tear gas were seen rising in the capital, Tehran. Protesters were also chased and beaten with clubs by the motorcycle-riding Basij, or volunteers in Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard Police.
The Basij have violently suppressed protests in the past, including over water rights and the country’s cratering economy.
Yet some demonstrators still chant “death to the dictator,” targeting both Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s rule and Iran’s theocracy, despite the threat of arrest, imprisonment and even the possibility of a death sentence.
Here’s a look at what sparked the protests and where they might lead.
What caused the protests in Iran?
Iran’s morality police arrested Amini on 13 September in Tehran, where she was visiting from her hometown in the country’s western Kurdish region. She collapsed at a police station and died three days later.
Police detained her over wearing her hijab too loosely. Iran requires women to wear the headscarf in a way that completely covers their hair when in public. Only Afghanistan under Taliban rule now actively enforces a similar law. Ultra-conservative Saudi Arabia dialled back its enforcement over recent years.
Also read: Hijab row: What India can learn from women’s march without hijab in Iran
The police deny Amini was mistreated and say she died of a heart attack. President Ebrahim Raisi, who will speak at the United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday, has promised an investigation.
Amini’s family says she had no history of heart trouble and that they were prevented from seeing her body before she was buried. The demonstrations erupted after her funeral in the Kurdish city of Saqez on Saturday, and quickly spread to other parts of the country, including Tehran.
A protester holds a portrait of Mahsa Amini during a demonstration in support of Amini, a young Iranian woman who died after being arrested in Tehran by the Islamic Republic’s morality police, on Istiklal avenue in Istanbul. AFP
Women’s treatment in Iran
Iranian women have full access to education, work outside the home and hold public office. But they are required to dress modestly in public, which includes wearing the hijab as well as long, loose-fitting robes. Unmarried men and women are barred from mingling.
The rules, which date back to the days after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, are enforced by the morality police. The force, officially known as the Guidance Patrol, is stationed across public areas. It is made up of men as well as women.
Enforcement was eased under former President Hassan Rouhani, a relative moderate who at one point accused the morality police of being overly aggressive. In 2017, the head of the force said it would no longer arrest women for violating the dress code.
But under Raisi, a hard-liner elected last year, agents of the morality police appear to have been unleashed. The UN human rights office says young women have been slapped in the face, beaten with batons and shoved into police vehicles in recent months.
How has Iran responded to the protests?
Iranian leaders have vowed to investigate the circumstances of Amini’s death while accusing unnamed foreign countries and exiled opposition groups of seizing on it as a pretext to foment unrest. That’s been a common pattern in the protests that erupted in recent years.
Iran’s ruling clerics view the United States as a threat to the Islamic Republic and believe the adoption of Western customs undermines society. Khamenei himself has seized on so-called “colour” protests in Europe and elsewhere as foreign interventions — and not as people demonstrating for more rights.
Tensions have been especially high since former President Donald Trump withdrew from the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran and imposed crippling sanctions. The Biden administration has been working with European allies for the last two years to revive the accord, but negotiations appear deadlocked as nonproliferation experts warn Iran has enough highly enriched uranium for a nuclear bomb if it chose to build one. The Islamic Republic insists its program is peaceful.
The governor of Tehran said Wednesday that authorities arrested three foreign nationals at protests in the capital, without elaborating. Iranian security forces have arrested at least 25 people, and the governor of the Kurdistan province says three people have been killed by armed groups in unrest linked to the protests, without elaborating.
Activists and human rights groups have blamed Iranian security forces for killing protesters in other demonstrations, like those over gasoline prices in 2019.
A woman sets a headscarf on fire as Iraqi and Iranian Kurds, residing in northern Iraq, protest near a park in the Iraqi Kurdish city of Sulaimaniya against the death of Mahsa Amini, a woman in Iran who died after being arrested by the Islamic republic’s “morality police”. AFP
Could the protests bring down the government?
Iran’s ruling clerics have weathered several waves of protests going back decades, eventually quashing them with brute force.
The most serious challenge to the clerics’ rule was the Green Movement that emerged after the country’s disputed presidential election in 2009 and called for far-reaching reforms; millions of Iranians took to the streets.
Authorities responded with a brutal crackdown, with the Revolutionary Guard and the Basij militia opening fire on protesters and launching waves of arrests. Opposition leaders were placed under house arrest.
Among those killed was Neda Agha Soltan, a 27-year-old woman who became an icon of the protest movement after she was shot and bled to death in a video seen by millions on social media.
With inputs from AP
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