Three weeks after the start of the social protest in Iran, which followed the tragic death of the young Mahsa Amini, 22, arrested by the morality police for violating the dress code of the Islamic Republic, the movement is not weakening. He even maintains unprecedented pressure on the regime of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei with his calls for the fall of the dictatorship launched bluntly across the country.
Tuesday, in front of the Science Department of Ferdowsi University in Mashhad, students have also summed up their determination in a slogan: “This is no longer a demonstration. This is the beginning of a revolution”, thus illustrating a resistance which had probably never gone so far since the student demonstrations in Tehran repressed by the regime in 1999.
But this wind of demands, despite its strong images of women burning their veils and public figures daring, for the first time, to speak out in support of them could still sink into an impasse, for lack of strong leadership and a structured opposition. Decryption.
Resistance movement
The fuse ignited by Mahsa Amini’s death caused the powder keg to explode. In three weeks, demonstrations against the oppression of women, led by young female students, have turned into a real national revolt in Iran, bringing to the streets of nearly 172 cities in the country citizens of all ages who now share the same anger against the Khamenei regime.
Under the slogan Zan, zendegi, azadi (Women, life, freedom), women, yes, but also men, workers, celebrities are no longer just calling for more air. They want nothing less than a change of regime and, above all, the head of its two tutelary figures: Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Ebrahim Raisi. And they are no longer afraid to say it.
“From the start, we heard slogans calling for the death of these two individuals and of the regime,” notes Aladdin Touran, an Iranian dissident who has taken refuge in France, where The duty joined him on Thursday. “In 2019, the protests also demanded this same change, but in a less direct, less frontal way, with international support for their cause also less than at the moment. »
On Wednesday, French actresses including Marion Cotillard, Juliette Binoche and Isabelle Huppert publicly cut strands of hair in support of Iranian protesters. They joined several other personalities, including two-time Oscar-winning Iranian director Asghar Farhadi, who last week urged people around the world to “stand in solidarity” with the Iranian revolt. Canada heard it by becoming one of the first countries to impose sanctions on the regime in Tehran after the death of Mahsa Amini.
Earlier in the movement, it was former soccer star Ali Karimi who multiplied support for the resistance fighters and asked the Artesh, the army of the Islamic Republic of Iran, to “stand on the side demonstrators” to “avoid a bloodbath”. The 43-year-old man, who lives in the United Arab Emirates, has since been prosecuted by Iranian justice, which considers him “one of the main leaders of the recent riots” and as the “spokesman of the enemy”. the Mehr news agency said on Tuesday.
Enemies defined by the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who on Monday accused the United States, Israel and their “agents” of fomenting the ongoing anti-government protest movement in his country.
A difficult repression
Since coming to power in 1979, after the fall of the Shah, the Iranian regime has always served up severe and merciless repression to all movements challenging its authority. Fear and violence being the basis of his continued power.
This is how he treated students in Tehran in July 1999, outraged by the closure of the reformist newspaper Hello, close to the then president, Mohammad Khatami. Hundreds were sent to prison. Their demands for a free press and a more democratic electoral process have been shelved.
Same thing against the spontaneous movement of 2009 aimed at denouncing the apparent manipulation of the result of the presidential election. Three million Iranians then took to the streets to be crushed by mass arrests. In the face of the 2019 revolt denouncing the tripling of the price of gasoline, 1,500 people, mostly working-class Iranians, were shot dead by state security services.
In 2022, the repressive discourse is indeed heard, but it seems to be accompanied by an improbable restraint, no doubt due to “constraints”, notes Aladdin Touran.
It is because this latest wind of anger seems more difficult to repress, because of its scattering across the country – and even within the capital, Tehran -, which complicates “the mobilization of repressive forces” to come to terms with it. “The resistance units are better organized,” he says.
The crisis is also playing out as rumors persist over the health of 83-year-old Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Middle East’s longest-serving leader, whose weakening may partly explain the weakness of the security response, the intensity of which does not seem very consistent with the history of the regime and its guards.
An uncertain future
Still, the future of the movement remains uncertain despite everything, and its chances of bringing down the regime are very slim. First, because of the figures who come to the gate to replace Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. We find there Mojtaba Khamenei, second son of the supreme leader, religious like his father and pure product of the regime in place. Comes just behind another standard-bearer of Iranian ultra-conservatism: Ebrahim Raïsi, current president, nicknamed the “butcher of Tehran” for having been one of the masterminds of the great repression of Iranian dissidents in 1988 punctuated by the torture and extrajudicial executions.
During the last election, the regime also confirmed the omnipotence of the conservative wing at the top of the state by silencing and dismissing the few reformist or moderate voices that tried hard to make themselves heard there. Among them was that of the young Mohammad-Javad Azari Jahromi, former Minister of Information and Communication Technologies, a relatively moderate politician in the government of President Hassan Rouhani. He was rejected for his age, 39, the limit having been raised to 40 for applications. Also rejected is that of Hassan Khomeini, grandson of Ayatollah Rouhollah Khomeini, leader of the 1979 revolution, whose chances of leading a pragmatic reformist current to victory were then high.
Next, the current protest “has no solid and structured leadership,” remarked in an interview with the To have to Houchang Chehabi, a specialist in Iran at Boston University, which could lead at most “to a restructuring of the regime, away from the clerics, but despite everything openly dominated by the Revolutionary Guards”, the paramilitary organization of the Islamic Republic of Iran, which however remains under the control of the Supreme Leader.
This perspective is also maintained by the fact that the regime has, for more than 40 years, reduced in Iran the opposition coming from the academic world as well as that of labor and trade unions to nothing.
And it is also difficult to count on the opposition in exile which is struggling to find its way, but also its legitimacy among the Iranians who have remained in the country and who consider that its rare figures are disconnected from their reality. At the end of September, the shah’s son, Reza Pahlavi, a refugee in the United States for 40 years, called for the continuation of the movement and the union of the oppositions, while specifying that he was not interested in taking power . As for the National Council of Resistance, of which the Iranian people’s mujahideen and its charismatic leader Maryam Rajavi are part, it recently recalled the existence of its ten-point plan to bring Iran into modernity, but seems poorly equipped to form a solid coalition from the outside in order to take it further.