A first hanging for example, last Thursday, that of a demonstrator, Mohsen Shekari, 23, tried for “enmity against God” for having blocked a street and injured a bassidji militiaman of the Guardians of the Revolution. Other executions will inevitably follow, since the mullahs’ regime thinks that, by fanatic logic of repression, the revolt of the last three months can be crushed.
It is an assassin regime which has means that are incommensurate with those of the demonstrators, armed with the single slogan “Woman, life, freedom!” “. Except that, nearly 20,000 arrests and more than 500 deaths later, half among the Kurdish and Baloch minorities, the demonstrators were not silent. Let them be silenced, and their voice will find a way to carry on.
The call for a general strike launched for three days was widely followed last week in Iran. It’s unprecedented. Bazaars, shops and offices have closed in Tehran and around 50 other cities across the country.There are signs that do not lie: the workers of the Mahchahr petrochemical plant have notably rallied, which has significant symbolic significance, considering that in 1978, the great strike in the petrochemical plants played a leading role in the fall of Shah Reza Pahlavi at the beginning of the following year. This is a sign that the movement that started from the universities after the death on September 16 of Mahsa Amini, 22, arrested for a veil deemed “badly worn”, is the expression of a broader anger – a smoldering anger in fact for twenty years — in the face of the failure of a theocracy which has known only how to impoverish and muzzle.
The ambiguous announcement, ten days ago, of the abolition of the morality police was quickly unmasked by civil society for what it was: a pseudo-concession – which in any case does not cancel the obligation to wear the veil — intended to confuse the opposition.
“Each time, in a bus, a female body brushes against a male body, a jolt shakes the edifice of our revolution”, declared Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini after having imposed, the Shah just overthrown, the obligation to wear of the veil in 1979. It is the edifice of this ideological and religious immurement which is cracking today under the impact of a fed up at the start feminist.
There was the forced march Westernization – and therefore anti-veil – postulated under the pro-American dictatorship of the Shah. Today there is the blinding Islamization imposed by the current regime. From one to the other, we do not lose sight of the fact that the reasons for the Iranian people’s anger — corruption, repression, inequalities — are the same.
Theocracy thus reaps the fruit of its contradictions. In 1984, a law voted in Parliament stipulated that unveiled women exposed themselves to 72 lashes, at the same time as they were authorized to pursue studies and enter the labor market. There was an economic reason for this arrangement: the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, in which a whole generation of young men disappeared. Result: the rate of schooling for girls has risen sharply, a factor, as in any society, of awareness.
The regime has thrown some ballast under Mohammad Khatami (1997-2005) and Hassan Rohani (2013-2021), two so-called reformist presidents. Between the two, he tightened the ideological screw with the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, under whom this morality police was created in 2005, before outright imposing that, in 2021, of the ultraconservative Ebrahim Raïsi, who came to power. by immediately adopting a law more regressive than ever “on the hijab and chastity”. Raïssi has acted as an accelerant on collective despair: against a background of economic rout, he embodies a establishment religious, irreformable and illegitimate, which no longer even takes the trouble to maintain the appearances of a certain pluralism.
True that the regime is showing signs of internal dissension and that reformist voices, like that of Khatami, have come forward. The relentless repression is indeed a sign of fragility. Unlike the revolution that swept away the shah, the current opposition movement does not have a leadership figure. The dynamics at work in fact accredit the thesis of an inexorable militarization of power in favor of the Revolutionary Guards, this State within the State which, holding the levers of the economy, would wait for the death of Supreme Guide Ali Khamenei to reconfigure power to his advantage.
By opening the door to the lifting of sanctions and the geopolitical reintegration of Iran, the international Iranian nuclear agreement reached in 2015 happened to lend a hand to reformist forces. This hope, however fragile, was dashed in 2018 by the decision of Donald Trump, aligned with Israel, to reject the agreement. To return to a policy of containment, he accepted that the Iranians be left to their own devices.