Chinese-style repression is doing its sinister work in Iran, eight months after the beginning of the revolt against theocracy sparked by the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, a young Kurdish girl of 22, for “badly worn” veil .
Call for denunciation, blocking of Internet access, installation in the streets of surveillance cameras and subsequent distribution of warning text messages… The authorities have forced hundreds of businesses – restaurants, cafes, pharmacies, etc. — having welcomed Iranian women without veils to close their doors lately. At the end of April, the large Opal shopping center in northwest Tehran had to suspend its activities for a few days, which caused a stir, because of young shoppers violating the law on the hijab.
So many measures of harassment and intimidation that do not prevent women from still having the courage to go out in the street without a veil every day.
The repression is relentless, since that is about all that this Islamic-military regime, controlled by the Revolutionary Guards, can do to stay in power. Also, the revolt runs out of steam and atomizes. Are swiftly imprisoned or executed those who still dare to try to remobilize a youth which today is hunched over after having carried – almost alone – the movement of revolt.
The Oslo-based Iranian Human Rights Organization says at least 203 prisoners have been hanged since the start of the year, including two young men last weekend, for blasphemy and promoting Islam. atheism. On the occasion of World Press Freedom Day on May 3, Reporters Without Borders pointed out that women journalists were particularly targeted. For covering Mahsa’s death, journalists Niloofar Hamedi and Elahe Mohammadi have been in jail for seven months, accused of “propaganda against the system”.
The proof of the repressive character of the Islamic dictatorship is not to be done, but is worth being detailed. Repression is ruthless, but not blind. It is particularly relentless in the Kurdish provinces, in the north, and Baloch, in the south-east, where around twenty people were executed in 10 days. In another region, that of the small province of Khuzestan, in the south-west, an oil-rich but marginalized region, grappling with an environmental crisis which has wiped out its agriculture, the leader of an independence organization, deemed terrorist by Tehran , was executed last Saturday.
This means that the movement for democracy was all the more threatening for the regime as it had a national scope, asserting itself beyond cultural and ethnic divisions. From the moment when the “Down with the dictatorship” was combined with “Women, life, freedom”, repression was necessarily going to want to extinguish all dissent.
According to scholar Farhad Khosrokhavar, the huge wave of protest that has swept through Iran is a sign that the “system of indoctrination [islamiste] and desecularization” that the government has wanted to put in place since the 1979 revolution “has totally failed”. A failure of political Islam, we analyze by extension, shared in its own way by Turkey, where President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, with a fading Islamo-conservative star, is trying to get re-elected in the election next Sunday.
Because if the obligation to wear the veil constitutes the clear and precise expression of the denial of freedom against which so many Iranian women rise up, it is also the mask behind which the ayatollahs conceal the fiasco of their governance.
The failure might not be so profound if it were not also economic. The religious and ideological springs used by the regime to maintain a certain legitimacy work even less as Iranian society becomes impoverished, wedged between Western sanctions and a regime that has become a kleptocracy. Inflation exceeds 50% and a third of the population lives below the poverty line. Global warming, which the authorities are doing nothing to mitigate, is deepening the catastrophe; water shortages are worsening everywhere.
From the smallest to the largest, Tehran is reinforced geopolitically in its behavior by the constitution of a new version of what could be called an international of repression. With China as a facilitator, the reconciliation of circumstance between Saudi Arabia and Iran forms the tragic triangle; Russia is a bridgehead. We are talking here about a Saudi Arabia where, behind the facade of so-called progressive reforms, the number of executions has doubled in one year, to 138. We are talking here about an Iran which is the busiest executioner in the world, after China. Their collusions let in very little light.