Sanctions split Iran protesters
Competing downtown rallies turn hostile over the value of intervention from the West
Debate over the violent protests in Iran led to some pushing and shoving as competing groups rallied outside the Vancouver Art Gallery to support the Iranian protesters on Saturday.
Anti-government protests continue in the Islamic Republic of Iran, where tens of thousands of protesters have taken to the streets, primarily over economic conditions. Since the unrest started Dec. 28, at least 21 people have been killed and hundreds more jailed.
In Vancouver, two rallies overlapped — one started at 11 a.m. and the other at 1 p.m. — as about 200 people showed solidarity with the Iranian protesters, with some calling for the ouster of Islamic Republic supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
“Death to Khamenei!” and “Down with the Islamic Republic of Iran!” many shouted in Farsi. Some came waving the country’s historical flag bearing a lion and sun motif, which was replaced by the Islamic Republic in 1980 following the Iranian Revolution.
But when the afternoon rally’s organizers took the microphone on the gallery’s steps and called for U.S. sanctions to be lifted from the Iran, they were met with jeering from many in the crowd.
Golsa Golestaneh, 20, an SFU student and organizer of the afternoon rally, said before the rally that she was there to support her countrymen but also to address economic sanctions that she believes are behind much of her homeland’s problems. As well, she said, it is important that foreign governments don’t intervene when a government change finally comes.
“We are trying to take a strong stance here to say that we do not want any intervention and that the presence of Western powers right now is more pressure than help, because we are always threatened,” Golestaneh said.
But when Golestaneh expressed her views with the crowd, she was met with raised middle fingers and cursing in Farsi. Her detractors even accused her of supporting the Islamic Republic.
Golestaneh said that while she supported their freedom to disagree, she was disappointed she and others sharing her beliefs were shouted down.
“I put this event up — that means I’m supporting my people,” she said.
Golestaneh said the complex situation in Iran has Iranian-Canadians in B.C. debating the issue of sanctions, but she believes that unless pressure from both Iranian and Western governments is lifted from her people, change won’t come “organically.”
At least a half-dozen skirmishes broke out between the opposing sides, leading to shouting and shoving. Several protesters had flags or signs ripped from their hands and police came to remove one man from a particularly heated spat on the gallery’s top steps. Some were left in tears.
Mack, 47, who asked his full name not be printed, said he understood why there was debate over lifting sanctions, but said the rally was not the right place to delve into such a matter.
“We can talk about it later, if the sanctions are effective or not,” said Mack, who had come to protest what he described as a “massacre” in his homeland. “We’re hear to say that we’ve had enough, that we want this regime to go, and we want the international support behind this regime to be lifted.”
Mehdi Moghaddam, 43, who works in property development and was draped in the old flag, said he opposed foreign governments working with Iran’s terrorist-linked regime. Moghaddam said he supported former prime minister Stephen Harper’s closure of the Canadian embassy in Iran and expulsion of Iranian diplomats from Canada.
He said his concerns for Iran go far beyond his family in Tehran.
“I worry for everybody — all people — in my country,” he said. “All people is my family.”
After an earthquake destroyed Majid Ahadi’s home in November, he waited for aid promised by the Iranian government to help his young family and others who had lost everything. But it never came.
Far from the capital Tehran, Ahadi and the 30,000 or so residents in the northern city of Kermanshah left homeless in the disaster felt abandoned by their leaders.
A few weeks later, President Hassan Rouhani announced he would be cutting the cash handout scheme the 25-year-old part-time mechanic had been depending on.
The government neglect in Kermanshah had left him angry, President Rouhani’s budget proposal made him furious. The huge hike in food prices that followed was the final straw. On Dec. 29, Ahadi took to the streets with several friends in protest at what he saw as endemic corruption and mismanagement.
“You hear about one thing or another sparking the demonstrations, but it wasn’t a single thing — it was a perfect storm,” he told The Sunday Telegraph from a cousin’s house, where he is now staying with his wife and two daughters.
“There was so much pressure on the people, it just exploded.”
The first protests sprang up spontaneously in Kermanshah and Mashhad in the north. Unlike the 2009 Green Movement revolution, most of those out on the street were working class, a demographic which has suffered most under the sluggish economy.
“Eggs used to be 100,000 rials ($3.75), now they are 210,000, ($7.80)” said Ahadi, using a pseudonym. “But it’s not just about eggs, it would be OK if people had good jobs to pay for the extra, but they don’t. We were promised them by Rouhani but they never materialized.”
Inflation is at 12 per cent and 40 per cent of young people are unemployed, leaving an increasingly consumer-driven population restless.
Many of the demonstrators are angry at what they see as the failure so far of the government to deliver on promises of more jobs and investment as a payoff from the 2015 nuclear accord, which saw Iran halt its nuclear program in return for the lifting of sanctions.
“Iran is not a poor country, but its national wealth is going to Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hashd al-Shaabi (Popular Mobilization Forces) in Iraq and the Houthis in Yemen. Where is our money?” Ahadi asked.
In its desire to take on Sunni power and arch-enemy Saudi Arabia, Iran has invested billions in propping up its Shia proxies in the region. Iran’s military forces saw their funding increase by nearly 20 per cent to $18.5 billion in the same budget that ended cash subsidies for millions of citizens and increasing fuel prices.
Meanwhile, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, his mullahs and the Revolutionary Guard, only seem to be getting richer, one trade unionist complained. “Even conservatives have become increasingly concerned about the ruling mafia of the Islamic Republic, which has systematically trampled on the rights of Iranian citizens,” said the activist, using the pseudonym Kiumars Pirouz.
A few years ago a photograph was widely shared on social media of a smashed-up car belonging to a high-ranking mullah following a crash in Tehran. The cost of the Porsche Boxster GTS he had been driving was equal to a decade’s salary for most, and users piled in to comment on the hypocrisy.
Greater access to technology in recent years has helped expose the growing chasm between the wealthy elite and the impoverished majority, as well as provide a window into the relative freedoms enjoyed in the West.
“These current protests are big — not in terms of people, but in terms of geography,” Holly Dagres, a Middle East analyst and curator of The Iranist newsletter, told The Telegraph.
“As long as the government doesn’t address the concerns of its citizens, their anger will continue to bubble beneath the surface.”