Picture of defiance that could spark a revolution against Iran’s ruling mullahs
As a young woman pulls off her niqab in public...
PICTURES of a young woman, her head uncovered, waving a flag to a crowd in the street, would be a slice of New Year fun in most places. But for a woman to do so in Iran is tantamount to a revolutionary act.
The anonymous woman’s defiance of the rigid dress codes of the Islamic Republic has gone viral on the internet. That fact in itself is astonishing given how repressive the Islamist regime has been for four decades.
In a snapshot that sums up the culture clash between the young and the deeply conservative religious elders who run the country, social media has been fuelling protests against the ruling clerics – and giving the world a window on the discontent spilling on to the streets.
The reach of the internet is frustrating the mullahs’ efforts to keep Iranian society, and women in particular, cloistered from the rapidly changing outside world.
No wonder Iran blocked access to Instagram and the encrypted messaging app Telegram on Sunday as it became apparent they were facilitating what has become the biggest threat to the theocratic government since 2009, when millions of people took to the streets to protest against disputed election results.
It is nearly 40 years since the decadent, Western-backed monarch, the Shah of Iran, was deposed by an Islamic revolution which installed Ayatollah Khomeini as the supreme leader and ushered in decades of insular, hardline religious rule.
WHAT’S so fascinating about this week’s clashes is that now the situation is reversed and thousands of young people, as well as minority groups like Kurds, are raging against the Islamic authorities. They are not just chafing at the restrictions on their lifestyle required by the mullahs.
Worse still for them is the simple fact that the Islamic Republic isn’t functioning as it should. Steep price rises for food were the immediate spark of the protests that flared up over the weekend, but endemic unemployment and the fate of millions in low-paying breadline jobs fosters discontent.
Three things have enraged them. The hypocrisy of the mullahs who control much of the nation’s wealth through so-called foundations, which ignore their charitable responsibilities and enrich only the well-connected in the Islamic elite.
This leaves poor Iranians asking why their rulers can afford to subsidise allied regimes like that of the Syrian dictator, Bashar al-Assad, and send troops to help fight his enemies, but insist on putting up food and fuel prices at home. Worse, the regime boasted that its deal with the UN to stop developing a nuclear programme two years ago would transform the economy because sanctions would be stopped.
It is true that Iran has quickly found business partners in Europe, but being able to buy Airbus planes or deal with European banks doesn’t put bread on the tables of ordinary folk.
The two most pressing questions now are how the religious fundamentalists in the capital Tehran will respond to the challenge – and what the West should do.
There is no doubt the revolution of 1979 plunged relations between Iran and the West into the deep freeze. One only has to think of the Iranians taking 60 Americans hostage in the US embassy in Tehran that year, a drama recreated in the film Argo, or the SAS storming the Iranian embassy in London in 1980, to understand just how troublesome Iran has been for so long.
Even now, 38-year-old British woman Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe is languishing in an Iranian jail, convicted of ‘plotting to topple the Iranian government’ in 2016.
Already this week, US President Donald Trump has tweeted his support for the protesters in Iran. The danger is, however, that such open encouragement could play into the hands of the Iranian hardliners, who will use it to claim the protesters are American puppets.
Already Iran’s President Rouhani has made much of Trump’s comments in his only public response to the protests. And now the country’s supreme spiritual leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has said that the protests are being fomented by Iran’s ‘enemies’.
America has long been the ‘Great Satan’ to the Iranian regime, which has not forgotten that back in 1953 the Shah was put on the throne with the help of the CIA. To the blinkered mindset of the mullahs, the fact that online messaging apps being used by today’s protesters are based in America is proof the CIA’s hidden hand is still pulling the strings.
Certainly it is true the younger generation who have been protesting this week do not feel such antipathy to the West. To these protesters, it is not the Shah who represents corrupt repression, but the hardline rulers of today.
So far, the regime has held back the stormtroopers who suppressed the mass protests in Tehran in 2009. This is not a sign of tolerance, but a shrewd assessment of the risks of antagonising the tens of millions who are unhappy with everyday life, but who have not yet taken to the streets to join in the protests.
These are the sort of people who were indifferent to the students and intellectuals demonstrating eight years ago. But violence against the crowds would anger them, already several people have been killed, and if the numbers rise it’s likely the protests will grow all the more.
The demonstrations which toppled the Shah only really found strength after his troops shot into the crowds, after which ever-larger numbers poured on to the streets in fury.
At least 450 people have been detained in the capital alone since Saturday, according to Iranian officials, but the protesters seem to have learned some lessons from the last revolution.
Instead of concentrating in one place where the regime’s security forces can surround them, the crowds have popped up in scores of places. Even the tens of thousands of Revolutionary Guards who now enforce the mullahs’ will can’t be everywhere at once.
BACK in 1978, the exiled cleric who orchestrated the uprising, the future Ayatollah Khomeini, put women in the front ranks of the demonstrators because he guessed soldiers would be reluctant to shoot their fellow citizens’ mothers and sisters. Now, it is the Islamic Republic’s enforcers who face that same dilemma.
So what will happen next? These protests could fizzle out, or they could be brutally stamped out.
Or they could explode into something that shakes the Islamic Republic to its foundations.
There is hope for change for the better in Iran – it is what educated and energetic young people want.
We must only hope that if they can change the face of modern Iran, they don’t make the mistake of their parents’ generation and topple one tyrant, only to install another.