Unrest in Iran: are the mullahs losing their grip?
There’s a change of mood in Iran, said Omid Rezaee in Die Welt (Berlin), and most of all among young urban women fed up with the Islamic regime’s “medieval rules”. Last December, on a crowded pavement in Tehran, 31-yearold Vida Movahed clambered onto a utility box and waved her headscarf on a stick until she was apprehended by the morality police for uncovering her head. Others have copied her; about 30 women have been arrested, some even jailed, but the campaign shows no sign of abating. Now the guardians of public morality face trouble on another front: the storm of anger at the humiliation served to a teenager for posting Instagram videos of herself dancing in her bedroom. The sight of 18-year-old Maedeh Hojabri being driven to tears while bullied into making a televised “confession” was too much for many to bear.
The furious public outcry in this case is decidedly novel, said Maziar Motamedi in Al-monitor (Washington DC). The state broadcaster, IRIB, was savaged on social media for terrorising a young woman whose sole crime was being “happy”. Even conservatives have joined the angry chorus, calling it regressive for courts and police to harass youngsters. One cleric declared that it was “old judges”, not the “quivering of a teenage girl’s waist”, that had given religion a bad name. And the Trump administration, ever eager to promote regime change, was quick to exploit the unrest, said Azadeh Moaveni in The New Yorker. Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state, voiced support for the hijab protests and noted that they seemed to terrify the “brutal men of the regime”. But Iran’s feminists say that by appropriating their cause for his propaganda purposes, Pompeo will provoke a regime crackdown, in which they stand to lose the little they’ve so far gained.
Since the birth of the Islamic Republic, social unrest has simmered beneath the surface and periodically manifested itself, said Martine Gozlan in Marianne (Paris). Yet the regime has always survived it. Last week, however, protests were breaking out in every sector of Iranian society: farmers suffering from drought; traders exasperated by the crash of the rial; working families unable to pay their bills, and suffering from power outages and water shortages – all took to the streets, often to be repulsed by security forces using tear gas. The riots might not be on the scale of those that rocked Iran in the wake of rigged elections in 2009, but they do still attest to an underlying shift in sentiment. “Amid all the anxiety, one feels a sense that the ayatollahs’ reign is drawing to a close.”