Jaime León |
Tehran (EFE).- For months many young women dreamed of an Iran different from the theocracy founded by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. They protested in the streets of the country, burning veils and removing the turbans of clerics. The revolution was around the corner. But it was not like that.
The Islamic Republic has in fact strengthened its control, intensified repression and partly broken its international isolation since the death a year ago today of Mahsa Amini after being arrested by the so-called Morality Police for wearing the Islamic veil incorrectly.
After the death of the 22-year-old Kurdish girl on September 16, 2022, university students, teenagers and even schoolchildren challenged the Islamic Republic in the longest protests so far against the clerics shouting “women, life, freedom.”
And they dreamed of freedoms that they do not have now, political and social, but also mundane such as dancing, letting their hair down, listening to music or riding a motorcycle.
But the Iranian Government crushed the protests with a repression that caused 500 deaths, thousands of arrests and in which seven protesters were executed, one of them in public.
After this, the authorities have intensified repression, closed media outlets, locked up activists, journalists and lawyers, broken their international isolation and even achieved the unfreezing of 6 billion dollars blocked by the United States.
Disenchantment
All this to the disappointment of Iranians who dreamed of another Iran.
“We thought things were going to change. This time yes,” a young Iranian woman tells EFE, her voice filled with emotion.
“There were people in the streets of dozens of cities, we danced around bonfires and burned our veils. The world was paying attention to us,” continues Kyra, a fictitious name to preserve his anonymity.
“We felt free for a moment,” he says.
An Iranian university student believes that they have barely achieved anything and have instead paid a high price, given the large number of dead and executed.
“We have lost,” Ali Reza, fictitious name, tells EFE. Some of his friends were injured in the protests and others spent months in prison.
Ali is now looking for work before finishing his studies, an arduous task given the battered state of the Iranian economy, hit by high inflation.
“What have we achieved?” he asks, more concerned about his future job than his civil liberties.
Some of the apparent achievements of the protests, such as the supposed end of the feared Morality Police, the scourge of women who did not cover their heads or bodies enough, have been reversed.
Thus, since the end of July, patrols have returned to the streets with the mission of giving warnings to women who do not cover their hair, although at the moment they are only giving warnings and are not making arrests.
Crack in the country
For Iranologist Raffaele Mauriello, the protests were a movement of “civil disobedience” rather than a revolution and no profound changes have occurred.
“There has not been a paradigmatic change,” Mauriello explains to EFE, pointing rather to a generational change and the polarization of the country.
“The crack between visions of the country is stronger. This polarization of Iranian society has increased,” says the professor of Spanish Language and Literature at the Allame Tabatabaí University in Tehran.
Raffaele also considers that the Iranian Government now appears to be stronger after controlling the protests and its entry into the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the group of emerging economies BRICS or the normalization of relations with Saudi Arabia.
Nervousness of the authorities
And yet on the anniversary of Amini’s death, the authorities have not stopped issuing warnings and have deployed strong security measures in the streets, revealing a certain nervousness.
Some streets that, in fact, have not been able to fully recover, especially due to the refusal of many women to cover themselves with a veil, the most visible symbol of discontent, despite growing repression.
“We are not going to give in. Let them fine me, let them take away my car. “I’m not going to wear the veil,” a young Iranian woman tells EFE.
A position held by many women in Tehran and who think that sooner rather than later a change will occur in the country.
“They cannot keep the population oppressed forever. It is unsustainable,” continues the young woman.
As the Polish reporter Ryszard Kapucinski wrote in his classic “The Shah or the Excess of Power,” Khomeini repeated the slogan “the Shah must go” for 15 years until his revolution triumphed in 1979.
Perhaps the cry “woman, life, freedom” just needs more time.
