On 13 September 2022, a young Kurdish woman, Jina (Mahsa in Farsi) Amini was arrested for ‘improperly’ wearing a hijab while travelling to Tehran with her family and was transferred to the custody of the Islamic Republic (IR)’s so-called ‘morality police’. She was announced to have died on 16 September. A statement from Iran’s Legal Medicine Organisation claimed her death was the result of pre-existing conditions, whereas Amini’s father has insisted that: ‘the authorities are spreading lies about my daughter every day …she was in perfect health.’
Amini’s murder triggered protests in her home town of Saqqez in the Kurdish province of Northwest Iran. These rapidly spread across the country, fronted by pro-Kurdish, progressive and feminist groups adopting the slogan ‘Women, life, freedom’, a popular Kurdish rallying cry used by women fighters against ISIS in Iraq. Pro-Iranian government Press TV stated on 11 November: ‘Rioters went on a rampage across the country, brutally attacking security officers and causing massive damage to public property as Western powers, especially the United States, provided support.’ While covert imperialist operations may well be taking place to help foment unrest, the reality is that the IR is a brutal, reactionary regime which has murdered hundreds of thousands of opponents in the 40 years since its establishment after the 1979 revolution.
One third of the Iranian population are under 25, and youth have been in the vanguard of the rebellion; Ali Fadavi, deputy commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps announced in early October that the average age of arrested protesters was 15. Social media has been awash with videos of young women tearing off and burning their hijabs, even cutting off their hair in protest, and joined by young men in solidarity, who are burning public billboards of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Young people have taken to heckling imams on the street with kids videoing each other knocking off imams’ turbans and sharing the film on social media, a powerful political gesture against the clerical elite. National minorities within Iran, particularly the Kurds, are a powerful influence on the movement.
Protests have now developed into an unorganised mass movement comprising of people from different layers of society; from Monarchists, pro-government reformists and liberals (both religious and secular), to more radical but less-organised leftist and ethnic minority groups. Although the working class makes up the significant part of the movement, the emerging leaders are drawn from the petit bourgeoisie, corrupting the slogan of ‘Women, life, freedom’ to ‘Nation and prosperity’. Decades of repression have decimated the left, whose supporters were tortured, imprisoned and executed in their thousands throughout the 1980s. Broad swathes of society want to see a change of government to various degrees, based on their own class positions, ethnicities and religious practices.
Unbridled repression
By 12 November, according to the NGO Iran Human Rights (IHR), IR forces both official and unofficial had murdered at least 326 people, including 43 children, during the current wave of protests; thousands have been arrested. IHR says that at least 20 protesters face charges that carry the death penalty. Six protesters so far have been sentenced to hang. Mass executions by the IR are not unprecedented; between 2008 and 2021, at least 7,166 people were executed by the Iranian state.
Devastating sanctions
Numerous rounds of sanctions have been imposed on Iran since 1979. In 2012, US sanctions were intensified, restricting the government’s ability to receive dollars from exports. The value of petroleum exports dropped by 75% between 2011 and 2015; oil exports were restricted because of the EU’s ban on Iranian oil in 2012, the value of the rial dropping by two-thirds compared to the US dollar. The overall effects of sanctions between 2012 and 2020 fuelled a drop in GDP from $644bn to $232bn, a staggering 64% decline in less than a decade.
As of 2020, GDP per capita has shrunk to $2,757, the lowest for almost 20 years, and lower than in the mid-1980s. The average rate of inflation has been 20% over the past three decades, with a higher average of 40% over the last three years. World Crunch (July 2022) stated: ‘Every year, the purchasing power of vulnerable groups like pensioners or working-class families buckles under the pressure of inflation as prices leap ahead of stable wages. The government raised state-sector wages by no more than 10% in the Persian year to 20 March 2022. That has pushed millions of state-sector employees and their households below the poverty line.’
Sanctions are an act of war. They have been designed to slash Iranian living standards to drive unrest and undermine the IR with the ultimate aim of creating a regime which is no longer an obstacle to western imperialist interests. US President Joe Biden said during a campaign event on 3 November: ‘Don’t worry, we’re going to free Iran, they’re going to free themselves pretty soon.’
Western regimes also feather the nests of a litany of Iranian reactionaries. The prime example is the ‘Crown Prince’ of Iran, Reza Pahlavi, who heads the National Council of Iran, his nominal government-in-exile based in the US. While rhetorically pleading the case for ‘democracy’, he has indicated his preference for a ‘constitutional monarchy’ – that is, to reinstitute the Peacock Throne. He is a creature nurtured by the needs of the US foreign policy establishment to maintain a stock of puppets to help facilitate regime change. His supporters have dominated Iranian diaspora solidarity protests in Britain and elsewhere, side-lining and attacking Kurdish and progressive demonstrators. They are aided by the imperialist media which presents the need to bring Iran back into western imperialism’s orbit. That is why they have emphasised the appalling oppression of women in Iran to the exclusion of the sanctions which have caused mass impoverishment, or the national rights of minorities such as the Kurds. Western imperialist interests demand the maintenance of a singular Iranian state; socialists in Britain must support those forces which are fighting for the democratic rights for all for women, and for self-determination for Kurdish people in particular.
Women, life, freedom!
Freedom for Kurdistan!
End imperialist sanctions!
Ben Adelaide
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 291 December 2022/January 2023
