Antiregime Protests By Students, Women, And Ethnic Minorities In Iran – Part I: The Protestors’ ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ Chant vs Islamic Regime Claims That The Protests Are Organized By Foreign Countries
MESOP MIDEAST WATCH – Inquiry and Analysis Series No. 1674 – By A. Savyon and M. Manzour 26-12-22 – Introduction
The antiregime protests in Iran have now been underway for three months, and many of those protesting the regime’s tyranny are students and other young adults, and also members of Iran’s ethnic minorities.
The protestors’ motto, “Woman, Life, Freedom,” indicates that the protests are against the regime that suppresses human and women’s rights. The protests focus on the nature of Iranian society; while Iran’s Islamist regime promotes an Islamic society that imposes religious revolutionary principles on the public, the protestors are demanding a society that while religious is also moderate.
It is notable that the young people’s political protests are targeting symbols of the regime – for example, setting on fire the ancestral home of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the father of Iran’s Islamic Revolution, in the city of Khomein, and knocking turbans off the heads of clerics on city streets. Police stations and public buildings are also targets of arson, and protestors are defacing posters and statues of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and the late leader of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) Qods Force, Qassem Soleimani, who was in charge of expanding the regime’s forces in the region. Video footage shows demonstrators shouting slogans against Khamenei and his son Mojtaba, and against the IRGC and the Basij paramilitary force that is in charge of suppressing the unrest in the cities.
Regime officials, in contrast, are promoting a narrative according to which the protests are masterminded and fomented by Western countries and their collaborators within Iran, who are enemies of the country. The regime has dubbed the protest movement “the joint war and global media war on Iran, claiming that these elements are seeking to harm the regime by sowing chaos and unrest with the aim of pressuring it, inter alia to agree to concessions with the U.S. and the West in the nuclear talks. Regime officials are also claiming that the West fears Iran’s might and scientific power, particularly its achievements in the nuclear field as well as in the areas of missiles and drones, as well as its ideological strength that challenges the Western order and offers the world an alternative – that is, the Islamic Iranian order as embodied by the Islamic Revolution. Thus, they claim, the West is trying to rile up the Iranian public, especially the younger generation. Therefore, regime officials are promising that the unrest will be harshly suppressed and that the revolution’s “values of truth and justice” will continue to be imposed.
Domestically, Supreme Leader Khamenei, who has explained that demons and Satans are behind the unrest, demanded publicly, on December 10, 2022, that Iranian authorities suppress the protests. Indeed, regime enforcement institutions had already announced, a month into the protests, that they would deal harshly with demonstrators. In late October, IRGC commander Hossein Salami publicly warned Iran’s young people not to return to the streets to protest. At the same time, the Iranian judiciary announced that it would be holding public trials for thousands of young people arrested during demonstrations.