Iran has seen three days of protests against government mismanagement and economic hardships. This week’s protests began in the country’s second-largest city, Mashhad on Thursday, though there have been small-scale protests since September. The generally accepted view is that the protesters are frustrated with high food prices, limited economic opportunities and corruption.
The crowds are nowhere close to the very large-scale protests in 2009, when millions of Iranians took to the streets. Most cities have seen several hundred or a few thousand people marching this week. The 2009 protests were driven by supporters of Mir-Hossein Mousavi’s campaign for the presidency. Mousavi lost the election to Ahmadinejad, amidst widespread reports of vote rigging, which sparked almost a year of protests. Mousavi remains under house arrest till today.
The interesting and new thing about this week’s protests is that they have not been driven by support of any single politician. There are some reports that the initial protests were organized by hard-liners who opposed the current president Hassan Rouhani. However, this seems to have changed rather quickly and current reports suggest the protesters are not targeting Rouhani. Instead, they are chanting slogans against clerical rule and the Islamic republic itself. This for instance is video of a protest in Qom:
What is remarkable is that this chant was heard in Qom. Qom is the largest center of Shi’a scholarship in the world. A large number of Grand Ayatollahs have seminaries there and it hosts tens of thousands of clerical students at any given time. We should keep in mind that many clerics are more liberal than the current regime, and some do not believe clerics should directly exercise political power, a reflection of a centuries old debate among Shi’a theologians. All that said, it is almost shocking that this chant was heard in Qom.
The unexpected thing about the slogans is that they are directly targeting Ayatollah Khameini and the power structure that supports him, the Revolutionary Guards and Basiji militia. Keep in mind that chants like this against the head of state can result in the death penalty.
This pattern of slogans is being repeated in cities across Iran.
The fate of these protests is really uncertain. Some observers believe that the general population is unlikely to join them since the demands for an end to clerical rule are seen as both radical and dangerous. The regime has begun to crack down on protesters reportedly killing two protesters. There are also reports that internet connectivity has been slowed or blocked to mobile phones. Most of the protests seem to have been organized online via Whatsapp or Telegram. The regime is trying to paint some of the protests as the result of foreign-meddling. Pro-Khameini rallies had been planned for Saturday across the country, and demonstrators at these rallies offered strong support for the supreme leader.
I don’t think anyone has a clear answer as to how this will end.
"People ask me what will happen next," Abbas Abdi, a leader of the 1979 seizure of the American Embassy in Tehran who is now an influential advocate of political reforms, wrote in a newspaper column. "And I can say that people can tolerate economic pressure but not humiliation." — beta.latimes.com/...
— @subirgrewal