Iranians mobilize against the Hard Right after young woman’s death at the hands of its Morality Police

[jserraglio]

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR

‘This girl has united us all’: Women’s rage mobilizes Iranians

Viewed from the level of Iran’s acrid, smoke-filled streets, the protests that have swept the country since the death a week ago of a young woman in the custody of the morality police have unleashed a pent-up determination to create real change in the Islamic Republic.
The protesters’ stated goals go beyond merely reforming the strict rules about women’s dress and extend to broadly expanding freedoms. And they speak openly of using violence to chip away at what they say is the calcified edifice of the regime.
Yet it is women’s outrage that is the driving force.
Mahsa Amini was detained by Iran’s morality police for an alleged infraction of edicts that require the full covering of women’s hair with a hijab, or headscarf, in public. Witnesses and family members say the 22-year-old was severely beaten in custody, charges the authorities deny. Her death after a three-day coma triggered rage that quickly morphed into broader anti-regime unrest.
By Friday, protests had spread to some 83 cities, and the violent clashes and a crackdown by security forces have left 26 dead, according to state TV. Protesters say 50 have died.
Videos posted on social media appear to show police firing directly into crowds.
Women have conducted mass burnings of headscarves, and even symbolically cut off their own hair in protest, against a backdrop of burning police cars and buses, and clashes with baton-bristling riot police.
Indeed, women and the evisceration of their freedoms are for the first time since the Islamic Revolution of 1979 the catalyst for demonstrations demanding reform, even, as some on the streets are saying, the wholesale toppling of the regime.
“This is the moment I’ve been waiting for,” says Mahnaz, a 40-something English tutor in Sanandaj, a city in the Kurdish region of northwest Iran near Ms. Amini’s hometown, who has taken part in the protests. Like others interviewed, she gave only one name. Individuals in Iran were contacted by phone or online messaging services, despite severe disruptions to internet usage this week across the country.
“Our people have never been this united. Our men could never be more supportive of women,” Mahnaz says. “I know this might not necessarily lead to our ultimate goal of overthrowing the regime this time. But I have no doubt it’s causing a very deep crack on its body.
“It’s like a wall which you can’t smash to the ground with one blow. More blows, and it will collapse,” she says. “I am absolutely positive, victory is ours and it’s more imminent than it’s ever been.”

Shrinking political space

For years Iranians have reeled from a growing sense of hopelessness due to an economy crushed by U.S.-led sanctions, mismanagement, and corruption; political disenfranchisement; and more recently, even the failure to restore the 2015 nuclear deal with world powers.
Those problems have been exacerbated, analysts say, by conservative and hard-line control of all levers of power in Iran. Since President Ebrahim Raisi assumed office last year, the space for political expression has shrunk further.
In July the government rolled out a new hijab policy, and videos of morality police violently enforcing strict rules have gone viral.
On Thursday, during his first visit to the United Nations in New York, Mr. Raisi decried the “acts of chaos” in the streets of Iran.
“The Islamic Republic ignored us women, humiliated us, and destroyed two entire generations of women, and it only got worse,” says a protester in Sanandaj called Shiva, who’s 19 and plans to be a civil engineer.
“But they never knew that the rage was just intensifying beneath the surface. And guess what? We’re there to vent all that accumulated anger back into their faces. ... And trust me, it will be devastating,” she says.
“This girl [Ms. Amini] has united us all, because we could all relate to her, not just women, even men. She’s the embodiment of our plight; in one word she’s ‘Iran,’ its suffering, the barest form of a nation’s misery under a criminal regime,” Shiva says.
Read rest of story here https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Middle- ... s-Iranians