Berlin/Teheran.
Cameras monitor the headscarf requirement. It has become quiet on the Iranian streets. Has the regime defeated the women’s protest?
It has become quiet on the streets. There have been hardly any pictures or videos of demonstrations from Iran for weeks. Is the uprising over? Has the mullah regime triumphed over the angry women who no longer want to be patronized? Aida, an engineer from Tehran who was present at the demonstrations from the start, doesn’t see it that way. Especially in Teheran The atmosphere is very tense since the government stepped up its threats again. “It’s like waiting for a spark to reignite everything,” says the woman in her early 30s.
For months, Aida has been reporting to our editorial team about what she has experienced on the streets since the death of the Iranian Kurd Jina Mahsa Amini in mid-September. The 22-year-old died in police custody. She had been arrested for wearing the hijab – the mandatory one headscarf – wore too loose. Protests broke out, and more and more dissatisfied people – by no means only women – joined the resistance. Since then, the country has not calmed down.
Iran: Cameras from China monitor the women
But now they have Mullahs upgraded – both technically and rhetorically. Because the four executions temporarily put the protest movement into a kind of shock, but they didn’t suffocate it. Chinese technology is now supposed to help enforce the headscarf requirement, which fewer and fewer women are complying with: with surveillance cameras made in China. Police chief Ahmad-Reza Radan announced that they should be used to identify women without a headscarf. Your pictures should go to the public prosecutor.
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For eight years there has been im Iran biometric ID cards that can also be used for facial recognition. First, the police want to warn women who wear their hair down with a text message on their mobile phones. If it happens again, they will go to court. Relatives and friends with whom they ride uncovered are allegedly threatened with having their vehicle confiscated. Those who incite women to take off their headscarves should be punished even more severely. Surveillance has been running since Saturday. The error rate of the CCTV cameras is “zero”, enthuses Radan.
The government and security forces want to enforce headscarves
The police chief announced the high-tech offensive against women on a special day – Al-Quds Day. Revolutionary leader Ayatollah Khomeini proclaimed “Jerusalem Day” to demonstrate against Israel. But this year the hate came on Israel and the Jews in the background. In their final statement, the regime’s marching supporters called on the state to take tougher action against women who do not conform to the hijab rules hold. They called the refusal to wear the headscarf an “ominous gift from Zionism” that “the enemy’s espionage apparatuses” are promoting.
Supreme leader Ali Khamenei has also declared the refusal to wear hijab as “haram” politically. In the Sharia, this means a ban that the government and security forces are now trying to enforce with even greater severity. But that doesn’t deter everyone.
The women show themselves with the hashtag “Bravery is increasing”.
On Saturday there were demonstrations for the first time in a long time. Student organizations had called on women to go to universities without headscarves. Images on social media show protests near Isfahan being broken up by police with tear gas. “I think it’s good that on a certain day a collective hijab denial takes place. But every day since September has been such a day for me,” says engineer Aida. She no longer wants to wear the headscarf.
Hundreds of images and videos surface daily on social media showing women with their hair down on the street. More often than not, women post such photos of themselves—many with the hashtag “Fortitude Multiplies.” “The demonstrative rejection of the headscarf has become a clear sign of rejection of the regime,” says a cultural scientist in Iran, whose name the editors will not disclose for security reasons.
The resistance finds a new form
The threats, the violence, the mass arrests, the show trials with long freedom and dozens death penalties If the protests haven’t suffocated, Azadeh Akbari is also observing this from Germany. “The fact that the anger and dissatisfaction can no longer manifest themselves on the streets does not mean that the movement has reached a dead end,” says the scientist, who researches women’s movements in Münster and Twente.
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It is the nature of such movements to change again and again. In Iran in particular, such ups and downs are normal, because the great repression has forced the demonstrators to leave the streets – at least for the time being, says the sociologist. She points to the scale of the repression: “In this movement we have seen a few executions of the death penalty on innocent people without a fair trial, alongside systematic sexual violence against detainees, shots aimed in the eyes, through which scores of women have one or even both have lost eyes. Children were shot.” Therefore be resistance on the streets no longer possible at the moment, but in other forms.
Not only fear and repression are holding back the opposition
Iran expert Cornelius Adebahr confirms this. “In fact, the months of street protests died down earlier this year,” says the analyst from the German Council on Foreign Relations, who lived in Tehran from 2011 to 2016. Nevertheless, the revolt continues, it expresses itself on a small scale – in quickly written graffiti, in short protests captured on video or “Death to the Dictator” shouts at night. “Because for many people, the Islamic Republic has lost all legitimacy due to the brutal crackdown that killed more than 500 people.” At first glance, the regime seems strengthened, “because there hasn’t been another revolution so far, but the revolt could flare up again at any time,” says Adebahr.
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Not only fear and repression are holding back the opposition. She also weakens herself because her protagonists have not yet become one more powerful alliance came together. The movement is fragmented. “Meanwhile, individual groups have emerged both domestically and in the diaspora who are writing down their demands for fundamental change in manifestos,” says Adebahr. However, this has not yet resulted in a unified opposition that could pose a threat to the regime (like the Shah did in 1979).
“The warmer it gets, the more freely women will dress”
There is also dissatisfaction among the hardliners. On social media, they threaten to act on their own if the state doesn’t get the situation under control again. “The next flare-up of protests is very close,” says researcher Azadeh Akbari.
The summer could help with that. “The warmer it gets, the more freely women will dress,” expects Aida, “and that will bother the state and the fanatics even more.” She, too, is convinced that the next wave of clashes is only a matter of time. “This revolution started because of the hijab, so it’s always linked to the topic of hijab,” says Aida. The uprising of women who are fighting against compulsory headscarves continues. It has become quieter, but nothing has calmed down.
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