Iran rises up for women's rights

Dozens have been killed, hundreds injured and thousands arrested in the mass protests sweeping Iran since 17 September, following the killing of 22 year old Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini by the “morality police”.

One underground socialist workers’ group described developments as the “biggest protest event in the history of four decades of the Islamic Republic’s repression”. It may well be the most powerful of many challenges to the Islamist regime since it confiscated and destroyed the Iranian revolution in 1978-79.

On 13 September Mahsa Amini, visiting Tehran with her family, was arrested for “bad hijab”, i.e. wearing her headscarf too loosely, and for her trousers being too tight.

Iranian socialists point out that the Gasht-e Ershad morality police operate mainly in poorer areas, seeking to monitor and impose compliance with (recently strengthened) dress codes on mainly working-class and middle-class women. Rich and ruling-class Iranians are much less likely to be targeted and can get out of trouble much more easily.

Two days after Amini’s arrest, the police issued a statement claiming she “suddenly suffered from a heart problem” and was “immediately taken to hospital”. A string of evidence quickly emerged that she had been badly beaten. Hospital officials issued a statement saying that “upon admission at the centre the patient was already brain-dead”.

Amini died on 16 September. Demonstrations in Tehran and cities in Iranian Kurdistan quickly spread around the country, including to conservative areas not known for protests.

Slogans reportedly raised on demonstrations include “Killed for a hijab — how much more humiliation?”; “You are our ISIS”; “Death to the oppressor, whether shah or ‘leader’” (i.e. Islamic Republic “Supreme Leader” Ayatollah Khamenei). Demonstrators are demanding an end to compulsory veiling and abolition of the morality police.

Many women, particularly students, have publicly removed and in some cases burnt their hijabs, with some cutting their hair or shaving their heads. Significantly, though, there are also reports of hijab-wearing women joining the protests. And men are protesting too.

While the regime shut off internet access and the police and other state forces attacked, beat and shot demonstrators, the Iranian majlis (parliament) met not to discuss why the Iranian people are so angry but how the protests are supposedly the work of foreign governments.

There do seem to be divisions in Iran’s elite as a result of the protests, but the dominant factions of the regime are working to suppress them.

Ayatollah Khamenei — who vocally condemned American police over the murder of George Floyd — has claimed the protests are organised by the US and “the Zionist regime” and given strong backing to the repression.

The remarkable force of the protests surely stems from the connection of the immediate issues to sharp oppression of women in Iranian society more broadly; and to the regime’s wider denial of basic freedoms. The even wider background is the growth of economic insecurity and inequality as Iran’s ruling class has deepened its neoliberal policies over decades. Since 2018 there has been an upsurge of strikes.

As the protests have developed, students have come to the forefront, with big rallies at universities and regime symbols torn down. (Despite the misogynistic nature of the Islamist regime, a majority of university students are now women.) On 2 October security forces shot student protesters in Tehran; student mobilisations have since escalated.

University and school workers have joined student protests. Other workers recently involved in important struggles have also started to organise in support.

Workers from the Haft Tappeh sugarcane factory, since 2014 one of the centres of working-class struggle in Iran, have visited Amini’s grave and met her family to express solidarity.

Workers in Iran’s pivotal oil industry are threatening strike action in support of the protests, with groups of contracted and then directly employed workers issuing remarkable statements at the end of September.

Big solidarity demonstrations in London have attracted relatively few non-Iranians. We will be trying to change that.