The demonstrations against the regime in Iran have been going on for five weeks. From a local protest in Kurdistan, they have developed into the greatest challenge for the ruling ayatollahs and military in years.
It all started on September 13 in Tehran, when the morality police arrested a young woman on the street because her headscarf didn’t comply with the rules. What exactly happened afterwards at the police station is still unclear to this day. The fact is, however, that 22-year-old Mahsa Amini was taken to a hospital shortly afterwards, where she died in a coma three days later. After a newspaper made the young woman’s death public, there was an outcry. Many Iranian women felt that it might as well have happened to them.
The protests expressed the frustration that has been building up for years about the discrimination against women and the anger at an authoritarian, corrupt regime that wants to force its rigid, patriarchal moral concepts on society, which are in ever more blatant contradiction to the desire of young people for freedom . Added to this was the desperation about the catastrophic economic situation, the growing poverty and the dramatic lack of water in many places.
Despite the regime’s ruthless repression, protests in Iran have been going on for five weeks now. These maps show how the wave of protests, starting in Mahsa Amini’s Kurdish hometown of Saqez, spread across the country within days.
More clearly than ever, the protests show the broad rejection of the leadership of aging ayatollahs and corrupt military officials, who have long had nothing to offer the people but hackneyed slogans, violence and deprivation. The slogan “Women, Life, Freedom” expresses the desire for a free, self-determined life that unites Iranians across generations and across all social, religious and ethnic boundaries.
To this day, the regime is struggling to find an answer to the protests, which are doing without fixed structures and leaders. But what makes the protests so difficult for the regime to grasp is also their weakness. Because as long as the protest movement has no clear organization, no central leadership and no program, it will find it difficult to overthrow the regime or to formulate a coherent alternative to the system of the Islamic Republic.
Many different concerns are hidden behind the common slogans “Women, Life, Freedom” and “Death to the Dictator”. In addition to women’s rights, problems such as poverty, unemployment and water shortages, as well as the oppression of ethnic minorities such as the Kurds and Baluchis, are driving people onto the streets. It is still too early to speak of a new revolution in Iran. But even if the regime succeeds in putting down this wave of protests, it will only be the beginning of a new one.