On Wednesday October 26, demonstrations continued in some thirty Iranian cities to mark the fortieth day of the death of Mahsa Amini. The 22-year-old Iranian died after being released from police custody because of her clothes on trial “non-compliant” to the rules of the police, the September 16. Since then, Iran has been crossed by an unprecedented uprising. Today, a question arises: what will be the nature of the regime in Tehran, especially after the death of the Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, aged 83? Ali Alfoneh, an expert at the Arab Gulf States Institute, a Washington think tank that studies the Revolutionary Guards (the country’s ideological army), believes that the latter are prone to “gradually transforming Iran into a military dictatorship”.
How do you analyze the regime’s response to the current uprising in Iran which has claimed more than 200 victims? What logic prevails?
The regime’s response to the ongoing protests is based on Iranian leaders’ analysis of the collapse of the Shah’s regime in 1979: they believe that the Shah’s regime collapsed when he made concessions to protesters, for example by arresting officials known to be corrupt – to deflect criticism against the shah – and releasing political prisoners. The result was catastrophic: regime officials began making deals with revolutionaries to secure their careers, if not their lives, after the revolution, and more people joined the protests with new demands. This is why Ayatollah Khamenei and today’s regime are unwilling to make concessions from a position of weakness, but prefer to suppress protests.
How do you see the uprising evolving? Are we already witnessing the beginning of the fall of the regime?
In Iran, people take to the streets to demand bread or freedom. Individually, these protests are easy for the regime to suppress, but when the middle class, demanding freedom, and the underprivileged, demanding bread, unite, they pose a formidable challenge to the regime. Moreover, the protesters lack leadership, organization and funding. They obviously embarrass the regime, but cannot overthrow it. However, the longer the low-level protests drag on, the greater the possibility of leadership, organization, and even funding sources emerging.
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