Women, life, freedom. Those three words have been repeated by protesters in Iran since the death of Mahsa Amini on 16 September. The protests, the largest recorded in the Middle East country in years, have to some extent shaken the regime of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, whose rhetoric seeks to downplay the movement’s origin, size and purposes.
Kurdish activists, members of the same ethnic minority as the 22-year-old who has become a symbol of the acts in the country and abroad, tell Sheet that the mobilization is ultimately aimed at the overthrow of the Iranian regime.
“For the first time we are seeing people from all ethnic groups in Iran fighting for the same goal,” says Alan (not his real name), a human rights activist in the northwestern city of Urmia. He requested anonymity for fear of becoming a target of retaliation.
Still according to these activists, the motto of the street movement in Iran is inspired by the struggle of Kurdish women in neighboring Turkey, Syria and Iraq.
“Amini’s death, unfortunately, is a universal story,” says Elif Sarican, an anthropologist at the London School of Economics and a member of the Kurdish women’s movement in the UK. “In many countries, people die in police custody because of their ethnic or racial origin. That’s why there is so much international solidarity with the protesters in Iran.”
Understand what is behind the main motto of the protests, according to activists.
Women
Amini died in the custody of the moral police in Tehran after falling into a coma days after being detained. What motivated the arrest was allegedly having violated the law imposed after the Islamic Revolution of 1979 that forces women in the country to cover their hair with the hijab, the Islamic veil.
Based on independent reports attesting to blows to the feathers and other parts of the body, the family accuses the arm of the security forces of torturing and assaulting the young woman. The regime denies it and says she had preexisting health conditions.
Chanting “jin, jiyan, azadi” (women, life, freedom, in Kurdish), a crowd gathered for the young woman’s funeral in her hometown of Saqez, in Iranian Kurdistan. Since then, the acts have spread to other parts of the country, and the Kurdish motto has also been repeated in Farsi (“zan, zendegi, azadi”).
Images of Iranian women taking off their veils and cutting their hair won the world. But anyone who thinks that women in Iran just want to get rid of the obligation to wear the hijab is wrong.
“There is a simplistic view that the protests are just about the veil,” says Iranian Kurdish filmmaker Beri Shalmashi, who lives in Amsterdam. “We want the downfall of the regime, we want a democracy in which Iran’s 80 million people feel represented.”
Asked to what extent the protests in Iran can be understood as an expression of feminism, she ponders: “I believe that it is insufficient to explain all the layers of oppression we are facing. This is a multifaceted revolution.”
Many of the demonstrations, by the way, have been led by girls and young people in schools and higher education institutions, some of them with direct criticism of members of the regime.
Life
If the economic crisis and restrictions on freedoms make life in the country difficult for Iranians of the ethnic Persian majority, the situation is even worse for members of other communities, such as Kurds, Baluchis and Azeris. These minorities report being targets of marginalization, police violence and mass incarceration.
Amini, the dead young woman who became a symbol of the protests, for example, did not even have the right to be addressed by the authorities by her Kurdish name, Jina. She was forced to register as Mahsa, the Persian name by which she became known worldwide.
“We want to be treated like human beings,” says Alan. He, who is a Kurd and a Jew, says he feels like a “third or fourth class” citizen.
The activist has been sharing news of the protests in Iran with the rest of the world through social media, despite the regime’s internet blockade in parts of the country from time to time.
Security forces have reacted to the demonstrations with violence. According to NGOs that monitor human rights in the country, there are at least 336 victims of repression as of last Friday (11), 52 of them minors. The regime cites 39 dead agents and around 15,100 arrests.
Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, the ultra-conservative, recently claimed that the country’s cities were “safe and sound”. He and Ayatollah Khamenei describe the protests as a failed attempt by the US and Israel to replay the 2011 Arab Spring revolutions in Iran to destabilize the regime.
Filmmaker Shalmashi has been receiving news of the demonstrations directly from friends in Iran. “People are less afraid to talk on the phone than they were a few months ago. They’ve accepted that the biggest risk they run is getting killed for protesting, so the other dangers become less important.”
Freedom
According to activists interviewed by the Sheet, the protests for justice for Mahsa Amini mark a process of profound transformation in Iran. On the horizon, they see the construction of a democratic society, in which all citizens have their human rights respected, regardless of their gender and ethnic origin.
This does not mean that they simply want to copy the Western way of life. Shalmashi asserts that “it is a mistake to treat freedom, modernization and westernization as synonyms”.
She advocates a decentralized political model, in which Iran’s diverse ethnic groups organize themselves autonomously. Power, now concentrated in the hands of Revolutionary Guard officers and Shia clerics, would be shared.
“The choice that seems to be posed for the people of Iran is between a brutal theocracy or Western democracy. The Kurdish movement offers a third option: our principles are radical democracy, ecology and women’s liberation,” says anthropologist Sarican. .
“A flame has been lit in the people of Iran. They can conquer whatever they want. It is the people who are there, resisting, who should define the country’s future, not the regime or the West.”
With a wealth of experience honed over 4+ years in journalism, I bring a seasoned voice to the world of news. Currently, I work as a freelance writer and editor, always seeking new opportunities to tell compelling stories in the field of world news.
