source: BBC
There goes a young woman, as she makes her way down a street in Tehran, one cannot miss the air of freedom, perhaps fragile freedom about her. Her hair uncovered, her jeans revealing a fashionable rending. An unmarried couple walk hand in hand. Some couples promenade the streets arms around each other. One year after Mahsa Amini’s death, and the morality police’s fear factor has almost evaporated.
An open and bold rebellion, the like, unthinkable in the periods before Mahsa Amini’s death.
The mass protests that shook Iran after her death subsided after a few months in the face of a brutal crackdown, but the anger that fuelled them has not been extinguished. Women have just had to find new ways to defy the regime.
A Western diplomat in Tehran estimates that across the country, an average of about 20% of women are now breaking the laws of the Islamic Republic by going out on to the streets without the veil.
All the women I spoke to referenced the surveillance cameras that monitor the streets to catch and fine those who flout the dress code.
A Western diplomat approximates the proportion of women refusing to publicly wear the hijab in the ritzier neighbourhoods of north Tehran to be even higher than 20%. But he stresses that the rebellion is not limited to the capital.
“It’s a generational thing much more than a geographical thing… it’s not just your bright educated people, it’s basically any young person with a smartphone… so that’s what takes you right out into the villages, and all over.”
The diplomat describes the protests sparked by Mahsa Amini’s death as a huge, and terminal, “turning point” for the regime, which has tried to control how women dress and behave for more than four decades.
“It turned [the regime] into a one-way street with a dead-end,” he says. “The only thing we don’t know is how long the street is.”
The uprising, led by women, was the most serious challenge to Iran’s theocratic regime since the revolution of 1979. In crushing it, human rights groups say the regime killed more than 500 people. Thousands were wounded – some blinded after being shot in the face. At least 20,000 Iranians were arrested, with accounts of torture and rape in jail. And seven protesters were executed – one of them publicly hanged from a crane. As intended, this had a chilling effect.
Security has been largely mobilised across the country, especially around the home of Mahsa Amini during the anniversary to ensure that another wave of protests is not sparked.
This attempt to prevent further unrest as the anniversary of Mahsa Amini’s death is marked; has led to the authorities carrying out another wave of arrests. Among those locked up are women’s rights activists, journalists, singers, and relatives of people killed during the protests. Academics deemed anti or unsupportive to the regime have also been purged from their jobs.
But extraordinary acts of quiet defiance continue every day.
Tehranis continue to deface government billboards and to write “#Mahsa” and “Woman, Life, Freedom” – the rallying cry of the protests – on walls, mostly on the subway. With the government repeatedly wiping them out but the slogans keep coming back.
Some men wear sleeveless clothes and shorts or wear make-up when they go on the streets, because these things are illegal for men to wear. Some men wear mandatory hijab on the streets to show how bizarre it looks when you force someone to wear something they do not like.
The morality police patrols, which were temporarily paused in the wake of the protests following Mahsa Amini’s death, have been visible again in the past few weeks – though they seem to be wary of provoking direct confrontation for fear of reigniting mass demonstrations.
But the authorities have sought to impose control in other ways in the past year. They have shut down hundreds of businesses for serving unveiled women, and have been issuing fines and impounding cars driven by women not wearing the headscarf.
Currently women without the veil risk a 5,000-500,000 rial [$0.12-$11.83] fine or a prison spell of between 10 days and two months.
“Bahareh”, 32, says she’s already received three text warnings on her phone from the authorities, after being captured on CCTV driving in Tehran without the veil. She says if they catch her again they might impound her car.
According to the police in one province alone – East Azerbaijan province – 439 cars had been impounded as of 11 August for hijab infractions.
Bahareh has also been stopped from going into the city’s metro and into shopping centres. Hardest of all, she was prevented from attending celebrations at her son’s school to mark the end of his first year there.
But she is also clear in her mind that there is no going back, recalling the thrill she experienced when she first took off her headscarf in public last September.
“My heart was pounding. It was so exciting. I felt like I’d broken a huge taboo.”
Now she’s so used to it, she doesn’t even carry one with her.
“Not wearing it is the only tool I have to show my civil disobedience, not just against the hijab but against all the laws of the dictatorship, all the suffering that Iranians have endured over the past 43 years. I will keep going for all the mothers and fathers who have to wear black in mourning for their children.”
It’s impossible to gauge exactly how many people would like to see the end of the Islamic Republic, but fury at the regime is widespread, according to film-maker Mojgan Ilanlou, who was jailed last October for four months after taking off her veil and criticising Iran’s supreme leader. She was briefly detained again last month in an effort , she says, to intimidate her.
It is all very clear now that the women of Iran have crossed the threshold of fear, though the latest round of repression has been so “horrifying”.
“This is a marathon not a sprint,” IIlanlou says, likening it to the moment Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man on a bus, igniting the US civil rights movement. “Her refusal to give up her seat wasn’t just about a person sitting on a chair. It’s a statement telling others: ‘I’m not afraid of you. Look at me. I have power,” said IIlanlou.
Illanlou continued; it’s working. Men’s attitudes towards women are changing, even in more conservative parts of the country, she says. A social revolution is under way.
“Society won’t go back to the pre-Mahsa time,” In the streets, in the metro and in bazaars, men now admire women and praise their courage… Remarkably, even in some very religious cities like Qom, Mashhad and Isfahan, women no longer wear a headscarf.”
She, like the Tehran-based diplomat, insists this is a rebellion that cuts across social classes. She describes street vendors unveiled on the metro. And she told she’d shared a crammed lice-infested room in Qarchak jail last year with a young impoverished woman – who became a mother at just 11 years old – who had also refused to wear her headscarf.
And it’s not just the hijab. Ilanlou says women are now making other demands, such as for equal rights in a marriage contract.
For Elahe Tavokolian – a former factory manager – and others, the sacrifice has been heavy. She misses her children, 10-year old twins, desperately.
From the suburbs of Milan where she now lives, in borrowed spare rooms, she calls them whenever she can.
As she talks about them, tears roll down her cheek from her left eye.
Elahe, who had never taken part in protests before last September, was shot by Iranian security forces in Esfarayen in the north of the country.
“I was with the children and we’d just been buying supplies for the start of school. They were covered in my blood.”
Escaping to Turkey, she got a medical visa to travel to Italy, where surgeons removed her right eye and the bullet which had penetrated it.
She still needs another operation so that she can close the eyelid over her new glass eye.
And she has no idea when it will be safe for her to return to Esfarayen, and see her children again.
“Whenever we speak, we always talk of our hope that we can be together again in Iran, in better days.”
For now, those better days seem a long way away.
Human rights groups say no Iranian official has ever been held to account for Mahsa Amini’s death and the ensuing crackdown.
And the regime is not backing down – quite the reverse. A draft law currently before parliament – the so-called Hijab and Chastity Bill – would impose new punishments on women who go unveiled, including fines of 500m-1bn rials [$118-$23,667] and prison terms of up to 10 years for “those who do not comply… in an organised way or encourage others to do so”. It’s been described by UN-appointed human rights experts as a “form of gender apartheid”.
The government has “dug its heels in”, according to Jasmin Ramsey, deputy director of the New York-based NGO The Center for Human Rights in Iran.
But the Iranian population refuses to surrender, she says.
“Iran remains a tinderbox, ready to ignite at any moment.”
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