Posts tagged : "Iran protests 2022"

Kourosh Ziabari - Stimson Center: Emigration from Iran is on the rise again as more and more Iranians conclude that their country has been turned into scorched earth by the Islamic Republic and seek shelter, stability, and opportunity elsewhere.   While not as dramatic as the exodus from some other nearby countries such as Afghanistan or Syria, the human flight is a simmering societal cataclysm with long-term negative implications for Iran’s prosperity and national security. Over the past four decades, waves of emigration have deprived Iran of its most talented youth, who instead have become engines of economic growth in Europe and North America. Nepotism, failure to reward merit, shrinking civil liberties, and a lack of...

Kourosh Ziabari - PassBlue: Nationwide protests convulsing Iran triggered by the death of Mahsa Amini in police custody last September have tapered off, but as the women-led uprising recedes from the streets, a new spectacle is dominating slowly. It is unnerving the authorities once again. In the post-Woman, Life, Freedom movement, women are scrapping their headscarves in growing numbers and appearing in public without the compulsory hijab. The government has not reinstated the morality police to go after the women but has instead conjured up new ways of enforcing the hijab with economic repercussions. The measures include shutting down venues and businesses that cater to women who don’t wear a headscarf and conditioning...

Kourosh Ziabari - The New Arab: As the administration of the ultra-conservative Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi finds itself lonely on the world stage with a dwindling appetite for foreign relations beyond “strategic” partnerships with China and Russia, the functioning of foreign embassies based in Tehran is becoming increasingly unsteady. In the wake of the nationwide protests that followed the September 16 death of Mahsa Amini in custody of the morality police, the Islamic Republic’s relations with Western nations went down a slippery slope of estrangement as more countries raised their voice in support of the protesters and decried the crackdown. Amid this period of precarity, embassies in Tehran...

Kourosh Ziabari - Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington: The countrywide uprising precipitated by the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in the custody of Iran’s morality police has been described as the first feminist revolution of the Middle East. Taking wing after years of inertia, Iran’s civil society was incentivized by its women to defy patriarchal structures and enforcement of laws that have been steeped in religious fundamentalism. The “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement is less visible these days as street protests have waned in the face of a government crackdown, but the long-term social change set in motion because of the upheaval is consequential. Young and old Iranians rebelled against the...

Kourosh Ziabari - Democracy in Exile: Spooked by the success of citizen journalists in revealing the magnitude of the state-sponsored crackdown on protests and the critical role of popular public figures in mobilizing grassroots activists, Iran's parliament is pursuing two pieces of legislation that boil down to a government fiat that Iranians shouldn't have public opinions and express them freely. As part of the first legislation, which is being euphemistically promoted as a "bill to criminalize the publication of news contradicting citizenship rights," the judicial commission of Iran's Majlis, or parliament, is working to codify into law a ban on publishing—both by individuals and media outlets—any news that may...

Kourosh Ziabari - Democracy in Exile: As nationwide protests have gained steam in Iran following the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in the custody of the so-called morality police in September, the Islamic Republic has confronted dissent with new levels of severity. As of Sunday, 488 protesters, including 68 minors, have reportedly been killed, and with some 18,000 protesters arrested, detention facilities are overflowing. After several reported executions in the province of Sistan and Baluchestan, some of which haven't been documented, two protesters were hanged to death in a span of four days in Tehran and Mashhad. As the crackdown widens, artists and athletes who express solidarity with the protest...

Kourosh Ziabari - Democracy in Exile: The nationwide protests rocking Iran for the past month, sparked by the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in the custody of the so-called morality police, show the depth of anger and resentment that Iranians feel toward their government for its stifling of women, symbolized by the compulsory hijab law that so many Iranian women are now openly defying. But this sweeping outrage and outpouring of dissent across the country could have erupted at any time, well before the current protest movement crystallized against the violence unleashed by the morality police and the government's unremitting enforcement of the hijab. Widespread frustration and fear have been building up among Iranians for years,...

Kourosh Ziabari - Atlantic Council: The sweeping nationwide protests that followed the death of Mahsa Jina Amini in police custody on September 16, 2022 have been distinct from previous rounds of uprisings in Iran. Aside from the inclusive nature of the movement, which has straddled social boundaries and unified people of all stripes, the government crackdown has also been unprecedented. To quell what appeared to be a thundering revolutionary wave, the Islamic Republic unleashed violence, killing at least 524 people, making over nineteen thousand arrests, and, for the first time in years, engaging in a head-on confrontation with the nation’s most prominent artists, athletes, and celebrities who sympathized...

Kourosh Ziabari - Arab Center Washington DC: Over the past four months, the international community has been heaping praise on the Iranian people for their audacious uprising, which has been challenging the country’s clerical establishment despite a heavy-handed crackdown that is now being bolstered by a wave of retaliatory executions. The ongoing protest movement, whose spirit and core message have been captured in its unifying slogan, “Woman, Life, Freedom,” was initially ignited by the death of a 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian woman, Mahsa Amini, who died while in the custody of Iran’s “morality police,” a force that millions of Iranians have decried for its brutality and arbitrary enforcement of the...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: On December 6, the mayor of Tehran, Alireza Zakani, was the special speaker at the Sharif University of Technology in a ceremony to mark Students Day. He was one of several conservative ideologues deployed to university campuses by the Iranian government to initiate dialogue with students and placate them as the nationwide protests triggered by the death in police custody of Mahsa Amini in September showed no sign of abating. Universities were particular hotbeds of protest and activism. While the authorities consummated a campaign of mass arrests, sham trials and violence on the streets, they also touted “dialogue.” They made a stab at appealing to young people through speeches like the one...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: The nationwide uprising that ensued after the death of 22-year-old Iranian woman Mahsa Amini in the custody of the morality police in September added a new dimension to the global media coverage of Iran and dislodged the exclusive focus previously set on the country’s nuclear program and the stalled negotiations to revive the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. Now, the media are spotlighting the heroism of the Iranian women braving an overwhelming crackdown to reclaim their dispossessed rights, as well as the often-untold stories of ordinary citizens who are these days the protagonists of an epoch-making, dramatic struggle for freedom. These stories are being relayed to an...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: A month has rolled by since the outburst of nationwide protests over the death of the 22-year-old Iranian-Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini arrested by Iran’s morality police for what the authorities argued was her “inappropriate hijab,” a movement that soon ballooned into a broader social revolt characterized by the centrality of women demanding freedom and equal rights. The core element of the uprising that has convulsed Iran has been the rejection of the grotesque morality police equally loathed by the religious women who wear hijab voluntarily and the more progressive, liberal-minded women who don’t wish to subscribe to the government-prescribed lifestyle. Iranian women have become emboldened...