Uprising in Iran and International Solidarity

More than 76 people have died and hundreds have been arrested during two weeks of protests in Iran. Protests broke out on September 17, the day the funeral was held for Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman killed while in the custody of the morality police (Gasht-e-Ershad). She was arrested on September 13 for not properly covering her hair as mandated by Iranian law. 

Protests have spread to over 80 cities in Iran and across all 31 provinces, with students striking to join the protests and oil workers threatening to strike if the government doesn’t end its repression of the protests. 

There have been solidarity demonstrations in cities all over the world with women gathering to cut their hair in protest of the law that led to Ms. Amini’s arrest. Solidarity protests led by Iranians living outside the country, a diaspora estimated at over four million, are occurring across cities large and small and in different regions of the world. A wide range of groups within Iran have also demonstrated support and solidarity, including footballers, artists, and academics. This is crucial to the protesters knowing that they are not alone in their struggle and for the Iranian government to know that the whole world is watching as security forces continue to crackdown on protesters. 

There are also many who are happy to see Iranians rising up against an Islamic regime. Viewing the situation through an Islamophobic lens, many pundits and journalists are quick to point out the anti-woman and repression “inherent” in the religion. The protesters, however, are quite clear that the dress code law they are fighting against–and a demand for greater civil liberties—is a political demand, not a religious one. 

Head coverings only became mandatory in Iran after the 1979 revolution when people rose up to overthrow the monarchy of Shah Reza Pahlavi, US-backed dictator that ruled Iran with an iron fist since 1941. During the revolution, Iranian workers took over factories and oil refineries and began to organize in their own interests. Women played a leading role in the revolution, some using their chadors to hide weapons during the insurrection. 

The rise of an Islamic government was in reaction to the revolution, not a product of it. Religion and religious symbols were an effective way for the new regime to take over and justify its actions. The hijab and mandatory head covering became weaponized against rival revolutionary groups. Many leaders of the revolution were forced to flee the country, imprisoned, and executed. Women had to be suppressed as well and the policing of their appearance was an effective way to do that.   

The current protests are the first major challenge to the dress code laws and regular harassment by the morality police. Women are fed up with the policing of their bodies and the reality that a slipping head scarf can lead to being beaten or even killed. Iran’s many policing agencies, whose leadership hierarchies are intricately intertwined within the state and its capitalist enterprises, are eager to crackdown on all dissent and preserve the existing order at all costs.

US Empire is no friend of the Iranian uprising

However, some calls for solidarity and international support ring hollow. When Biden spoke to the United Nations about the protests, he said, “We stand with the brave citizens and the brave women of Iran who right now are demonstrating to secure their basic rights.”

Other Democrats have jumped on the bandwagon to show support for the protesters. Democratic Representative Katie Porter said, “…the [Iranian] state is brutally cracking down on its own citizens protesting for their freedom. I stand in solidarity with the brave women and allies fighting for their rights.” New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez, who chairs the Senate's Foreign Relations Committee has also publicly praised the “brave women and men” of Iran.

These politicians, and the U.S. government, have no credibility in denouncing state repression and demanding a woman’s right to bodily autonomy. The United States has a long history of police repression of protests–most recently the militarized response and repression of Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd–and they have done nothing to reverse abortion bans affecting more than 20 million people who can become pregnant. They are hardly the champions of civil and women’s rights.

The Biden administration is using the anti-government sentiment resonating throughout Iran, and reflected internationally by Iranians living outside Iran, to escalate US imperial sanctions against Iran.

While women are fed up with their appearances being policed, I’ve had my own experiences with the morality police during my time in Iran, the outrage towards the government is rooted in economic devastation in Iran caused by decades of US-led sanctions, neoliberal capitalist policies that have widened social inequality, and widespread suffering from the effects of sky-rocketing inflation, Covid-19 mismanagement, and climate change disasters. 

Sanctions are a weapon against the people

The U.S. first imposed sanctions on Iran in 1979 when students took over the American Embassy. The sanctions have controlled everything from what goods and services can enter and exit Iran to what Iran is allowed to produce to blocking countries from doing business with Iran. 

Iran is denied materials to produce medicine and permission to import medicine. For decades medication from basic painkillers to lifesaving treatments have been prevented from entering the country. Aside from the countless deaths this has caused, the lack of medicine and medical supplies meant that Iran had one of the highest Covid death tolls at the beginning of the pandemic. 

One goal of the sanctions is to keep Iran economically isolated. Without the ability to sell oil and do business with other countries freely, Iran suffers from shrinking resources and few prospects for its population, especially those who are university educated and middle class. The current wave of inflation has hit Iran hard, especially the working class and vulnerable sections of the population who cannot access dollars to access goods on the black market. 

The government has responded by imposing more taxes. This led to a two-day merchants' strike in June that was joined by pensioners and teachers. Merchants, historically core supporters of the Iranian government, closed their shops across Tehran and several other cities in protest of “rising taxes and a falling currency”. According to Iran International, “one US dollar surpassed 333,000 rials on Sunday. This represents a more than 25-percent decline since late March and a 10-fold drop since 2017.” As of August, inflation in Iran was at 52.2%, creating an untenable situation for a population of 86.4 million people.        

In addition to high inflation, flash flooding in July impacted 19 of Iran’s 31 provinces, damaged more than 20,000 homes, and killed more than 100 people. The flooding displaced more than 2,600 people and caused about $200 million in damage.

Now that protesters are challenging the government and the dress code law and there is widespread anti-government sentiment throughout Iran, the Biden administration has dropped any plan to resume nuclear talks. Instead, it is using this opportunity to impose further sanctions against Iran. The US has placed sanctions on Iran’s morality police and the U.S. Department of Treasury has placed sanctions on seven senior Iranian military and security officials, including the chief of the Iranian army’s ground forces. This opens the door to more U.S. (and Israeli) assassinations of leading military officials, such as the drone strike that killed Iran’s top security and intelligence commander in 2020.   

There are additional calls for the U.S. to limit Iran’s sale of 750,000 barrels of crude oil per day to China which is in violation of US third-party sanctions. Oil is at the crux of U.S. policy towards Iran, ever since the revolution ousted the Shah who functioned as a puppet of United States’ imperial policy in the region. The United States is still committed to its imperial project in the Middle East and Iran continues to be a central piece of the puzzle to the United States controlling the region’s oil and accessing oil reserves in the Caspian Sea. 

Building solidarity with the people of Iran

Building solidarity with the protesters means more than cynical statements calling out the Iranian government. It means standing against calls for further sanctions to punish the Iranian government that will only hurt the protesters and the rest of the population. 

True solidarity means building a movement within the United States to end the sanctions on Iran. In addition, real support for the protesters can be given by continuing to mobilize large numbers to protest the abortion bans in the United States and the fight for bodily autonomy here at home.

Building a large movement to fight for abortion access is fundamental to building an international movement for gender-based equality. Protesters in Iran need to know that their struggle, which may escalate and lead to the fall of the regime, won’t be manipulated by the U.S. to impose a puppet government that will amass great wealth for itself and U.S. companies at the expense of the majority of Iranians.

For this reason, calls for solidarity with Iranian protesters must be synonymous with an end to U.S. imperialism in the Middle East and around the globe. 

Anahita Tehrani is an Iranian-American socialist activist.