Jin, Jiyan, Azadî! (with Samira Ghaderi)

Will the Jina Amini protests bring change to Iran?

On September 13, 2022, eight days before her 23rd birthday, Jina Amini was arrested in Tehran by officers of the Guidance Patrol—the arm of the Law Enforcement Command of the Islamic Republic of Iran charged with enforcing shari’a law—for the crime of wearing her hijab improperly. In Iran, the hijab is mandatory, and women must keep their hair covered. However, in Tehran especially, plenty of young women do not stick to the letter of the law.

Amini was Kurdish. She was born and lived in Saqqez, in the Kurdistan province of Iran, and was only in Tehran to visit her brother. She was in his company when she was detained by the Guidance Patrol, who told him she would be taken to the station for a re-education class on the mandatory dress code. That’s not what happened. Instead, in the van on the way to the station, the police brutally beat her, as police do, and two hours after being taken into custody, she was transferred to a hospital. She was in a coma for three days due to brain trauma, and died on September 16.

“There’s a lot of females walking around Tehran with their hair showing,” says the Washington-based immigration attorney and activist Samira Ghaderi, my guest on today’s PREVAIL podcast. “For the Kurdish community, for the Kurdish ethnic group, it wasn’t about the hijab. It was the fact that they did stop her, to ask about her hair showing. They take her ID, they see that she’s from a remote Kurdish village, thinking that nobody’s going to be held accountable for what happens to her. Nobody’s going to care, right, because she’s just another ethnic Kurd that’s going to get killed—just like it’s happened so many times before.”

Amini, Ghaderi tells me, was named Jina, but because that is a Kurdish name, the state insisted that she be given a Persian one—Mahsa—to use on her official documents. “Under Raisi’s new hardliner approach, they’re using [her arrest] to kind of send a message to others that are showing hair or that are not as conservative.” In a word, Amini was an example.

Iran has been an Islamic Republic, under control of a Supreme Leader, since 1979. Under the previous president, Hassan Rouhani, hijab enforcement was less maniacal. But under the new leader, a reactionary named Ebrahim Raisi—whose previous claim to fame was intimate involvement in the government’s 1988 execution spree of political prisoners—the Guidance Patrol, which Ghaderi sardonically refers to “the Mortality Police,” has emphasized the importance of controlling how women look. Representatives of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei opined in 2020 that improperly veiled women should be made to feel “unsafe.” The cops, I’m sure, didn’t need to be told twice what their priorities were.

In the United States, regrettably, we are not strangers to the concept of police officers savagely beating and killing ethnic minorities who are taken into custody for the flimsiest of reasons. It happens with alarming regularity. The execution of George Floyd by white cops sparked the largest protest movement in the history of the country.

In Iran, whose people have lived under an oppressive and misogynistic regime since 1979, the execution of Jina Amini—the government, like some bloated insurance company, blames her death on pre-existing conditions, but few believe that—ignited a protest movement that has gone on for months. Her death was a result of bigotry, misogyny, police brutality, violence against women, and the disproportionate enforcement of a ridiculous law, a law written by men for women.

The journalist who broke the Amini story—Niloofar Hamedi—was arrested by the security forces and accused of being a spy engaged in “multi-dimensional wars” organized by “Western and Zionist intelligence agencies. . . to carry out serious and uninterrupted planning with the aim of influencing different social layers, especially in areas related to women.” She’s still in prison. That Hamedi is a woman does not make the regime look any less paranoid, oppressive, or sexist.

For a few months, it appeared that the protest movement might succeed in toppling the odious Khamenei government. Ghaderi was hopeful. Now, she is more pessimistic. “I personally think the diaspora failed the people of Iran,” she tells me, “because of self-appointed leaders that were very quick to label themselves as the leaders of the movement without having any concrete step on how we’re going to achieve democracy, or how we’re going to bring about change in Iran.”

The involvement of Reza Pahlavi, the son of the last Shah of Iran, Ghaderi regards with suspicion. “The rumors are that Reza Pahlavi just wants to get us to a free Iran, but once we’re there he’s just going to get off the train and go live his life and let the people of Iran decide how we’re going to rule the country,” she says. “I don’t believe it.” Can we really trust a Crown Prince to help bring democracy to a country where his father was once king?

It’s tempting, living in the United States—land of the free, home of the brave—to look at Iran and think, “That will never happen here.” But with the Supreme Court being captured by extreme rightwing forces, is the concept of staunchly religious men in robes dictating what women can and can’t do really that hard to imagine?

We all have our ayatollahs.

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LISTEN TO THE PODCAST

S5 E9: "Jin, Jiyan, Azadî!" | Protests in Iran (with Samira Ghaderi)

Greg Olear is joined by the immigration attorney and activist Samira Ghaderi, who talks about the protests in Iran that started in September, prompted by the death of Jina Amini in police custody. They discuss the brutal incident that started the protests, the significance of Amini being Kurdish, the crimes committed by the Khamenei regime, the fracturing of the movement, and the future of Iran. Plus: help from our friends.

Follow Samira:
https://twitter.com/Samira_Ghaderi

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Photo credit: Taymaz Valley. Protesters in Ottawa, Canada, October 2022.