In the early days of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah
Khomeini famously dismissed an aide’s concerns about rising inflation.
Economics, the Supreme Leader quipped, was “for donkeys. The 1979
revolution was not about the price of watermelons.”
Four decades later, however, the revolution’s future may depend on the
price of eggs and other staples that recently shot up by almost forty
per cent. Since December 28th, Iran has been swept by popular street
protests in dozens of cities, triggered by the oil-rich nation’s
economic woes. The death toll has topped twenty. Arrests are in the
hundreds. The turmoil is the worst since the 2009 Green Movement
challenge—then over allegations of fraud in a Presidential election—that
dragged on for six months.
The unrest has also further increased tensions between Tehran and
Washington. From vacation at Mar-a-Lago, President Trump seemed to
delight in Iran’s situation. “Many reports of peaceful protests by Iranian
citizens fed up with regime’s corruption & its squandering of the
nation’s wealth to fund terrorism abroad,” he tweeted, on Friday.
“Iranian govt should respect their people’s rights, including right to
express themselves. The world is watching! #IranProtests.”
The Administration’s tone has become more belligerent in the new year,
with Trump alluding to support for regime change “Iran is failing at
every level despite the terrible deal made with them by the Obama
Administration,” Trump tweeted, on New Year’s Day. “The great Iranian
people have been repressed for many years. They are hungry for food &
for freedom. Along with human rights, the wealth of Iran is being
looted. TIME FOR CHANGE!”
On Tuesday, the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders,
called the protests “an organic, popular uprising.” She said that the
international community could no longer sit silent. “America longs for
the day when Iranians will take their rightful place alongside the free
people of the world,” she told reporters.
Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, pushed back, blaming
foreign powers for infiltrating Iran and organizing the unrest. “Look at
the recent days’ incidents,” he told a group of women related to Iran’s
veterans and war dead. “All those who are at odds with the Islamic
Republic have utilized various means, including money, weapons, politics
and intelligence apparatuses, to create problems for the Islamic system,
the Islamic Republic and the Islamic Revolution.”
The new protests are different from any since the 1979 revolution. They
didn’t start in Tehran, the cosmopolitan capital. The genesis was a
small demonstration in Mashhad, Iran’s second-largest city and its
holiest site. The city is a bastion of clerical ideologues and political
hard-liners. Shiites from all over the world make pilgrimages to the
burial shrine of Reza, a Shiite saint. Mashhad is not a rowdy place.
The initial protesters also didn’t fit the profile of reformers and
educated élites, as in 2009 or the student protests of 1999. This time,
they are populist. The activists appear to be largely the working
classes and the young. At least twenty-nine per cent of Iran’s young are
unemployed—in a country where the majority of the population has been
born since the Revolution. So far, ninety per cent of the arrests are
youth under twenty-five, the deputy interior minister, Hossein
Zolfaghari, announced on Tuesday.
The grassroots uprising is largely leaderless. The 2009 Green Movement
had figureheads in the two losing Presidential candidates—former Prime
Minister Mir Hossein Mousavi and former parliamentary speaker Mehdi
Karroubi. Both men have been under house arrest since 2011. Other
politicians—a former Vice-President and members of parliament—had
endorsed the Green Movement. Some were tried and received long prison
sentences. But no big names and no new names have emerged in support of
the latest unrest. There is no manifesto.
“It’s a winter of discontent in Iran, with natural disasters and
pollution exacerbating the plight of a population that is fed up with
political and economic stagnation,” Ali Vaez, the director of the Iran
Project at the International Crisis Group, told me. “Their trigger seems
to be widespread disgruntlement, worsened by recent price hikes and
slashing of subsidies, over the country’s economic performance, which,
despite a number of marquee deals and recovering oil sales since the
2015 nuclear deal, has failed to significantly redress issues of
unemployment, corruption, and income inequality.”
The protests spread quickly to all but one of Iran’s thirty-one
provinces, pulling in thousands, largely through social media. The tenor
also quickly switched to politics and the regime itself—both Supreme
Leader Khamenei and President Hassan Rouhani, who was inaugurated for
his second term in August. Videos on social media have showed crowds
shouting “Death to the dictator” and “Death to Rouhani.” Protesters even
challenged the regime’s foreign policy and expensive military
interventions in Syria and other parts of the Middle East. “Leave Syria
alone. Give a thought to us,” went one chant. “I give my life for Iran,
not Gaza, not Lebanon,” said another. (Tehran is the main source of
support for Lebanon’s Hezbollah, and has had fluctuating ties with the
Palestinian party Hamas.)
So far, however, the demonstrations have not matched the size of the
million-person marches that typified the 2009 unrest. They have been
more pervasive, but smaller. According to accounts from Iran, some have
been marches. Others have been pockets of protests in public venues that
defied security forces or even took them on. One popular story on
social media recounted protesters who cornered a paramilitary Basij
militiaman—and stripped him of his pants rather than beat him. Other
protests popped up on a street corner, where demonstrators shouted
chants to get the message across, then dispersed before security forces
arrived.
For the regime, the uprising over price hikes is a perfect
storm. The price of eggs and poultry reportedly soared after the culling
of chickens due to fears of avian flu. As global oil prices have fallen,
sustaining subsidies on basic goods from petroleum products to food,
which date back to the Iran-Iraq War in the nineteen-eighties, has also
become more difficult. And, last month, Rouhani’s new government budget
for the first time unveiled the huge sums being spent on religious
institutions at a time when families were getting less. The idea of
being transparent with state funds has backfired on him.
In 2013, Rouhani ran for President on a platform of brokering a nuclear
deal with the world and boosting Iran’s struggling economy. He got the
nuclear deal, in 2015, and his government has brought down inflation from
over forty per cent to around twelve per cent. But since Rouhani’s
reëlection, last year, he has not produced the trade benefits or foreign
investments that many Iranians anticipated from the deal. Foreign
companies are nervous that the Trump Administration will impose new
sanctions and fear making risky new investments in the country.
Rouhani acknowledged the problems—and the right to protest—in an appeal
for calm. “We are a free nation, and based on the Constitution and
citizenship rights, people are completely free to express their
criticism and even their protest,”
he said.
“But the procedure of expressing criticism and protest should be in such
a way that would lead to the betterment of public life and country’s
situation.”
For now, the uprising has left reformers and educated élites on the
margins. The groups that led the 2009 Green Movement appeared surprised
by the protests. Many of their most prominent voices have been silent
during the recent unrest. Meanwhile, in cities across the country,
security forces have fanned out to contain the populist movement and
prevent it from evolving into a larger and coördinated uprising. Iran’s
chief justice warned that protesters could face charges of “moharebeh,”
or waging war against God, a capital offense. Six days in, the stakes
are deadly serious for all sides in the Islamic Republic.