A shaken Iranian political elite is struggling with whether to frame the protests shaking the country as primarily the product of a covert foreign intelligence conspiracy, or instead a dangerous warning that the values of the Islamic Revolution have lost sway over a new generation infected by a western controlled internet, analysts say.
The debate, in which there are many shades of grey, matters since it determines whether the response should be a security crackdown coupled with retribution against the outside forces of disruption or some kind of dialogue with the largely leaderless youth.
If the first course is adopted, as is likely if the protests amplify, the already narrowing space for the west to revive the Iran nuclear deal after the US midterm elections correspondingly declines. It will also be a test of whether this Iranian government is capable of reform.
Some Iran observers are struck by the lenience – by the Iranian state’s brutal standards – with which the regime is acting, pointing out that the 200 reported dead is low in comparison with the 400 killed in a matter of days in the 2009 protests, when hundreds of people were also tortured in Kahrizak prison.
It is only in Iranian Kurdistan that the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, facing what they deem separatist groups, are exploiting the death of the 22-year-old Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini. She died after being arrested by morality police last month, sparking the current wave of protests across Iran.
One reason for the uncertainty is that the regime believes these leaderless protests will peter out. They claim only 80,000 people have been out on the street, and that the protesters lack the critical mass to create a revolution or a leader overseas – an assessment shared in most western capitals, however much leaders sympathise with the demands for greater personal freedom for women. “There is no Mandela, no Aung San Suu Kyi”, said one western observer.
It is the Revolutionary Guards, above all, who refuse to see the protests as a turning point, but the work of the west and Saudi funded Iran International.
Javan, the newspaper closest to the Revolutionary Guards, has even named the previous UK Foreign Office head of its Middle East department Stephanie Al-Qaq as the sinister ringleader. The paper claimed she entered Iran a few days before the start of the riots and closely monitored the management of the situation. Pointing to her past record as an employee of Reuters and Human Rights Watch, the paper said Al-Qaq “has acted as a bridgehead and one of the main centres of communication with opposition movements inside the country and has played an effective role in guiding and media-field operations of the recent disturbances”.
Simon Shercliff, the British ambassador in Tehran, ridiculed the claim.
The Revolutionary Guards’ commander, Hossein Salami, was also convinced agents provocateurs were at work, and said: “We will bring the roots of recent unrest from the streets of Iran to the heart of Washington, New York, London, Tel Aviv and Riyadh.” He argued the conflict had to be seen in the context of a battle between a successful Islamic revolution and a jealous declining west. The interior ministry claims the protesters are being paid 50,000 tomans for each molotov cocktail.
Broadly, the 83-year-old supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, has turned his back on dialogue, dismissing the protests as “minor incidents”, and “scattered riots here and there”. His legitimacy and legacy assembled over three decades is not to be challenged. If there is a problem it was Amini’s death, which official inquiries claim was due to natural causes. Protesters say she was beaten to death.
Far from Iran going through a process of secularisation, Iran’s clerics comfort themselves that as many as 3 millions Iranians have just travelled to Iraq on the annual pilgrimage, known as Arba’een marking the end of a 40-day mourning period for the killing of the 7th-century grandson of the prophet Mohammed, Imam Hussein.
But faced by its own reports showing that the average age of the protesters is about 20, some clerics say soul searching is required about how they lost a strata of the nation’s youth.
This is a dispute that is being fought out both on the internet and about the internet. Many conservatives blame the penetration of the western internet for undermining traditional Islamic values, and changing their psychology. One cleric this week claimed the internet had turned into a cultural Nato.
Javan claims that during the Covid lockdown “a number of high school and university students entered into business on social media. Because their pages became well known, they were able to put a lot of ads on their pages and achieved financial independence. They were able to solve their families’ financial problems as well and were able to have more authority in making personal decisions and became more and more independent.”
But the western internet, they say, has depraved the morality of Iran’s youth. Mohammad Sadegh Kushaki, a professor at Imam Sadigh University cited by Iranwire, claimed the protesters’ only demands were “swimming pools, removal of the hijab and mixed gender parties”. Hamid Rasaee, a former member of the parliament asked: “What do you think that minority who wave their headscarves in some streets are after? … The only ‘freedom’ that they want is to sleep with somebody each night and behave like animals.”
So a muddled distinction is being drawn by the justice department between the hardline opponents of the regime and those led astray by emotion. The education minister, Yousef Nouri, for instance, confirmed that some school students had indeed been detained and referred to what he called “psychological institutions”.
The establishments holding the students, he said, are meant to reform and re-educate them to prevent “antisocial” behaviour, a solution not radically different to the morality police re-education classes.
The parents of arrested children are also being hauled in, and many are being asked for bail conditional on their children’s future behaviour.
Reformists within Iran, largely scattered to the four winds by successive election defeats and Donald Trump’s betrayal of the nuclear deal, claim the conservatives are reaping their own bitter harvest.
By systematically discrediting the electoral process, chaining the media and imprisoning dissidents, younger Iranians have had to look elsewhere for freedom. The managing director of the reformist Etemaad, Elias Hazrati, in an open letter on Thursday, said that “every single Iranian added to the audience of BBC and Iran International … was the fault of Iranian state censor”.
The paper also reprinted a previous warning it had published about the way the internet was changing Iranian youth and creating a potentially unbridgeable generation gap: “The role of their parents is very weak. Their obedience to teachers and traditional education systems, such as parents and formal education, such as high school and university, is decreasing day by day.”
The heavy-handed “Mashhad cabal” around the president, Ebrahim Raisi, influenced by his powerful father-in-law, Ayatollah Sayyid Ahmad Alamolhoda, ordered the escalation of the role for the morality police and the enforcement of the hijab, igniting the protests. Influential figures are now saying an Iranian internet – rather than the police – is the the right tool through which to regain the youth.
It is not clear if the Iranian political class has the dexterity to respond to the shock that has hit them. For the moment, the evidence and precedent suggests those that blame outsiders and favour repression have the upper hand.
