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bne February 2018 Eurasia I 59
Iranian news agency websites have barely mentioned the protests. Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) engaged in some propagandistic pushback, publishing this picture and proclaiming: “Iranians from differ- ent walks of life rallied throughout the country on Saturday to support the Supreme Leader..."
Iranian protests seen as revolt of the provincial poor
but Iran’s struggle to pull out of its economic crisis while still facing sanctions pressure from the US
Trump administration was, shown
in the austere draft state budget presented to parliament by Rouhani
on December 10. Then there are the occasional reports and anecdotes relating economic hardship caused
by, for instance, punishing spurts of inflation, such as a near-doubling in the price of eggs and poultry seen in the past month, even though Rouhani is credited with having reduced inflation by around 20 percentage points to approximately 10% since he came
to office in 2013.
Violence broke out in many locations across the country of 80 million on December 30, but as far as December 31 was concerned it was unclear how many demonstrations were occurring. The BBC, however, said there were reports of water cannon being used by police
in Tehran against protesters who had gathered in a central square.
Kasra Naji, of BBC Persian – which in
a recent investigation found that on average Iranians have become 15% poorer in the past 10 years – reported: “Protests have remained confined to relatively small pockets of mostly young male demonstrators who are demanding the overthrow of the clerical regime. They have spread even to small towns throughout the country and have the potential to grow in size. But there
is no obvious leadership. Opposition figures have long been silenced or sent into exile. Even in exile, there is no one opposition figure that commands a large following.”
Nobel Peace Prize-winning Iranian lawyer Shirin Ebadi told Italian newspa- per La Repubblica on December 31 that the unrest was essentially social and economic and was just "the beginning of a big movement" that could be more widespread than the [anti-hardliner] demonstrations of 2009. "I think the protests are not going to end soon. It seems to me that we are witnessing the beginning of a big protest movement that can go well beyond the Green wave of 2009. It would not surprise me if it
bne IntelliNews
The word in Tehran on the three days of anti-establishment protests that have shaken up Iran is that they have largely been driven by a revolt of the provincial poor that is little understood by middle-class and wealthier inhabitants of the capital.
The Iranian authorities were on Decem- ber 31 attempting a many-sided strategy of trying to deter, hinder and disperse demonstrations, especially those that might gain critical mass in Tehran. For instance, a “smog holiday” was declared, thus forcing many potential demon- strators to stay at home to look after children off school, the provision of the internet became extremely patchy and “temporary” restrictions were placed on social networks such as hugely popular messaging app Telegram and photo sharing app Instagram. Iran’s Revolu- tionary Guards warned protesters they would face the nation’s “iron fist” if political unrest continued.
The protests have amounted to the big- gest show of dissent against the estab-
lishment since the huge “Green Move- ment” rallies in 2009 in which at least 30 people were killed. They began in the northeast as a response to economic hardship and rising prices, but turned political in many places, with slogans chanted against Supreme Leader Ayatol- lah Ali Khamenei and President Hassan Rouhani. “Like many journalists I live
in middle-class Tehran which seems largely ignorant of what’s going on so far,” a local correspondent told bne Intel- liNews. “All local media have been taken aback by what is going on, from foreign reporters to government outlets. The source of the protests is outside Tehran so, given the capital city bias, people have not taken much notice of it until now. Satellite news channels have been calling local journalists for comment
but everyone was just saying they were as clueless as anyone else. One thing though – the free market gold and currency rates hardly moved .”
Government statistics from Iranian government bodies are notoriously unreliable and irregularly released,
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