Page 84 - bneMag Dec22

84 Opinion
bne December 2022
Rules of the game have finally changed
On social media, celebrities and footballers, to some surprise, are now among those speaking truth to power. Something vital really does seem to have shifted. Even a dyed-in-the wool establishment creature like Ali Larijani has spoken
out against inflexibility. The rules of the game have finally changed in Iran.
There’s a multi-generational call for change that has been
a long time coming. The movement is leaderless still, but certain names pop up with regularity, such as that of Hamed Esmaeilion, a widower who was a dentist in Canada until the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in January 2020 shot down Ukraine International Airlines flight PS752 over Tehran, killing 172 people including Esmaeilion’s daughter and wife (the Iranian authorities say the shooting down was an accident. Maybe it was, but there could well have been a cover-up of negligence in the chain of events that led to the tragedy).
The soft-spoken Esmaeilion has embodied the national
pain of Iranians. Photos of the man show the sheer level of agony and frustration felt by many towards the clerics in Tehran. Other names include that of Mahsi Alinejad, a former journalist in the US whose push for regime change originated in her “My stealthy freedom” campaign some years back. It nudged women to forgo the hijab.
The road ahead
The regime shows no sign of allowing the fate of the seat of power on to the agenda. Encouragingly, however, it does seem that top officials are by now deeply divided on how to respond to the protests that won’t go away. A paralysis has crept into some proceedings. The parliament, for instance, bungled a presentation of the autopsy report on Amini. An MP proved unable to pronounce half of what was given to him to relay to the chamber.
Different factions argue that they know the right path to take from here in dealing with the nightmare of deeply scorned women on every street corner, but they are not effective in how they communicate their new diktats. They are even incapable of implementing processes that would ease social rules to at least curb and soothe the angst and tensions in society.
The confusion of the factions in the face of the insoluble protests could be the final undoing of the Raisi conservative administration, seen as a rehash of the former hardline Ahmadinejad government that concluded in 2013. The president himself has looked unnerved in recent television footage of him. His spokesman, meanwhile, was something like a rabbit in the headlights when he attempted to calm students at Tehran University on October 24. Photos and video recordings of the spokesman’s meeting with the students leaked to social media suggested that the youth, especially young women, are not for backing down anytime soon.
Irrespective of whether or not the government lets women wear what they want, 43 years into the longest revolution known to man, the protests and outrage persist, convictions and passions continue to spill onto the streets. The obstinate authorities can choose to slay more 16-year-old girls with beatings and bullets. They can kick students out of the university canteen for mingling with the other sex. But the kids are not listening. The fusty edicts of the clerics are not for them.
Ultimately, the authorities are going to have to move over. They’re going to have to make some room for personal freedom of expression or they can expect continued turbulence in the cities and towns for months ahead into the cold season. And that, historically, is when more people descend onto the streets of the capital, just as they did in putting an end to the Last Shah and his ancien régime.
Iran for first time involved in major war on
European continent, conclude analysts
bne IntelIiNews
It is an extraordinary development, but according to many analysts it is a simple fact – for the first time, Iran
is involved in a major war on the European continent.
Backing the claim that Iranian military advisors, most likely members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), are on the ground in occupied Ukraine – and possibly Belarus – to help Russia deploy Iranian kamikaze drones in strikes against Ukrainian cities and civilian infrastructure, two analysts at the Washington, DC-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies also suggested that Iran is now preparing to up the ante by
www.bne.eu
providing Russia not only with potentially thousands of additional drones but also with two types of Iranian-made ballistic missiles.
With Iran’s drones – write John Hardie, deputy director of
the Russia programme at the Foundation, and Behnam Ben Taleblu, a senior fellow at the Foundation, in a Foreign Policy piece headlined “Iran is Now at War with Ukraine” – having helped Russia redress battlefield weaknesses hampering its eight-month war against Ukraine and conserve some of its dwindling missile stock, Tehran, looks set to provide Moscow