The death of Mahsa (Jina) Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman who died in hospital on September 16, 3 days after being arrested by Iran’s orientation patrol, sparked large ongoing protests in Iran. Women’s remedy for not practicing the “proper hijab,” Iranian women in other cities and rural spaces have been at the forefront of street protests, cutting their hijabs and some cutting their hair publicly in mourning while resisting police repression. A month later, an estimated 233 people, totaling 23 children, have died in the protests.
The Iranian protests erupted due to long-standing grievances stemming from the damaged promises of the post-revolutionary Iranian state, whose anti-imperialist Islamic nationalism aspired to the economic injustices, inequality and political oppression of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s regime. However, more than 4 decades later, the promises are still not fulfilled. The growing economic and wealth hole between the maximum population and economic elites; the unequal distribution of resources (and the impoverishment of provinces inhabited by ethnic minorities such as Kurds, Arabs and Baluchis); And repression of dissent has been building for decades. Iran’s domestic economic policies are aggravated by sanctions against the country, which harm the most vulnerable segments of the Iranian population.
While the US has consistently imposed sanctions on Iran since the 1979 Iranian revolution, the Obama leadership has imposed the toughest sanctions in the history of US economic warfare against Iran. On July 1, 2010, President Obama signed into law the Iran Sanctions, Accountability, and Divestment Act of 2010 (CISADA) to amend the Iran Sanctions Act of 1996 (ISA). CISADA has added new types of restrictions that have devastated the Iranian economy. The new sanctions have placed unbearable economic strain on the rest of the people of Iran, especially posh runners, and have endangered many lives by making life-saving drugs unaffordable. The imposition of CISADA and economic stress from the United States and Europe led Iran to sign the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA, also known as the Iran Nuclear Agreement) in 2015, an agreement that lifted some (but not all) ) of the sanctions. . ). The overthrow of the JCPOA by the Trump management, followed by the imposition of a “maximum tension” sanctions campaign, continues under President Biden. Although Iran-USA Negotiations have resumed this year, Israel, US hawks and some anti-regime replacement forces within the Iranian diaspora have been serious obstacles to sanctions relief and continue their opposition to the reinstatement of the JCPOA by hijacking Iranian protests.
Despite the brief relief the JCPOA has provided to the Iranian people, long-standing sanctions, exacerbated by Trump’s renewed measures, have profoundly affected the quality of life in Iran. The Iranian state’s hasty resolution to put into effect “independent development” with the aim of strengthening the economy has resulted in local technologies that have had devastating environmental consequences. For example, after Obama imposed sanctions on the sale of gas to Iran, resulting in a 75% drop in imports, Iran began refining its own oil. This policy has resulted in the production of gas and diesel containing 10 to 800 times more pollutants than the foreign standard. The resulting air pollutants have higher rates of cancer (especially breast cancer) in Iran, exacerbated by the lack of life-saving cancer treatments. , also because of US sanctions, has subjected the Iranian population to a slow death.
The renewal of US sanctions under the Trump administration has further reduced the buying power of the Iranians and raised inflation to unprecedented rates. Even though the US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) issued rules that humanitarian items (such as medicines) would not be subject to US sanctions. medical. – a fact that has resulted in an incredibly high mortality rate in the coronavirus pandemic. In addition, even though medicines are exempt from paper sanctions, due to Central Bank sanctions, suppliers strive to promote medical materials and life-saving medicines in Iran, since monetary transactions are subject to consequences or have a cap that makes exemptions meaningless. As Human Rights Watch reported in April 2020, “The definition of drugs under US export regulations, which includes prescription and over-the-counter drugs and medical devices, excludes certain vaccines, biologicals, chemicals, and medical devices. doctors, adding medical materials, instruments, devices, supplied ambulances, institutional washers for sterilization and cars with medical control devices. This means that some of the essential devices in the fight against the virus, such as decontamination devices and full face masks, require a special license. While some foreign aid has been legal due to the pandemic, even aid organizations that have OFAC licenses to operate in Iran have grappled with legal battles that have delayed their license renewals, causing a significant delay. in the early weeks of the pandemic when relief efforts were crucial.
Increased privatization, in contradiction to the ideals of the early years of the revolution, combined with sanctions to widen economic inequality and generated discontent and resentment. With the economic crisis resulting from sanctions have led to large protests in recent years. For example, in June and July 2018, the drastic fall in the price of the Iranian currency as a result of sanctions and lack of access to white water in the southern province of Khuzestan led to protests in Tehran, Khorramshahr, Abadan and Ahwaz. More recently, in recent months, teachers and civil servants have protested against low wages and the privatisation of education. These protests have been brutally suppressed by the Iranian state in the so-called “national security”.
Sanctions, as many have argued, are wars under some other name. More than 4 decades of economic sanctions have made life incredibly complicated for the majority of the Iranian population without making any difference in the repressive policies of the Iranian state. In fact, sanctions – along with U. S. covert operations – are not the same. The U. S. military under the guise of “democratization projects” and the imminent risk of U. S. military intervention is not yet U. S. The U. S. has helped protect the Iranian state and given it a convenient excuse to silence any form of dissent. Any protest, whether a reaction to emerging fuel prices, economic corruption and the exploitation of sanctions (opportunistic monetary transactions and industry through personal entities and corrupt government elements to profit from the misfortune of the majority of the population), restriction of social freedoms, catastrophic environmental policies, oppression of ethnic minorities or injustice of paintings – is accused of “foreign collusion”. and is brutally repressed.
The opportunistic appropriation of Iranian protests through some opposition teams in the Iranian diaspora, as well as through US war hawks. their lives in street protests. The hijacking and appropriation of Iranian protests by regime change advocates is not new. In reaction to those threats, the Iranian state is employing a strategy all too familiar to other Iranians: arresting, torturing and extracting confessions from dissidents, whom the state accuses of “foreign collusion” and propaganda, and cutting off internet access to Iranian citizens during protests.
Domestically, the anti-imperialist concepts of post-revolutionary Iran have lost their appeal to certain segments of the Iranian population that characterize the economic atrocities and runaway inflation of Iran’s geopolitical role in the region, i. e. , its political teams in Palestine, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Lebanon. This resentment is based on the concept that state political teams in the region ignore Iranians, and on the claim that this has alienated Iran from “the West. “Other Iranians oppose the struggles of Iran’s Arab and Afghan neighbors.
“Zan, Zfinishegi, Azadi”, which is the continuation of the Kurdish slogan “Jin Jian Azadi” (“Woman, life, freedom”), has become the rallying cry of recent protests, summarizing politics and life with an emphasis on “freedom”. beyond nationalism Zan, Zfinishegi, Azadi do not oppose the struggles of the peoples in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, the United States, Syria, Lebanon and other parts of the world, nor do they reject those struggles because the Iranian state appropriates them for its own geopolitical agfinishas. It rejects Islamophobia and orientalist representations of Muslim women and refuses to reduce the motion opposing compulsory hijab to a binomial of faith and secularism. Zan, Zfinishegi, Azadi does not translate into liberal democracy’s promise of freedom, a freedom that has been intertwined with personal property, racialized and finished notions of man, and built on death, the weakening of slavery and the spoil Zan, Zfinishegi, Azadi, or “Woman, Life, Liberty”. , crystallizes a politics where “woman” is not an overdetermined biological identity, a symbol of national honor, or a framework without subjectivity on which struggles unfold. of liberation “Woman, Life, Freedom” calls for a long road where sanctions do not exhaust life and where repression is not justified in the call of national security. Sanctions harm women who bear the brunt of economic devastation, increased violence and state repression. The call to “Woman, Life, Liberty” is not feasible until the fatal sanctions and the benefit of sanctions end.
Large protests in Iran indicate that many Iranians, even some who are aligned with or aiding the state, are fed up with the corruption and repression being imposed under the guise of “morality. “After 43 years, Iranian women who reject the instrumentalization of their bodies as a position of morality/freedom are at the forefront of the movement.
The transition to “Woman, Life, Freedom” in recent demonstrations represents, therefore, a harsh questioning of sectarian orientation through the movement towards solidarity and another vision of the construction of the global. through nationalism, empty promises of rights or neoliberal competition, but aspiring to a life free of repression, injustice, scarcity and violence.
If sanctions kill softly on the call of rights and foreign security, if the Iranian state kills brutally in the call of morality and the disguise of anti-imperialism, and if American bombs kill shamelessly on the call of liberal democracy, then “Woman, Life, Freedom” aspires to a life where death does not have the last word.
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Sima Shakhsari is a professor and co-chair of the Department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Her book, Politics of Rightful Killing: Gender, Sexuality, and Civil Society in Weblogistan (Duke, 2020), won honorable mention Fatima Mernissi from the Middle East Studies Association.
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