October 13, 2022
The death of a young Iranian woman in police custody has ignited a wave of extraordinary protests among young Iranians, including university students and schoolchildren. World leaders watch in awe as brave Iranian women publicly remove their hijabs and even burned them, knowing full well the possible consequences. Iranian youth, raised under the Islamic Republic, have shown remarkable resilience in opposing a brutal regime. Do they have the potential to spark another revolution in Iran?
Revolutions are often ignited by individual courage. In 1900, Edmund Morel began his campaign against Leopold II’s genocidal rule of Congo that led to its collapse. In 1947, Mahatma Gandhi’s decadeslong activism achieved India’s independence. In 1958, Rosa Parks defied the segregated bus rules in Montgomery, Alabama, leading to those rules being declared unconstitutional. In the 1990s, Nelson Mandela, after decades of political activism and imprisonment, brought democracy to South Africa. These historical precedents can bring hope to today’s revolutionaries in Iran.
A particularly applicable precedent, however, is the Eastern European revolution of 1989 that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Solidarity workers’ movement in Poland delegitimized the Communist ideology of representing the proletariat class. It revealed that the Soviet Union had been sown with the seeds of its own destruction — ideological rigidity, centralized power, repression and sycophantic supporters. The Islamic Republic shares these seeds.
In September 2022, Mahsa Amini was arrested by the morality police and died during police custody, igniting a revolution in Iran that poses an existential threat to the country, to the Islamic Republic. Amini’s death was the match to light a tinderbox. This revolution defies the Islamic Republic, which can no more stop delegitimization than sandbags can stop a tsunami. Amini and the brave Iranian women who honor her sacrifice by removing their own hijabs, as well as their many supporters have placed the Islamic Republic on a steep and downward path to inevitable destruction.
Another commonality between the communist regimes of Eastern Europe and today’s Iran is their aging leaderships. While innovations in science, technology and the arts were embraced by the West, the USSR was stagnating in the 1980s under an ill and aging Leonid Brezhnev and his Politburo. A similar thing is happening in Iran. According to Iranian authorities, the average age of protesters arrested is 15 to 18 years old. Iranian ruling clerics tend to be around 70 years old or older. At 83, the ailing Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is the world’s longest-serving dictator.
Can a rigid ideological political system governed by aging clerics survive in a society where the average age of the population is 25 years old and the average age of those who are protesting the government is 18-20 years old?
Iranians, especially those born after the 1979 revolution, are impatient for change in the same way that young civil societies in Eastern Europe yearned for freedom and change. A vibrant civil society is flourishing in Iran with students, workers, teachers, artists, journalists, athletes, filmmakers, environmentalists, lawyers, human rights activists and entrepreneurs. Travelers to Iran can clearly see how vibrant and alive the Iranian civil society is, how integrated they are with the global community and how resilient they have become in the face of repression and corruption by their government for 43 years.
As more influential Iranians join the revolutionary wave and coalitions form, it is likely that an opposition leader will emerge as did Vaclav Havel, Lech Walesa and Jozef Antall in Eastern Europe. Who would have thought an author, poet and playwright would lead post-Communist Czechoslovakia? Or a trade-union activist from Gdansk would become president of Poland? Who would have imagined that a librarian would become the first president of post-communist Hungary? In Iran a leader will emerge, but it will not be a cleric.
With the change in leadership, it is imperative to assess the regional implications of the uprising and its impact on the rest of the Middle East and on other Muslim countries. Just as the revolutions in Eastern Europe had a profound effect on countries far beyond its borders (such as the student-led uprising in Beijing in 1989), so will the Iranian uprising.
After the 1979 Iranian revolution, a belief was imposed throughout the region: Islam provides the solutions to all social problems. But Iran’s social problems persisted and worsened, producing a powerful current of anticlericalism. The Shia clergy and their institutions will face the fallout for a long time.
One significant difference between Eastern Europe in 1989 and Iran in 2022 rests in the information revolution. Today’s interconnectedness allows people to bypass government control and expose the government atrocities. In Eastern Europe in 1989, opposition leaders had to plan demonstrations and petitions secretly by meeting in person, issuing communiques and speeches, and hoping that people would attend. Today their counterparts in Iran organize themselves within hours, share videos of individuals courageously defending their rights, and communicate grievances and frustrations across social media platforms. With today’s technology, communist regimes in Eastern Europe would have fallen within months.
Although no one knows when Iran’s Islamic Republic will collapse — it could be months but hopefully not years — Iranians of all ages, races and classes, both inside and outside the country, oppose the Islamic Republic. The current situation is particularly intolerable for in-country Iranians who view a future without change as hopeless. With revolutionary uprisings underway and a dictatorial government struggling for survival, history reminds us that time is on the side of the Iranian people.
Change must come.
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