AS A SECOND REVOLUTION HAS YET TO COME IN IRAN:

FUTURE OF AYATOLLAH’S RULE SHROUDED IN MYSTER

By Osama elghazouly

Protests that broke out, a week ago, in more than eighty cities all over Iran may be showing signs of abating, but protesters are still rampaging after dark in many out of the way provinces. Demonstrators are chanting slogans directly against Khamenei and calling for the end of nearly 40- year- old rule of cleric-politicians.

Though about 500 people have been arrested in the capital, Tehran, the protests broke out in Mashhad and turned into an open and widespread challenge to the regime in rural areas reflecting a divide between the country’s urban and rural populations. No matter how, or when, these protests will end, the widespread violence will always be a reminder of the internal weaknesses of the Iranian regime.

Following months of minor acts of dissent, here and there, the situation took a dramatic turn on the eve of the day when supporters of the political establishment put an end to the protests after the 2009 elections (ninth of Dey, in Iranian calendar). According to member of the Foreign Committee of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, Musa Afshar, the main reason why angry protesters took to the streets, this time, was to complain about high prices, unpaid wages, and the looting of national wealth by the authorities to finance military interventions and expansion projects in neighboring countries.

Afshar claimed that the kind of slogans heard in these demonstrations, clever use of social media and messaging apps(before being restricted by the government) and the wide extent of the protests indicated the adept organization skills of Iranian resistance networks, now in operation. This level of organization, he said, sets these protests apart from previous movements of dissent that were mainly spontaneous.

Taking a different perspective, political analyst Muhammed Majid Ahwazi, on twitter, said that no specific political party in Iran stood behind the current events. Yet, he went on to say, the protests that started in rural areas, and not in the capital, before going north and south, east and west of the country, were the opposite of the Green Movement of 2009 that failed to unroll to outlying provinces and was easily crushed by the Revolutionary Guards.

He attributed the protests to three reasons; first, 160 thousand families in Mashhad lost their savings along with the dream of each family to have a descent residence in the high-profile fraud case involving Shandiz Construction Co.; second, most of the banks that went bankrupt were in Mashhad, and the government ignored the demand of the people concerning that issue, focussing, instead, on the Iran Nuclear Deal; third, absence of Gulf tourists has hurt thousands of workers and small investors in Mashhad since Saudi embassy in Tehran was set on fire, last summer.

Meanwhile,leader of left-wing opposition movement, the People’s Mujahideen, Mariam Rajavi, saluted the demonstrators as “Courageous sons and daughters of Iran” who ” have brightened up Iran’s cities with the light of struggle for freedom and justice”. Rajavi called on her fellow compatriots to “stage sit-ins and strikes anywhere you can, in the factories and offices and at every work place, so that the world will see the general public’s protest against the mullah’s detested rule in Iran and hear our nation’s voice.” She saw the uprising as” an uprising for freedom, democracy, equality and separation of religion and state”. She said it was “an uprising for social justice” and concluded by saying “And this is a movement that will carry on until final victory”.

On the other hand, the Iranian journalist Maziar Bhari, who is known to have been jailed by the Iranian government in 2009, thinks that the second Iranian Revolution has yet to come. Still, he thinks that “Iran’s government is its own worst enemy” and that “Economic woes leading to infighting can bring down this corrupt and brutal system”.