A regime that last year executed more than 2,000 people, many of them demonstrators who had joined rioters on the streets, seems determined to use the full might of the state to quell a popular uprising that is bigger than anything Iran may have seen in recent years
Anti-government protests have been spiralling over the last couple of weeks in Iran. Protesters across the nation’s 31 provinces have been standing up to the regime of the mullahs under Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and more than a hundred of them have already been killed by the police and security services like the Revolutionary Guards.
Not even warnings from US President Donald Trump of direct action against Islamist extremism may have helped to change the repressive attitude marked by systemic oppression and persecution that the theocratic state has shown towards dissent, its first action being invariably shutting down of the Internet.
A regime that last year executed more than 2,000 people, many of them demonstrators who had joined rioters on the streets, seems determined to use the full might of the state to quell a popular uprising that is bigger than anything Iran may have seen in recent years. Khamenei has called them vandals who are acting at the behest of Trump while the President offered a hardship allowance of US$7 to the people.
Egged on by Reza Pahlavi, son of the Shah of Iran who was deposed in the Islamic Revolution of 1979 since when a progressive state has slid into throttling theocratic control, the Gen Z, along with a fair sprinkling of working-class and middle-class people, see this as an opportunity to bring about a regime change.
Any act of abdicating by Khamenei would be an extraordinary event like the Arab Spring that took shape in 2010 and immediately brought down governments in Tunisia and Egypt before spreading in the region. The fear is the unlikely event of any change at the top could see the country slip into the hands of the unknown, perhaps even someone from the feared Iran Revolutionary Guards.
Iran has, however, no easy answers to the widespread economic grievances of its people, caused primarily by the collapse of the Iranian currency last month which was the springboard for the protests. A 12-day war with Israel had eroded the finances and any military action now by the US or Israel could only exacerbate the problem of controlling the dissent in a country with a history of suffering Iranian people.
