What is clear is that the protests were overwhelmingly anti-systemic and about repudiating the Islamic Republic in its entirety. Obviously, there were those who were calling for freedom: they were saying death to the dictator, death to the supreme leader — lots of things of that nature.
But another undeniable point — and I think those of us who are on the Left usually struggle with this — is that there were sizable numbers of protesters who chanted pro-Pahlavi slogans. A lot of them were saying, “Long live the king — this is the last battle — Pahlavi will return.” The key thing to understand is that this is symptomatic of decades in which the Islamic Republic has blocked and suppressed various efforts to reform it internally as well as more inside/outside challenges.
Going back to 1997, you had the Khatami administration, which was trying to push through certain structural reforms (limited as they were) — particularly around elections, stripping the Guardian Council of its power to veto candidates that its members didn’t believe were loyal to the system. That effort was defeated in the end. Then you had the Green Movement, which emerged in the context of the contested presidential election of 2009. That was a major movement with huge protests — I saw them with my own eyes.
What is clear is that the protests were overwhelmingly anti-systemic and about repudiating the Islamic Republic in its entirety.
Those protests had a strong middle-class component and a strong emphasis on nonviolence and civil disobedience. They were looking toward a new constitutional settlement, one in which Iran would be more democratic, there would be greater respect for political pluralism, and civil rights would be guaranteed. Again, that was quite brutally suppressed. Even though the figurehead of that movement, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, was a former prime minister, he has been under house arrest ever since.
The most recent protest movement that…
Auteur: Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi
