December 1, 2023
by Warren L. Nelson
Another young woman has died after a confrontation with those furious with women appearing in public without a headcovering, but it has not produced as much public outcry as did the death of Mahsa Amini 13-1/2 months earlier.
Armita Garavand, a 16-year-old high school student, died October 28, a month after an October 1 confrontation on a Tehran Metro car. Metro surveillance video in Shohada station showed her stepping onto a Metro car without any headcovering. About 23 seconds later, she is seen being carried by two friends out of the car unconscious. She never regained consciousness.
The Metro authority said there was no video taken inside the car showing what happened in those 23 seconds. Some hardcore regime opponents said she was beaten repeatedly by security police. Most accounts, however, said one person in the car pushed her, that she fell over and banged her head on metal inside the car. The person who pushed her has been variously described as a male police officer, a female morality police officer and a civilian woman who shouted at her for not covering her hair.
The night after Armita died, there were numerous reports of Tehranis shouting anti-regime slogans from apartment windows and anti-regime graffiti were found all over the city. There were also reports of some scattered protests in the streets, but none of any large scale were reported anywhere in the country.
The protest movement in recent months appears almost completely confined to women a very large number of women who go about the streets with no headcovering. The government publicly proclaimed that the morality police were returning to the streets as of July 16. Some confrontations have been reported since then, but not a large number. And the Tehran streets appear to have been devoid of morality police patrols since Armita Garavand was hospitalized late in September an event that seems to have frightened the authorities.
There are still reports of shops being closed and barricaded for the crime of serving women with uncovered hair. But there is clearly no mass crackdown on hejab violations and no police sweeps in the streets.
In November, published reports spoke of a hejab crackdown on university campuses, though not by physically confronting hejab-less students. Instead, the Students Guild Council stated November 2 that many female students had been summoned before a disciplinary committee in the preceding week where they were often suspended for various lengths of time.
The guild council described the wave of summonses as unprecedented in scale.
The major gathering after Garavand’s death was at her burial, which police raided, beating attendees and arresting a number. Human rights activist Nasrin Sotoudeh, 60, who was freed from prison a few months ago, was among those taken away by police. She was freed after a few weeks, during which, her husband said, she was severely beaten.
Mass protests do continue in one city Zahedan in Sistan va Baluchestan province—where angry Sunnis have gathered every Friday since the death more than a year ago of Mahsa Amini. October 20 was one of the protest days when regime forces attacked the protesters. According to the Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA), about 50 people were arrested that day and an unusual amount of force used to disperse the protesters.
A Majlis committee approved legislation imposing a hard new hejab law in August. Many news outlets in the West reported erroneously that it was passed by the full Majlis in September. There has been no vote on the bill by the full Majlis at all. The Majlis committee made the proposal law under an obscure provision that allows a committee to make laws without a vote by the full Majlis, but the law is only temporary for one to five years. The full Majlis vote in September was to make the new law applicable for three years.
Late in October, however, the 12-man Council of Guardians vetoed the legislation primarily because the text used too many “vague” and “ambiguous” terms. The council often vetoes bills for just that reason. Now the Majlis committee must rewrite the “vague” parts and send the bill back to the Council of Guardians.
The council cited the term “immodesty,” which is used frequently throughout the legislation. But the council said the Majlis never defined the term. The council also complained about the term “cultural goods.”
Tightened wording will preclude judges from punishing women for any behavior of which they personally disapprove.
The council also vetoed the bill for calling for public expenditures without providing for the revenues to cover those expenditures, as required by the Constitution. (Many conservatives in the United States also complain about new laws requiring new spending but not providing for new revenues; the US Constitution, unlike the Iranian Constitution, does not require such revenue coverage.)
The Tehran courts sentenced two female reporters who covered the death of Mahsa Amini to stiff jail terms for their “crimes.” Niloufar Hamedi of the Reformist Sharq daily and Ela-heh Mohammadi of the Sazan-degi daily were charged with collaborating with the American government, conspiring to commit crimes against Iran’s national security and propaganda against the Islamic Republic, the Judiciary said. Hamedi, 31, was given a seven-year prison sentence while Mohammadi, 36, was handed a six-year term.
Meanwhile, at the UN, the Human Rights Committee passed a resolution calling for disbandment of the morality police in the Islamic Republic.
