July 29, 2022
by Warren L. Nelson
Demonstrations and protests are continuing daily across Iran, but with little apparent coordination or unity or unified purpose.
Protesters complain about everything water shortages, low pay, no pay, rising prices, rising taxes and the lack of the right to take exams online. And, of course, the regime.
The only well-organized and focused protests going on nationally are those by teachers, who are incensed by the regime’s refusal to give them substantial pay raises. The teachers regularly protest at the same time in dozens of cities and towns. This has prompted a crackdown with progressively larger numbers of teachers being arrested. That prompts even larger demonstrations with the teachers not only demanding more pay but the release of their coworkers.
Al-Monitor reported that on June 16 intelligence agents arrested about 100 teachers all across the country, the largest one-day roundup yet, with about 60 arrested in Shiraz alone.
The teacher protests, as with most other protests, have included chants against President Raisi for his alleged do-nothing administration. Many demonstrations include chants of “Marg bar rahbar” or “Down with the leader,” a chant that was unheard of more than a decade ago but has now become standard. Many chanted praise for Reza Shah, who ruled from 1925 to 1941.
The greatest attention has been gained by a series of major themed demonstrations.
A few months ago, the big issue was the water shortage. After subsidized imports of food were ended, the protests shifted to high prices and inflation as the chief topic of concern. More recently, the subject has been the building collapse in Abadan.
The protests are almost entirely in the provinces. There have been very few demonstrations in Tehran and most of the marches in the capital have been in neighborhoods rather than in the center of the city.
Furthermore, there have been no mass student demonstrations; students were behind the mass protests in 1999 and 2009, but the campuses have gone silent in recent years except for protests confined to student issues, like the enforcement of the dress code on campuses or the arrests of student activists. At Payam-e Noor University, they protested because they weren’t allowed to take their exams online but had to appear in person.
There is nothing like the nationwide protests that grew all through 1978 and ended with the overthrow of the Shah in early 1979. Some local protests do involve thousands of people, but many just draw hundreds, or even just dozens.
In mid-June, for the first time, the merchants and bazaaris in a number of cities pulled down their shutters and marched to protest higher taxes. This was noticed because the bazaar protests in 1978 were such a major part of the revolution. In Tehran, the merchants in Lalezar Avenue, a center for electronic goods, locked up and protested. But the Tehran Bazaar remained open for business.
The vast bulk of the protests all across the country are by labor groups, mostly protesting delays in wage payments. Many of the protests say the workers have gone unpaid for months, not just weeks. And it’s not just industrial workers protesting. In recent weeks, more and more municipal workers have gone out on marches to protest the failure of the government to pay them.
The marches and protests have gotten very little attention outside Iran—and very little attention in the Iranian media because of censorship. But on June 15, a group of 11 UN special rapporteurs on human rights issued a statement of alarm over what they called a “violent crackdown” on teachers and other civil society protests in Iran. They demanded that those responsible in the Iranian government be held to account for the repression.
The rapporteurs, who are appointed by the UN but only speak as individuals not as agents of the UN, were moved to action by the sudden large number of arrests of teachers and others.
“We are alarmed at the recent escalation of arbitrary arrests of teachers, labor rights defenders and union leaders, lawyers, human rights defenders and other civil society actors,” they wrote. “The space for civil society and independent associations to carry out their legitimate work and activities is becoming impossibly narrow.”
A compilation done weekly by the Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) shows that in the first week of June the protests included the following:
- Farmers in Khorramabad County in Lorestan Province gathered before the county building saying they had not received their assigned water allocations from the reservoir of the Eyvashan Dam.
- Workers at the AzarAb Industries Co. protested that they had not been paid for two months.
- Pensioners holding accounts with the Social Security Organization mounted protests in numerous cities demanding an increase in their checks to reflect the soaring inflation. They got a 10 percent boost recently despite inflation of almost 40 percent last year.
- Shareholders in a housing cooperative held a protest in Tehran. They paid for plots of land 10 years ago, but complain that they have received no land so far.
- In Tabriz, firefighters gathered to demand higher wages after they were given a 10 percent raise for the year.
The largest number of protests that week by far were by pensioners, likely because they had just been told of the 10 percent hike a few days earlier.
