[ Don’t be fooled that this is meaningful reform. It’s about
regime self-preservation.]
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THE REAL REASON IRAN SAYS IT’S CANCELING THE MORALITY POLICE  
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Roya Hakakian
December 7, 2022
The Atlantic
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_ Don’t be fooled that this is meaningful reform. It’s about
regime self-preservation. _

Thousands turn out in Melbourne to stand in solidarity with protests
that have broken out in Iran following the death of 22-year old Mahsa
(also known as Jina or Zhina) Amini at the hands of the country’s
brutal dictatorship and its ‘morality’ police., Matt Hrkac from
Geelong / Melbourne, Australia

 

Last week, Iranian Attorney General Mohammad Jafar Montazeri announced
that the Guidance Patrol, widely known as the Morality Police because
it enforces the Islamic Republic’s laws on personal behavior and
dress, will be suspended. Though Montazeri quickly added that the
judiciary will continue to monitor public conduct, the announcement is
a clear acknowledgment of the toll that the demonstrations have taken
on the regime since September, when the death in Guidance Patrol
custody of a 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian woman, Mahsa Amini, led to
widespread protests.

In the typical fashion of senior Iranian officials, Montazeri was
vague and did not make clear whether the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei, has approved the decision. Nor did he disclose what will
happen to women who appear in public without the mandatory hijab, or
headscarf. Iran’s state television channel has since denied the
announcement. Still, the protesters are buoyed by the news, though
they remain unappeased—buoyed because this is a small victory, but
unappeased because disbanding the Guidance Patrol, if that proves to
be the case, is only the beginning for them. In an interview with the
BBC, one unnamed protester said
[[link removed]], “A revolution
is what we have. Hijab was the start of it, and we don’t want …
anything less but death for the dictator and a regime change.”

The regime knows this. The many elders of the Islamic Republic learned
long ago—from the fate of the preceding regime, in fact—that to
concede to protesters is to reveal vulnerability. In January 1979,
Iran’s last king, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, tried to quell the
dissent he faced by appointing
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prime minister Shapur Bakhtiar, a reformist whom some close allies of
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the de facto leader of the movement to
depose the shah, regarded highly. But Khomeini immediately rejected
the move, calling the new prime minister and his government
illegitimate and vowing that the movement would go on until the
monarchy had been dismantled.

The regime also knows that, even if it was capable of reform
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opportunity for it. The 2009 Green Movement was the theocrats’ last,
best chance. Back then, the protesters were asking “Where is my
vote?” because they still had hope in bringing about change by
electing a potential reformist, Mir Hossein Moussavi, from among the
supreme leader’s approved candidates. But the rigged election
followed by a violent crackdown proved that the system was too
recalcitrant.

The regime knows, too, that of all the many protests that have swept
through Iran in the past four decades, this latest round is very
different. No other uprising has been as widespread or endured as
long, and until now, none had ever challenged the very foundation of
the regime itself. This time, Iran appears once more to be on the
threshold of a revolution because it can neither subdue the
discontented nor meet their demands. Even though the regime has
killed more than 400 [[link removed]] of
its own citizens and detained some 16,000
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quelled. Faced with the failure of repression, the regime appears to
be offering a concession by withdrawing the Guidance Patrol. But why
such a concession, if the clerics know the example of the shah’s
attempt to mollify protesters? Perhaps the better question is: Whom is
it for?

Inside Iran, the protesters have dismissed the news and have begun a
three-day nationwide strike
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Numerous shops and bazaars were closed this week in solidarity with
the protesters. So the concession must be a signal to the outside
world, above all the United States. Despite the regime’s
anti-Western bluster, it has always staged much of its political
theater for American consumption; in the absence of diplomatic
relations, this is how it attempts to send a message to and influence
Washington. Tehran is reacting, therefore, to the way it believes the
U.S. views the events of the past three months.

From the start, many in Washington have underestimated or downplayed
the seriousness and scale of the protest movement. There have been
protests in every corner of Iran, not just in provinces with large,
disaffected ethnic-minority populations, such as Baluchistan and
Kurdistan, but also in the heavily conservative city of Qom, and in
Khomein, the city where Ayatollah Khomeini was born—and where
protesters recently set fire to his former residence. As might be
expected, university professors have refused to teach and their
students have conducted sit-ins, but even members of the most
conservative, merchant class, the _bazaaris_, recently closed their
businesses to honor the memory of 2019’s Bloody November, a
week-long nationwide uprising during which the riot police shot
dead hundreds
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demonstrators.

Yet U.S. officials and many opinion formers tend to foreground the
role of “women and girls” in the current movement—as though the
imposition of the female Islamic dress code were all the protest has
been about, even while the demonstrators chant
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the dictator!” and untranslatable expletives about the supreme
leader. The special envoy for Iran, Robert Malley, tweeted
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October that the Iranian people “continue to peacefully demonstrate
for their government to respect their dignity and human rights,” and
the State Department’s spokesperson, Ned Price, declared
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Biden administration’s support for “those brave Iranians,
including many women and girls, who are peacefully demonstrating to
call for reforms.” The protesters have not asked for any such thing.
Their mantra is that the hijab issue was merely the spark—“The
regime’s very core is our target,” they cry.

Turning to the West, Tehran judges, is its best hope of weathering the
crisis. The regime is under both severe internal and external
pressure. A recent vote at the United Nations Human Rights
Council will establish
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special commission to investigate the violence against the protesters.
Rifts within the Iranian military recently led to the arrest of 115
disaffected personnel, according to leaked documents
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Iran’s support for Russia’s war in Ukraine, despite Moscow’s
worsening difficulties, has further frayed Tehran’s relations with
the West. Facing this deteriorating situation on so many fronts, the
regime hopes to improve its fortunes by showing that it’s capable of
change. Through easing a few restrictions, Tehran wishes to convince
Washington that it has addressed the demands of the demonstrators, so
that the U.S. and the European Union might soften their stance and
possibly resume nuclear negotiations.

Washington has a long record of misreading events in Iran. On the eve
of 1978, only weeks before the outbreak of mass demonstrations in the
country, President Jimmy Carter toasted
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shah and praised the stability of his rule. And the U.S. persisted in
that wishful misrecognition long into the monarch’s last year,
banking on his ability to retain power. Given that precedent,
Tehran’s calculations today could prove shrewd.

Hours after Montazeri’s announcement, Secretary of State Antony
Blinken
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to a question about the disbandment of the Guidance Patrol by praising
the courage of the protesters and saying, in a qualified way, that
“if the regime has now responded in some fashion to those protests,
that could be a positive thing.” As long as America’s leaders fail
to recognize that the movement in Iran is about more than a revolt
against a restrictive dress code, Tehran knows it can manipulate the
U.S. into not responding with due seriousness.

The tragedy in 1979 was that the U.S. didn’t see the change coming
that made life in Iran, and across the region, much worse. The tragedy
in 2022 will be if the U.S. doesn’t see the change coming that can
make life in Iran, and across the region, much better.

_Roya Hakakian [[link removed]] is
the author, most recently, of A Beginner’s Guide to America for the
Immigrant and the Curious
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* Iran
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* protests
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* Morality Police
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* Concessions
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