On August 1, the Iranian regime state-run news website Sotareh Sohb published an article that looked back on the country’s two recent uprisings and commented upon the conditions that had contributed to such widespread unrest. The article unequivocally declared that nationwide demonstrations “will happen again,” on account of the protesters’ grievances having not been addressed in the roughly nine months since the second uprising was suppressed by regime authorities.
The details of that repression make the article’s prediction of renewed unrest all the more remarkable, especially coming from a state-run outlet. This article reflects the regime’s utmost fear of another uprising and how it is inevitable. Sotareh Sohb implied that the Iranian people’s frustration with the mullahs’ regime is severe enough to overcome the deterrent effects of violent crackdowns on dissent.
This was already clear to many observers after the January 2018 uprising gave rise to numerous localized protests even after dozens of people had been killed for their participation in the nationwide protests. But this led the regime’s authorities to react with much greater aggression in November 2019, when disparate protest movements once again came together on a grand scale, spanning an estimated 200 cities and towns.
The People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI / MEK) announced back then that in a matter of days, the Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) forces killed over 1,500 protesters. Human rights organizations like Amnesty International confirmed that the paramilitary had opened fire with the definite intent of killing peaceful activists. And this aim persisted long afterward, as the regime’s judiciary moved to pass death sentences for several individuals who had participated in the uprising.
Many of these protesters are now facing execution. In the midst of the 2018 uprising, regime Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei identified the movement’s leadership as being mostly comprised of the Iranian opposition, the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI / MEK). In so doing, he effectively signaled to his subordinates that anyone associated with the movement could be subject to the death penalty.
This is because a fatwa from Khamenei’s predecessor and the founder of the regime, Ruhollah Khomeini, technically remains in effect more than three decades after it was declared. The 1988 edict declared that opposition to Iran’s theocratic system made a person inherently antagonistic toward God himself, and that the suitable punishment for this situation is death. In practice, the charge of “enmity against God” has been used to justify killing democratic activists on the flimsiest of pretexts, such as donating money to the Resistance media outlets or handing out the organization’s literature.
The year that it was issued, the fatwa was used to establish “death commissions” throughout the country for the purpose of interrogating political prisoners and determining who among them still harbored resentments against the theocratic system. Those who refused to succumb to the regime’s demands were summarily executed, and the resulting death toll reached 30,000 in a matter of only months. Last year’s mass shootings by the IRGC, along with the subsequent death sentences, raise concerns over the regime’s likely willingness to again adopt repressive measures on the scale of the 1988 massacre.
But given the current situation of the Iranian society and its restiveness, the regime knows that oppression can no longer thwart an uprising. The regime is neither capable of hiding its crimes. After all, details of the 1988 massacre received unusual publicity beginning in 2016, when the son of the ayatollah who was Khomeini’s designated successor in 1988 released an audio recording of him condemning the “worst crime of the Islamic Republic.” Hussein-Ali Montazeri was driven out of the regime’s leadership as a result of his dissent over the massacre, and the perpetrators of that massacre were elevated to positions of even greater influence, from which they have defended their actions in recent years, thus underlining the regime’s commitment to domestic terrorism as a form of state craft.
Notably, all of this was prominent in public discourse before the first of the two uprisings began in the final days of 2017. This goes to show that the Iranian people were already aware of the inherent danger of expressing their grievances publicly, and en masse. Thus, it also goes to show that the urgency of those grievances was considered greater than the threat to activists’ lives. It was this phenomenon that Sotareh Sohb recognized when it said that a third uprising was ultimately inevitable.
It was not the only outlet to do so. The daily newspaper Asre Iran, for instance, published an editorial on Tuesday that compared the unresolved dissent within Iranian society to the ammonium nitrate that recently caused a massive explosion in Lebanon after being neglected for years. The piece warned that the simmering dissent is poised to burst into new protests in the near future unless the regime undertakes serious internal reforms. It even went so far as to say that in the face of a persistent status quo, and “with the passage of time and the arrival of ripe circumstances,” participants in those protests could even overthrow the theocratic system.
This was precisely the aim of both of the recent uprisings. January 2018 brought slogans like “death to the dictator” fully into the mainstream, and the November 2019 follow-up helped to keep them there. But in both cases, such full-throated condemnation of the regime supreme leader emerged from protests that were initially focused on economic issues. The first sprang up in response to a cluster of alarming news stories about currency inflation and unemployment, and the second emerged in the wake of the regime’s announcement that it would be hiking gasoline prices at a time when these challenging indicators had already lowered the vast majority of Iranians to new levels of deprivation.
This, too, has been acknowledged by Iranian state news outlets, and it is a key reason why growing numbers of them are willing to admit that popular uprisings are here to stay. At a time when standard wages for workers rarely exceed one-fifth of the poverty line, the choice for many is to either await a slow death from illness and malnutrition, or to risk a quick death at the hands of repressive authorities while fighting for a better future.
Only one of these options comes with any meaningful sense of hope, since Tehran has demonstrated its willingness to demand more sacrifices from the people in lieu of making any changes to its own behavior. The gasoline price hike was only one example of this. Disregard for the people’s suffering can be seen just as clearly in the lack of any substantial response to the coronavirus outbreak. It took several weeks of community spread before Khamenei, who personally controls hundreds of billions of dollars in assets, would even agree to the release of one billion dollars to combat the disease. To date, only about a third of that figure has actually reached the country’s health system.
It seems safe to assume that Iranian media’s recent appeals for the regime’s is nothing but a desperate move. In fact, throughout last four decades, the organized Resistance movement has insisted that the only means of improving the fortunes of the Iranian people is through the establishment of an entirely new form of government. The past two years’ uprisings have demonstrated that the people as a whole embrace this premise. And the next uprising will be the one to prove it true.
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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde