Behind closed doors, a new law was approved in Iran this week. One that will further limit the freedom of women in the country. Its timing, of course, is not purely coincidental. After all, it has been almost a year since the Kurdish-Iranian Mahsa Jina Amini was arrested by the so-called moral police because she did not have her headscarf on her head properly. After which she was beaten so badly that she died of her injuries.
Since then, Iranians, women and men, have taken to the streets to protest against the strict Iranian regime. Brave Iranians who will not be silenced. Among them women who have already become victims of the moral police, sometimes even lost an eye or were beaten up, but still continue their fight. Last September, we admired the images of dancing women in the streets of Iran, who had taken off their headscarves in protest. Beautiful girls and women with beautiful hair. They cut off part of that hair in protest, as many women in the West did, to show support for their sisters in Iran. These women are fed up with the oppression in their country, because their freedom is being taken away.
But what have all these protests actually achieved? The vice squad is now hitting back ten times as hard. Relentless. Official announcements show that more than a million women in Iran have received text messages from the government warning that their vehicles may be seized if they are photographed without a headscarf. The Islamic Republic wants to show that it can and will go to great lengths when it comes to the headscarf obligation.
What the protests have in any case yielded are the so-called MEK resistance units. Each unit consists of people in a certain neighborhood and/or city who, in addition to their daily work, organize activities to keep the protests alive in the country. A staff member of an Iranian university told me that she would like the global double standards to end so that the current regime in Iran no longer receives international support. The Western countries should put the Iranian Revolutionary Guards on the terror list, she says, because this elite military corps is the instrument of the regime to oppress the people. She also let me know how aggressively the morality police can react when you use makeup.
Last July, more than 10,000 activists sent video messages from Iran to the Free Iran Global Summit 2023, a special convention in Paris organized by the Iranian opposition. The videos show their struggle for more freedom, democracy and a secular republic. For 42 years, the Iranians have been resisting, especially those who fled and continued to resist from abroad.
On September 16, the day that Mahsa Amini has died exactly one year, there will be memorial protests in many places in Iran and around the world. The question is how we in the West can support these women. Because really, I don’t know a braver people than the Iranians. Continue your resistance, dear ones. Ultimately, this suffocating religious regime will come to an end. But the price you have to pay for it is very high…
2023-08-18 04:04:52
#Woe #dont #wear #headscarf #column
