Iranian Hardliner Says Government Will Get Tough With Protesters
A hardliner member of Islamic Republic parliament has implicitly threatened that the government will respond differently to the ongoing popular protests from now on.
A hardliner member of Islamic Republic parliament has implicitly threatened that the government will respond differently to the ongoing popular protests from now on.
Mohammad Esmail Kowsari, also a high ranking IRGC officer said that so far “Protesters were able to scare businesses” but government policy will change.
Many small businesses close their doors during street protests, mostly in solidarity with the anti-government demonstrations, but regime insiders such as Kowsari claim protesters threaten shops and other small businesses.
The IRGC officer also repeated typical accusations made by hardliners that the protests and an attack in Shiraz Wednesday that killed 15 people are organized and financed by “foreign countries”, without naming any country. But he threatened that Iran “should deal with these countries in a serious manner.”
ISIS has taken responsibility for the attack on Shahcheragh shrine in Shiraz but many Iranians are not convinced the regime had no part in it, saying it is a scenario for cracking down harder on protesters.
Authorities have been claiming that “separatists” and “instigators” are behind the efforts to overthrow the government and break Iran into areas controlled by ethnic groups, a claim routinely denied by Iranians on streets and social media.
Following Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s lead, Iranian officials have alleged that protests are instigated by foreign enemies while the unrest continues.
President Ebrahim Raisi on October 25 accused “enemies of the Islamic Republic” of fomenting the protests, echoing what Khamenei said a day earlier. Parliament Speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf in turn vowed the parliament would take action to change the ways of the morality police in a bid to calm the protesters.
Although following the 2021 presidential election only conservatives have remained on the political scene, still various groups among them are competing fiercely to win the lion’s share of power and financial resources.
The general belief was that the so called “revolutionaries” have the upper hand in Iran’s domestic politics after takeover of parliament and the presidency in 2020 and 2021. However, it appears that there are super ‘revolutionaries’ who want to grab the power from the clutches of those we knew so far as ‘revolutionaries.’
Several Iranian news outlets in recent days have quoted Gharn-e Now website as having reported that it was Majles Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf who first revealed that super-revolutionaries have been posing a challenge to other conservatives.
More recently, Mohammad Sadegh Tavangar a lawmaker close to Ghalibaf wrote in a commentary on the government-owned news agency ISNA’s website that hardliners such as Mohammad Sadegh Koushki and Amir Hossein SabetIi are the leading figures of this group that have been trying to undermine the authority of politicians in the conservative camp, particularly the so-called neo-cons led by Ghalibaf.
These individuals are linked to hardliner former nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili. Ghalibaf recently lashed out at this group without naming Jalili and accused them of “opening their mouth and saying anything and doing anything without calculating the consequences of their behaviour.” He called these individuals super-revolutionaries borrowing a label Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei earlier put on pseudo-revolutionaries. Ghalibaf said, “They have never done any serious work, but they behave in a way as if all of us owe them something.” This looked like a characterisation of Jalili, a presidential candidate who was defeated by others at least twice. “If you never write something, no one knows how many mistakes you can have in a sentence,” said Ghalibaf.
The Majles Speaker has experienced competition from super-revolutionaries associated with the ultra-conservative Paydari party during the Majles elections of 2020 and the presidential election of 2017. He still remembers how they undermined his upper hand in 2017 and put forward Ebrahim Raisi as their candidate, who at the end of the day lost the election to moderate conservative Hassan Rouhani.
In recent months, inside the Iranian parliament, the so-called super-revolutionaries have attacked Ghalibaf several times, the last time by engineering revelations about his family’s controversial shopping trip to Turkey.
More recently, those close to Ghalibaf have accused the super-revolutionaries in and out of parliament of causing the ongoing unrest in Iran with their hardline positions and behaviour that have annoyed all walks of life, particularly women and the youths. The Ghalibaf camp’s attacks directly target individuals such as Saeed Jalili and those close to him. Tavangar in his commentary in ISNA, has finally named Amir Hossein Sabeti a showman on the state TV who has annoyed almost everyone both on TV and on social media, particularly Twitter. Koushki has done the same as a frequent contributor to those programs. Tavangar said that the duo had an active part in radicalizing Iran’s hardliners.
Sabeti’s tweet on October 26, in which he accused Iranian protesters of having the blood of the victims of the terrorist attack on a mosque in Shiraz on their hands, seriously annoyed and angered many Iranians.
Tavangar wrote, “They want to force more devolved individuals to leave the train of the Islamic revolution by levelling accusations against them, but we will not allow them to do so.”
Meanwhile Tavangar harshly criticised Jalili for keeping silent about the ongoing protests for longer than a month.”
Tavangar also criticised the ultra-Conservative party for radicalizing Iranian youths by furthering an initiative to ban social media and for not being accountable for its actions.
The infighting may also signal the neo-cons’ attempt to save their faction before the unrest brings down everyone currently in power in Iran.
The 16-year-old Nika Shakarami’s body was found in suspicious circumstances ten days after she left home to take part in a protest rally against compulsory hijab on September 20.
The last time she spoke to anyone, she was on the run from security forces chasing her on motorbikes. Authorities claimed that she was thrown off a roof or jumped to her death after taking part in the protests.
The teen’s aunt, Atash Shakarami, announced Wednesday in an Instagram post that the family would gather at the cemetery where she is buried to mark her 40th-day memorial. A huge crowd of people gathered Thursday at the cemetery in Veisyan village near Khorramabad where she was buried to commemorate her on day 40th of her death, which is a long-held tradition in Iran
So far around 250 have been killed by security forces, nearly a hundred of whom were killed in one day in Zahedan, Sistan and Baluchestan province when security forces opened fire on a crowd returning from Friday prayers on September 30. In the coming days there will be several such ceremonies every single day in various parts of the country for other victims.
As seen in videos posted on social media, security forces used tear gas and shot at participants in the ceremony in Veisyan.
Videos on social media show the mourners holding photos of Nika and chanting “Khamenei will be overthrown in this bloody year,” “We are all Nika, Fight us and we will fight back,” “Death to the Dictator,” “Death to Khamenei,” and “They took Nika away and brought her body back to us.” Videos also show people throwing stones at the security forces and singing a famous Luri folk song with the chorus “It's Time for War.”
This was the second 40th day memorial for the victims of government violence in protests triggered by Mahsa Amini’s death in police custody on September 16 . Huge crowds marked Mahsa’s own 40th-day memorial in her hometown of Saqqez and many other cities on Wednesday.
Nika’s mother was not informed of her death for ten days. Authorities claimed Nika’s body was found in a courtyard at the back of a building on the morning of September 21 but had not been identified. They initially claimed she had been pushed to death from the roof and it “had nothing to do with the protests.” A report by state media later quoted a Tehran prosecutor as saying that Nika had committed suicide.
Nika’s aunt, Atash Shakarami, and her uncle were arrested by security forces for publicly speaking about the suspicious manner of Nika’s disappearance and death.Both were forced to appear on the state television to corroborate the official account of the teen’s death.
On Thursday, CNN published an exclusive investigation into Nika’s death. CNN said it received several videos and had eyewitness accounts that suggested Nika was chased and arrested by security forces on the night she disappeared. The video showed Nika ducking behind a vehicle shouting to the driver not to move to shield herself from security forces chasing her.