Iranian MP Urges Govt. To Bring Perpetrators Of ‘Bloody Friday’ To Justice

Judiciary Spokesman Masoud Setayeshi said Tuesday at a press briefing that around thirty celebrities have been indicted by courts, and he threatened them with harsh repercussions if they continued such activities.

The interior ministry said Saturday that over 100 people in eleven provinces were arrested in connection with the poisonings that started in the religious city of Qom in central Iran in late November and spread to dozens of schools across the country. The accused, authorities claim, were connected to “terrorist groups” and foreign governments.

The government, however, has not revealed any details about these alleged arrests, as the public remains skeptical about the government’s role in the attacks.

Among the celebrities indicted for his social media posts about the spate of attacks is popular actor Reza Kianian. In a recent Instagram post Kianian shared a poster showing two men in black balaclavas and combat uniform holding up a little girl with a gas mask on her face fearlessly flashing a victory sign at one of the two men.

Kianian came under immense attack from hardliners on social media for the post that suggested security forces’ involvement in the poisonings, and demanded that authorities take legal action against him for defaming security forces.

Like Kianian, many ordinary Iranians have been suspicious of involvement of the regime itself, or religious extremists protected by the regime, in the school attacks and call the acts “state terrorism”.

Instagram post by actor Reza Kianian 

Authorities have revealed very little about the alleged perpetrators, the nature of the attacks, and the chemicals used to poison the children. The state television, nevertheless, aired the so-called ‘confessions’ last week of a man and his daughter arrested and accused of attacking schools with N2 gas canisters.

One of the accused said in the video that they lit “wicks” attached to the canisters before throwing them in the courtyards of seven schools in Larestan, a city in southern Iran. Experts say N2 is neither poisonous nor flammable to require a flame to explode and spread.

Several celebrity actors and other artists who supported the Mahsa protest movement by criticizing the regime or releasing ‘hijabless’ photos of themselves on social media, such as popular actress Taraneh Alidousti, were arrested in the past six months.

In defiance of the compulsory hijab, Alidousti appeared ‘hijabless’ in the photos taken outside Tehran’s Evin prison with her colleagues and supporters upon her release on a large bail in January after nearly three weeks of imprisonment.

Actress Taraneh Alidousti after being released on bail outside the prison

The harsh legal action against celebrities follows threats of "severe punishment” by Chief Justice Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Ejei against those criticizing the authorities for the gas attacks that have sent hundreds of schoolgirls to hospitals.

The judiciary spokesman also said Tuesday that the charges have been brought against three newspaper editors, academic and reformist political activist Sadegh Zibakalam, and Secretary General of Unity of the Nation Party Azar Mansouri for “spreading rumors and lies.”

Around sixty journalists have been arrested since September in connection with the protests ignited by the death of the 22-year-old Mahsa Amini who died in the custody of the morality police after being arrested on the street for not wearing her hijab ‘properly’. Two female reporters, Elaheh Mohammadi and Niloufar Hamedi, who were arrested in October for their reporting on Mahsa’s death, are still in prison.

According to a video received by Iran International, one of the people who suffered injuries during Iran-Iraq war said Monday that government officials keep repeating that “you went to war for the sake of God.”

This is not the first time the war veterans protest against their poor living conditions.

In the past years, they gathered many times in front of the parliament urging lawmakers to resolve their issues.

In August, Iran's Council of Retirees reported that one of the veterans wounded in the Iran-Iraq war, named Khosro Yavari, set himself on fire and died in Songhor city of Kermanshah province due to financial hardship.

Meanwhile, Iran’s Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf admitted in a televised speech Monday that the Islamic Republic has failed to resolve economic problems and control inflation. He said the regime has not been able to help people in covering their daily life expenses.

He once again claimed the government intends to compensate for this to some extent "with policies such as tax exemptions and direct subsidies".

These remarks come at a time when inflation has increased sharply this year and MPs have warned against another wave of inflation in the coming year beginning March 21.

They came out to mark the ancient Iranian annual fire festival and used the occasion to vent their anger at security forces.

The action came after a call for three nights of protests beginning Monday, when smaller groups of protesters were seen marching and chanting anti-government slogans in some parts of the capital Tehran, Mashhad, Qazvin, and Malayer. But the turnout appeared to be much more impressive Tuesday evening with more cities and neighborhoods in Tehran, Rasht, Kamyaran, Divandareh, Sanandaj, Karaj, Ghaemshahr, Esfahan, Mashhad and Zahedan involved.

Videos posted on social media show crowds chanting “Death to Khamenei”, “Death to the Dictator” and other anti-government slogans, throwing firecrackers and small homemade bombs (grenades) at security forces. They were also playing “Baraye” – a song that has turned into the anthem of the Mahsa protest movement – full power on speakers, and dancing around massive bonfires.

The fire festival, now called Charshanbeh Soori (Suri), has been celebrated for many centuries by Iranians, on the last Tuesday of the year in the Iranian calendar. It is the first of the festivities of the New Year (Nowruz) which falls on March 21.

Religious fundamentalists frown upon the fire festival as a ‘pagan tradition’ and authorities have often resorted to harsh measures to suppress its celebration in the streets, often bringing out the police, Basij militia, and vigilante groups to disperse the youth and even arrest them. Thus, the streets in larger cities such as Tehran have often turned into battlegrounds between the dancing and merrymaking youth and the police on the last Tuesday of the year.

“Charshanbeh Soori is the only time that people are also ‘armed’,” Jahan, a young man in Karaj, a city of 1.2 million half an hour from the capital Tehran, told Iran International referring to the homemade firecrackers the youth have been using for years to taunt the security forces during the fire festival.

Younger people want to take revenge on the regime and its security forces for suppression of the protests in the past few months, Jahan said, adding that the call to the three-night protests is like cracking the whip so that the regime understands that people have not retreated in the face of its cruelty to protesters.

Mehdi Yarahi, a singer who supported the nationwide protests, in a post on his Instagram Monday published a picture of an order which belongs to Deeds and Properties Registration Organization of Iran showing that he is banned from buying and selling property.

Yarahi also announced that he along with famous actress Taraneh Alidousti, film director Asghar Farhadi and prominent musician Kayhan Kalhor were banned from transactions that need to be registered officially.

Within the past six months and during uprising against the clerical rulers, the government mounted pressure on many artists by arrests, summons, and imprisonment to force them to stop expressing support for the movement.

A TV host, Mojtaba Pourbakhsh, who used to work for Iran’s state television, also wrote in a tweet that it’s been almost forty days that he is jobless struggling against cancer at home.

He was fired by the directors of the state TV for expressing solidarity with people and with football legend Ali Karimi who is one of the opposition leaders now.

This is not the first time that the Islamic Republic puts such bans on artists or other activists and even journalists.

In 2019, Iran’s judiciary banned the employees of Iran International from purchasing or selling assets in Iran due to the coverage of the protests in November of that year.

Last week on International Women’s Day, a 40-second video of five young women in loose clothing and without the mandatory headscarf dancing in Tehran’s Ekbatan neighborhood to the song “Calm Down” by Selena Gomez and Nigerian singer Rema went viral, prompting the regime’s security forces to start a hunt for the teen girls. 

The video was published on Instagram by the trainer of the troupe, who was the first victim to be identified and forced to remove the video and deactivate her page. The following day, Shahrak Ekbatan Twitter account, which covers news about the neighborhood, warned that police were looking for the teenagers. The neighborhood has been an epicenter of ongoing protests ignited by the death of Mahsa Amini, the 22-year-old woman who died in September 2022 while in police custody following her arrest for not wearing her headscarf “properly.”

"They looked for CCTV footage of Block 13 [apartment building] to identify the girls who were only dancing and were not involved in any political activity. Police were seen checking the footage and questioning the guards," it said. 

The account later reported that the five girls were initially summoned and received a warning, and later, called in again and detained for two days before being pressured into making a video of forced confessions and expressing remorse.

After news of the manhunt for the teenagers broke out, people from Iran and other countries started releasing videos of themselves dancing to the same tune to express solidarity and support for the Iranian girls.

Prominent Iranian human rights defender and currently a political prisoner, Narges Mohammadi, republished the video of the dance on social media on Tuesday, saying women's singing and dancing is a form of feminine presence in the streets. This is a right which should not be suppressed, she noted. Earlier in the week, actor-cum-activist Golshifteh Farahani also published the video of the dance, with the caption, "Nothing can stop the freedom of Iranian women. Nothing can stop the freedom of all human beings."

The simple act of dancing on streets is construed as “defiance” against the Islamic Republic, so are many other simple things in Iran since the regime tends to label anything it deems “critical” or “improper” as a security threat. 

The five teenagers are not the only victims of the Islamic Republic’s opposition to dancing and singing. Islamic laws in Iran forbid dancing, although many people dance during family gatherings in their homes. Even using the word “dance” is forbidden in all media platforms and publications in all sorts in Iran. A state-TV host was banned in 2021 after a guest on her program mentioned the word “dancing.” Several Iranian university professors were sacked late in 2022 over participating in the graduation ceremony of their students because some people danced in the celebrations. And most recently, a court sentenced two bloggers to ten and a half years in prison each for dancing in the streets. They were charged with “encouraging corruption and public prostitution”.

The Academy of Persian Language and Literature, the regulatory body for the Persian language currently led by hardliner politician Gholam-Ali Haddad-Adel, has proposed the word “synchronized movements” as a replacement for “dance” in all the literature published in Iran. Ironically, the regime is also against any synchronized movement by the people as it views any form of popular unity as an existential threat.

However, people in Iran are in sync more than ever to defy the regime. Iranians inside and outside the country keep singing the Grammy Award-winning protest song “Baraye” in their rallies and events. Shervin Hajipour’s revolution song, which is composed of a collection of tweets by Iranians bemoaning the situation in their country and has become the unofficial anthem of the women-led uprising in Iran, opens with “For dancing in the streets.”

In the past six months, many parts of Iran witnessed the largest protests since the 1979 revolution. More than 520 people have been killed.