German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said Sunday that Berlin will ensure the European Union freezes the assets of those responsible for a violent crackdown on antigovernment protests in Iran.
She told German Sunday newspaper Bild am Sonntag that "Those who beat up women and girls on the street, who abduct, arbitrarily imprison and condemn to death people who want nothing other than to live free -- they stand on the wrong side of history."
Expressing support for protesters she said, "To those people in Iran we say: we stand by you, and will continue to do so," she said.
Antigovernment protests began on September 17 following the murder of Mahsa Amini and soon turned into the biggest challenge to Iran's clerical leaders in years, with protesters calling for the downfall of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
Germany, France, Denmark, Spain, Italy and the Czech Republic have submitted 16 proposals for new EU sanctions against Iran for its clampdown on protests ignited by the death in hijab policy custody of the 22-year-old Kurdish girl.
The EU foreign ministers are set to decide on the measures at their meeting on October 17, with no resistance expected from the members of the bloc, Spiegel magazine reported. "We are now working flat out to implement these proposals," a German foreign ministry source said.
Despite curfew-style restrictions on mobile internet service that 90 percent of the population depend on to access social media and the global web, there was sufficient footage of protests that began in universities and secondary schools Saturday morning and spread to streets in the afternoon, lasting well until the early hours of Sunday.
“Hey you, this is not a protest, It’s a revolution,” young protesters are seen chanting to the police in Shahr-e Qods in one of the videos posted on Twitter. The youth also chanted “Down with the Dictator” while older protesters honked their car horns in approval.
Shahr-e Qods is an industrial and agricultural town of around 300,000 about 30km from the capital Tehran. Residents of the town are mainly migrant workers.
In the November 2019 unrest, the area was a bastion of protests. Many government offices, banks, and supermarkets were torched, and many were shot dead by security forces. There were allegations at the time that government agents were responsible for much of the destruction which gave security forces an excuse to suppress the protests with military ammunition.
This is the first time in recent years residents of working-class areas like Shahre-e Qods and Nazi Abad in the south of Tehran, have taken to the streets demanding freedom and revolution. Sources inside Iran say so many protesters had turned out that the riot police had to avoid confrontation with them.
There have been a lot of unbelievable footage of brutality against protesters by police and security forces including the ever-present plainclothesmen. A video taken Saturday in Mashhad, Iran's second most-populous city, shows several riot police beating up a protester, a “child” according to the narrator.
But there is also a video from Nazi Abad protests in southern Tehran that includes an extremely rare scene of a few riot policemen walking alongside protesters, instead of attacking to disperse them, and apparently guiding them to the middle of the street to keep them away from the sidewalks and shops.
Protesters in the same video are chanting “Mortars, Tanks, Fireworks: Khamenei is a [profanity]”.
Profanities against the Supreme Leader which were only chanted in the worst protest-riot situations in the past are quickly becoming mainstream. Protesters are continuously coming up with new and ingeniously rhyming slogans with even stronger profanities, and this time the angry slogans have spread everywhere, even to universities and schools.
Students at Sharif University of Technology, one of the country’s most prestigious, chanted a slogan of this type against Khamenei on October 3 that quickly became popular among all protesters. “You are ‘dirt and rubble’: You deserve this [profane word],” students at another prestigious university in Isfahan chanted a few days ago while all raising their middle fingers.
This degree of profanity is unprecedented in Iran where four-letter words are normally avoided in most social and even private contexts, particularly in the presence of women and children.
“In our society sexually charged swearwords are only uttered when conflicts are at their highest and most serious levels … One should ask the authorities to explain what they have done to make the other side [people] so angry and uninhibited,” Asr-e Iran, a moderate conservative website said Sunday in a commentary entitled “Why Sexually Explicit Slogans Are Chanted On Streets, Universities, And Schools.”
The economists warned the government to either listen to the protesters and pave the way for a peaceful transition from the current dangerous juncture, or wait for the people's anger to turn into hatred and violence as the driving force of social developments in Iran.
Massoud Nili, of Sharif University of Technology, Mohammad Tabibian the founder of Planning and Management Research Center, Mousa Ghaninejad of the Donya-ye Eqtesad Research Center, Mohammad Mehdi Behkish from Allameh Tabatabai University, and Hassan Dargahi, from Shahid Beheshti University in Tehran explained in a statement released in Tehran on October 7, "Why the Iranian society has been turned into an explosive store where recent sparkles can rapidly lead to an extensive blaze."
The economists observed that generational changes in the Iranian society have increased the number of young and educated Iranians, while the rise in the number of educated women has empowered the Iranian society in a way that it is not comparable to the years before the 1979 revolution.
"The Iranian society now is more urban, more educated and a main part of it is within an age range that increases the country's social energy. Meanwhile, the society's access to information [Internet] is a key factor that leads to to social developments. Individual Iranians can have access to any information they might need and at the same time, their academic level has increased their awareness in an amazing way," the statement maintained.
Based on this assessment, the economists addressed the government and said: "Running such a society requires respect for a set of rules including "taking care" of the society and "respecting its demands and tendencies." These rules, said the statement, are even more significant when we are talking about women.
"Meanwhile, with the rise in the educational and academic level, urbanization and access to information especially for women, there will be rising demands for more welfare, political participation, financial and political transparency and in a nutshell, for better governance. Nonetheless, during the past decade, particularly since 2017, what we have seen in the areas of welfare, political participation and financial and political transparency is that the government has moved in the wrong direction and against the demands of the people," the economists added.
They also highlighted the fact that the past four years have been the worst in economic terms, as low-income Iranians have been pushed more rapidly below the poverty line, while the government has used violence against protesters. "Mismanagement by the government has shifted the protests from anger to hatred," the economists said and warned that in this way, "even if decision-makers manage to suppress popular anger, this does not mean an end to protests. On the contrary, this will lead to a permanent tension between the society and the government in Iran."
The economists further warned that Iran is no longer capable to handle any new complications. They suggested that the only way out for the government is to accept cultural and social differences and diversity and seek to tackle the country's massive economic problems and foreign policy challenges. They also suggested that government should encourage and tolerate criticism in a bid to reduce tensions.
