Why This Time the Protests in Iran are Different (Requiem for a Dream)
By: Shervin Malekzadeh
Tags: Iran Protest, Iran, Iran Protests 2019, Protests In Iran

Protesters carrying away a comrade shot during protests in Shiraz, Iran. November 17, 2019

The last time around, when it once again seemed like the Islamic Republic of Iran was tumbling down and the usual suspects were telling us it was the end of the regime, was in 2017. Anti-government demonstrations had broken out without warning in Mashad during the early days of winter and quickly grew to include dozens of communities throughout Iran, sending forth countless headlines and dispatches filled with speculation about the imminent demise of the IRI.

At the height of what was then the worst political violence in Iran since the calamitous 2009 presidential elections, the journalist Ali Reza Eshraghi offered a second opinion on the crisis, diagnosing the widespread and fast-moving protests gripping the country as the expression of hope, not abandonment, uncertain remedy for a body politic plagued by corruption and the pathology of arbitrary rule. “For a country that behaves in ways that defy prediction,” wrote Eshraghi,a veteran of the student movement of the 1990s, “mass protest is like a medical treatment that is both poison and cure. It could expand the scope of participatory politicking or shrink it into more exclusionary and authoritarian forms of government.” Prescribed by the public through direct action, it was up to Iran’s leaders to take or reject their medicine.

That in 2019 they chose poison is the source of despair. The brutal takedown of protestors this past November, the unrepentant violence that in the span of a few weeks resulted in the deaths of at least 304 Iranians, marks a turning point in the political development of Iran, a retreat from, if not outright abandonment of what had been in recent years the fitful but incremental consolidation of democracy. If Iran was for a time and against the odds becoming more democratic in spite of itself, then the decision by the authorities to fire on protestors, to reach immediately for the gun, was spite itself, an act of unaccountable malice.

The bill will not be long in coming. We are undoubtedly witnessing the final days of an oppositional politics centered on the vote, each ballot and electoral triumph a step towards securing a politics less cruel, less absolute. The virtuous cycle of elections that unexpectedly defined the aftermath of the 2009 Green Movement is already being replaced from below by an emerging cycle of protest, of demonstration and violent counter-demonstration, an accelerating path to ruin without the usual offramp of elections to restore the peace.

The speed at which the turn to violence has metastasized is breathtaking. It took several weeks for an unprepared security apparatus to fully bare its teeth in the summer of 2009, and another six months for officials to fully suppress the Green Movement uprising, resulting in the deaths of 72 Iranians. This fall’s protests surpassed that total in a matter of days. State agents killed at least 106 protesters in 21 cities between November 15–19, according to Amnesty International; the number killed may be as high as 1,500.

Conflagration not implosion

The compounding tragedies of 2017 and 2019 bode badly for the durability of the IRI. Iran may yet tip into rapid collapse, an absolute nightmare scenario of political change (see Syria, Libya). The shameless use of violent force by the state against unarmed protestors makes such an outcome more, not less, likely in the long term. Fierce states are almost never strong states, the deployment of bayonets being, as Talleyrand reminds us, useful for maintaining the throne, but not for sitting on it.

Nonetheless, that the present state of affairs will end with implosion in the near-term remains an unlikely, if not exactly unimaginable, outcome. Iran 2019 is not the Soviet Union in 1989, nor Libya 2011. The nature of IRI rule, an ideological state lacking a singular “Dear Leader” in the manner of a Saddam, Qaddafi, or Assad, makes it a poor candidate for the type of rapid collapse associated with so-called sultanistic regimes. Cries of “Death to Khamanei” make for good copy, but are hardly sufficient for bringing about the demise of a well-entrenched system, sustained by the special authenticity of religion and boasting numerous nodes of power.