Umamah Bakharia | ub@radioislam.co.za

3 min read
4 November 2022 | 10:00 am CAT

Protests in Iran continue following the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman who was allegedly killed in Tehran by morality police for improperly wearing her scarf.

Photo credit: AP/Vahid Salemi

Since then, forty prominent human rights lawyers in Iran are publicly criticising the country’s rulers, which they say will be unsuccessful because protesters no longer care about violent crackdowns.

“The government is still drowning in illusions and believes it can repress, arrest and kill to silence,” the lawyers said in a statement sent to Reuters.

“But the flood of people will ultimately remove a government because the divine will side with the people. The voice of the people is the voice of God.”

Speaking to Radio Islam International on this week’s ‘Media Lens’, analyst Ebrahim Deen says protests have been increasing since 2019 when Iranians protested against water and electricity prices. However, since then, the government has not been able to curb the protests.

“The government at the moment doesn’t know how to deal with [protestors] and the fact of the clerical establishment who has bought into the system- which had worked quite well, and so there’s very little support for government action, but again, there’s also the support of the protestors only seem to be a certain age group,” he says.

Deen adds that the media coverage has been focusing on ‘anti-hijab’ narratives. However, some major news outlets, like Al Jazeera etc., have looked at the situation in Iran as a socialist culmination.

“Also, the fact that the situation in Iran politically has worsened over the past 4 years – freedom has become more conceited and more people are alienated from the governing regime, but the general narrative has been on the ‘anti-hijab’ protests mainly because of Western media and also because of Irans role in supporting Russia in Ukraine,” he says.

In past years violent protests erupted in Iran over election results and economic challenges, but the current unrest has one main demand — the abolishment of the Islamic Republic.

Since Amini’s death, Iran has denied allegations by human rights groups that it abuses prisoners.

Listen to this weeks ‘Media Lens’ here: