How Iran’s Ethnic Divisions Are Fueling the Revolt →

October 19, 2022

Excerpt

The escalating wave of protests shaking Iran since Sept. 17 isn’t the first time the country’s theocratic regime has faced mass unrest. However, the current upheavals are exceptional in scope and they show no signs of slowing down. The protests—which followed the death of a 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman under custody of the morality police—aren’t confined to Tehran and other cities in the Iranian heartland but have engulfed remote border provinces as well. Within the provinces, demonstrations are taking place outside the capital cities in dozens of locations. Industrial workers and bazaar shopkeepers—important constituencies for the regime—have joined in as well. In another departure from past unrest, protesters have been fighting back against and even targeting police and security forces, who have killed hundreds of protesters. Over the weekend, Tehran’s notorious Evin prison was on fire with gunshots heard and several reported deaths. As it continues to intensify, this wave of demonstrations may pose the most formidable challenge to the regime since the immediate aftermath of Ayatollah Khomeini taking power in 1979.

Perhaps the most important aspect to the current uprising is the major role played by Iran’s ethnic minorities. According to BBC News, security forces have targeted and killed a disproportionate number of minority protesters, with a significant concentration of deaths in Baluchistan and the Caspian region in northwest Iran. Security forces perpetrated an outright massacre in Zahedan, a city near the border with Pakistan largely populated by Baluchs. On Sept. 30, regime forces killed over 80 Zahedan residents as they were leaving Friday prayers. Security forces wore traditional Baluch dress to avoid detection before opening fire on the worshippers. That this massacre was perpetrated on the Baluch minority went unmentioned in many Western media reports. Despite the massacre, the Baluchs held more anti-regime protests after prayers.

Iran’s history of ethnic grievances—especially in the non-Persian provinces dominated by Tehran—adds additional fuel to a highly combustible mix, and the regime’s harsh crackdown in Zahedan and elsewhere suggests that the regime is aware of this. Iran’s multiethnic nature is also an important part of Iranian politics, and it’s a source of potential upheaval that has been largely left out of debates outside Iran. Western experts and commentators tend to look at Iran through the eyes of its Persian elite, just like the West has long looked at Russia through the imperial eye of Moscow with little space for Ukrainian views, let alone Dagestani or Tatar ones. We ignore these realities—and the potential for internal conflict and disintegration—at our peril.

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