Iranian Minister Says Dissident Artists Must Express Remorse To Return To Work

A group of retirees as well as workers at a local sugarcane company gathered in the city of Shush in southern Khuzestan province on Sunday to protest their poor living conditions and the small increase in wages in the new Iranian year.

Meanwhile, pensioners held a protest rally in Shushtar in the province chanting "Controlling inflation, Just An Empty Slogan," referring to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei's motto this year as the year to control inflation.

At the same time, videos shared on social media show retirees in the cities of Ahvaz, Esfahan, and West Alborz region holding gatherings.

Union protests continue in Iran while student and popular protest rallies against mandatory hijab are also underway.

The students in the faculty of social sciences at Allameh University in Tehran held a rally on Sunday, to show anger at the mandatory hijab and poisoning of schoolgirls.

Rising prices and economic hardship have led to repeated labor strikes and nationwide protests in the past few days.

The national currency has halved in value since September pushing prices for food and other necessities higher on top of 40-50-percent inflation in the past three years.

Parents and students who gathered spontaneously outside the education department of Shahin-Shahr, near Esfahan Saturday morning soon began chanting anti-government slogans. “We don’t want a child-killing government,” they chanted.

According to Hosseinali Haji-Deligani, representative of the district in the parliament, twelve schools were attacked in the city of around 175,000 on April 11.

Videos posted on social media also show people chanting “Down with the Dictator” and “Down with those responsible for the poisonings” and a member of the security forces threatening them over a loudspeaker.

Some of the women protesting in Shahin-Shahr, as videos show, attended the rally unveiled in defiance of the government’s new attempts to re-establish strict hijab rules.

Dozens of schools have been targeted by unidentified people using chemicals in various cities across the country including Esfahan, Tabriz, Shahin-Shahr, Genaveh, Kermanshah, Oshnavieh, Kamyaran, Ardabil, Sanandaj, Orumieh, Karaj, and Pardis to the south of the capital since the reopening of schools and dozens of girls have been hospitalized.

Attacks against girls’ schools started in November and subsided before the Iranian new year in March, but they have resumed in full force.

Many believe that the attacks are a coordinated effort by state-protected religious vigilante groups or the state itself to frighten students and their parents so that they will keep away from anti-government protests or even education for girls.

Women and girls having been at the forefront of anti-government protests that began in mid-September following the death of the 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in the custody of ‘morality police’. They have burned their headscarves and cut their hair in defiance of the regime, and many are vowing they will never wear the compulsory hijab again.

On Saturday several new attacks were reported in Izeh in the southwestern Khuzestan Province, Sanandaj, the capital of Kordestan Province and other cities. A call to protest outside the education department of Izeh on April 16 and 17 has been circulating on social media. The city of around 100,000 was the scene of some bloody protests in November and December.

Demonstrations were also held in the Kurdish majority city of Saqqez on April 9 after half a dozen schools were attacked. Protesters who chanted anti-government slogans and lit bonfires on the streets were similarly attacked by security forces and several protesters were arrested.

The principal of one of girl’s schools attacked in Saqqez last week resigned in protest to the authorities’ failure to find the perpetrators of the attacks. Parshang Ranjbari said her resignation should be considered as “civil protest”.

The scale of the intentional poisoning of female primary and secondary school students -- which started in the religious city of Qom - and reached schools in large and small towns and villages across the country has almost become a daily occurrence but deeply concerned parents are still waiting to see the authorities find the perpetrators.

Officials and the state media have continuously tried to downplay the seriousness of the incidents and the press were warned by the Islamic guidance ministry this week not to give coverage to news of the poisonings and even ignore “unreliable sources including some authorities in the province who may not be informed” to avoid “serious damage to the country.”

Meanwhile, on Saturday the police officially commenced using public CCTV images and image recognition software to identify and prosecute women who defy the strict Islamic dress code and hijab rules in a bid to end the ever-increasing appearance of “hijabless” women in public.

Many express outrage that surveillance cameras can be used to track women for not wearing hijab, while the government has failed to identify vigilantes attacking schools.

The incident took place Friday during a match between popular football club Persepolis FC and Sanat Mes Kerman FC. It is not clear what triggered the protest.

Videos received by Iran International show the torn banners while spectators chant anti-government slogans with police using tear gas to disperse them. One citizen who shared a video says twice football fans ripped the posters and in the second half of the game they had to remove the banners.

Soleimani, who was Iran’s top military and intelligence operator in the Middle East, was killed by a targeted US drone strike on January 3, 2020, directly ordered by former US president Donald Trump.

Several pictures and statues of the Islamic Republic leaders and important figures were set on fire in recent months as anti-government protests and strikes have taken place on a regular basis in many cities throughout the country.

Statues and pictures of Khomeini, Khamenei, and President Ebrahim Raisi as well as the slain IRGC Quds Force Commander Qasem Soleimani are the top targets for the political vandalism.

As poverty is soaring in Iran and the regime keeps failing to deliver on its promises, such acts of political vandalism are growing across the country.

The former head of the Tehran City Council Mohsen Hashemi has said this week that lack of hope and trust in the future was a factor in the ferocity of the protests.

Prominent sociologist Mohammad Fazeli has also said that hope in the future of Iran has weakened among the public and this casts a shadow of doubt on any solution that the government might offer for long-standing problems.

Pundits from the two extremes in the Iranian political landscape, reformist commentator Abbas Abdi and conservative pundit Mohammad Mohajeri spoke to Tejarat Farda magazine’s issue published in late March about the outlook of Iran's political landscape as the new Iranian year began. The magazine's editor Sadaf Samimi concluded that their views about the future of Iran and what happened last year are strikingly similar.

Abdi opined that the Islamic Republic was under pressure from the protests and the foreign-based opposition.

"I believe the next two years will definitely bring about major changes in Iran." He did not expand on the nature of those changes but said, "Iran has many potentials for improvement, but this does not mean that today's official policies can continue."

Mohajeri said that last year's protests created a very good opportunity for the Iranian regime. Although the protests were threatening the regime, they also signalled dangers that alerted the regime. Mohajeri added that Iranian officials attributed the protests to the intervention of foreign countries, but they realized that the protests have their roots inside the country.

He observed that previous protests in Iran were motivated by economic problems, but this time there was no talk of the economic grievances among the protesters.

"Although everyone knew that there were problems relating to the people's livelihood, and nearly all of those arrested during the protests were coming from the lower strata…the main problems the protesters were concerned about were political and cultural issues.”

The two pundits however agreed that the receding of street protests did not mean that the movement is over. Anything can re-ignite the protests, they said.

Abdi said it is essential that major changes take place in Iran during the next two years, but the Iranian government seems incapable of problem solving. This is a government that does not accept even clear facts such as rising meat prices and in one instance banned a newspaper that published the news. The first thing that should be reformed in Iran is the media, he said that even do not cover recent gas attacks on girls' schools.

On the other hand, the government is not aware of the impact of international reporting, such as CNN's report on torture in Iranian prisons, Abdi said. More competitive election and equality before the law are essential to restore a semblance of normality.

Mohajeri said the people have lost their trust in the government so that even if it disseminated factual news, still people would not believe the government. This trust has been lost over many years.

He said, When the officials promise that the rate of exchange and market prices will come down but the opposite happens, the people have every right not to believe them again. He added: Although I believe the officials have realized the truth following the protests, I still have not received a signal that would indicate the likelihood of an improvement in the next year.

The city’s prominent Sunni cleric, Mowlavi Abdolhamid, delivered another fiery sermon criticizing the regime for its heavy-handed crackdown on protesters, particularly women who have revolted against the Islamic Republic’s compulsory hijab rules. 

Referring to the renewed wave of chemical attacks against schoolgirls across the country, he slammed the authorities who want to use traffic cameras to identify women who remove their headscarves in public but would not use the cameras to arrest the perpetrators of poisonous gas attacks on girls’ schools. 

When the perpetrators of these attacks are not identified in a country which uses numerous surveillance devices, it means that these incidents have "roots in the system". This is why people do not believe the authorities and think that the regime is implicated in the attacks, he said. 

During the past weeks, Abdolhamid had said several times that the chemical attacks are the regime’s revenge against the teenage girls who protested against the Islamic Republic, especially following the death in custody of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in September 2022. 

More than 300 schools have been targeted since November 2022, without any apparent effort by the government to seriously pursue the perpetrators or explain to terrified parents and students what was happening in so many schools. 

Earlier in the week, Moineddin Saeedi, a member of the Iranian Parliament from Chabahar in Sistan and Baluchistan Province, also said, "If these cameras can detect crimes to such an extent, why are we currently facing the poisoning of girls?"