Iran International
Several students at Tehran’s College of Arts protesting stricter hijab rules were seriously injured in the early hours of Thursday by the head of campus security.
According to the popular Telegram channel of the National Student Unions Council, at about 2:30 am Thursday, Hamzeh Borzouei attacked a group of about fifty students who had begun a sit-in protest against new, stricter hijab rules and seriously injured several.
The Telegram channel said university authorities have still not allowed the students who began their sit-in on Wednesday afternoon to leave, and campus security has prevented anyone from bringing food or water to the students.
Students said on social media that Borzouei and other university officials made various threats against them including the threat of calling in the military to deal with them. Plainclothesmen and other security forces were already present in and outside the university in quite big numbers.
Students also said that security claimed they blocked food delivery to prevent poisoning that they could later be blamed for if students fell ill. Students also said the besieged protesters were not allowed to use the toilettes.
The new rules require girls to wear a pullover headscarf with stitched front (called maghna’e in Iran) which is like a nun’s coif, completely covering the head and the neck. Failing to comply, the university has announced, would result in suspension.
In the early 1980s wearing maghna’e became compulsory in all universities, government offices and even banks but its use gradually became obsolete in some more lenient establishments including the College of Arts.
The hijab required in the Islamic Republic consists of a long and loose tunic in muted colors worn over trousers with a similarly plain headscarf that covers all hair and shoulders. Authorities including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei say wearing a long black veil (chador in Persian) that covers from head to toe is the ‘optimal hijab’.
In the past few years, the anti-compulsory hijab movement which took root with a social media campaign organized by US women’s rights activist Masih Alinejad in 2017, called White Wednesdays, has hugely grown. The movement has gained greater momentum since the death in custody of the 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in September 2022 and the protests that her death sparked.
Defiance of hijab has now turned into a form of civil disobedience. Many women who have been in a tug of war with the authorities for years are now adamant to be hijab free in public. They can be seen defiantly rejecting the head scarf everywhere, from restaurants to banks and parks where previously, they could not even enter without covering their head.
In recent months, authorities have increased pressure on students for hijab, presumably to stop the growth of the anti-compulsory hijab movement in universities across the country.
The National Student Unions Council said in April that 435 students had been suspended or expelled in universities nationwide, where they had staged many protests and sit-ins since the beginning of the Mahsa movement last year.
In recent months some political parties and dissidents in Iran, including the reformist Etehad-e Mellat Party and Zahra Rahnavard who has been under house arrest together with her husband Mir-Hossein Mousavi for thirteen years have demanded the abolition of the compulsory hijab laws.
Mehrabian said that water treatment facilities have resumed operations since Tuesday evening and are working at full capacity. “We are trying to raise the water pressure back to the normal level gradually,” he said. But videos on social media showed tankers distributing water to residents on Wednesday.
Drinking water outage which started in some districts of the capital Tehran Friday has impacted not only households but also many businesses, particularly restaurants. Beside regular household use, the outage has disrupted the use of cooling systems in houses when often near 40 degrees Celsius during the day at this time of the year.
Videos sent to Iran International TV by citizens indicate that outage or low pressure has continued in some of the areas of the capital. They also say water tankers are still distributing water in various neighborhoods.
Reports from Tehran also indicate that bottled water has vanished from shelves in some areas of the capital and the price has gone up too.
The water outage started when torrential rains flooded rivers and caused extensive landslides in various areas of the country including around the capital where riverbeds were completely blocked by debris from the mountains.
Karaj, the capital of Alborz Province, which is a city of over 1.6 million only about 40 kilometers (25 miles) to the west of Tehran has also been affected by the outage.
Some citizen reports on social media indicate that the outage has continued in some areas of the city despite officials’ claims that it ended at midday Monday.
Many citizens have expressed anger on social media over lack of accountability by the water supply network officials who did not provide timely warnings to citizens and repeatedly claimed the outage would end within hours.
Water shortage has been threatening the Iranian capital of 10m for years. Causes include drought and the massive waste of water due to the dilapidation of the distribution infrastructures.
Iran has been suffering from drought for at least a decade and officials have been warning of a further decrease in precipitation. The volume of water in the five dams that supply Tehran, for instance, has consistently been going down in recent years.
Mohammadreza Bakhtiari, the former CEO of Tehran Water and Sewerage Company, said in early April that about 20 percent of drinking water in Tehran, as much as 300,000 cubic meters, goes to waste before reaching households and businesses.
In recent years, massive protests have occurred in several cities against government mismanagement of water resources, harmful dam building, and politically motivated diversion of rivers that have devastated agriculture and drinking water sources in many areas.
In July 2021, water protests erupted in several cities in the oil-rich Khuzestan province that ended with the forceful intervention of police and the Revolutionary Guards. More than ten people were killed and hundreds detained during the protests that lasted a week.
In November of the same year, thousands protested in Esfahan over lack of water for agriculture where the iconic Zayandeh-Roud river has turned into a dry bed over the past few years. The protests soon turned into anti-government unrest.