Grief and Grievance in Iran’s Growing Protests

For four days, protestors have marched on Iranian streets. The protests were triggered by the killing of Mahsa Amini, who was fatally injured while in the custody of the Guidance Patrol, a police unit in Iran that mainly enforces the country’s Islamic dress code. Amini, who was 22 years old, died last Friday after several days in a coma. She was visiting Tehran from the province of Kurdistan to see her relatives.

Iran has seen multiple waves of protests in recent years. In 2017, protests erupted in response to a sharp drop in the value of the rial and grew to include claims of economic mismanagement and corruption. In 2019, nationwide protests were triggered by a fuel subsidy reform and Iranians took to the streets to decry declining living standards. In 2021, protests focused on water rights recurred in various Iranian provinces. This year, labour protests have taken place across the country as a public sector employees and blue-collar workers seek job security and wage increases.

In many respects these protests have been linked. In each round of unrest, protestors mobilised because of similar grievances, mainly economic. They shouted the same slogans—“Death to the dictator!”—expressing anger at a sclerotic political establishment. They faced the same brutal response from security forces, who injured and killed with impunity.

But the protests triggered by the killing of Mahsa Amini appear different and are arguably more significant. While there are similarities with previous protests when considering the grievances, the slogans, and the repression, there is something distinct about the emotions being foregrounded as the mobilisations take place. 

So far, people of different backgrounds and different classes have joined these protests. They have taken to the streets of Amini’s hometown of Saghez and have assembled on college campuses in Tehran to express their anger and sadness. These protests are motivated by grief, not mere grievance. Grief has opened the way for a new, wider mobilisation. 

As my colleague Zep Kalb has observed, looking across recent protests in Iran, “solidarity has been hard to obtain.” Reflecting on last year’s water protests in Esfahan, Kalb explained that the protests forced “ordinary Iranians, state organisations, and political elites” to “compete fiercely about how to share the country’s increasingly scarce water resources.” Communities involved in the protests shared the same grievances—they were all demanding their water rights—but in an environment of scarcity their demands pitted them against one another.

The same can be said for the earlier rounds of economic protests in Iran. The individuals who took to the streets all shared economic grievances and wished an end to their unfair treatment in the face of low wages, high prices, and growing inequality, due in large part to the accumulative effect of sanctions. But the protests, while frequently dispersed, did not overcome class and communal divisions. 

The fragmented nature of these past protests has made it easier for authorities to respond with carrots and sticks, shirking calls for broader reform. Last year, Iranian authorities used live rounds to suppress protests in Khuzestan, a region in southwest Iran beset by poverty pollution, and water shortages. Their use of violence in a region many Iranians see as a backwater had limited political repercussions. Earlier this month, the Raisi administration inaugurated a major water infrastructure project to increase water supply in 26 cities in the province. In this way, national resources have been used to address local grievances, while systemic reforms are rejected. After all, many Iranian protestors did not necessarily care if the restoration of their rights and economic welfare came at the expense of others and without broader reform. In this way, the politics of scarcity has undermined the solidarity necessary for broader mobilisation.

But the emotion that has brought so many Iranians to the streets after Amini’s death—grief—is anything but scarce. A photograph of Amini’s parents, utterly alone and in a mournful embrace in the hospital ward, struck a chord and was widely shared on social media. Millions of Iranians have endured such private moments of grief in recent years. The scene in the hospital ward even evoked the unprocessed pain of the COVID-19 pandemic—during which 144,000 Iranians lost their lives according to official statistics. The sadness of Amini’s killing was profoundly relatable. 

There is also anger. Another daughter of Iran has had her life ruined or ended by state brutality. Over the last year, apprehensions had grown about the increasingly aggressive actions of the Guidance Patrol and Amini’s killing was the inevitable conclusion.

If Amini’s death seemed inevitable, it was also because the same thing has happened before. Comparisons have been made with the death of the “Blue Girl” in September 2019. Sahar Khodayari set herself on fire as an act of protest and died of her injuries a week later. Khodayari had faced prosecution for attempting to attend a football match at the stadium of Esteghlal, her beloved club, whose uniforms are blue.

Another aspect of Amini’s death, the idea that she was killed simply because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time, has led to comparisons with the January 2020 downing of Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752, in which 176 people were killed. Iranian authorities admitted shooting down the civilian airliner, which was departing from Tehran’s international airport, but claims it was accidental. In the aftermath of such senseless events, many Iranians, especially women and youth, feel they live in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, a nationally representative poll conducted by Gallup in 2021 reveals Iran to be a country beset by anger and sadness. Respondents were asked what emotions they had felt in the previous day. The responses were stark—34 percent experienced anger, 36 percent experienced pain, 40 percent experienced sadness, and 43 percent experienced stress. Responding to Amini’s death, journalist Omid Tousheh captured the national mood succinctly in a tweet: “Grief, anger, and desperation pour forth from the door and the walls.”

The hope for Iran is that these crushing feelings will not lead to dejection. There is a power in the emotions that are being unleashed in this new round of protests. There remains a possibility that a broad mobilisation can lead to reform, if the Iranian people can harness the deep solidarity that grief—not grievance—can foster.

Photo: AP