Thousands of people poured onto the streets of Iran in numerous cities on Tuesday evening. In addition to slogans critical of the government, more and more people shouted: “We’re fighting, we’re dying, we’re going to take Iran back.” Even in the arch-conservative city and the Shiite center of Qom, young people demonstrated once morest the Islamic dress codes. There were several arrests, according to the Fars news agency.
Videos of protests were also shared on social media on the holiday island of Kish in the Persian Gulf, which is considered to be particularly quiet. Videos on social media, the authenticity of which might not be verified, showed demonstrators beating security forces or women setting their headscarves on fire. The governor of the Iranian province of Kurdistan reported three dead demonstrators on Tuesday – but rejected any intervention by security forces.
There are also increasing numbers of voices in the country calling for the strict dress code to be relaxed and the government to change course. “A law that the majority of society does not follow must be revised,” said the former mayor of the capital Tehran and editor of the daily newspaper “Ham Mihan”, Gholam Hussein Karbaschi (69), in an interview on Wednesday. In a letter to President Ebrahim Raisi, Elias Hasrati, former member of parliament and head of the newspaper “Etemad”, called for the immediate dissolution of the moral police units
Harsh words also come from Vienna: “It is the expression of a policy that violates human rights and inhumanity that a young woman is put to death because of an uncovered lock of hair. Human rights are not negotiable,” wrote the Rector of the University of Applied Arts, Gerald Bast, in a broadcast on Wednesday. “We call on our Foreign Minister, Alexander Schallenberg, to officially protest once morest the actions of the Iranian (police) authorities. The Iranian ambassador must be “quoted to the Foreign Ministry” in order “to make it clear that the death of Mahsa Amini is due to these way that cannot simply be accepted”.
