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Iran: “Today, the religious institution is extremely divided”

A poster of Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei amid flags during a protest outside the former US embassy in Tehran on November 4, 2022. AP - Vahid Salemi

Text by: Guilhem Delteil Follow |

Julien Gouesmat

4 mins

It was on September 16 that the demonstrations began in Iran, after the death of the young Mahsa Amini, arrested three days earlier in Tehran for wearing an improper veil.

For nearly two months, the protest has not weakened, despite the violent repression carried out by the regime: shooting at demonstrators, numerous arrests... According to the organization Iran Human Rights, at least 304 people have been killed since the beginning of the movement.

Despite everything, the mobilization continues, with demonstrations or signs of distrust of the authorities.

Interview with Stéphane Dudoignon, research director at the CNRS.

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Stéphane Dudoignon is a specialist in the contemporary history of frontier societies in Central Asia and the Middle East.

He is the author of a book entitled "Guardians of the Revolution in the Islamic Republic of Iran", published by CNRS.

RFI: The region where the toll of the repression is the heaviest is that of Sistan-Baluchistan, in the south-east of Iran.

After the "Black Friday" of September 30, in which more than 90 people were killed, security forces opened fire on further protests on Friday November 4.

According to Iran Human Rights, at least sixteen

Stéphane Dudoignon

The region of Sistan-Baluchistan occupies a special place in the Iranian political imagination.

It is an old imperial march that remained underdeveloped.

For twenty years, it is a region crossed by protest movements against the underdevelopment of which it is the object, against the confiscation by the Revolutionary Guards and their regional customers of the products of the contraband which, for a long time, has been a very rare safety valve in an underdeveloped region plagued by absolutely catastrophic socio-economic problems.

It is a region where quite often, especially since the turn of the 2010s, the authorities are tempted to play the card of extreme police pressure.

Sistan-Balochistan and the Baloch, like Kurdistan, occupy a particularly important place in the penal statistics, the executions, of the Islamic Republic.

So it is a region that is under particular pressure and where the government seems to have been tempted, since the start of the demonstrations in mid-September, to play the abscess of fixation card with a repression that has very quickly reached a much larger dimension than what was observed elsewhere in the country, with “Black Friday” in Zahedan on September 30.

Throughout the country, demonstrations continue, a month and a half after the start of this protest movement.

But we also see other gestures of defiance towards the authorities.

Women who walk in the street without veils, or Iranians who drop the mullahs' turban in the middle of the street.

Are all the symbols of religious power targeted?

Everywhere one feels growing hostility vis-à-vis part of the religious establishment;

even if this violence is not systematic;

and even if we have seen, in very different regions of Iran, imams, very great religious notables, rising up against the purely repressive treatment by the Islamic Republic and by the Supreme Guide Ali Khamenei.

We have seen, in particular during funeral ceremonies for the burial or the fortieth anniversary after the death of demonstrators, Shiite funeral rituals associating the memory of the martyrdom of Imam Hussein with cries of death to the dictator.

Today, the religious institution is extremely divided.

And a considerable part of them either find themselves associated with the protest movement through these funeral ceremonies, or show themselves to be more and more aware of the threat that the all-repressive policy of power poses to the whole of society. religious institution in Iran today.

Are these criticisms also heard among law enforcement?

We do not hear them at headquarters level, but the social networks are beginning to reflect a certain bad mood of the troops, even of the officers of intermediate ranks who are beginning to spread, obviously in a completely anonymous way, with messages of protest.

In places, this translates into an extremely relative zeal and a very great reluctance to fire on the crowd.

There is therefore a hierarchical and generational divide between the base and the top of the pyramid.

On the floor of the staff, we will have a unit - in any case of facade - much more important.

That said, the calls for troop unity that we hear more and more from the general staff are also an indication that mobilization is not self-evident and that in the garrisons,

►Read again: The Iranian regime faces growing criticism

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