Baluchis at the forefront of protests in Iran since Mahsa Amini's death

The province of Sistan-Baluchistan, in southeastern Iran, is the scene of weekly anti-government protests. In videos posted by the local human rights organization Haalvsh on social media on Friday, March 10, a compact crowd of men once again flooded the city center of Zahedan, the regional capital, at the end of the Friday prayer. In chanted slogans, the demonstrators demanded the release of political prisoners.

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In the background, the great Makki mosque, held by Sunni imam Molavi Abdol Hamid, who plays a leading role in the continuation of the anti-power protest movement in this province of Iran with a Sunni majority, bordering Pakistan and Afghanistan.

While protests have become rarer in the rest of the country, the Baloch continue to beat the streets for 23 weeks, although they are paying a heavy price. Many of the victims of the Iranian government's crackdown on the protest movement that followed Mahsa Amini's death on September 16, 2022, are Baloch.

According to Human Rights Iran, at least 530 people have been killed in protests across the country over the past six months. In Sistan and Baluchistan, the crackdown reached its peak on Friday, September 30, renamed "Bloody Friday". On that day, security forces opened fire on protesters in Zahedan, killing at least 66 people, including children, according to Amnesty International.

>> Watch: Iran: in Zahedan, an invisible massacre

"Needles in the genitals"

But if the goal was to crush the uprising, it had the opposite effect. Friday demonstrations resumed two weeks later, despite an intensification of means of repression: military presence, installation of security cameras, regular Internet cuts, surveillance of hospitals to track the wounded...

In early February, the Washington Post authenticated a hundred videos testifying to violence and intimidation against Baloch demonstrators. "The feared Revolutionary Guard Corps is working in tandem with riot police and plainclothes agents to violently suppress protests — carrying out arbitrary arrests, indiscriminate beatings and, in some cases, opening fire on civilians," the newspaper's journalists said.

Amnesty International noted in a report published in early March that at least thirteen Baloch have been sentenced to death since January "after grossly unfair trials", including six young men in December alone, "in connection with the protests". For some of them, the NGO collected evidence of torture, including sexual violence, to force them to make "confessions". "They stuck needles into the genitals of Ebrahim Narouie and beat Mansour Dahmardeh so violently that they broke his teeth and nose," the NGO said of two of the executed prisoners.

After being subjected to torture in detention for weeks, Ebrahim Narouie, 25, has been sentenced to death on the charge of "waging war" by an Islamic Revolutionary Court in Zahedan in connection with recent protests, reports @1500tasvir.#ابراهیم_نارویی#زن_زندگی_آزادی pic.twitter.com/0Orni3t3op

— IranHumanRights.org (@ICHRI) January 18, 2023

"Baloch people are used to a high execution rate. While they are estimated at only 2% of the Iranian population, they regularly represent more than a third of annual executions," notes Stéphane Dudoignon, a CNRS researcher and Iran specialist.

'Social and economic despair'

In this poor region of Iran, the protest movement finds its roots "in social and economic despair," says Stéphane Dudoignon. The predominantly Sunni Baloch face discrimination by Tehran's theocratic Shiite government. They are systematically excluded from public employment.

"The current conflagration corresponds to cumulative frustrations. For years, the Baloch could not express themselves. They took advantage of this window to make their case," adds the researcher.

In some parts of the province, unemployment is as high as 60%, productive investment is scarce, and the region is in the grip of an ecological disaster with global warming, the drying up of its seasonal lakes and an explosion of respiratory diseases.

But the demands of the Friday demonstrators go beyond their ethnicity. "They are joining the national movement," says Stéphane Dudoignon. Their movement presented itself very early on as an Iranian movement and not only Baloch, in the mouth of Imam Molavi Abdol Hamid, who speaks to the faithful every Friday.

Although this Sunni religious leader is rather a supporter of the Islamic veil, "the demands for democratization that he advocates join the discourse of many demonstrators across the country". "There is a connectivity of struggles between the blogger in Tehran, the metal worker and the protester in Zahedan. They all see themselves as second-class citizens to whom no hope can be given of attaining the status of full citizen," concludes the researcher.

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