The most popular chant of the young men and women
(mostly under 25) who are now going to the streets all over Iran is “Zan!
Zendegi! Azadi!” (“Women! Life! Freedom!”). ‘Women’ comes first because it was
the beating and death in custody of a 22-year-old woman arrested for letting
too much hair show under her hijab that set the protests off.
The revolt is led by young women, to the extent that it has leaders at all, and
they are still protesting after a month despite around 250 people killed by the
regime’s forces and 12,500 arrested. Moreover, these protests are targeting the
theocratic dictatorship as a whole, not just its various misdeeds and failings.
“Death to the dictator” or “Death to Khamenei!”, they chant, meaning Supreme
Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in power since 1989. But they oppose any
dictatorship, not just the current one, so they also condemn the former king
whom the Islamic Revolution overthrew: “Death to the Shah!”
That won’t weaken the determination of the Revolution’s beneficiaries,
including several hundred thousand well-armed religious fanatics in the Basij
militia and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, to defend the regime to the
bitter end.
Ayatollah Khamenei made the regime’s response clear a few days after the
protests started. He called them “riots”, and said that they were “engineered
by America and the occupying, false Zionist regime [Israel], as well as their
paid agents, with the help of some traitorous Iranians abroad.”
He may even believe that (he doesn’t get out much), but either way the die is
cast. In order to overthrow the regime that the younger generation now reject,
they will have to fight it.
The final battle may not happen now: in the past few days, the number of people
daring to go into the streets and defy the regime’s enforcers seems to be
dwindling. But it will come sooner or later, and it may not end well.
There are three possible outcomes. Option One is that it ends like the Shah’s
overthrow in 1979. The crowds come out in ever greater numbers, offering
themselves up to be slain by the ‘security’ forces, until the enforcers
themselves grow sickened by the scale of the killing and refuse to shoot the
citizens any more.
This is unlikely because the rebels this time are not motivated by the
religious fervour that drove their grandparents four decades ago. Endless,
willing self-sacrifice before the guns of the oppressors is not a style that
will appeal to them, nor would the current regime just walk away like the Shah
eventually did.
The second option is that the rebels arm themselves somehow and try to bring
the regime down by force. But the only way they would get large quantities of
weapons is if significant numbers of the IRGC and the Basij defected to them.
That’s unlikely, so it would probably just end up as a huge bloodbath but no
regime change.
There is a third option, but it would probably lead to an even bigger
bloodbath. If the young protesters did get enough weapons to take on the
regime’s forces on a more or less equal basis, it would probably end up as a
full-scale civil war.
That’s the ‘Syrian’ model. Non-violent young Syrian protesters demanded
an end to the tyrannical Assad regime in early 2011, and were shot down in such
numbers that their leaders were displaced by more violent people.
At that point many conscript soldiers defected to the anti-regime side too, and
the confrontation morphed into a nationwide civil war that lasted an entire
decade. About half a million Syrians were killed, almost half the population is
still displaced internally or abroad, and most of the country is in ruins. And
the tyrant is still there.
Multiply that by four, and you have a vision of what Iran could look like if an
originally non-violent pro-democracy movement were driven to take up arms
against a ruthless regime: the entire country devastated, with tens of millions
of people displaced.
To say this is to rain on the protesters’ parade, but it cannot be helped. The
day may come, in five or ten years, when enough of the regime’s staunch
supporters have aged out, and the economic misery caused by its isolation from
the world is so extreme, that a peaceful transition to a different kind of Iran
becomes possible. But that day has not yet arrived.
Gwynne Dyer is an independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.
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