Iranians withstand increased repression

It’s the first week of my month-long trip visiting relatives in Iran. I am walking past the… It’s the first week of my month-long trip visiting relatives in Iran. I am walking past the gorgeous mosques and many shops of Esfahan’s Nakhshe Jahan square, one of Iran’s most beautiful tourist attractions. Loosely adhering to the Islamic dress code, I am dressed in jeans, high-heeled sandals, the required long sleeve jacket that falls inches above my knees and a sheer head scarf that barely covers my hair.

While Iran is an Islamic fundamentalist country, I know that it’s not at all unusual to see Iranian women dressed as I am. In fact, some are even more daring with their cropped pants, stilettos, heavy makeup and skin-tight jackets. The Iranian people have a tendency – no, a need – to push the country’s laws to the limit. It’s simply the Iranian way.

As I browse the stores and take photographs of my surroundings, I suddenly feel a hand on my shoulder. I turn around to face a middle-aged woman covered from head to foot with a black chador. I see only the oval of her face and her short, chubby fingers as she carries a pen and a pad of paper. There is a police car parked a few feet behind her.

“Excuse me, miss,” she says politely, almost nervously. “Is your jacket 100 centimeters long?”

I gaze down at my feet and try to discreetly stretch my jacket down so it will reach my knees. The woman shakes her head at my unsuccessful attempt, hastily writes me a ticket and warns me that if I am not properly covered next time, the punishment will be three hours of prison.

I quickly learn that things have changed in Iran since the last time I was here in 2004. An Ahmadinejad Iran is slightly more repressive. I say “slightly” because in Iran, repression is nothing new – it’s just been taken up a notch.

You can still find those women who dress daringly, especially in the country’s capital of Tehran, where the population is so high the police are unable to stop every law-breaking woman they see. But cropped pants and small headscarves are clearly not as prominent as they once were. Yellow, eye-catching banners outside many women’s clothing stores now state that “short jackets are no longer sold here.”

On July 8, or the 18th of Tir by the Iranian calendar, I spent a day at a friend’s house watching government-banned satellite television. He told me he has had his satellites confiscated several times and has even been sent to jail for it, but that he keeps buying and installing new ones anyway. I flipped to the Iranian Voice of America channel and learned that Iranian police beat up and arrested 15 students at Amir Kabir University that day. Like they do every year, the students were protesting and commemorating a bloody attack against University of Tehran students that happened eight years ago.

This kind of repression is undoubtedly the government’s response to international pressure, an attempt to keep Iran and Iranians within its control. But in many ways, it’s also useless. The Iranian people, a population of people mostly under the age of 30, are a lot smarter than their government. They constantly find ways to defy laws whether by dressing boldly, watching satellite television, learning to access blocked Internet websites or acquiring and drinking bootleg liquor.

In late June, when the Iranian government suddenly proclaimed that petrol was to be rationed, people began setting gas stations, cars and stores on fire. The streets were bustling and noisy with incessant honking and shouting, cursing and fighting. My cousins and I were stuck in traffic for hours amid a throng of cars desperate to get to the pumps. But Iran’s petrol problems have helped raise awareness among Iranian people. And as unemployment quickly increases and inflation skyrockets, more and more Iranians are starting to take notice of their country’s struggling economy.

It’s clear that the Iran we see in newspaper headlines, the Iran we know as a member of the “axis of evil,” whose face is a bearded, anti-Semitic hardliner, does not characterize the majority of its people.

These are young people who are fed up with an Islamic regime they did not choose. They do not remember an Iran before the 1979 Islamic Revolution, and thus, the history and memory of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi is often glorified and romanticized.

The Shah, a U.S.-installed dictator, is an inculpable, supreme hero to many Iranians, who hope his son will come back to rescue them one day.

In this framework, the possibility of nuclear weapons is not at all a huge concern for most Iranians. In fact, some Iranians are surprised to learn that the Bush administration thinks President Ahmadinejad is even a threat to the outside world. They see him as mostly a threat to themselves.

At the same time, Iranian people are not scared, just frustrated. In fact, their government seems more paranoid and frightened than they are. Today, the Iranian government is desperately trying to build a strong and united country the old-fashioned way – with repression and a dash of propaganda.

Throughout the streets of Tehran, patriotic banners of red, white and green display the barely smiling face of the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and the words, “The year 1386 (by the Iranian calendar) is the year for national and Islamic unity.”

But most people look at signs like those and laugh. Like just about everything else the government does to influence the people, they’re useless.

E-mail Elham at elk23@pitt.edu.