Iran declares new crackdown on women, “social vice”    Mon. 11 Jul 2005

 



Iran Focus

Tehran, Iran, Jul. 11 - With the arrival of a top commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards as the country’s new police chief, Iran’s state-run media announced a new summer-long crackdown on “social vice” in Tehran targeting in particular young women and runaway girls.

Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei appointed on Saturday Brigadier General Ismail Ahmadi Moghaddam, the number two in the paramilitary Bassij and commander of the force in Greater Tehran, as Iran’s new chief of police.

A senior security official told one of
Iran’s state-run news agencies, ISNA, that “mal-veiled or unveiled individuals inside and outside of cars” would be the target of arrests by Iran’s State Security Forces, the paramilitary police force.

SSF in
Tehran would also be on the lookout for “open examples of corruption in tourist and recreation resorts”.

The top official said the police would embark on a systematic clampdown on “shops and public places where public chastity and Islamic values are ignored”. Loud music will no longer be tolerated, he said.

Runaway girls and homeless young women would also be the target of arrests, and
Tehran’s police force would also identify and crack down on places where “corrupt people gather”, the report added.

The appointment of Ahmadi Moghaddam, who is among the top commanders of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and a protégé of IRGC Commandant General Rahim Safavi, brings the country’s police force under the complete domination of the Revolutionary Guards and signals a readiness to crack down harder on what the ultra-conservatives see as “deviation” from the country’s rigid religious laws.

Moghaddam was quoted by the state-run daily Kayhan as saying in November 2004, “A country where liberal ideas rule will get no where”.

 

Index