{"id":1520,"date":"2019-12-06T15:57:39","date_gmt":"2019-12-06T15:57:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.iransos.com\/en\/?p=1520"},"modified":"2019-12-07T16:02:25","modified_gmt":"2019-12-07T16:02:25","slug":"could-irans-revolution-unravel-over-a-four-cent-price-hike","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.iransos.com\/en\/?p=1520","title":{"rendered":"Could Iran\u2019s Revolution Unravel Over a Four-Cent Price Hike?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Protests erupted throughout Iran in November, over an increase in gas prices, and the regime responded with deadly force. Photograph from Middle East Images \/ Redux<\/p><\/div>\n

December 6, 2019 -The New Yorker – By\u00a0<\/strong>Robin Wright<\/strong><\/p>\n

In\u00a0mid-November, in a surprise overnight announcement, the revolutionary regime in Iran\u00a0hiked the price of gasoline. By standards anywhere else in the world, it is still pitifully cheap. A litre of gas increased from\u00a0eight cents to twelve cents\u2014or to fifty cents per gallon\u2014for the first fifteen gallons each month.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s about a\u00a0tankful\u00a0for a large car. After that, gas went up to ninety cents per gallon. (The U.S. average is around two dollars and sixty cents per gallon.) The price hike nevertheless triggered instant outrage. During the next four days, protests erupted in a\u00a0hundred cities\u00a0across the country. The theocracy responded with ruthless brutality. Hundreds, at least, were killed.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs the truth is trickling out of Iran, it appears the regime could have murdered over a thousand Iranian citizens since the protests began,\u201d Brian Hook, the U.S. special representative for Iran, said at a State Department briefing about the unrest, on Thursday. At least seven thousand were detained, and \u201cmany thousands\u201d were wounded, he said. To curtail the protests and contain reports about it, Iran cut off access to the Internet. After access was restored, the State Department set up a\u00a0tip line\u00a0on Telegram, for Iranians to submit video, photos, and other evidence of the government crackdown. Hook said that it received more than thirty-two thousand responses.<\/p>\n

The protests represented the widest unrest since the 2009 Green Movement uprising over alleged fraud in a Presidential election. They were the\u00a0deadliest\u00a0since the\u00a01979 revolution, which ousted the last dynasty. By the government\u2019s own\u00a0count, protesters torched more than seven hundred and thirty banks, destroyed a hundred and forty government sites, and attacked fifty police-force bases.<\/p>\n

The protests quickly escalated from being about the price of gasoline to being about the future of the theocracy. \u201cHave shame, dictator\u2014leave the country alone!\u201d protesters\u00a0shouted\u00a0in Mashhad, Iran\u2019s holy city, normally a bastion of conservative support for the Islamic Republic. The term \u201cdictator\u201d refers to\u00a0Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran\u2019s Supreme Leader for the past three decades. In the oil-rich Khuzestan Province, demonstrators chanted against President Hassan Rouhani: \u201cHave shame, Rouhani\u2014leave the country alone!\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe November unrest is at least as serious a threat to the longevity of the Islamic Republic as the post-election upheaval in 2009 was at that time and arguably more challenging to overcome or durably repair,\u201d Suzanne Maloney, the deputy director of the foreign-policy program at the Brookings Institution, told me. \u201cBack then, the main schism was within the political establishment and secondarily within the politically engaged middle class.\u201d A decade later, she said, \u201cthe fissures run deeper into the core constituency of the regime, and the disaffection is more systemic and more intense.\u201d The internal tensions, including the government\u2019s brutal response, \u201care indicative of a system whose resilience is dangerously fraying,\u201d she said. She compared it to \u201ca slow-motion metastasis that is echoing across the political establishment, the economy, and society.\u201d<\/p>\n

Utopian ideologies and revolutionary regimes are often undone by a confluence of political and economic factors, which is exactly what is happening in Iran. The political unrest intersected with chronic economic challenges produced by the\u00a0Trump\u00a0Administration\u2019s \u201cmaximum pressure\u201d campaign, combined with regime mismanagement and corruption. The United States reimposed sweeping economic sanctions a year ago, a few months after walking away from the historic nuclear deal that was brokered between Iran and the world\u2019s six major powers, in 2015. Sanctions have cut off Iran\u2019s ability to export oil, its primary source of revenue. In 2016, it exported 3.2 million barrels of oil per day; this fall, it\u2019s been down to about three hundred thousand barrels of oil. The value of Iran\u2019s rial has also plummeted, slashing consumer buying power for daily goods and raising the price of all imports. In 2015, the rial traded at just over thirty thousand rials to the dollar. Today, it trades at almost a hundred and thirty thousand rials to the dollar. Although the rial had stabilized, food inflation was, until recently, between sixty per cent and seventy per cent during a twelve-month period, Adnan Mazarei, an Iran specialist at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and the former deputy director of the International Monetary Fund\u2019s Middle East Department, told me. In October, the I.M.F.\u00a0downgraded\u00a0its economic forecast for Iran. Its economy is expected to contract by 9.5 per cent this year\u2014its worst performance in thirty-five years, since the nineteen-eighties, when the country faced challenges during eight years of war with Iraq.<\/p>\n

The price hike was actually a smart move economically, according to the I.M.F. Iran has long provided subsidies for basic commodities that it cannot afford because its population has mushroomed from just over thirty million at the time of the revolution, forty years ago, to more than eighty million today. The plan was designed to help the poor. It cut subsidies that also helped the rich consume even more; it included doling out millions in cash to the lower classes to compensate for the price hike. \u201cUnder the current circumstances that the country is facing the most unprecedented sanctions and pressures, the main reason for adjusting prices is to promote social justice or to move toward that [goal],\u201d Ali Rabiei, the government spokesman,\u00a0told\u00a0a local news agency. The mistake was failing to provide advance warning or details, Mazarei said.<\/p>\n

Iran\u2019s Supreme Leader\u00a0blamed\u00a0the United States and Israel for fomenting the unrest\u00a0and local thugs for exploiting it. Security forces put down \u201ca very dangerous, deep conspiracy that cost so much money and effort,\u201d Khamenei said in comments to the Basij, a paramilitary force under the Revolutionary Guard. \u201cIn such incidents, hooligans, spiteful and evil people, often enter the field and, sometimes, some youths, driven by emotion, accompany them and commit seditious acts. Such deeds do not fix anything other than adding insecurity to the problems.\u201d Iran\u2019s Revolutionary Guard\u2014the \u00e9lite force created to preserve the revolution\u2014has vowed to quash any future unrest. \u201cIf necessary we will take decisive and revolutionary action against any continued moves to disturb the people\u2019s peace and security,\u201d it\u00a0said, in a statement.<\/p>\n

For now, the Islamic Republic may be able to contain the unrest. \u201cThe violence is not necessarily a precursor to more massive political violence in Iran; nor is it the desperate and bloody response of a regime verging on collapse,\u201d Elizabeth Rosenberg, a former treasury specialist now at the Center for a New American Security, told me. Despite Iran\u2019s struggles under powerful sanctions, \u201cit would be folly to underestimate the staying power of Iran\u2019s regime \u00e9lites who are experts at repressive rule and economic resilience in conditions of extreme hardship,\u201d she said. \u201cWe should not expect a fatal turning point for the revolution any time soon.\u201d<\/p>\n

The November protests are the\u00a0fourth major challenge\u00a0to the revolution. In July, 1999, students protested for five days against the closure of a reformist newspaper; it was put down by force when security forces raided dormitories and campuses. In 2009, millions rose up across the country to protest voter fraud in the re\u00eblection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The demonstrations ran on sporadically for more than eight months. Thousands were arrested, including former government officials and members of parliament who backed the protests. Two of the opposition\u2019s Presidential candidates\u2014former Prime Minister Mir-Hossein Mousavi and former Parliamentary Speaker Mehdi Karroubi\u2014are still under house arrest. In late 2017 and early 2018, protests lasted for weeks in thirty of Iran\u2019s thirty-one provinces over economic issues, including unemployment and unpaid wages.<\/p>\n

The question now is how much support the revolution has lost with each round. \u201cThe Iranian regime keeps losing major constituencies in its revolutionary base: first the students, then the middle class and merchants, then the working class, and even many of the clergy who criticize the regime,\u201d Hook, the State Department envoy, said. \u201cNow, in the latest protests, nine seminaries were burned. The only support left for the regime is with a handful of clerics whom the Iranian people despise for having imposed forty years of brutality on them.\u201d<\/p>\n

One of the striking aspects of the two most recent rounds of protests, in 2017 and this year, is that they were largely spontaneous with no known national leadership, Marazei noted. They were decentralized. In the latest unrest, the protesters also played into local grievances, such as discontent among the Arab minority in Khuzestan Province. The State Department said that it received a video showing troops from the Revolutionary Guard mowing down protesters in Mahshahr, a city in southwest Khuzestan. When protesters fled to the nearby marshlands, troops surrounded them in trucks mounted with machine guns. Screams of the victims could be heard on the video. In that one incident, the regime murdered several hundred. \u201cWhen it was over, the regime loaded the bodies into trucks,\u201d Hook said. \u201cWe do not yet know where these bodies went, but we are learning more and more about how the Iranian regime treats its own people.\u201d<\/p>\n

Pressures on the regime are certain to grow, with the United States promising to further tighten the economic squeeze until Iran returns to the negotiating table. \u201cAn amorphous, unpredictable movement that is fiercely estranged from the Islamic Republic represents an acute vulnerability for Tehran, especially at a time when key political transitions, like succession, loom large,\u201d Maloney said. Iran faces parliamentary elections in February and a Presidential election in 2021; Rouhani is now a lame duck. The more important transition will come when the Supreme Leader, who turned eighty this summer, dies. His replacement will set the tenor for Iranian politics, security, and the economy for the future. \u201cThe regime can maintain and even intensify its violent repression of protestors. But the system\u2019s legitimacy rests on some foundational claim to popular support,\u201d Maloney said. \u201cRoutine reliance on fierce crackdowns, applied across the country, will further erode the coherence of the system and compound the challenges facing the current leadership.\u201d<\/p>\n

In other words, that four-cent price hike proved disproportionately costly to the regime and also its people, making the political environment more unstable and the theocracy\u2019s future more uncertain.<\/p>\n

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