Season of unrest in Iran

The summer of 2000 has been full of protests in Iran. On June 28, thousands of women in a shanty town in the southern part of Tehran burned tires and blocked a road to protest the lack of basic living necessities such as clean running water, electricity and gas. The Islamic Republic's police attacked them with batons and tear gas and arrested many participants. A few days later protests took place in the Kurdish city of Piranshahr over the murder of a 15-year-old by the police. The next day there were mass protests in the southern city of Abadan, a city devastated by the Iran-Iraq war and a site of many previous oil workers' strikes. People demanded clean water, threw stones at governmental buildings, overturned buses and burned down government stores and a mosque.

Government troops attacked a gathering of thousands of women, men and children near Tehran University on July 10, the anniversary of the government's brutal attacks on student protesters last year. Hezbollah goons attacked protesters with chains, knives and batons. The reaction of some "reformist" members of the new Iranian parliament to the attacks on the mass protests was to call the acts of the protesters illegal. Furthermore, on July 11, the Iranian courts declared that the 20 police officers arrested for attacking and murdering student protesters in their dormitories last July were innocent. Only one officer was convicted on minor charges. Many students arrested last year are still languishing in jail and have been tortured. They have now started a hunger strike.

As the police were beating demonstrators in Tehran, president Khatami was visiting Germany, where he met with Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder. Iranian dissidents from other parts of Germany and Europe who were trying to attend a protest in Berlin were barred from entering the city. The German government had taken extreme measures to protect him. The offices and homes of some dissidents were searched illegally.

What is also extremely significant in Iran today is the number of workers' strikes over lack of payment of wages. In some cases workers have not been paid for one year. There have been more strikes in the past few months than in any other period in the past 20 years. Clearly the protests are becoming more widespread and confrontational.

At the same time, divisions exist within the reformists. Some are condemning the confrontations and others are supporting them.

An issue on which many reformists and dissidents alike have been quiet has been the conviction of ten Iranian Jews in Shiraz on sham charges of espionage for Israel. On July 1, they were sentenced to 4 to 13 years in jail after a closed trial in which the only evidence was their forced confession. Outside of Israel, Iran and Turkey are the only two countries of the Middle East which still have Jewish populations of significant size. Iran's Jewish community, which dwindled from 100,000 in 1979 to 30,000 today, is soon to decrease even more as a result of emigration in wake of the latest convictions.

-Sheila Fuller