Women join protests against hijab in Iran’s conservative southeast

Paris:

Women in Iran’s Sistan-Baluchistan province joined nationwide protests on Friday over the death of Mahsa Amini, in what one rights group called a “rare” move in the staunchly conservative southeastern region.

Online videos showed dozens of women on the streets of the provincial capital of Zahedan holding banners reading “Woman, life, freedom” – one of the main slogans of the protest movement that erupted in mid-September.

“Whether with hijab or without, on to the revolution,” women dressed in black body-covering chadors chanted in videos posted to Twitter and verified by AFP.

Women-led protests have engulfed Iran since Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian of Kurdish descent, died following her arrest in Tehran for an alleged violation of the Islamic Republic’s sharia-based dress code.

Security forces killed at least 448 protesters, with the largest toll in Sistan-Baluchistan on Iran’s southeastern border with Afghanistan and Pakistan, according to Iran Human Rights, an Oslo-based non-governmental organization.

“It is rare indeed,” said IHR director Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam of the latest protests by women in Zahedan, with men taking to the streets after Friday prayers for more than two months.

“The ongoing protests in Iran are the beginning of a revolution of dignity,” he told AFP.

“Women and minorities, who have been treated as second-class citizens for more than four decades, are empowered by these protests to take to the streets and demand their basic human rights.”

Baluchi women were among the “most oppressed” in Iran and their protests on Friday were the most organized by them since demonstrations broke out across the country, Amiry-Moghaddam added.

Dozens of men also took to the streets again on Friday, chanting “We don’t want a government that kills children,” in other images posted by activists on social media networks.

Security forces were seen opening firebird shots and tear gas against male protesters in Taftan, a town elsewhere in Sistan-Baluchistan, in a video published by the IHR group.

– ‘Bloody Friday’ –

Mainly Sunni Muslims Sistan-Baluchistan is the poorest region of Iran, where the ethnic Baluch inhabitants feel discriminated against.

At least 128 people were killed in the crackdown on protests in Sistan-Baluchistan, according to the IHR, by far the highest death toll in 26 of Iran’s 31 provinces.

More than 90 of them were killed on Sept. 30 alone — a massacre that activists have dubbed “Black Friday.”

Those protests were provoked by the alleged rape in custody of a 15-year-old girl by a police commander in the province’s port city of Chabahar.

Analysts say the Baluchi were inspired by the protests that erupted over Amini’s death, which were initially driven by women’s rights but expanded over time to include other grievances.

“Iran’s Baluchi minority face entrenched discrimination that limits their access to education, health care, employment, adequate housing and political office,” Amnesty International said on Tuesday.

“The Baluchi minority has been hardest hit by the ruthless crackdown by security forces during the insurgency that has plagued Iran since September,” the London-based rights group said in a statement.

The second province on the IHL list is Kurdistan, Amini’s home province on Iran’s western border with Iraq, another epicenter of the Sunni-majority protests, where 53 people were killed.

Iran accuses its nemesis the United States and its allies Britain and Israel of inciting what it calls “riots”.

It blames separatists for protest-related violence in Kurdistan and has repeatedly launched deadly cross-border attacks on Kurdish exile groups in Iraq.

“If Kurds and Baluchs were separatists, they would have fought against Iran, not for Iran,” said a banner held aloft by protesters in Zahedan on Friday.

An Iranian general said this week that “more than 300 martyrs and people” have been killed in the unrest.

Thousands of Iranians and about 40 foreigners have been arrested during the demonstrations and more than 2,000 people have been charged, the country’s judicial authorities said.

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