Women might be at the forefront of the uprising overwhelming Iran, but they certainly aren’t alone.
Since the death last month of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in the custody of Iran’s “morality police”, who had detained her for allegedly wearing an improper head covering, the world has watched Iranian women march, shout and shear their hair in protest of unfair, violent treatment. But while the imposed hijab makes women the most visibly suppressed group in the Islamic Republic, ethnic minorities including Kurds, Baluchis, Azeris and Arabs have also long struggled for equality.
These minority groups have joined this wave of protest, too, continuing their own long-standing quest for rights within the Islamic republic’s social hierarchy. It’s the first time Iran’s disparate movements have risen up simultaneously, and authorities are shaken. The republic will buckle only under combined pressure from all oppressed quarters of its society — and the international community must back each of them.
The coalescing of the women’s and ethnic rights movements in Iran is something Kurdish Iranian journalist and author Behrouz Boochani has been predicting for years. “We want our own rights and freedom. ... The ethnic minorities movement represents a hope for a democratic future in Iran”, Boochani, who now lives in New Zealand, told me.
Among Iran’s minorities, the Kurds are unique. They form a large share of the population of Iran (and Iraq, Syria and Turkey) and are the world’s largest ethnic group without a state of their own. From that sprang a Kurdish nationalist movement that the Islamic republic has always deemed a threat.
While other out-groups don’t share these particularities, ultimately, all the country’s minorities are struggling for equal representation and opportunity. Like Iran’s women, they also all know that the only way they can get it is with the downfall of a political system that favors ethnic Persian Shiite men and no one else. Persian chauvinism and the group’s outsize access to opportunities are facts of life from the very start: Ethnic languages and cultural traditions aren’t even taught in schools.
These group are not separatists, though. They are Iranians who simply want to be equals in the land their ancestors inhabited for centuries. And in the case of Kurds, they have rebelled against the oppressive central government since the earliest days of the Islamic Republic in 1979, with thousands being executed in the years following the revolution.
“Kurdistan’s resistance now is peaceful and progressive”, Boochani said. “It’s important to acknowledge the effect Kurdistan is having on other parts of the country”. You only have to look as far as the rallying cry “Woman, Life, Freedom”; it’s been adopted within Iran and across the world in support of the Amini protests — but its roots are as a Kurdish political slogan.
“The international community doesn’t understand the different layers of our struggle”, Boochani said. “Minorities in Iran have a big problem, which is that the rest of the world only understands Iran through the lens of Tehran. We need the international media to look at us. To see us”.
He’s right. But with very few international news organizations able to operate inside Iran, that’s easier said than done. For the reporters who are in the country, that often means getting access only to the capital or other cities in the Persian heartland. Parts of the country with large minority majorities are particularly difficult for journalists to secure government-approved travel to.
Right now, Iran isn’t letting foreign journalists in the country — and certainly not into minority enclaves: This week, regime forces have opened an offensive on Sanandaj, the Kurdish provincial capital to which protests have spread over the past month. Humanitarian organizations working in the area confirmed the deaths of at least four demonstrators, but the death toll could be much higher. Information coming out of the area has been scarce, given that security forces control the hospitals there and internet outages are frequent.
The regime is threatened, and its crackdowns will continue. Most likely, independent media won’t be able to observe. That’s why it’s all the more critical that Kurdish voices, Arab voices, Baluchi voices, Azeri voices, female voices and more be amplified outside Iran as they call louder and louder for freedom. The groups oppressed by the Islamic republic won’t succeed without working together; the world can’t support one of them without supporting them all.
Jason Rezaian is a writer for Global Opinions. He served as The Post's correspondent in Tehran from 2012 to 2016. He spent 544 days unjustly imprisoned by Iranian authorities until his release in January 2016.