The crisis unfolding in Iran\u2014and the passions that sustain it\u2014occasionally features an individual face or a human voice that conveys the public\u2019s anguish. Kimia Alizadeh, a lithe, six-foot-tall athlete with raven hair, won the bronze medal, in Tae Kwon Do, at the Rio Olympics, in 2016. No Iranian woman had ever won a medal, in any sport, in the summer Olympics. Few outside Iran noticed. Over the weekend, however, Alizadeh generated headlines around the world when she defected. In a message<\/a> on Instagram, she wrote, \u201cHow do I start? With a hello, a goodbye or to offer my condolences? Hello to the oppressed people of Iran, goodbye to the noble people of Iran, and my condolences to the perpetually mourning people of Iran.\u201d She recounted being \u201ca pawn\u201d of a regime that told her how to dress, dictated what she said, and paraded her and her medals around for political gain. \u201cTo the kind and oppressed people of Iran: I did not want to climb to a pedestal whose steps are paved with lies and deceit,\u201d she wrote. \u201cI am willing to bear the difficulty of living in exile because I could no longer stay at a table where dishonesty, con-artistry and injustice were being served. Making this decision was more difficult than earning the Olympic medal.\u201d In the accompanying black-and-white picture, she wears her sports uniform; her face was buried in her hands.<\/p>\n Alizadeh\u2019s defection coincided with protests that erupted when Iran finally admitted on Saturday, after three days of lying, that its Revolutionary Guard shot down a Ukrainian passenger plane, on January 8th. (U.S. officials said they detected<\/a> the signatures of two heat-seeking missiles near the Boeing 737.) The public outpouring began as a vigil; more than eighty of the passengers were Iranian. The vigil quickly turned into demonstrations that started on university campuses in Tehran, then spread, on Sunday, to at least a dozen cities. The chants were scathing. \u201cDeath to the liars\u201d was a common cry. So was \u201cClerics, get lost!\u201d At Tehran\u2019s Azadi Square, where protests against the Shah four decades ago helped end millennia of monarchies, the demonstrators shouted, \u201cThe Supreme Leader is a murderer. His regime is obsolete.\u201d<\/p>\n Anger has gripped Iran. On Sunday, the students at Amirkabir University in Tehran issued a lengthy statement<\/a>\u2014a kind of manifesto, in the name of \u201cthe children of Iran\u201d\u2014outlining their grievances and their demands. \u201cToday, we are surrounded by evil from every quarter.\u201d They railed at the theocracy for \u201ccomplete incompetence,\u201d from political repression to economic neglect and a foreign policy that brought the nation close to war. \u201cDear Iranian people!\u201d they appealed. \u201cThe only way to escape the current crisis is to return to a policy based on people\u2019s democratic rights, a policy that will not rush into the arms of imperialism due to its fear of despotism, and one that in the name of resistance and fighting against imperialism will not legitimize despotism.\u201d<\/p>\n President Trump praised the protesters on Twitter, highlighting their refusal to walk on huge American and Israeli flags painted on the road for Iranians to symbolically trod on. \u201cWow! The wonderful Iranian protesters refused to step on, or in any way denigrate, our Great American Flag.\u201d Trump wrote<\/a> on Sunday. \u201cIt was put on the street in order for them to trample it, and they walked around it instead. Big progress!\u201d But the students expressed equal scorn for U.S. \u201caggression.\u201d For several years, they wrote, America\u2019s presence in the Middle East \u201chas produced nothing but increasing insecurity and chaos.\u201d<\/p>\n The protests have been a stunning contrast to the emotional outpouring by millions of demonstrators, just a week ago, at memorials for General Qassem Suleimani<\/a>. The mastermind of Iran\u2019s strategy to export its ideology and influence, Suleimani was killed<\/a> in a U.S. drone strike in Iraq on January 3rd. Iran is a society deeply polarized between those who hate the regime and those still loyal to its rigid revolutionary ideology. The back-to-back outpourings are not a contradiction. Iranians are passionately proud of their country\u2014which dates back millennia, before Persia\u2019s seventh-century conversion to Islam or the 1979 Iranian Revolution\u2014whether or not they like their leaders or political system. \u201cThe outpouring of grief after Suleimani\u2019s assassination was an ephemeral peak of nationalism that dissipated as quickly as it had emerged,\u201d Ali Vaez, the International Crisis Group\u2019s Iran Project Director, told me. Suleimani, beyond his support among the regime\u2019s hard-line base, was admired by many Iranians for protecting the country as well as the Revolution. But the shooting down of the Ukrainian flight, further defaming Iran\u2019s already deeply tarnished image, also struck a nationalist nerve.<\/p>\n Kimia Alizadeh, an Olympic bronze medallist, recounted being \u201ca pawn\u201d of a regime that told her how to dress, dictated what she said, and paraded her around for political gain.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n <\/span>Photograph by Richard Heathcote \/ Getty<\/small><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Gelare Jabbari, the host of a popular program on state-controlled television, issued a public apology on her Instagram page for propagating the regime\u2019s original claim that the Ukrainian plane had a mechanical malfunction\u2014and other lies. \u201cIt was very hard for me to believe the murdering of my countrymen,\u201d she wrote. \u201cForgive me for believing it too late. I apologize for lying to you on television for thirteen years.\u201d After her comment was picked up by international media, the post was deleted. A union of journalists in the capital also apologized and appealed<\/a> to other national media not to aid the government\u2019s coverup. \u201cWe are currently holding a funeral service for public trust,\u201d the union\u2019s statement said. \u201cThe first coffins are for state broadcast company and all media and websites.\u201d<\/p>\n The new protests appear distinct from four earlier confrontations between the public and the state that have occurred since 1979. In 1999, students demonstrated on campuses after a reformist newspaper, Salam<\/em>, was banned by the government. Protests grew into an open challenge to the regime and lasted six days, despite mass arrests, raids on dormitories, and the use of brute force. The most famous picture, which made the cover of The Economist<\/em>, showed a long-haired student waving his blood-soaked T-shirt above a demonstration.<\/p>\n A decade later, after the Presidential election in 2009, tens of millions turned out on the streets of several cities to charge the government with fraud in the re\u00eblection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Those protests raged on sporadically for more than six months, even as security forces used live ammunition, arrested thousands, and held mass Stalinesque trials. Former senior officials, including a former vice-president and a member of parliament, went to prison. A decade later, two opposition Presidential candidates\u2014a former prime minister and a parliamentary speaker\u2014are still under house arrest. Many participants in the street marches were from the middle class and reformist political camps. The most iconic image in 2009 was a cell-phone video of Neda Soltan<\/a>, a twenty-six-year-old aspiring musician, after she was shot in the chest. Streams of blood poured from her eyes, nose, and mouth, as passersby tried to help her. It was over in forty seconds. On social media accounts, dissidents transposed the pattern of blood on her face onto the face of the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.<\/p>\n Two other rounds of nationwide protests\u2014the first spanning the end of 2017 and the beginning of 2018, and the second in November, 2019\u2014were triggered by pocketbook issues. In the past year, Iran\u2019s economy has contracted by more than nine per cent, according to the International Monetary Fund. Prices for basic necessities have soared, while the government removed subsidies and instituted fuel rationing. Unemployment is high, and underemployment is chronic. U.S. sanctions are partly responsible, but Iranians also blame government corruption and mismanagement. Protests during the past two years have been different because they included members of the lower classes in whose name the Revolution was carried out. They were also striking because the regime used force against its political base to crush the unrest. In November, hundreds were killed and thousands were injured, the highest casualty count since the Revolution, according to human-rights groups. The government shut down the country\u2019s Internet\u2014and the prospect of lingering images.<\/p>\n The pace of protests is now more frequent, the tone more anti-establishment, and the government\u2019s reaction more violent, Vaez told me. \u201cThe leadership’s abject failure to allow any serious reforms has brought the system to a dead-end. It is unlikely to regain the trust and support of the middle class and is increasingly losing the support of its own more pious\/poorer constituents.\u201d<\/p>\n The regime is scrambling to placate public opinion. On Tuesday, Iran\u2019s judiciary announced the arrest of people linked to the shooting down of the Ukrainian plane, but provided no names, no number, and no specific charges; it also announced the arrest of dozens of protesters. Khamenei, who has been the Supreme Leader for more than three decades, announced that he would lead Friday prayers this week\u2014the first time in eight years. But so far there is no government transparency. And the protests continued on Tuesday into the night.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Iranian leaders may take solace in their apparent ability to corral protests, but it would be the wrong conclusion,\u201d Vaez said. \u201cThere are numerous examples of repression backfiring, hardening opposition, and in some cases toppling governments that once seemed invulnerable.\u201d Behind the protests, there is a wistful longing as well as deep disillusionment. At the end of her Instagram post, Alizadeh wrote, \u201cPlease know that wherever I am, I will forever remain a child of my native country.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/ww-vb.mine.nu\/w108\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/01\/Wright-Iran02.jpg\" "\\"\\"\/")
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