According to media reports, peoples’ anger boiled over on October 16 after the serial acid attacks on women in the city of Esfahan, the capital of Esfahan Province in Iran.
Protesters gathered in front of the Esfahan’s Prosecutor’s Office, but as usual the prosecutor and other officials at the provincial and national level tried to hide the connection between these crimes and their own reactionary social-cultural policies. They promised immediate investigation of these criminal activities. Cries of “catch them” and “lock them up” were raised from the mouthpiece of every state institute and official, in order to perhaps pour cold water on peoples’ blazing anger.
An Iranian Students’ News Agency (ISNA) report on October 18, entitled “Fall of Security in Half the World” and in interviews with victims of these crimes, the significant point is that all four female victims were in their own vehicles, had “modest Islamic covers,” were speaking on their cell phones and were employed. In terms of appearance, these are all signs that are contrary to the reactionaries’ model of a woman. In addition, none of these girls and women who were victims of this barbarism had any specific enmity in their personal lives, and all were targeted by “motorcyclists.”
The practical silence of President Hassan Rouhani’s government of “prudence and hope” and the widespread media campaign of the ruling reactionaries against those who protested these inhumane actions (including arresting several people at the protest gatherings in Tehran and other cities), once again confirms the fact that in the theocratic regime of Iran the principle of oppression and trampling the basic rights of citizens is an inseparable and institutionalized nature of a regime which is willing and prepared to commit any crime in order to safeguard its survival.
On October 19, in line with this media blitz, Raja-News [an ultra-conservative, religious, pro-government news site] wrote that just as Ayatollah Larijani (the head of the Judiciary) last week spoke of his special instruction to the prosecutor to deal with those media which are trying to spread “provocative” news about economic corruption in the society, the Judiciary must also get involved in the “acid attack matter” to prevent the suspicious media from “disturbing society’s psychological security and spreading the counter revolution’s unfounded claims against the revolutionary forces and Islamic veil (hijab) in this regard.”
The barbaric attack on the rights of the women of our country, women who have been, and will be a militant and relentless part of the social forces in the struggle against reaction and for freedom and reforms in our country is by no means an accidental matter. Intimidating and forcing women to stay at home and surrender to the medieval ideas of a bunch of backward-thinking criminals who are controlling our country’s fate is one of the aims of such plots. In the minds of the regime, the refusal to submit to its medieval models for women is one of the “sins” of these women and girls.
By no means accidental is the timing of organizing these crimes, so shortly after the remarks of some of the clergies and reactionary perpetrators and commanders of the “Ansar Hezbollah” [militant, conservative, paramilitary, pro-regime organized groups] about the need for “forbidding wrong” and confronting the process of growing popular efforts to open up the social and cultural atmosphere of the society. It is the Iranian mothers, wives and sisters who are paying the price for factional fighting inside the theocratic regime.
In spite of all the malicious ploys specific to this reactionary regime, the women movement in our country will continue its struggle for achieving the true rights of the brave women and girls of Iran, including freedom and social safety.
Tudeh Party of Iran condemns these criminal acts and demands the prosecution and punishment of the primary organizers and perpetrators of the acid attacks on the nation’s women in recent days. Only with a widespread protest across the country and around the world can such inhumane acts of the security apparatus of the regime and its beneficiaries be stopped.
Tudeh Party of Iran
Wednesday, October 29, 2014
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