Daily Times

Iran has decided to execute its first known protestor who participated in recent nationwide anti-government demonstrations sparked by the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini following her arrest by the regime’s morality police in Tehran. Mohsen Shekari was hanged earlier this week after an appeal against his sentence was rejected by the police. Amini’s funeral catalyzed mass protests against the state’s controversial morality laws, quickly spreading to other cities; a striking gesture of solidarity from people all across Iran who believe that Amini’s death is emblematic of the state’s increasing propensity for oppression.

Workers abandoned factories, storekeepers and merchants closed their doors, students started protesting on campus, and even a significant number of religious individuals including clerics have demanded the revocation of the laws mandating mandatory hijab, but the regime remains untenable. Thousands of people have been rallying in daily demonstrations throughout the country and show no signs of slowing down even against the state’s brutal crackdown on protestors. Iranian security forces have been known to use unlawful force against protestors before and this time is no different, with the state throwing metal pellets at unarmed groups of people, using live ammunition and arbitrarily detaining protestors for being “enemies of the Islamic Republic.”

Despite repeated calls for leniency both from regulatory international bodies and countries abroad, the state continues to punish protestors and has now begun executing people for their involvement in what it deems treacherous. The Republic clearly feels threatened by these protests, which represent an accumulation of grievances that go far beyond concerns about “Islamic repression.” They also respond to a burgeoning socio-economic crisis that finds its roots in US sanctions and the regime’s neoliberal economic policies which have created massive unemployment and concentrated wealth in the hands of a regime class that is no different from the Pahlavi dynasty that the 1979 revolution seemingly emancipated the country from. Protestors are already familiar with the regime’s penchant for hasty trials and death sentences but continue to rage against its despotism regardless. The Islamic Republic needs to take a cold hard look at itself before it executes anyone else and prepare for many more months of demonstrations. Shekari’s execution is proof that the state has waged a war against its people that it will ultimately lose in the face of rising public disillusionment. *