The Long Game for Iranian Democracy

[TomSea]

September 23, 2019
The Long Game for Iranian Democracy

After forty years of draconian religious rule, meaningful change may be possible in Iran.
by Ilan Berman

In early September, a twenty-nine-year-old Iranian soccer fan named Sahar Khodayari set herself on fire in front of a courthouse in Tehran in a dramatic display of defiance against regime authorities. Khodayari had been arrested this spring for defying an official ban on female attendance at public sporting events—a violation that left her facing six months behind bars. Khodayari subsequently succumbed to her injuries, but her public act of protest succeeded in breathing new life into the political ferment that has buffeted Iran for the past year-and-a-half.

Since December of 2017, Iran has experienced the longest sustained period of unrest in four decades of clerical rule. Through recurring rallies, public marches, labor strikes and other forms of protest, Iranians throughout the country have regularly organized in opposition to the social malaise, economic decline and glaring official corruption that has come to characterize life under the ayatollahs. These protests, moreover, have persisted despite intensifying regime pressure. For activists like Mariam Memarsadeghi, this resilience is a hopeful sign that—after forty years of draconian religious rule—real, meaningful change may in fact be possible in Iran.

It is a goal that the forty-seven-year-old Iranian-American human-rights campaigner has been working toward for decades. Memarsadeghi, who previously headed the Middle East/North Africa portfolio at pro-democracy NGO Freedom House, launched her current initiative, Tavaana, in 2010 with seed money from the U.S. Department of State’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor.

Read more at: https://nationalinterest.org/blog/middle-east-watch/long-game-iranian-democracy-82896