 Welcome to the sixth annual Great Decision Series co-sponsored by the Meadburg Library and the Sheboygan Branch at the American Association of University Women. AEW is a nonpartisan organization dedicated to empowering girls and women and advancing equity through advocacy, education and research. We are celebrating our 100th branch anniversary this year. And we are going to have a centennial tea at the Balder House in Kohler where our first meetings were held. AEW does not endorse candidates, but we do take positions on issues, especially women and education. And we sponsor candidates forums for the nonpartisan elections here in April. Locally, we also give scholarships to non-traditional women students. This year we again gave $3,000 scholarships to non-traditional women students. And one of the other big things that we do is sponsor a STEM workshop for sixth-to-ninth grade girls. This is our sixth year doing that. And last year we had 86 girls who we hope to inspire to consider careers in science, technology, engineering and math. We also always welcome new members. So if you're interested, you can talk with me or you can go online to the Shabuigan branch of AEW. Great Decisions is a project of the Foreign Policy Association, which also publishes a book with information about eight timely topics. We are not offering books for sale this year, but you can go online and print the book through the Foreign Policy Association. We are indebted to the work of Meade Library and Albrey Blau for arranging the schedule of the programs. The topic for tonight, very timely, is Iran's protest movement. And will be presented by Beth Doherty, who has a PhD and teaches at Beloit College. Beth Doherty is manager professor of international relations and professor of political science at Beloit College. She received her MA and PhD in foreign affairs from the University of Virginia. Since joining the Beloit faculty in 1996, she has taught a broad range of international politics courses, including U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, the politics of mass killing, human rights and nationalism and ethnic conflict. She has received both campus and national awards for innovative teaching. Her main research interests are transitional justice, focusing on the causes, cases of Iraq, Sierra Leone and Bosnia, human rights and Iraq policies. Dr. Doherty will speak for about 45 minutes after which we will have a question and answer period. And we need to be out of this room by eight o'clock. Thank you for that introduction. Thank you to everyone who came tonight. So one year ago, almost to the day, Masa Amini, a young Kurdish woman in Iran, died in the hospital three days after she had been admitted. She was actually not a native of Tehran. She was visiting the city with her family. They had been elsewhere and they were just passing through Tehran on the way back home. In fact, she had asked if they could fly directly from where they were back to their home rather than have to go through Tehran. But in the one day that she was there, she was arrested by Iran's morality police for showing too much of her hair. She collapsed in the custody of the Guardian police and died three days later. They claim that she had a heart attack and underlying health issues, but her family and most others in Iran believe that she probably died of a blow to the back of the head because the morality police do tend to use their truncheons when they are arresting people. Shockingly, Masa Amini's death led to an explosion of protests in Iran. The largest protests that we have seen since the Iranian Revolution itself in 1979. So what I want to consider tonight are the factors that are contributing to the Iranian regime's crisis of legitimacy. These are all interconnected and they threaten the regime's survival. It's already clear that the regime has lost its legitimacy with many in Iran. Most rounds of protests in this most recent wave have also included the so-called reformers within their slogans. So they're basically angry at the entire establishment for failing to deliver on promises and for the repression and violations of civil and political rights that are so typical. This has left the regime with nothing but repression and violence as its only option because the hard-line members of the regime are simply not open to the issue of reform. In some ways, it's ironic because this is very reminiscent of the last days of the Shah's regime because at a certain point, those protests went from calling for constitutional reforms to calling for death to the Shah. That transition happened in Iran in late 2017 when protesters began chanting for the overthrow of the Islamic Republic. So the four crises that I want to consider, demography, political repression, socioeconomic grievances and environmental problems. And then I want to go through the several rounds of protests that have taken place in Iran in recent years and sort of point out the different social bases for these protests, the reasons why they're protesting, et cetera. So Iran's political structure is a combination of elected offices, so the parliament is actually elected, so is the presidency, everything else is appointed. And at the top of the political structure is the so-called Faki, the supreme leader, who is Ayatollah Ali Khomeini. He succeeded Ayatollah Khomeini when Khomeini passed away. He is a hardliner. He is considered to be extremely close to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. Iran has a dual military structure. It has a regular army, like Navy Air Force, but it also has the Revolutionary Guard. The Bazi, which is a paramilitary force and the morality police. And actually the Revolutionary Guard Corps has more power than the regular military does in Iran. But Khomeini is well known to be closely tied in with the leadership of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. Nothing can happen in Iran unless the supreme leader allows it to happen. The current president, Ibrahim Raisi, is also a hardliner. In fact, in an earlier stage when he was a deputy prosecutor in Tehran, he was one of the four judges that held show trials of political prisoners when thousands, literally thousands, of political prisoners were executed. They basically just emptied out the jails in 1989. We've had this kind of rotating thing in Iran where a reformer gets elected and then a hardliner, like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, gets elected and then a reformer gets elected and then another hardliner, in this case, Raisi. But what we've seen is that people are not going out to vote in nearly the numbers that they once did. In the June 2021 presidential election when Raisi was elected, it was the lowest turnout for a presidential election in Iran since the Revolution. And it suggests that people are beginning to believe that voting is not, like for Majlis and for president, that that is just simply not going to be enough to be able to bring about real change. There is going to be an election in Iran in 2024. And so that may give us more of a sense if voter turnout rebounds, then there may be a possibility that the efforts at reform could get channeled that way. But if we continue on this downward trend of very low voter turnout, again, it just underscores the degree to which the regime has lost its legitimacy. So the Revolutionary Guard Corps is basically there as the ideological guardian of the Revolution. And the Basij is a volunteer force. They are heavily indoctrinated. So a lot of young men will join because it's a way to get a job and youth unemployment in Iran is very high. But once they are in, again, it's intense indoctrination and it's kind of like a feeder to send people into the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. So the first of the four crises that I want to consider is demography. There are concerns that by 2050, Iran will be the oldest country in the Middle East. 30% of its population will be over the age of 60. But the current demographic challenge that the Iranians are facing is coming from Gen Z. Gen Z is in the green. Those are individuals who are between 10 and 24 years of age. It's close to 20% of the overall population. In 2019, almost 47% of Iran's population was under the age of 30. And that is significant because anybody who is under the age of 45 was born after the Iranian Revolution and the establishment of the Islamic Republic. They have no memory of the Shah. They have no memory of the founding of the Republic. This population wants jobs. They want political freedom. They want more freedom in general. Thanks to social media, advances in communications, television, et cetera, they see what members of their generation are able to do in other places and they wanna know why they can't do that as well. So the other piece to this is with this large young population, the regime is going to have to be able to provide jobs for them. But unemployment, especially for university graduates, is especially high in Iran. And the regime has not really shown itself able to produce the kinds of jobs that will be necessary to help make this generation feel like they have any kind of stake in the system. About 95% of everybody who came out to protest in Iran during the most recent rounds from September of 2022 was under the age of 25. It overwhelmingly being driven by young people. The second piece to Iran's crisis of legitimacy has to do with political repression but also in some cases actual political incompetence. And this is sort of all on top of the rigged nature of the political system and the way in which the supreme leader basically can rule over everything. Iran's system is plagued with endemic corruption. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps is tightly linked into the economy. They own a lot of companies and fronts in things like telecommunications, in business, in construction, et cetera. Ironically, one of the reasons the Revolutionary Guard Corps has been able to get this huge slice of the economy in their hands is because of sanctions against Iran by the US, the UN, et cetera. This has meant Iran has had to try to find smuggling options, black market options to try to get around those sanctions and that has allowed the Revolutionary Guard Corps to be pushed to the front. So they have a socioeconomic stake in trying to keep the regime in place as well. In terms of the political repression, there are severe restrictions on media in Iran and very heavy censorship. The hardliners control the state broadcasting company and satellite dishes are banned. They have used force to crush protests and not just tear gas and water cannons but repeatedly have used live ammunition against unarmed civilian protesters. Labor unions are banned. Human rights and democracy activists and organizations have been harassed, jailed, tortured. The judiciary is used in a variety of ways to try to silence the opposition. Things like vague laws, show trials, long sentences. Oftentimes people are arrested but then they're held without charge for long periods of time. Prison conditions in Iran are awful, especially in Evan prison outside of Tehran. Many of the Americans that were just released in the swap with the Iranians were being held in Evan prison and the administration said that was one of the reasons why they wanted to get these people out. Conditions are so bad there. There's overcrowding, there's ill treatment, there's torture, especially for human rights and democracy activists. Oftentimes they are denied access to proper medical care, et cetera. Iran is second only to China in terms of the number of executions that it's carried out. There is discrimination and underdevelopment of minority regions. Kurdistan, Baluchistan in the south and Housistan province. And women obviously do not have equal rights in Iran. Much of the focus now has become about the issue of hijab and the compulsory covering of your hair when you go out in public. A third issue that Iran struggles with is socioeconomic grievances. Part of this has to do with sanctions. I mean, prior to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Iran was the most sanctioned country in the world and these are multifaceted, so some are for human rights violations. Some of them have to do with its ballistic missile program. Some of them have to do with interference in other countries. Some of them have to do with their nuclear program and many of the sanctions go back 30 years, like in the United States, et cetera. So very heavily sanctioned and as I said, this has allowed the Revolutionary Guard Corps to take a substantial portion of the economy under its control. Many Iranians find themselves in situations of economic precarity despite the promises of the revolution that it was going to take care of the marginalized, et cetera. There has been economic growth in Iran, so the blue is showing growth up, the red is showing negative growth, but despite that, the problem has become that the growth is highly inequitable. So a small slice of society is benefiting from this. Regime supporters, members of the Revolutionary Guard Corps, people connected to the Supreme Leader, they have seen themselves do well in Iran while the vast majority of the population remains impoverished. There's been a great deal of inflation in Iran. It's actually fallen off in July of 2023 to only about 40%. We think we have issues with inflation. And this has been especially spelt in the prices for key staples for Persian cooking, which would include eggs, onions, and tomatoes. The prices for those things have gone up by 50% in some cases. The currency in Iran has also been tanking, this is at least partially the responsibility of the sanctions. And you have high levels of unemployment, as I said, especially for youth women and minorities. It reports a 15% unemployment rate among young professionals and a 19% rate among those in the ages of 15 to 24. And of course the likelihood is that the actual numbers are much higher than what the regime is reporting. This is one of the world's highest unemployment rates for university graduates. There are no labor protections in Iran. And the estimate is that about 50% of the Iranian workforce is in irregular employment, which means they get paid irregularly, often not on time. There's little protection for them for exploitation. There's really no social safety net for them if they get hurt. You have significant migration that is being driven from regions outside of Tehran towards the capital that is the result of environmental degradation. There is anger at the regime over its failure to bring prosperity to ordinary people. The fact that ordinary people find themselves growing more and more impoverished helps explain at least some of the explosion of anger that we see that starts in late 2017. A fourth major crisis that the regime is facing is actually environmental. And this is sort of interesting because your assumption is immediately, oh, it's all climate change. But actually, even the Iranian parliament's study suggests that it's between 20% to 30% of the damage is attributable to climate change. The other 70% to 80% is because of mismanagement of the water resources on the part of the current regime. There has been tremendous overuse and mismanagement of water sources that have contributed to desertification, to the drying up of various bodies of water, to sandstorms which have then led to all kinds of health problems, et cetera. Agriculture is an area where the regime has a stronghold. So they see farmers as being one of their chief constituencies and that's why they've been willing to put so much effort into ensuring that water is getting to the areas where it is needed for irrigation. The Iran has over-dammed. It just keeps building dams everywhere in the country. And so Lake Ermia is the largest saltwater lake in Iran, or in the Middle East, rather. So it's up across from Turkey and Iraq. So this is basically an Iranian Kurdistan. This is a picture of what the lake looks like. And this can show over time how much that lake has shrunk. And of course, when the lake bed is exposed, you get dust storms, there's all kinds of stuff that's in that lake bed that gets put in the dust. It's really bad for people if they're breathing it in, et cetera. And to complicate matters for the Iranians with their groundwater shortages, you've had periods of extreme drought. So this area, down where it says December of 2021, that part of Iran is Baluchistan. That is a separate ethnic group from the majority Persians. And there's been a great deal of unrest coming from that area, a lot of it having to do with water shortages. And we're talking in this case where people turn their taps on and nothing is coming out. Or they have to buy bottled water because the water they have access to is too salty for them to be able to drink. Abadan and Horemshahr, this area is in Kuzestan province. That is where the Arab population in Iran lives. Like the Baluch, the Arabs believe that they have been mistreated and marginalized. So that's been another real hotbed of protest. And you can see that actually those are some of the areas where the drought has been the worst in Iran. So Avaz, which is in Kuzestan province, the Arab, it has the worst, one of the worst air pollution problems anywhere in the world. And in fact, a photographer from there took these series of pictures where he just went around and took pictures on what it looks like on a regular day and then what it looks like when the sky is orange, which is a great many days out of the year. And so there's a lot of, and what this means is people are leaving these places because they don't have water. They can't farm, they can't do animal husbandry. Their health is being impacted by the sandstorms and the pollution. And then that is putting a lot of pressure on Tehran. So these interconnected crises have led to a number of outbreaks of protests against the regime since late 2017. Prior to this outbreak of protests, the largest protests we had seen in Iran after the Iranian Revolution was the so-called Green Movement in 2009. This was launched because there was a presidential election. It was Ahmadinejad was running for his second term. The opposition candidate, people thought that he was doing very well. There was some expectation he might even be able to win the election. And on June 12th, two hours after the polls closed, the regime announced the results of the elections. There's no way they could have counted those votes in two hours. But they claimed that Ahmadinejad got 62% of the vote and his opponent, Mir Husan Musavi, got about 34%. And they claim Musavi didn't even win his hometown. He immediately claimed fraud. He asked the Supreme Leader to step in. He said, I won by a big margin. You can't allow this corruption of the election. And this precipitated massive demonstrations in Tehran. On June 15th, three million people demonstrated in the capital city. And there were hundreds of thousands of people who came out in these demonstrations every day for a week. The slogan for the green movement was, where is my vote? After that initial week of protests, for about six months, they would periodically emerge on major holidays. It's largely limited to Tehran and several of the other larger cities in Iran. But when they did come out, hundreds of thousands of people were coming out into the street. In late December, the regime fired on the protesters with live ammunition, killing a number of individuals. There is a ritual in Shia Islam where 40 days after someone's death, you have commemorations. And so the plan was that there would be very large commemorations in early February of 2010. But the regime decided at this point that it had enough and it engaged in a massive crackdown in advance of the February 11th date to ensure that the protests were unable to go down. According to the regime, three dozen people were killed in these protests. The opposition says that probably twice that number were killed. You had thousands of people who were detained. The top leaders of the protests, this was a very well organized movement, were all arrested and put on trial. And Meera Hussein Musavi and two of his closest allies were placed under house arrest in February of 2011, which is where they remain. They've never been released. In the aftermath of the green movement, there were major crackdowns on journalism. And this is when the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps became the major owner of the telecommunications company in Iran. So a couple of things about 2009, just to keep in mind, these were calls for political accountability and reform. They were appealing to the Supreme Leader to follow the rules that the Islamic Republic had set out. Secondly, you had identifiable leaders who were public figures. Musavi, the presidential candidate. Thirdly, the huge size of these demonstrations, but they were mainly limited to Tehran and some provincial capitals. It was mainly the middle class that came out in 2009. And then one other thing to keep in mind, at this stage, only about one million people in Iran had smartphones. And Twitter is only three years old at that point. The explosion in telecommunications and social media is going to have a major impact on people's ability to be able to organize protests. After the regime suppressed the green movement, it was relatively quiet in Iran. And then suddenly at the end of December of 2017, you had a massive wave of protests emerge. They were sparked by the 50% rise in the price of eggs in a little over a week, following on a year in which the price of food staples had risen by 50%. One of the remarkable things about this set of protests is that they started in Iran's second largest city, this up in the corner here, Mashhad, but that is considered a regime stronghold. So this is the first sign that the regime's actual base might be cracking. The so-called day protests ended up nationwide, whereas it had been fairly limited for 2009, late 2017 into early 2018, anywhere from 70 to 100 provincial cities and towns in Iran had protests that came out. The rapid diffusion of the protests across the country was the result of the fact that 40 million Iranians were on an app called Telegram, which allowed them to very easily, for example, people were using the same slogans in city after city. So that's suggesting that social media had a lot, a big role to play in helping all of this take place. Other reason why the day protests are important is because the slogans at this point are much more radical than what we heard in 2009. At this point, people are now targeting the entire regime. They are calling for economic justice, and they are actually linking Iran's regional policies to its domestic shortcomings. So for example, chance that complained about the fact that Iran was involved in Syria, but children were going hungry in Iran. And so, and of course, it's the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps that's largely responsible for things like involvement in Syria and other places. So this was also kind of a hit at the Revolutionary Guard Corps. The social base of the day protests was different than what we had seen in 2009. This time, it was mainly the alienated, lower socioeconomic classes that went out into the streets. The youth, lower middle class, students, pensioners, I mean, this is a class base that is largely, previously, had been considered to be the regime's base. Whereas 2009 had been huge protests, but only occasionally, this was smaller protests, but everywhere. So some of these protests would only have a few hundred people. Others would have tens of thousands of people who went out into the streets. You also had violence by both protesters and counter demonstrators and deaths and attacks on police, which is what the different color-coded things are trying to show on this map. Once again, the regime cracked down heavily. And actually, it's the oppression, really, that did bring this round of protests to an end. They sent the Revolutionary Guard Corps into the minority areas of Iran, and that really frightened people. And so that's kind of why this round of protests tamps down. There were at least 21 people that were killed, because again, the regime oftentimes will use live ammunition. About 5,000 people were detained. The regime banned telegram for a little bit, little period of time. And so by early, you know, first week, second week of January of 2018, the day protests had died down. But while they were happening, we had a different kind of protest that emerges. And that is, in December of 2017, Vita Mohave Day was the first known person to publicly protest by taking her hijab off in Tehran. So she stood on like a utility box. She took her headscarf up and she held it up. And she just stood there. These became known as White Wednesday protests. Young women in Iran would publicly go out, take off their headscarves, hold it up, take pictures of themselves. This would then spread on social media. So this began, gets a lot of movement. The regime tries to arrest people who do this. They harass the lawyers like Nazreen Satuta, who tried to defend women that were arrested for participating in these kinds of protests. Again, they're not doing anything except standing there with their hair uncovered. But so White Wednesdays is going to begin to sort of push forward, you know, into the early 2020s. So the regime only had a little bit of respite because about two years after the day protests broke out, another round of protests broke out in 2019. These were sparked by a tripling of fuel prices. So the 2017, 2018, 2019 protests, these are all over socioeconomic grievances. These protests were much larger than the day protests had been. They spread to over 100 cities and towns. So again, that diffusion outside of the capital, they lasted about a week, but the regime engaged in a ferocious crackdown, even worse than what they had done during the day protests. At least 321 people were killed. Some people in the Iranian opposition claimed that the number could be over 1,000 individuals. Iran actually shut down internet access to the whole country for a week to try to prevent people from being able to share details about protests or slogans, et cetera. You also, in this, had thousands of people that were arrested. You have a different set of protests that begin in 2021 that are all about access to water. And so in Huzastan province, there were mass deaths of livestock because of thirst. The rivers and the wetlands in the areas had dried up, and you had whole villages in the area that were without running water. This was an area where the drought was particularly intense. And so this brought people in Huzastan, first in Avaz, and then it spread across Huzastan, and then it actually went national. So you had protests in places like Tehran in support of the people that were protesting of water in Huzastan. This time the regime was a little bit more careful. They only engaged in a partial internet blackout. They realized actually that completely cutting the internet off for a week wasn't just gonna stop. Ordinary people from using the internet, but businesses, et cetera, were also blocked from using the internet, and that had bad economic consequences. The water issue has led to these kinds of sporadic protests in different parts of the country. This one is from November of 2021 in Ishfahan, which is a city in the center of Iran. They're protesting on the dry riverbed, right? So again, just trying to make this point that the regime's water policies aren't working. This protest was just this past summer, July 31st. And so again, many of these are going to be on a smaller scale, but there's a persistence about this that's really notable. And that brings us to the protest that started last year in September of 2022. In many ways, it's remarkable that Masa Amini was able to spark this kind of response because she is a double minority. She's a Sunni and she's a Kurd. So both ethnically and religiously, she's not part of the majority. But her death, there was a journalist who snuck into the hospital and was able to snap a picture of her in her hospital bed and she's on life support. And you can see that there's blood that's coming from her mouth and from her ears, which again is why people think that she had a head injury that led to her death. That picture went viral. Her death resonated across ethnic lines in Iran, across class lines, across sectarian lines and across the urban rural divide. It was an absolute explosion of anger. It quickly spread to all the major cities and to many small towns in Iran. You had protests, you had strikes, you had small-scale shop closures to show their discontent. Probably 200 cities and towns at one point or another had a protest that was linked to the Masa Amini death. This round of protests was wider geographically and socially than any of the earlier rounds of protests. One of the things that had prevented the day protests in 2017, 2018 from going any further was it was the lower middle class that went out into the streets. The middle class, which had gone out in 2009, did not join them. Partially that may be because of fears of repression. They saw what happened in 2009. Some people were worried about the destabilization that come from what massive wide-scale protests and the example of Syria was often raised that if you went out and protested against the government, you would end up like Syria, in just a collapse of authority, civil war, et cetera. So the middle class didn't go out 2017 and 2018, but they have gone out in 2022. Another remarkable fact about this set of protests is that they were sparked and led by women, which is absolutely unprecedented. This unity between men and women was really striking. The youth of the protesters is striking. Again, nearly everyone who participated is under the age of 25. And what you saw were lots of things like up in the far corner, school girls, right? Taking their hijab off at school, photographing themselves, shouting insult at a picture of Ayatollah Khomeini in their classrooms. There's one video that went viral where a bunch of school girls were having a rally in the courtyard of their school. The administration's trying to get them back into the building. And a man from the local government came into that courtyard and tried to quiet the girls down. And they drove him from the courtyard chanting shame at him. And again, this went viral because you can see he rapidly makes the calculation that it's probably not a good idea for him to stay there. And so he leaves. So even young girls are involved in these protests in different sorts of ways. Whereas 2009's protests were large and organized, these have been more widespread, but more sporadic and oftentimes smaller. So sometimes the protests may only be held for 15 minutes, a couple of dozen people, but they are still going out and chanting anti-regime slogans. These were much more sustained than the earlier rounds of protests, the day protests and the ones in 2019. Each of those episodes only lasted a week or two. These protests continued on into early 2023. And it's only because again, a ferocious crackdown that the protests sort of have dissipated. 2009 had organized leadership. This is a leaderless protest movement. People, young people are organizing on social media. They're organizing with friend groups and family groups. And that's how this whole thing is happening. But there isn't one particular person or set of people that the regime can arrest to try to stop this. And as a result of that, they have arrested about 20,000 people for their participation in these protests. So the regime eventually was able to get a handle on the protests because they executed, oh, one other thing I should mention. So cutting your hair is a sign of mourning in Shia Islam. And that's another thing you've seen people do at protests, take off their hijab, and then they just cut off their hair and hold it up to the crowd. A lot of women in areas where you have a lot of Iranian exiles in Europe and in the United States and just other people in solidarity with activists there have been doing the same thing. And again, social media allows people to see what's happening in other places and to know that they have this kind of support. This is one of the most iconic photos of the 2022 protests. This is in Kurdistan. People are going to the grave where Masa Amini was buried. But what the regime did that finally kind of stopped the protests in February was they began executing people. So these four young men were all executed by the regime in December and January. The young man at the far end, his body was actually publicly displayed after he was dead. I mean, the message could not have been clearer to individuals. At least a hundred people have gotten death sentences from the regime for their participation in these protests. And so it dampened the protests themselves but it hasn't ended people's defiance. So these are small protests that were held on the 40th day of the executions of these young men. They took place in multiple places. So this one is taking place in Zahedan, which is over here towards the border with Afghanistan. The slogans, as I said, have become really radical. So among the things that people have been chanting since the end of 2017, death to the dictator. Mullahs get lost. The international or the revolutionary guard corps are traitors. At a recent round of protests, they were chanting that the revolutionary guard corps is our Daesh and Daesh is the Arabic for the Islamic state, which is not a complimentary comparison. Forget about Syria. Think about our condition. The nation is begging while the supreme leader acts like God and death to Hamedi. All right. You've also heard in many places no more Islamic republic. A independent freedom, Iranian republic. And then another one that shows sort of like the cleverness that goes into some of these things. Chanting, resasha, may your spirit live on. So many of you are probably familiar with the Shah, the one that was overthrown in 1979. Resasha was his father. And Resasha, when he was in power, clamped down heavily on the clergy in Iran. So saying resasha, may your spirit live on is not directly saying that you want the regime to collapse, but it's clearly saying that you want the clergy to get out of politics. While the protests were still really kind of at their height in late November of 2022, you suddenly had these reports of schoolgirl poisonings. And this has happened all over the country. They estimate nearly all of Iran's provinces that this has happened. And at least 100 schools. Hundreds of girls have been hospitalized as a result of this. The stories are all very similar. The girls say that there's suspicious smells before they feel sick. They smell like rotten fish or rotten oranges or diesel fuel. They have the symptoms, say headaches, heart palpitations, lethargy, nausea. Some of them have temporary paralysis. And so this again, this has been happening in place after place after place. And their parents have been coming out repeatedly to protest against the fact that the regime did nothing. So the first round when in November 30th, the very first set of the schoolgirl poisonings, the Interior Ministry said that they had collected suspicious samples, but then nothing else was ever heard of that. The regime has told families, doctors, medical staff, that they are not permitted to talk about what happened. The journalist in the city of Qom, where the first attack was done, who was investigating this was then arrested. But the fact that it keeps happening and that the regime hasn't shown much interest in this means most people in Iran believe that the regime is responsible for this. And that this is an effort to punish schoolgirls for participating in the protests. They're a key demographic of this. And so this is a way to try to undermine that. The regime was finally forced to say something about this in March of this year. But their reactions have been really contradictory. So on one hand, the Ayatollah Khomeini has said, if it was deliberate, the culprits should face death. On the other hand, other high-ranking Iranian officials have said 90% of the cases are stress-related. They said the girls just wanna skip school or the girls are stressed because they don't wanna take exams. And that kind of dismissive attitude only making people's parents angrier about what is happening. So just three days ago was the first anniversary and there was a lot of expectation, concern, that there would be another round of protests that people were going to come out to commemorate this. But the regime also knew that the one-year anniversary was going to be important. And they have been taking steps to ensure that people did not come back out again. So as a result of these protests, they had withdrawn the morality police from the streets or at least they told them not to interfere with anyone. But at the beginning of July of this year, the morality police have suddenly begun to show up on streets in Iran again. A draft bill has been submitted to the Iranian parliament this fall or rather the vote will be this fall, was submitted in May. It would reclassify failure to properly wear your hijab to a crime punishable by a five to 10-year prison sentence or an $8,500 fine, which is just absolutely beyond the means of most Iranian families. They threatened business owners who allow, people who are not wearing headscarves if you let them into your restaurant or allow them into your business, the regime says it will confiscate three months' worth of your profits. I mean, really draconian kinds of punishments in this draft bill. In fact, the modulus recognizes that this is not a popular stand because they decided that they're going to debate the bill behind closed doors rather than on open debate on the floor of the modulus, which you would typically have with this kind of legislation. And then the last piece of this was starting in July, they began arresting well-known human rights activists. They started arresting or calling in for interrogation members of families of young people who had died in the uprisings. And so about 500 people at least died during the rounds of protests that started in September of 2022. Masa Amini's uncle was called in by the regime. So they're sending the signals that they did not want there to be any protests that broke out again. And they're starting to try to insist that women wear their headscarves. But many people, many women have decided they are not going to comply with this. So you see open defiance every day on the streets in Iran. Women just walking around without headscarves on. Mothers who decide that they're going to take their headscarf off in solidarity with their daughters, for example. And so the slogan of this latest round of protests has been women, life and freedom. So this is a brave young generation in Iran, which is literally risking their lives to try to assert that they want civil and political liberties. It's clear the regime knows repression is probably the only way that it can stay in power, giving these interlocking crises of legitimacy that it has been facing over the last number of years. And it's really hard to see change coming. Everything looks like it's going to stay forever until it doesn't. No one thought the Soviet Union was going to collapse. Hosni Mubarak did not think that he was going to be driven out of power in 17 days by a bunch of crowds in Cairo. And so while the regime looks like it has managed to sustain itself through this latest round of protests, the cracks are opening. When and how that final fracturing will take place, I think no one can really predict something like that. But it's clear that this younger generation is more fearless than older generations and much less willing to accept the conditions of life as they currently stand in the Islamic Republic. So I would be happy to take any questions that anyone has. I think there's a microphone. Okay, I don't know about you, but I have questions. So I'm sure you do. Okay, Yael. What's the size of the Revolutionary Guard and do private citizens have... Say the second part again. Do private citizens have weapons or guns? So farmers might have guns, but I mean, not. Like, right, exactly, yeah. The size of the Revolutionary Guard Corps, it's about 125,000 people that are in that. It reports directly to the Supreme Leader. There is compulsory conscription in Iran. All men over the age of 19 are supposed to spend two years in the military. And they do, some of them go to the regular military, but some people who are conscripted will be sent into the Republican Guard. And as I said, it is much more powerful than the regular military. Republican Guard has its own naval units. It has its own intelligence service. It literally is like a military security service unto itself. And its explicit purpose is to defend the Revolutionary Regime and make sure that the Islamic Republic maintains itself in power. Have you ever been to that country? No, and I would suggest American citizens not just travel to Iran. The prison exchange and the freeing up of billions of dollars. What kind of impact would that have on these people? So there was some disappointment about the timing because they felt like it deflected attention from the Masa Amini's anniversary towards the fact that the regime was going to be able to get some frozen funds back from South Korea. It doesn't appear that the timing so close to her death was actually intentional because a lot of it had to do with really complicated maneuvers where they're moving, like the money was in South Korean banks that had to be taken from South Korean currency, translated into something else, transferred into bank accounts in Qatar. I mean, there just were a lot of moving parts, but it is really unfortunate that it happened this week, of all weeks. So I don't know what the breakdown of men versus women are for the Iranians, but the population there is about 80 million. So do you mean in terms of what's happening elsewhere in Iran or? Yeah. So I would say in the younger generations, people are very aware of what's going on because of the fact that they're all connected on social media, they all have smartphones. People are filming themselves, for example, women of all ages are filming themselves on their camera, walking down the streets in Tehran, saying, I'm taking my headscarf off, I'm really scared, I'm just gonna keep going, and then you post that to the internet. And so it's just one of the reasons why we know as much as we do about what has been happening in Iran over the last number of years is precisely because there is so much of this kind of information that is being uploaded to the internet. So pictures of protests in far-flung places, probably wouldn't have known that Zahadan had a protest in February of 2023, if people there hadn't been doing it on their phones and then uploading it to the internet. It's another thing, the Iranians regime, again, they learned their lesson, you don't just cut the internet off completely, but they'll have partial blackouts. So areas where there is unrest or where they suspect there could be unrest, they'll have a partial blackout. Sometimes it's that they slow down data in the evening so that it takes forever for somebody to load a video up to the internet and then people won't do that, that's their assumption. If you're interested, there's a really good documentary that was released this, I mean, it was released in September by PBS Frontline about the protest movements that was made by Iranians and is all based on sort of the kind of footage from social media discussions with young women who were part of the protests with their families, et cetera. And so that gives you a really surprising picture, I think, of what's happening in Iran because many of the young women look just like the young women on Beloit's campus, right? Which I think is not what you would think, right? As far as young women in Iran. But it's clear, I mean, again, communications, they all know what's happening other places. They see what other people's lives are like. That has a flip side to that. I mean, people also know what happened in Syria. And so that might mean that people in the middle class may think we barely have enough to, you know, maintain our family where we're at. We can't risk this by going out into the streets. So I mean, the communications and knowing what's going on can really cut both ways. Can you say a name? They are. I mean, people, if you, I mean, Masa Amini, again, there's footage of her mother at her grave. Calling out, you know, just saying that she was dressed more modestly than anybody else's daughters, right? I mean, that she, it was just, she wasn't really showing that much hair. And so if you're showing everything, the Basji and the morality police typically use a lot of brutality when they arrest people. Activists are aware that they use sexual violence against them. They use rape against prisoners, both men and women, to try to intimidate them into not being part of the democracy movement or human rights activists. So yes, people who go out know the risks that they are taking and they have persisted. And it's not just that they're going up. The fact that you have people chanting death to Hameini is the worst possible thing that you could say in public in Iran. Oh, and the Iranians in April started installing a lot more security cameras in major cities so that they can get better pictures of the faces of people that are engaged in protests. It's, they might not get you there, but they might be able to find you later, right? Yeah. I mean, they are very, so they're exposing body parts. Why is there such an importance on a headscarf? So that's what many people would like to say to the regime, but for the hardliners, for people like Raisi and Hatemi, or not Hatemi, Hameini, this issue has now suddenly become symbolic of the entire Islamic Republic. And the idea is that women should cover their hair to be modest. And the regime has been enforcing this since the revolution in 1979. That seems very, you're sort of exposed, the other body parts are exposed. It seems irrational to focus on the hair. But that's the, for many Muslim women, covering your hair is a sign of modesty and it's a religious obligation. The issue is, of course, that there are lots of different kinds of Islamic dress, depending on what country you're in, depends on what it looks like, how people wear their headscarves is different in Turkey than it is in Iran. And it's different in Iran than it is in other places in the Arab world. But the regime has like just fixated on this as a sign of the legitimacy of the entire proposition. They could have kind of backed off of this, but the hardliners are not willing to give an inch. So it's a submission of women? That's a large part of it, yes. So we have a question back here. So just because the history of Iraq and Iran, I mean their conflicts, how about the countries that are surrounding Iran? How are they supporting or not supporting what's going on in Iran in general with this type of movement? So Iran has a very good relationship with the Shia government in Baghdad. And so they're not really saying anything. Afghanistan is another story because the Taliban and the Iranians actually had a small border clash a couple of months ago around water. So there's a river that's coming in from Afghanistan into Iran and they started shooting at one another and about three body or border guards were killed in that. So there's a lot of tension between Afghanistan and Iran, but it's related to the water issue, not to anything else. And other than that, I mean, Iran has long been isolated in the entire world. It's only real ally has been Syria. And that's pretty much where they're still at. Syria is still their primary ally. And that's why Iran went all in on making sure that Bashar al-Assad did not fall from power. So men are coming out to these demonstrations. I mean, that's one of the things that, you know, again, her death managed to cross all kinds of divides and earlier rounds of protests were mainly being driven by men. But this time it is women who are taking the forefront. So oftentimes you would see young women who were at the very front of crowds and with men behind them. But yes, men are coming out in support of women who are taking their headscarves off. How many years do they have to go to school? So it's a highly educated population. You have a significant percentage of the population, for example, that's gone to university. And I mean, that's what one of the problems is they haven't been able to create the kinds of jobs that are commensurate with young people coming out with university degrees. So it is, I mean, the regime would like there to be more sex segregation in schools. And so there are some universities that only take women and some that only take men, for example, but women can go all the way to the highest levels of education. That's not being restricted. It's not like it is in Afghanistan. Yes, yep, universal free primary education. The regime has done some, I mean, has done some things in the past that have been really interesting on this. I mean, assuring that girls are going to school, right? That that has never been an issue, right? With this regime, that yes, it was just, yes, girls will go to school. When Iran had just an exploding population, the regime recognized how much pressure that was gonna put on their resources. And so they actually implemented a really effective public program for family planning, which again is not what you would think of when you think of Iran, but it was a model that was used in many other places, and they were actually too successful from the perspective of the regime because now the average number of children per Iranian woman is 1.7. Replacement rate is 2.1. So that's why Iran is facing, by 2050, having a population where 30% of it is over the age of 60, right? So the regime has made some changes that you would think are surprising given it's sort of fundamentalist bent. So oil is a big part of the economy, natural gas. And then agriculture, that's been an important base for the regime, but that is really being threatened by mismanagement of water, and then climate change related kinds of issues. There was some place in Iran this past summer where it was 150 degrees. And so, I mean, that's past the limit at which the human body can actually regulate its own temperature. And that's what they're saying. There are areas in Iran, which are, they're among the places where you would have to be the most worried that temperatures would get so hot that people would no longer be able to live in those places and then you add the water crisis on top of that. So I've been reading about the billions of dollars that has just been released. And on one side, I hear that it's only for humanitarian purposes. And on the other hand, the regime is saying, we can do whatever we like with it. What do you know about this? They can't do whatever they like with it. There's actually more restrictions on that money now that it's in Qatar than there was when it was in South Korea. So yeah, they can only use the funds for humanitarian purposes, and the United States does have oversight of those funds. But it was money that South Korea owed Iran for oil purchases. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you.