A young Iranian woman cuts off a lock of her hair in defiance of the regime during a demonstration to protest the death of Masha Amini /
Thousands of men and women make up the Morality Police, an institution located in a limbo between law, conservatism, religion and the influence of the Basij militia, which has had a suffocating weight in Iranian society.
The Gasht-e-Ershad, “orientation” patrols or Morality Police, form a kind of autonomous limbo in Iran’s political, judicial and religious power structure. They belong to the realm of the security forces, but at the same time they do not report to the ordinary judiciary and their main support comes from the Basij militias, a paramilitary force originally created to fight the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. Their role The main task is to monitor compliance with the Islamic dress code and orders relating to morality. The precept works for both men and women, but fundamentally the patrols are dedicated to monitoring the latter with an absurd hypothesis in view of Western criteria. According to some of its members, it is about “protecting” them from the worst masculine instincts by preventing them from dressing in a “provocative” or “inappropriate” way.
It seems like a fictional plot, but numerous women have been punished, fined and arrested under it since the official founding of the institution in 2007. However, its operation dates back much earlier. The Basij militias themselves have been monitoring “moral compliance” at universities, where co-education begins, for decades. As of 2016, the Iranian Chamber decided on a legislative reform to limit the direct intervention of this Police, although its powers remain tremendously diffuse and its weight in society remains unchanged. In practice, cases such as Masha Amini’s demonstrate that officers have the authority to make arrests and, in any case, sufficient authority to report any “violation” to the security forces and have them complete the arrests.
A patrol arrested Masha Amini in the middle of the street in mid-September because a lock of her hair was visible outside her veil. An absolute insignificance that cost him his life. The young woman died in police custody. According to the regime, her death was caused by cardiac problems. For the family and forensics, she due to head trauma caused by repeated blows to the head.
Her death, although horrible, can now save many other Iranian women if it is confirmed that the repeated popular protests unleashed in the last two months and the harsh international reaction against the Government are going to end with the dissolution of the sinister brigade. The Iranian forums are on fire this Sunday morning with the news. The attorney general has announced it. It is a historic social and political step. As the prosecutor himself has argued, the Morale Police are alien to the Iranian judiciary. It has even been called into question by the official morality courts themselves. But dissolving it has traditionally been a red line for the government of a country so trapped under the designs of conservatism.
The suspicion remains that it is a cosmetic operation to demonstrate that the regime is sensitive to the protests and that, at last, even indirectly, it offers a response to the death of Amini. Even so, in one way or another, it represents the presumed end of a sword of Damocles over thousands of citizens and, especially, a female group that begins to challenge the rigid conduct of the regime with colored veils or more European-style clothing. The law not only imposes the hijab; it also prohibits tight dresses, miniskirts or simple ripped jeans. However, the Iranian Parliament admitted four years ago in a survey that 60% of women, especially young people, did not permanently comply with the dress regulations. Even the Speaker of this House, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, recently endorsed the investigation of “the processes and method of implementation in the orientation patrols.”
thousands of agents
It is estimated that some 7,000 plainclothes guards are part of the particular agency that fights against “vice” in Tehran. There are many more, evidently, if we add the conduct guards scattered in villages and smaller towns. Most come from the Basij militia or are conscripts doing military service. The volunteers have been trained in the strictest religious conservatism. They can be very dangerous units, especially in the most fundamentalist villages. In 2016, when the body itself decided to reinforce itself with the approval of the Police, it unleashed the anger of President Rohaní and a wave of indignation also swept through Tehran. Among the functions of this reinforcement was the deployment of undercover agents who still today stop those men who bother women and also all those citizens who wear brightly colored clothes. They also write down the license plates of the cars that play music at high volume or in which women are seen who have shed their headscarves taking advantage of the vehicle’s reservation.
A couple belonging to the Morality Police (she dressed in a dark chador) penalizes a young woman in Tehran for leaving part of her hair exposed. /
Not only men belong to these sub-militias, there are also girls among their ranks dressed in the chador, the veil that covers from head to toe and only leaves part of the face uncovered. The patrols, in fact, are made up of four men and two women and they travel in trucks. They choose squares and busy streets to supervise that the Iranian women are dressed according to their regulations. They also tend to walk inside shopping centers, which have become large forums where they can meet, have a drink and chat. Some protest movements see these rounds as a “continuous and suffocating presence designed to exert pressure so that women know that we are always under their surveillance.”
One of the problems of encountering these patrols resides in the difficulty to know what is right or wrong in their particular table of values. This is pointed out by the feminist movements, but also by certain institutional leaders. The law establishes that women must cover their heads with the veil once they reach adolescence, but then these militias make their own interpretations and apply criteria that may differ from one another in order to “prevent virtue.”
The slightest thing that can happen in an interception is that the police tell a citizen how to dress or advise against using cosmetics. From there, all hell can break loose: from receiving a sanction to being taken to a “correctional center” to receive “instruction”. This term normally includes “awareness talks”, which can be extended to “slaps” and even “whipping”, according to some humanitarian organizations. Of the latter, NGOs denounce, couples caught kissing “inappropriately” in the street know a lot. The usual thing in the lightest detentions is that the same day the victim (usually a woman) is released into the custody of a man from her family who is previously required to wear “appropriate” clothing for the detainee. Masha Amini did not have that fortune.
#sinister #sentinels #virtue
