Bronx Parents and Teachers Protest AOC Military Recruitment Fair

Cuba, like every other country on the planet, is struggling with the impact of COVID-19. This small island of 11 million people has created five vaccine candidates and sent its medical workers through the Henry Reeve International Medical Brigade to heal people around the world. Meanwhile, the United States hardens a cruel and illegal blockade of the island, a medieval siege that has been in place for six decades. In April 2020, seven United Nations special rapporteurs wrote an open letter to the United States government about the blockade. “In the pandemic emergency,” they wrote, “the lack of will of the U.S. government to suspend sanctions may lead to a higher risk of such suffering in Cuba and other countries targeted by its sanctions.” The special rapporteurs noted the “risks to the right to life, health and other critical rights of the most vulnerable sections of the Cuban population.”

On July 12, 2021, Cuba’s President Miguel Díaz-Canel told a press conference that Cuba is facing serious shortages of food and medicine. “What is the origin of all these issues?” he asked. The answer, he said, “is the blockade.” If the U.S.-imposed blockade ended, many of the great challenges facing Cuba would lift. Of course, there are other challenges, such as the collapse of the crucial tourism sector due to the pandemic. Both problems—the pandemic and the blockade—have increased the challenges for the Cuban people. The pandemic is a problem that people all over the world now face; the U.S.-imposed blockade is a problem unique to Cuba (as well as about 30 other countries struck by unilateral U.S. sanctions).

Origin of the Protests

On July 11, people in several parts of Cuba—such as San Antonio de los Baños—took to the streets to protest the social crisis. Frustration about the lack of goods in shops and an uptick in COVID-19 infections seemed to motivate the protests. President Díaz-Canel said of the people that most of them are “dissatisfied,” but that their dissatisfaction is fueled by “confusion, misunderstandings, lack of information and the desire to express a particular situation.”

On the morning of July 12, U.S. President Joe Biden hastily put out a statement that reeked of hypocrisy. “We stand with the Cuban people,” Biden said, “and their clarion call for freedom.” If the U.S. government actually cared about the Cuban people, then the Biden administration would at the very least withdraw the 243 unilateral coercive measures implemented by the presidency of Donald Trump before he left office in January 2021; Biden—contrary to his own campaign promises—has not started the process to reverse Trump’s designation of Cuba as a “state sponsor of terrorism.” On March 9, 2021, Biden’s spokesperson Jen Psaki said, “A Cuba policy shift is not currently among President Biden’s top priorities.” Rather, the Trump “maximum pressure” policy intended to overthrow the Cuban government remains intact.

The United States has a six-decade history of trying to overthrow the Cuban government, including using assassinations and invasions as policy. In recent years, the U.S. government has increased its financial support of people inside Cuba and in the Cuban émigré community in Miami, Florida; some of this money comes directly from the National Endowment for Democracy and from USAID. Their mandate is to accelerate any dissatisfaction inside Cuba into a political challenge to the Cuban Revolution.

On June 23, Cuba’s Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez said that the Trump “measures remain very much in place.” They shape the “conduct of the current U.S. administration precisely during the months in which Cuba has experienced the highest infection rates, the highest death toll and a higher economic cost associated with the COVID-19 pandemic.”

 

Costs of the Pandemic

On July 12, Alejandro Gil Fernández, Cuba’s minister of economy and planning, told the press about the expenses of the pandemic. In 2020, he said, the government spent $102 million on reagents, medical equipment, protective equipment and other material; in the first half of 2021, the government spent $82 million on these kinds of materials. This is money that Cuba did not anticipate spending—money that it does not have as a consequence of the collapsed tourism sector.

“We have not spared resources to face COVID-19,” Fernández said. Those with COVID-19 are put in hospitals, where their treatment costs the country $180 per day; if the patient needs intensive care, the cost per day is $550. “No one is charged a penny for their treatment,” Fernández reported.

The socialist government in Cuba shoulders the responsibility of medical care and of social insurance. Despite the severe challenges to the economy, the government guarantees salaries, purchases medicines and distributes food as well as electricity and piped water. That is the reason why the government added $2.4 billion to its already considerable debt overhang. In June, Cuba’s Deputy Prime Minister Ricardo Cabrisas Ruíz met with French Minister of Economy and Finance Bruno Le Maire to discuss the economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. France, which manages Cuba’s debt to the public creditors in the Paris Club, led the effort to ameliorate the debt servicing demands on Havana.

Costs of the Blockade

On June 23, 184 countries in the UN General Assembly voted to end the U.S.-imposed blockade on Cuba. During the discussion over the vote, Cuba’s Foreign Minister Rodríguez reported that between April 2019 and December 2020, the government lost $9.1 billion due to the blockade ($436 million per month). “At current prices,” he said, “the accumulated damages in six decades amount to over $147.8 billion, and against the price of gold, it amounts to over $1.3 trillion.”

If the blockade were to be lifted, Cuba would be able to fix its great financial challenges and use the resources to pivot away from its reliance upon tourism. “We stand with the Cuban people,” says Biden; in Havana, the phrase is heard differently, since it sounds like Biden is saying, “We stand on the Cuban people.”

Cuba’s Prime Minister Manuel Marrero Cruz said that those who took to the streets on July 11 “called for foreign intervention and said that the [Cuban] Revolution was falling. They will never enjoy that hope,” he said. In response to those anti-government protests, the streets of Cuba filled with tens of thousands of people who carried Cuban flags and the flags of the Cuban Revolution’s 26th of July Movement. Cruz said, “The people responded and defended the revolution.”

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

Manolo De Los Santos is a researcher and a political activist. For 10 years, he worked in the organization of solidarity and education programs to challenge the United States’ regime of illegal sanctions and blockades. Based out of Cuba for many years, Manolo has worked toward building international networks of people’s movements and organizations. In 2018, he became the founding director of the People’s Forum in New York City, a movement incubator for working-class communities to build unity across historic lines of division at home and abroad. He also collaborates as a researcher with Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and is a Globetrotter/Peoples Dispatch fellow.

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is the chief editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest book is Washington Bullets, with an introduction by Evo Morales Ayma.

Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in Peoples Dispatch.

Country-wide anti-coup demonstrations were underway once again in Sudan on Monday, December 26, a week after the previous “March of Millions” on December 19, during which 499 protesters were injured by the security forces in the three cities of Khartoum state alone. Sudanese have been protesting across the country against the power-sharing framework agreement signed earlier between the junta and right-wing political parties, and calling for the complete overthrow and prosecution of the leaders of the October 2021 coup.

Of the nearly 500 people who were injured on December 19, 226 had to be rushed to hospitals for treatment, while others were treated by medical volunteers on the field, according to the Association of Socialist Doctors.

Another doctor’s group, Central Committee of Sudanese Doctors (CCSD), estimated the total injuries treated in hospitals to be 155 in Khartoum State, and added that two of them with gunshot wounds had to be stabilized with surgeries. One protester is reported to have lost an eye.

Deliberately “targeting the eye,” “aiming tear gas canisters directly at the head,” and stun-grenade attacks on protesters who were already blinded by and choking on tear gas were systematic, CCSD added. Most of the injuries, 120 of them, were in the country’s capital Khartoum city, followed by its twin cities of Omdurman and Khartoum Bahri (North).

Demonstrations were also reported from at least 16 other cities outside Khartoum, including Wad Madani, capital of Al Jazirah state, Port Sudan, capital of Red Sea state, Atbara in River Nile state, and even capitals of civil war-affected states of South Kordofan and South Darfur.

The day marked the fourth anniversary of the start of the December Revolution in 2018. By April 2019, the mass protests had led to the overthrow of dictator Omar al Bashir who had been in power for nearly three decades. The Revolution did not stop, however, and continued the struggle against his inner circle of generals who had formed a military junta.

After a massacre on June 3, 2019, right-wing parties—a coalition calling itself the Forces of Freedom and Change (FFC)—entered into a power-sharing agreement with the military, forming a joint civilian-military transitional government in August 2019.

While maintaining control over much of the economy and foreign policy, the military ceded some power to civilian leaders chosen by the FFC parties for a period under this deal, before taking it back in a coup in October 2021. Soon after, the FFC parties opened another round of negotiations with the junta, and signed the framework agreement on December 5. This is said to be the first step toward a final agreement to pave the way for another transitional government.

In the meantime, relentless mass-demonstrations have continued since the coup. Led by Resistance Committees (RCs)—a network of over 5,000 of which are organized in neighborhoods across the country—hundreds of thousands have been taking to the streets several times nearly every month under the slogan, “No negotiation, No Compromise, No Partnership.” Thousands have been injured and over 120 killed in the crackdown on these protests.

On December 19, protesters in Khartoum, carrying portraits of those killed in the repression and waving national flags, once again marched to the Presidential Palace—the seat of coup leader and army chief Abdel Fattah al Burhan—amid the barrage of tear gas, stun grenades, and live bullets fired by security forces.

The marches in the capital city originated from 12 different locations and pushed toward the Presidential Palace along six separate routes, with some protesters reportedly getting as close as 1.5 kilometers (close to 1 mile) to the junta’s seat of power.

In an attempt to prevent the protesters from the capital’s twin cities of Omdurman and Khartoum Bahri from joining forces with those marching towards the Palace, security forces blocked the bridges over the Nile with large containers well before the start of the demonstrations.

“Early in the morning, the police had barricaded all the main roads of Omdurman with barbed wire and armored police vehicles. All over the city, the police were deployed in massive numbers. They fired hundreds and hundreds of stun grenades on the protesters,” said Osama Saeed, a member of the Sudanese Communist Party (SCP), who was among the protesters rallying in Omdurman.

He further claimed that many of the tear gas canisters were filled with stones and crushed glass, which, on exploding, sprayed shrapnel, injuring several at once. 82 different injuries were recorded in Omdurman, according to the Socialist Doctors. One young woman is reported to have lost her eye.

No Credibility

“[A]dherence to international human rights charters, especially charters of women’s rights… and protecting… freedoms of peaceful assembly and expression,” were commitments the coup leaders had made in the framework agreement with the FFC. The agreement assures that the “transitional authority” established after the final agreement would be “a full democratic civil authority without the participation of the regular forces.”

However, “the FFC political parties have signed six documents with the junta. None of them was respected by the junta,” Fathi Elfadl, national spokesperson of the SCP, told Peoples Dispatch. “Every time mass movements force the military to retreat, they buy time by signing such agreements with right-wing parties, and then violate them,” he added.

While the agreement makes way for a civilian prime minister and cabinet, Elfadl said that the real levers of power will nevertheless be held by what is envisaged in the agreement as the “Security and Defense Council.”

The agreement states that this body, consisting of the leaders of the security forces and of the six armed formerly rebel movements—those who signed the Juba agreement and went on to support the coup after getting a share in state power—will be headed by the Prime Minister. It declares that the civilian head of state is the supreme commander of the armed forces.

However, coup leader al-Burhan clarified to the media soon after signing the agreement that the “civilian Supreme Commander of the SAF (Sudanese Armed Forces)” neither “presides over the army chief” nor appoints him, but “only approves recommendations made to him.”

The agreement “prohibits regular forces from engaging in investment and commercial activities, except for those related to military manufacturing and military missions.” However, the army chief cautioned, “Do not listen to what politicians say about military reform… no one will interfere in the affairs of the army at all.” Matters of military reform are in any case only stated in principle in this agreement. The modalities will only be spelt out in the final agreement.

Regularizing a Notorious Militia

The formation of a single unified army and the disarmament and dissolution of all militias have been key demands of the pro-democracy movement since 2019. This is especially applicable to the notorious Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which carried out the massacre of June 3, 2019, and whose members are the soldiers who committed the atrocities in Darfur during the civil war under Bashir.

While Bashir stands trial at the International Criminal Court (ICC) for genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, his footsoldiers, organized as the RSF, not only continue what has been called a depopulation campaign in mineral-rich Darfur, but also police the protesters in Khartoum.

This militia, which controls over a billion dollars in finances, is headed by the military junta’s vice-president, General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, also known as Hemeti, who will continue to be a powerful figure in the Security and Defense Council.

The framework agreement states that the RSF “will be integrated into the armed forces according to agreed timetables”. However, it also recognizes the RSF as a separate entity, terming it a “military force affiliated with the armed forces.”

Saeed said that the agreement is in effect regularizing the RSF as “a special force of the army,” which will effectively continue to operate autonomously instead of ensuring its Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration (DDR) as demanded by the pro-democracy movement.

He added that the agreement also makes a mockery of another central demand: the prosecution of all military generals and officers responsible for the massacre on June 3, 2019, and for all other atrocities, including war-crimes, committed since 1989 after the Bashir’s coup.

“Transitional justice,” the agreement states, “is an issue that needs the participation of the stakeholders and the families of the martyrs, provided that it includes all those who have been affected by human rights violations since 1989 until now.”

This is a “manipulation of the whole concept of justice, shifting the burden on to the victims and families of martyrs,” said Saeed. “What they are essentially saying is, the state is not responsible for any crimes, only individuals are. If someone got shot while protesting on the street, it is not the responsibility of the state, but of the individual soldiers or police or militiamen carrying out this action. So victims must cooperate with the state to help identify them. But the state and its high command will always be protected.”

‘The Juba Agreement Has Failed’

The implementation of the Juba peace agreement is another commitment in the framework agreement that the SCP and many other sections of the pro-democracy movement are radically opposed to. While the leaders of the armed rebel groups who signed the agreement have made peace with the army and the RSF in exchange for a share in state power and even went on to support their coup, peace has remained elusive for the people in the war-affected regions.

Since the Juba agreement in October 2020, hundreds of thousands have been displaced and several hundreds killed in massacres by the RSF and other militias it backs in Darfur, whose governorship has been handed over to a former rebel leader Minni Minnawi.

Communal clashes have also been engineered by the junta in the Blue Nile State by pitting tribes against each other, allegedly with the connivance of Malik Agar, a former rebel leader who signed the Juba agreement.

“The Juba agreement has failed. It is not only the Communist Party and the Resistance Committees seeing this – everybody knows. The displaced people living in camps, the refugees, are all suffering the further deterioration of security since the agreement. Massacres, rapes, and other atrocities are worse than before the agreement,” Elfadl said.

“We don’t need this agreement between leaders of military and armed groups. We need an agreement between people who have a real interest in bringing peace – between the representatives of the displaced people living in camps, the Resistance Committees and the civil society in Darfur. None of them were represented in the agreement.”

These groups, he said, must be brought together to address the roots of the conflict in a new agreement, addressing the question of facilitating the return of displaced people to their lands, the distribution of resources, and the disarmament of RSF and other militias. Without this process, he insisted, peace can never be realized in the troubled peripheries of Sudan.

Without addressing these contested issues of peace and justice, the agreement rushes headlong into an election at the end of the transitional period, which is to conclude two years from the date of the appointment of the Prime Minister.

Foreign Powers, Right-Wing Parties and the Junta Combine Forces

Saeed calls it the “Egyptian model,” referring to Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who, after taking power in a military coup 2013, went on to legitimize his power grab by winning a “sham election” with over 96 percent of the votes in 2014. He has been Egypt’s authoritarian ruler since. Egyptian intelligence agents are “always around al-Burhan. They now even have an office in Sudan’s military headquarters,” Saeed said.

The Egyptian state, as well as the neighboring Gulf countries that are backing this deal, see the December Revolution as a threat not only to their interests in Sudan, but also to their own regimes domestically, he explained. These autocratic regimes, he said, fear that a successful revolution in Sudan might inspire the people of their own countries to revolt.

The United States, United Kingdom and European Union countries backing this domestically unpopular agreement also “prefer a military dictatorship” that they can use to advance their own interests in the country, located in a geopolitically crucial place on the Red Sea, Saeed argued.

“However, the Americans and their allies see the power of the streets. They see that the military junta has been paralyzed by the mass movement, and is not able to run the country. The situation today is that there is a junta on the top, but there is effectively no government to administer the country. So the Western powers and their regional allies hammered the right wing parties of the FFC to sign a deal with the military in an attempt to stabilize power in the country by hook or by crook.”

The stabilization of what will essentially remain military rule by simply giving it a civilian face is the goal of holding such an election, he said. Without the trials of the generals involved in the coups and other crimes since Bashir’s ascent in 1989, without first ensuring peace in the peripheral regions, any election—conducted in the absence of the right to organize, assemble, and express oneself freely—will be meaningless, he insisted.

“Even if the communists win such an election, they will not be able to accomplish anything,” because state power will still be held hostage by the forces of the dictatorship, Saeed said.

However, a consolidation of the authoritarian state through the alliance of the military, right-wing political parties, and foreign powers is far from certain, given internal contradictions.

The FFC split last month, and its constituent parties and armed rebel groups are currently squabbling over who should and should not be party to the agreement. In the meantime, their attempt to divide the mass movement with this agreement – with which they hoped to take a section of people off the streets from the protests – has “clearly failed,” said Saeed.

Pointing out that even rank-and-file members of the FFC are taking part in the protests against this framework agreement, he questioned what authority FFC leadership had to negotiate with the military.

“To negotiate, there should be a balance of power. The FFC has nothing. They don’t have the backing of the mass movements. Their own cadres are opposing the deal. That is why their leaders are found every night in the house of the Saudi Ambassador,” he said.

“They are relying on the backing of foreign powers to negotiate, but foreign powers are only interested in stabilizing the situation, even if it is on the terms of the military, so long as their interests are served.”

And the interests of the foreign powers are not unified either, added Elfadl. The UAE, which has “very strong relations” with Hemeti and the companies associated with his RSF, secured a $6 billion deal to construct a port in the Red Sea soon after the framework agreement. “This definitely goes against the interests of Saudi Arabia, and of Egypt, which is very closely allied with Bashir and his loyal generals in the army.”

The contradictions among foreign powers backing the consolidation of power in Sudan are also escalating the internal contradictions, including between the army and the RSF, he said. “Army officers are wary of integrating RSF among their ranks. The RSF, on the other hand, has been recruiting officers suspended from the army for one or the other reason.”

Unify the Resistance

In the face of attempts by this alliance of forces with contradictory interests to consolidate into a unified authoritarian state in Sudan, the main task is to unify the resistance, Elfadl said. “What we are trying to do now is to build a network for cooperation and coordination between the political activities of the Resistance Committees and the task of organizing a trade union movement.”

The first phase of the December Revolution, culminating in the overthrow of Bashir in 2019, was in fact spearheaded by the Sudanese Professionals Association (SPA), a coalition of trade unions, organized underground during his dictatorship.

However, after the formation of the joint civil-military transitional government, “we made a mistake,” he said. “The SCP and progressive movements had agreed that the next immediate task was to bring into force labor laws,” on the basis of which the trade union movement can be formally established.

“However”, with the failure to secure these labor laws under the former transitional government in which the military continued to have the greater share of power, “it proved to be the wrong approach. Since 1948, the working class and professionals in Sudan never had labor laws” to sanctify their unions. “Nevertheless, they called their general assemblies and organized their forces into a trade union movement, regardless of the law. This was the tradition, from which we had wrongly deviated recently.”

Arguing that “it is the right of the working class to organize themselves into unions,” Elfadl said, “we will organize the trade unions in accordance with the ILO conventions,” irrespective of labor laws (or the lack of it) in Sudan. The several separate strikes currently underway in the country makes the time fertile, and the task all the more urgent, argued Elfadl.

“This work must go hand in hand with the implementation of the proposals of the Resistance Committees for continued action on the streets. From this, the unity of action will emerge,” he said, adding that the SCP will strive to “unify the trade unions, Resistance Committees and the civil society on a common charter for the building of civil-democratic authority.”

Appealing for “international solidarity to stop the repression, and to force the junta to respect human-rights and the right to demonstrate”, Elfadl asserted, “the rest are tasks the mass-movement in Sudan is capable of achieving itself. It will defeat all the reactionary schemes, be it of international or local forces.”

Editor’s Note: The following was originally published by the Grayzone.

MAX BLUMENTHAL:  Welcome to The Grayzone.  It’s Max Blumenthal.

Protests inside Iran triggered by the death of Mahsa Amini, a young woman who was picked up by Iran’s morality police on the grounds of supposed indecent exposure, have drawn massive international attention.  Media around the world are following these protests, and on social media the hashtag surrounding Mahsa Amini’s name has generated more attention and retweets than almost any hashtag in Twitter history.

So how much of this international response is authentic?  And how much of it is related to genuine concern for Iranian women—and not long-standing Western desire for regime change in Tehran? To better understand this issue, I spoke to a woman inside Iran. Her name is Setareh Sadeghi. She is an independent researcher, a translator, a teacher, and a Ph.D. She lives in the city of Esfahan.

Setareh Sadeghi, let’s talk about you and your own political views before we get into some of the details of these protests and the campaign behind them.

You studied the U.S. Civil Rights Movement as part of your Ph.D., and you’re also a student of propaganda [analysis]. Where do you situate yourself within the Iranian political spectrum, and specifically do you support women protesting the morality police and issues like the hijab?

SETAREH SADEGHI: Well, yes, as you mentioned, I finished my Ph.D. in American Studies, and I studied propaganda analysis as part of my Ph.D. dissertation, and the rhetoric of social movements as well.  So, I have always been supportive of the Iranian government as a whole—the notion of an Islamic republic—but I have also been critical towards a lot of the things that happen in my country, like many of the other people who live here.

So, for the issue of hijab, as someone who believes in hijab and has always practiced it, I am totally against the morality police.  By the way, in Farsi, the word that we use for it is the “Guidance Patrol,” but in English it’s usually referred to as the morality police, and I’m totally against it. I have been a part of the people, especially women, who took it online and used hashtags to talk about how they do not believe in the morality police even though they believe in hijab. And this is not something new. It has been in place from many years ago, but it’s become more significant this year.

So, even before these protests and before the tragic death of Mahsa Amini, people were talking about it online and I was also one of them, because I saw this was totally unacceptable. And even in my personal life—because I have friends who do not believe in the hijab and they don’t want to practice it, or they practiced it in a way that did not fit the standards of the Islamic Republic’s law of the dress code, and they were stopped by the morality police. In at least three cases that I remember, I would just go talk to the morality police and tell them, as someone who believes in hijab, I am totally against what they’re doing, and this is not the way they should enforce the law. Because it’s not always that they… the morality police don’t always arrest people. Their main job was to go and tell people. But even that, I’m totally against it and I don’t think that’s something that works, mainly because a lot of people who live here believe in some sort of dress code. I think as a woman, I think that’s not something that people should tell us. Like, I believe in law and order, but also, I don’t like being told those details, like how to dress and how to appear in public.

MAX BLUMENTHAL:  So, what is the role of the morality police and how much public opposition is there to this unit of the security services? And are they known for being as brutal as they’re currently being portrayed?

SETAREH SADEGHI:  Well, yes, they are known as being brutal because Iranian women don’t find it acceptable—not necessarily because everything that they do is brutal, but some harsh treatments are an integral part of the way they enforce the hijab law. But it’s also that, while I think a lot of people are against the morality police, it’s not that everyone is against the mandatory hijab law. So, these are two things that should be studied differently. A lot of people, I mean, there are different surveys, and different surveys in different provinces show a different percentage of people believing in obligatory or mandatory hijab, and I think that’s something that has to be dealt with based on the local culture of each province.

And that is also reflective of how the protests are going on, for example, in my hometown, because it’s considered more conservative and more traditional. The protests there are very much smaller than what you could see in other cities, for example, in Tehran or Rasht or other cities where the protests were significant compared to what is going on in my town. So, yeah, there are also people who believe that the morality police should be in place but the methods that they’re using should be different.

So, I think if you want to categorize women and people who live inside Iran, we have people who are totally against the mandatory hijab. They don’t believe in hijab at all and, obviously, they don’t believe in morality police. We have people who believe in hijab, but they don’t believe in the morality police or the mandatory hijab. We have people who believe in hijab, and they believe in the morality police, but they don’t believe in the methods that they are using. And that also creates a collective of people who are against the morality police but, again, based on how they feel towards it, their participation in these protests is different.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: So, let’s talk about the issue of Mahsa Amini. What do we know about her death?  Most people in the West who are following this believe she was beaten to death by the morality police in police custody. Has that been established as the case, and is that the understanding even of the protesters in Iran?

SETAREH SADEGHI:  Not really. I mean, even a lot of those Western media outlets corrected their headlines or started using different terms, referring to the case when the CCTV footage of the moment when Mahsa Amini fell and went into a coma was published. So, a lot of people believed that footage, about how some people said that she had bruises on her legs when she was taken to hospital, which shows that there was a beating. But the footage clearly shows that she was in good health conditions when she was there, based on what we see.

An investigation has been ordered. The files all are not yet published.  There are talks about it, but there’s not a final statement by the state. The last thing that they have said is that the probe shows that there was no beating involved. They even released the CT scans of her brain and, as I said, there was CCTV footage. So, while there are protesters who believe that the beating happened, there are also a lot of protesters who think that it did not happen. But the fact that a young woman died in police custody only because of violating the dress code is something unacceptable, no matter what exactly happened in police custody.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: You’re in Esfahan, which is a large city in Iran, outside of Tehran. Most of the protests, as far as we know, have been centered in the capital of Tehran, and you have been receiving a wave of death threats for reporting that the protests in your city were very small and that the protests have not spread to key Iranian cities. Is that still the case?

SETAREH SADEGHI: Well, because I have already blocked a lot of people, and because the person who started those threats, as someone who knew me in person, at this point I can say that I haven’t received any new threats. But it was because I appear on different media and I have talked about Iran as a political analyst, I’ve always received insulting or sometimes death threats. But this time it was really unprecedented, as it was started by someone who knew me in person and had my personal information, and even the number of the people who attacked me was really huge.

And it started with the Independence Farsi account on Instagram, publishing a snippet of my interview and disregarding all the criticism that I had against the morality police, the crackdown on everything, and just saying that I lied about the number of the people participating in the protests, or the fact that these protests are much smaller than the ones that we witnessed, for example, in Esfahan in 2019. But at the same time there were a lot of people who were totally against even the Islamic Republic. But I mentioned that, and they verified it and they said that they were part of the protests, and that’s true. It was not significant because, as I said, Esfahan is a conservative and more traditional city, and people take to the streets on different issues.  The morality police are, I guess, not the number one issue for people who live here. And I talked to my friends who don’t observe the hijab completely or according to the law, and they said that this is really not their number one issue, and so they don’t want to be part of the protests.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: Right. We’ve seen large protests over the price of food or economic issues in Iran that were totally ignored in Western media. So, what do you make of the response in Western media, not just Western broadcast media but social media as well? The Mahsa Amini hashtag is one of the most popular hashtags in history, as you tweeted. It’s as if there are no other issues in the entire world. Do you think the outrage that we’ve seen on social media is authentic, or something that is being encouraged or pushed by Western—specifically NATO—states, the same way that there was a massive social media amplification campaign around the so-called Arab Spring?

SETAREH SADEGHI:  Yeah, that’s true. I mean, social media has never been a true reflection of what’s happening in different societies, especially not Iranian society, because Twitter is blocked here, and a lot of people do not have access to it. So, the number of Iranian users on Twitter is not significant because they use other [platforms]. For example, Instagram. Before these protests Instagram was not blocked, and a very large proportion of the population had Instagram accounts, especially because they also used it for selling products and they had their businesses on it; especially a lot of women run their own business on Instagram. But Twitter is very different and it’s something that is known by Iranians. Even those who are on Twitter, they know that it’s very different from the realities on the ground. And it’s surprising how when there was, especially in those towns where the protests were met, the crackdown on it was really severe and a lot of people couldn’t even use the hashtags, [but then] broke a record, which tells us that there is something that doesn’t come from Iran.

And there is a history of fake hashtags and fake accounts and trolls on Twitter, trying to portray Iran in a different way, and it’s not only about a protest. There are other cases. For example, there was a time when, if you posted anything positive about your life in Iran, you would be attacked by these trolls, because they said that you are normalizing Iranian people’s misery, as if there is no normal life in Iran and the only thing that you are allowed to post online about Iran is just all the problems and the grievances. They attacked a university professor for only posting pictures of him[self] inside a cafe in Tehran, for example.

So, we also have the case of Heshmat Alavi, who apparently is a Twitter user who posts against the Islamic Republic on Twitter. And it’s interesting that when Trump withdrew from the JCPOA [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action known commonly as the Iran nuclear deal], he mentioned that the JCPOA is facilitating Iran’s crackdown on its people or on certain issues, and two Washington Post journalists asked for a source. And the source that Trump offered was an article written by Heshmat Alavi. And an MEK defector later also talked about how the camp in Albania, the MEK camp in Albania, uses its members to start hashtags and make them a trend, and they’re paid to post about it.

MAX BLUMENTHAL:  Just quickly, for those who don’t know, the MEK is the Mojahedin-e-Khalq, which is a U.S.- and Saudi-backed opposition movement, dedicated explicitly to regime change in Iran and replacing it with its cult-like leader, Maryam Rajavi. They have been based in Albania under the watch of the US military and U.S. intelligence, and it’s there that they maintain a troll farm, as you said, to spin out hashtags against the government in Iran. And this account, Heshmat Alavi, apparently was a sock puppet run out of this troll farm.

SETAREH SADEGHI:  Yeah, that’s what the investigation shows. And even for the recent hashtag, the historical hashtag trends about Mahsa Amini, a few Iranian users track them and try to find out where those hashtags come from. And then you see a lot of users just posting nonsense, like alphabets and then using the hashtags, and right now I think it surpassed a hundred million times the hashtag words in Farsi and in English, and they come from a limited number of users. I think it’s less than 300,000 users that have been using the hashtags, but it already has the historical trend on Twitter.

And it’s interesting how, as you said, the protests in 2019, because at that time they were also really huge in my neighborhood. And in Esfahan I did not see any reflection of it online, because usually, like that protest was more by the working class and the middle class because it had economic causes, and it affected a larger proportion of the population. So naturally it was bigger, but you wouldn’t hear about it 24/7 on mainstream media or on social media. But this time, it’s a social issue, and it’s a very important issue for women, but at the same time it’s not really as big as the previous protests that we had. But we already have a historical record of hashtags for it, so it totally shows that it’s not reflective of what is actually going on in Iran.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: Well, The New York Times is also reporting that the US State Department and its allies are trying to get communication gear into Iran. However, much of the noise about these protests appears to be coming from the outside. Because of an issue that Westerners can relate to, we’re deluged with identity politics here and we don’t have large economic protests here in the United States anymore, outside of maybe some union activity, some strikes. This is a case of the weaponization of identity, and obviously a real issue, as you point out, a real issue with the morality police may be not at the top of the agenda but something that upsets a section of the population in Iran.

But outside much of the noise is being made by Iranian exiles or expats, and one of the key voices who’s emerged in U.S. media, cable news media, is a figure named Masih Alinejad, who I’m sure you know. She’s been backed by the U.S. government, paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in contracts with the Voice of America, which is the U.S. government’s global broadcasting system. She’s met with former CIA director and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Recently she cooked up a phony plot in coordination with the U.S. government and the FBI, claiming that the Venezuelan security services were going to kidnap her and take her on speed boats to Iran. It was one of the most ridiculous plots I’ve ever heard, and it was widely reported in U.S. media. Now she’s back. So, what do you make of Iranian expats kind of taking the mic and becoming the voice of the Iranian public?

SETAREH SADEGHI: Well, I wouldn’t mind. Obviously, Iranian women would be very happy if those in exile really wanted to be a voice for women inside, but the thing is they are just echoing the voice of, I would say, a minority and just a section of the population in Iran that they agree with.

I think they also believe in the Western liberal notion of freedom for women, and not the notion—they don’t really care.  I’m not talking about everyone, obviously, but some of these people who are given a voice and whose voices are amplified over the voices of women inside Iran, they’re just repeating the Western notion of freedom for women.  And they do not understand that women in Iran can have a different notion of freedom, and [that] they have other priorities when it comes to women’s rights and women’s activism.

And a lot of women here are working towards that.  They are organizing, they are using online campaigns to pursue Iranian women’s rights.  But these voices from outside really make our struggle more difficult. Instead of, for example, calling for the U.S. government or the EU to lift sanctions on Iran that are hurting ordinary Iranian people and making it more difficult for women to find, for example, job opportunities or to just be an active part of the society, they are calling for their own notion. They’re calling for something that they believe would be liberating for Iranian women, but that’s not necessarily the case for the majority of Iranian women. And I personally find it kind of insulting, because it is like you are disregarding and discrediting Iranian women.

Iranian women inside Iran are very powerful. A large proportion of Iranian women—or the majority of Iranian women, actually it’s a high percentage—go to colleges and they’re highly educated. We have women in business, we have women in medicine and universities, and women are a very active part of the society, so they know how to pursue reforms. For example, there is this case. You can see online that there is civil disobedience happening inside Iran without any hashtags or calls from outside, and it is helping women here. For example, in my town, riding a bicycle for women was not by law forbidden, but culturally there were a group of extra conservative religious people in Esfahan who were against riding bicycles for women, and they were calling for that to happen, they were saying that we’re not going to allow that. Women did not take to Twitter to talk about it. They did not make a fuss about it and start running a protest. What they did instead was, a lot of women, many of them in full hijab and full covering, started riding their bicycles through the city.  And now it has become an absolute normal scene in my city, and those conservative groups cannot oppose it anymore. This is how civil disobedience and pursuing reform works. Because a lot of the things we see, for example, that the government is actually imposing or implementing comes from the fact that there is a large proportion of the population that believes in those things.

So, we need education; it’s a progress, it’s a process of reforming and educating women and educating men about women’s rights. It doesn’t happen by a hashtag revolution and just taking to the streets. And then it’s very easy for these protests to get violent, and there are people who abuse it. It starts with slogans for women’s rights, but it ends up with slogans against establishment and calling for the overthrowing of the establishment. So, a lot of women don’t want to be a part of that simply because they see how this is hijacked, how this is exaggerated by Western media and social media as well. And so, they see the realities, and they see those reflections, and they don’t want to be a part of it. But they do their job for seeking reform and educating their family members and being an active part of this process of bringing change to their society.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: So, aside from the Iranian expats who were getting a lot of attention and speaking out on behalf of all Iranians, you have major celebrities sharing the Mahsa Amini hashtag. What do you make of the participation of celebrities, Hollywood stars, and recording artists? And how much do they really know about the situation inside Iran? Are they getting anything wrong?

SETAREH SADEGHI: Well, while I hope a lot of them have the good intention of supporting Iranian women—and it’s only out of ignorance, not that they have been paid or supported by the U.S. government to do that—I think it’s very hypocritical, because they didn’t talk about how sanctions have been hurting Iranian people and Iranian women and taking opportunities away from them. For example, as an academic, like a lot of my colleagues have experienced that their papers, their academic publications are not even considered, only because they come from Iran. That’s also a form of injustice. I mean, that affects only the academia in Iran, but sanctions affect ordinary people. They are really affecting ordinary Iranians and making it impossible, for example, people with cancer to provide their medicines, to find their medicines. A lot of medical companies refuse to sell Iran medicine, citing U.S. sanctions, because there are a lot of European companies who just do not want to stand against the U.S. pressure to abide by these sanctions, so they just refuse to sell medicine. It’s not always directly from those companies; it’s also because of the international sanctions on Iranian banks that make it impossible for Iran to buy those medicines. So, there are a lot of factors involved that are making it impossible. So, I personally—and I’m sure a lot of people—find it really hypocritical.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: Well, you mentioned some violence taking place. We’ve seen police officers be killed and a number of deaths, as well as what appears to be armed clashes on the Iranian-Iraqi border. Are these protests turning violent, and are they being infiltrated by violent elements who actually have very little interest in women’s rights?

SETAREH SADEGHI: Yes, that’s unfortunately the case. Iranian women rightfully wanted to protest and take to the streets and make a statement to the state, which I think they have already made, but there were elements who infiltrated it and started violence, like attacks on public property, even on people’s property. They burned people’s cars, there were shootings, and a lot of people have died in these protests, many of them who were women. And it’s not everyone died because of police shootings or police crackdowns. A lot of those people died because of the thugs and mobs that were involved in these protests. And obviously, like you said, they don’t care about women’s rights. They have another agenda to follow.

And this is also another reason a lot of women who maybe initially were protesting took a line to talk about that, that this is absolutely not what women want, and it’s not supporting women’s rights. But there were also, like I said, peaceful protests going on, and they didn’t receive crackdowns, obviously, because they weren’t as violent. In universities and on different streets where people just were peacefully protesting without burning things down. But with those infiltrations, it became very difficult to keep them peaceful.

And, also, you asked me about the Kurdish environment, right?

MAX BLUMENTHAL: Yeah, Mahsa Amini was Kurdish, and many of the protests have taken place in Kurdish areas, if I’m not incorrect. So, how is the Kurdish issue influencing these protests?

SETAREH SADEGHI: Yeah, well, it appears that one of Mahsa Amini’s cousins was a member of one of these Kurdish separatist movements which have also carried out terrorist acts, but obviously she had nothing to do with these people. But this cousin abused or exploited his relation[ship] with Mahsa Amini, to say that this was to [be] portrayed as an ethnic issue. But Mahsa’s family, including her uncle, spoke out and said that ‘This has nothing to do with our ethnicity. We are Kurdish, but this is about Iran and women’s rights. It has nothing to do with our ethnicity. This involves everyone.’

But different leaders of Kurdish movements inside Iran and outside, like the ones in Iraqi Kurdistan as well, started saying that they were planning for the protests, and they called for people to take to the streets.  And even the slogan that has become popular for this movement, which is translated into “Women, Life, Liberty,” that’s a popular Kurdish slogan. And it’s beautiful and people relate to it, but even the slogan came from these Kurdish ethnic groups that were involved, and by now one of the cities at the border witnessed attacks on police stations by some of these Kurdish elements. And Iran started—because they were funded and armed from outside Iran, from Iraqi Kurdistan—Iran also started attacking their bases in Iraq. And just recently, just yesterday, a lot of people, at least, I think about 11 people died in these attacks. But the IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] has made it clear that they won’t stop until they just back down.

And I think it’s also important to know that I have Kurdish family members and they do not see themselves a part of it at all. So, it’s not about the ethnicity. It’s about a group funded by outside sources wanting to exploit these protests and break a rock on Iran and the society.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: Well, those Kurdish separatists on the Iraqi side of the border are part of the Barzani clan, right?  Which has been historically backed by the U.S. and armed by the U.S.

SETAREH SADEGHI: Yeah, and Mossad at some time. Yeah, that’s true.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: And the Israeli Mossad.

SETAREH SADEGHI: Yeah, that’s why. And Iranian people have a really bitter memory of their activities in Iran. They have killed a lot of people within the Kurdish region. And they have been given a platform by, for example, BBC Persian and other propaganda by the British government and the U.S. government, which, again, doesn’t resonate with what’s going on in Iran and makes a lot of Iranians angry, because it’s really not about ethnicity at all. I mean, Mahsa Amini’s family made it very clear that they consider themselves Iranian before anything and it’s really not about ethnicity. But these people are totally disregarding that. They don’t care about the hair case or the case of women; they’re just exploiting it to create chaos inside Iran and make it very difficult for Iranian people to take part in those protests because they can be easily exploited.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: And we saw rather small protests in Cuba in 2021 backed by the U.S., staged by people who’d been involved in US embassy programs, be exploited by the Biden administration to justify not returning to the normalization deal that the Obama administration had hashed out with the Cuban government. Do you think these protests will have a similar effect, and will provide the Biden administration with justification for not returning to the JCPOA Iran deal that the Obama administration and the Iranian government agreed to?

SETAREH SADEGHI: Absolutely. And not only that, I think it gives more justification for the US government to impose even more sanctions on Iranian people, which, as I said, and the UN also acknowledges that the unilateral coercive measures by the United States are hurting ordinary people in Iran, especially women.  I mean, they’re taking a lot of opportunities away from women.  So, yeah, that’s why this is another reason for me, for example, and a lot of people in Iran and a lot of women inside Iran, that if these protests are going to lead to more sanctions, which seems to be the case already, they don’t want to be a part of this.

MAX BLUMENTHAL: And do you think that these protests and the attendant violence could prove destabilizing to Iran’s internal security or expand in any way?

SETAREH SADEGHI: Well, by now the protests are almost finished and everyone is talking about how there are no longer massive protests. And even on outlets, especially Persian-speaking TV, for example, like BBC or Manoto or VOA Persian, they tried hard to say that the protests are still going on.  And I was checking the hashtags today and there are still millions of hashtags for what’s going on in Iran, but if you go on the streets and just walk around, even in Tehran by now there’s really nothing significant happening. In Esfahan it’s almost over. It’s very insignificant, and that’s something that you will hear from a lot of people who live here, and actually in certain neighborhoods, if you walk you would never see anything. I had a friend of my family saying that if a tourist comes to Iran at this time and they go walk around Esfahan, they will believe that whatever they heard on social media or mainstream media was absolutely fake. That’s how normal life is just going on in Iran, and things are gradually going back to normal. Even the Internet crackdown eased today, and that’s why I’ve been able to do this interview.

MAX BLUMENTHAL:  Well, looks like at this point the medium is the message. Setareh Sadeghi, thanks so much for joining us at The Grayzone and keeping us informed.

SETAREH SADEGHI:  Thank you for having me and giving me a platform, as someone who lives in Iran, to have a voice.