“We’ve seen all of this before,” sighs my Iranian friend, sitting on the bar stool next to me in Joburg as we discuss the violence in Iran. “But,” he adds, “the anger is real.”
All of the country’s 31 provinces have been affected, with a death toll in clashes with security forces already topping 5,000.
In many respects the current revolt against the Shia regime, established in 1979, bears many of the hallmarks of the past decade of popular uprisings. That applies especially to 2022/2023, with young women flouting morality laws, discarding headscarves and lighting cigarettes off burning images of the dictator, and with brave unarmed masses standing against security forces who shoot, kidnap, torture and execute them.
But some commentators are now saying that Iran has never been this fragile, due to Israel’s demonstration last year in the “12-day War” that the Iranian state is not the regional power it was thought to be, combined with the loss of the allied Assad regime in Syria in 2024.
The collapse of the economy in recent months has devastated all but the elites.
We have also seen a return of the gold lion-and-sun flag of pre-revolutionary Iran — and the prominent support of Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, 65, a member of the dynasty deposed almost five decades ago. He lives in exile in the US, raising the possibility of a US-led regime change, as occurred in Iran in 1953 when the democratically elected prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh, was toppled.
Pahlavi has promised, if given the chance, to guide a transition to multiparty democracy, end Iran’s nuclear weapons programme, normalise relations with Israel and expand that country’s network of anti-extremist Abraham Accord countries. That pact was a series of normalisation agreements signed in 2020 between Israel, the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan.
Amid reports of Iranian supreme leader Ali Khamenei preparing a bolthole in friendly Moscow, the internet is abuzz with wild claims of a dark Zionist and Yankee conspiracy behind the revolt. These refer to several hospitals and medical centres being attacked by “rioters”. The Iranian military warned that arsonists faced execution as “enemies of God”.
But though about 8,000 death sentences were reportedly passed, Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi said on January 14 that there would be “no hanging today or tomorrow”, and US President Donald Trump has scaled back fighter and bomber squadrons which he had deployed to neighbouring Qatar while threatening strikes.
Despite a nationwide internet blackout from January 8, protesters have reported scores of martyrs, such as 23-year-old textile and fashion design student Rubina Aminian. She was shot in the back of the head at close range during a peaceful protest in Tehran. Human rights observers in Iran say about 26,000 people, including minors, have been arrested.
What astounds most Muslim observers is the burning by massed protesters of Qurans, shrines and mosques. This is seen as unconscionable, that Muslims could destroy Islamic icons, so it is regarded as a clear sign of CIA-Mossad fingerprints.
Iran has periodically been gripped by waves of unrest since the student demonstrations in 1999 against the closure of a reformist newspaper. Subsequent revolts have turned on diverse issues, from petrol rationing or cost of living increases to support for a reformist presidential candidate or sympathy with the Arab Spring. Yet the regime has managed to vigorously suppress all previous risings.
In September 2022, the beating to death by the “morality police” of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini escalated into months of nationwide protests, demanding an end to the theocratic regime. In unprecedented scenes, under the slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom”, enraged women ripped off their headscarves, burnt them in public and hacked their hair short in mourning.
Running street battles resulted in about 550 killed, more than 20,000 detained and many executed, according to human rights groups. Some claim the death toll is as high as 20,000 — but this is unverified.
That the current protests started in Tehran’s bazaar is almost unique (apart from an October 2012 protest by bazaaris against the devaluation of the rial, the Iranian currency). The trader class has traditionally been the staunchest defender of the regime. That the protests spread to the holy city of Qom, the theological keystone of the ruling party, has also been a shock.
And yet Iran is not the 99% Muslim country that the authorities claim it is. A survey by the Group for Analysing and Measuring Attitudes in Iran in 2022 showed dramatically different results: 37.9% Shia, 17.3% nonreligious theist, 16.1% humanist, 6.6% no belief, 6.5% atheist and 4.9% Sunni, with tiny spiritual, agnostic, Zoroastrian, Sufi, Christian, Yarsani, Bahá’í and Jewish groups.
The book Nonbelievers, Apostates and Atheists in the Muslim World (2024) stresses that these findings, showing that almost half of Iranians are nonreligious, confirm the country’s deep religious-secular divide, while a confidential 2023 survey by the ministry for Islamic guidance & culture found that 72.9% of Iranians felt that clerics should stay out of politics.
Though the trigger of the current revolt was a 42.4% inflation rate and then the collapse of the rial on December 28, many other concerns have been bubbling under for years.
In particular, environmental mismanagement and the overextraction of water for Iran’s agricultural sector have been blamed for exacerbating six consecutive years of drought. Rainfall is down by around 80% on historical averages.
Just days prior to the protests breaking out, President Masoud Pezeshkian warned Tehran’s 15-million residents, already living under severe water restrictions, that they may “have to evacuate” the capital.
South Africa and Iran
Reza Shah Pahlavi, father of the shah who was toppled in 1979, had been forcibly deposed during World War 2 as a Nazi sympathiser and detained in a Cape Dutch-style mansion in Houghton Estate in Joburg, where he died in 1944. The house is still maintained by Iran as a museum.
Diplomatic correspondence in the national archives in Tshwane shows that the apartheid regime established relations with Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in the mid-1950s, and sold uranium for Iran’s nascent nuclear energy programme, then backed by the US, as was a similar Atoms for Peace programme in South Africa.
Though relations with Pretoria were severed after the 1979 revolution, in 1987 it was reported that US investigators were probing evidence that Iran, desperate for weapons in its debilitating war against Iraq, had secretly bought arms from South Africa in exchange for huge quantities of sanctions-busting oil.
Pretoria’s post-1994 democratic government re-established diplomatic relations with Tehran, reflecting both capitals’ anti-imperialist ideological stance. This was consolidated last January when Iran joined the Brics grouping.
But the recent controversies over South African defence force chief Gen Rudzani Maphwanya shooting his mouth off, unauthorised, in Tehran, and Iran’s participation in naval exercises off South Africa against the orders of President Cyril Ramaphosa, have raised concern about civil-military relations as well as incompetence and possibly disloyalty at senior level.
Ramaphosa’s order may have been misinterpreted. Three Iranian warships — the corvette Naghdi, the forward base ship Makran and the expeditionary base ship Shahid Mahdavi — were clearly seen at sea during the exercise involving South African, Chinese, Russian and Emirati warships. But their presence may have indicated that they were merely observing, alongside Brazil, Egypt and others.
The exercise in itself was hardly significant, as Brics navies lack smoothly interoperable tactical doctrines, communications systems and encryption protocols.
Ironically, the salient real experience South Africa has in common with Iran regards sanctions.
Sanctions have wreaked devastation, not on the elites, but on Iran’s largely reformist-minded entrepreneurial middle class, the base of Pezeshkian’s limited power. About 9-million people fell out of the middle class into the working class between 2011 and 2019, according to the book by Narges Bajoghli and others, How Sanctions Work: Iran and the Impact of Economic Warfare (2024).
It argues that sanctions strengthened the Iranian state, impoverished its population, increased state repression and escalated Iran’s military posture toward the US and its allies in the region. Isolating the regime has widened the inequality gap, diverted reformists’ minds from political and social improvements to bread-and-butter issues and strengthened the hardliner clerical-military complex.
Yet the fact that the US, Israel and the Abraham Accord members in the Middle East are positioning themselves to benefit from the potential fall of an Iranian regime that has been a thorn in their sides for decades does not make them the lever and fulcrum that might topple the mullahs.
The mass-mobilised Iranian people themselves are the lever, and the apparently immovable fulcrum is the theocratic state’s intransigence and brutality. If the lever is big enough, the outcome is inevitable.
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