An official involved
with enforcement of Iran’s strict Islamic dress code for women confirmed Monday
that the country’s morality police force had been shut down, the first
concession by the government in nearly three months of protests set off by the
death of a woman being held by the unit.
اضافة اعلان
However,
officials have made clear that the laws requiring women in public to cover
their hair with a headscarf, or hijab, and their bodies with long, loose
clothing remain firmly in place, leaving open questions about whether and how
those laws may be enforced moving forward.
The senior
official, Ali Khan Mohammadi, spokesperson for the committee that oversees
enforcement of moral values, said Monday that the morality police had been
abolished. The first word that the unit, which was charged with enforcing the
dress code, had been disbanded came over the weekend from the country’s
attorney general, Mohammad Javad Montazeri.
Mohammadi said
Monday that senior government officials will now decide whether the morality
police will take another form, adding that there were “newer, more updated and
detailed methods” to promote the hijab and morality.
The unit was one
of the main triggers for the protests that began in mid-September after the
death of Mahsa Amini, 22, who had been arrested over dress-code violations and
was in the custody of the morality police at the time of her death. The
protests quickly morphed to encompass a broad range of discontents and calls
for an end to the system of authoritarian clerical rule that has been in place
for the past 43 years.
Since the start
of the protests, the morality police have mostly disappeared from the streets,
prompting questions about their status and the status of the so-called hijab
law they are responsible for enforcing.
Disbanding the
morality police is not likely to appease the protesters, whose demands have
gone far beyond just doing away with the mandatory headscarf and who have kept
up confrontations with the security forces across the country for nearly three
months.
Who are the morality
police and what laws do they enforce?
In the early years after the Islamic Revolution of 1979 that brought the
clerics to power, the government established a special arm of the police,
officially named the Guidance Patrol, tasked with regulating female dress and
behavior. Over the years, this unit operated under various branches of the
armed forces and in 2006 was rebranded as the morality police.
Over the past
decade, the morality police and the hijab law have become searing symbols of
the Islamic Republic’s control of women’s lives. Morality agents have been
posted in cities across the country, where they patrol the streets in
white-and-green vans.
Among their duties:
discouraging bold forms of entertainment or dress, penalizing drivers who allow
women to travel in vehicles with uncovered hair, and raiding and shutting down
businesses and concerts where people are deemed to be behaving in un-Islamic
ways.
Enforcement of the
morality codes relaxed slightly after the election in 2013 of Hassan Rouhani as
president. But with the election last June of President Ebrahim Raisi, a
hardliner, the morality police reemerged as a fixture in city squares and
shopping centers, detaining women deemed to be “badly veiled” and carting them
off in vans to police stations. The supposed violators were forced to sign
statements vowing to never disobey the dress code again, and they were required
to attend a re-education course.
After Amini’s
death, the US government imposed new sanctions on the morality police for
abusing women and protesters.
Abolishing the morality police is the government’s first major concession to the protesters since the movement began. But it is not clear that the change will have much impact: scrapping the force might be seen as a measure of the government’s desperation in the face of mass protests.
The abolishment of the morality police has raised
the question of whether the Iranian government might now decide to loosen the
Islamic dress code for women or, at least, ease up on enforcement by some other
means aside from the morality police.
Since Amini’s
death, morality agents have rarely been seen and many women are appearing in
public every day without the hijab in an act of civil disobedience. But other
security forces, including the notoriously brutal Basij militiamen, have beaten
and arrested women deemed to be defying the hijab law, videos posted on social
media show.
In his comments
Monday, Mohammadi confirmed that “the work of the morality police and social
safety, which were operating under the security forces and by the order of the
judiciary and prosecutor’s office, has been terminated for now”. He emphasized
that the authorities were considering “newer, more updated and detailed
methods” for enforcing morality laws.
When Montazeri said
over the weekend that the morality police had been shut down, he added that the
judiciary would continue to monitor social behavior, leaving open the
possibility that the mandatory hijab law would continue to be enforced.
A day earlier,
Montazeri had said the judiciary was working with other authorities to draft a
bill “related to the field of chastity and hijab”, and was expected to reach an
agreement within 15 days.
Until now, the
government’s response to the protesters has been to denounce them and use
violence to deter them. Abolishing the morality police is the government’s
first major concession to the protesters since the movement began. But it is
not clear that the change will have much impact: scrapping the force might be
seen as a measure of the government’s desperation in the face of mass protests.
Many Iranians
insist that the move is only an effort by the government to divert attention
from a crisis that has left at least 400 people dead, including 50 minors,
according to rights groups. The UN has said about 14,000 people have been
arrested.
“For ordinary
Iranians, the morality police are now irrelevant,” said Hadi Ghaemi, executive
director of the Center for Human Rights in Iran, an independent organization
based in New York. The recent wave of unrest effectively disbanded the unit, he
said, as it probably had to be armed and redeployed to combat violence in the
streets.
On social media,
activists have said that the action is too little, too late.
“Their grievances
now run far deeper than just the morality police or the hijab law — this is not
why hundreds are still putting their lives on the line,” Ghaemi said of the
protesters.
“This has evolved into something much bigger that is
questioning the entire political system.”
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