Protests in Iran – Guyana beware

Oct 01, 2022 Editorial

Kaieteur News – Peel back the layers and it is more than about quarrels over a shawl over the head, a hijab. In Iran, the flare of sharp protests has attracted the attention of the world, with many women in the forefront of the demonstrations (“Women take centre stage in anti-government protests shaking Iran” – New York Times, September 26). Though violence has seeped into the protests against the Iranian Government, the women have kept up the fight. It involves so much more than about compulsory headwear for women venturing out into public spaces.

The first thing to be said is that it takes a lot of force to shake up things in Iran. The government of clerics and their guardsmen are usually very good at keeping things under wraps, locking down dissent, in a hurry. In summary, there is neither patience nor tolerance for those essential ingredients so highly prized by the Western world. Things like peaceful protests, and daring to raise an assertive and courageous voice, against the power of government. In Iran, engaging oneself in such activities in a high-risk one, for the men in charge can be unmoving and ruthless. This is what the protestors are up against, and the cost can be steep at the individual and family levels.

Though the world may be fixed on the protests as an expression of objection and resistance against the legal requirement on the wearing of the hijab, they (protests) involve much more. This was what was conformed by the strapline to the New York Times caption, which noted that, “grievances against a repressive regime go far beyond the hijab.” These grievances include: “a collapsing economy, brazen corruption, suffocating repression and social restrictions handed down by a handful of elderly clerics.”

Two of those grievances caught our eye, one because it is the norm in Guyana, and the other because it is feared. The “brazen corruption” in Iran, and the cause of lengthy protests, is what Guyanese have lived within government after government, but never at the level that it is today. We are further intrigued that there is this development of “brazen corruption” in a country run almost exclusively by highly religious men. If they, or as is more likely their circle of insiders (also devout), can be targeted and exposed in this global fashion for something like massive corruption, then the prospects for incorruptibility, or something closer to it in Guyana, looks rather farfetched, meaning, out of reach. In other words, if “brazen corruption”, which sounds like openly rampant corruption, can occur in theocratic Iran, then a more secular oriented place like Guyana, with its own history of chronic corruption, is doomed to failure.

We at this paper are not too optimistic that corruption in Guyana will abate anytime soon. It is now too widespread and too deep-seated. The oil, with its host of enriching offshoots, has made that possible, and because we already had, and presently have so many, politicians who are scoundrels of the first order, the corruption outlook in Guyana looks particularly grim. It is how the new day-to-day reality of Guyana serves up ample proof. For we have politicians deceiving, concealing, and sliding all over the place when pushed to provide straight, simple answers. It is usually a powerful indication that matters are not being handled in an honest and clean manner.

The second aspect of the grievances that we noted was that Iranians exist in “a collapsing economy”. This is staggering in an oil rich country, and one that has been producing oil for decades, and which still has some of the largest reserves of crude. As much as we understand that American sanctions have put a huge dent in the Iranian economy, our thinking is that sanctions alone cannot be responsible, but mismanagement, and the same “brazen corruption” spoken of earlier, and which has bedeviled other oil producing nations in Africa and Latin America. Almost everywhere, there is oil, corruption is a leading byproduct, and national economies are devastated.

This is what we hope that Guyana would avoid, what we protest daily about, fight against, in this paper. We prefer to call-out, so that matters and relations don’t deteriorate, as in Iran.