Iran’s Supreme Leader Blames ‘Foreign Enemies’ For Domestic Unrest

Since the collapse of a building in Abadan, that has been blamed on shoddy construction made possible by corruption among city officials and contractors, dozens of cities in Iran have experienced protests against that culture of corruption, and these have metastasized into protests against the regime itself. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has been quick to defend the regime, claiming that “foreign enemies” have been spreading lies in order to overthrow the government. A report on the Supreme Leader’s attempt to blame outsiders for Iran’s unrest can be found here: “Iran’s Khamenei Blames Unrest on ‘Enemies’ out to Overthrow Islamic Republic,” Algemeiner, June 4, 2022:

Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Saturday blamed recent protests in Iran on foreign “enemies” seeking to overthrow the Islamic Republic.

Dictatorships like to paint their opponents as tools of foreigners. The most famous examples of this were the purge trials in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, where the state prosecutors claimed that those charged in the trials of being “wreckers” of the Soviet Union were following the orders of their foreign masters — the British and the Americans. It is a much more acceptable narrative – the foreigners are master manipulators, the foreigners are to blame — than admitting that domestic protestors have sufficient reasons of their own to oppose the regime; they don’t need to be prompted or encouraged by foreigners..

But no foreigners were marching in Abadan, in Khermanshah, Khore Shad, Andimeshk, Dorood, Izeh, and a dozen other cities. The protesters came in two waves. In mid-May the first wave consisted of people protesting the removal of subsidies from food and medicine. Overnight, on May 12, the price of flour was increased by 500%. At the same time, the price of other basic foodstuffs – eggs, milk, chicken, cooking oil – increased by 300%. The result was panic and despair in the Iranian population, almost two-thirds of which now lives below the poverty line. The second wave of protestors appeared when the building in Abadan collapsed, killing 37. Those protests were directed at the massive corruption that enables well-connected builders t and erect unsafe buildings, sometimes by directly bribing city officials. Building codes are not observed; the result is the collapse of buildings, and loss of life, as at Abadan in late May.

Today, the enemies’ most important hope for striking a blow at the country is based on popular protests,” Khamenei said, referring to week-long protests over the collapse of a building in southwestern Iran last month that killed 37 people.

Foreigners had nothing to do with the 300% rise in eggs, milk, and chicken, and the 500% rise in the price of flour on May 1. These were the result of decisions by the regime. Nor have foreigners been responsible for Iran’s decision to spend tens of billions of dollars on its nuclear programs, including its vast underground facilities built inside a mountain at Fordow and underground at Natanz. Nor are foreigners responsible for the billions more that the Islamic Republic has over many years chosen to spend on its network of proxies, including the Houthis in Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Kata’ib Hezbollah militia in Iraq. No foreigners made the Islamic Republic spend $34 billion dollars to help Bashar Assad win his civil war.

“They hope to turn the people against the Islamic establishment and the Islamic Republic through psychological work, activities on the internet and cyberspace… and by spending money and recruiting mercenaries.”

“They” – meaning those foreigners – have actually done very little to unsettle “the Islamic establishment and the Islamic Republic.” It is Iranian exiles who have been working, without much foreign support, to undermine the Islamic Republic through disseminating on social media news about the regime’s atrocities (such as the torture and killing of prisoners at Evin Prison, the hanging of homosexuals, the killing of protestors), its economic failures (Iran’s currency has lost 80% of its value in the last three years; nearly two-thirds of Iranians now live below the poverty line), its religious fanaticism (emblemized by the religious police (whose mission is to impose Islamic dress codes and norms of conduct in public, particularly regarding the hijab; the patrol also enforces Islamic codes of conduct in public, such as preventing the mingling of unrelated men and women without a male guardian for the latter, and preventing other types of behavior that are un-Islamic).

“But the enemies’ calculation is as wrong as many earlier ones,” he said in a televised speech on the 33rd anniversary of the death of the leader of Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

How likely is it that the protests over the colossal overnight rise in foodstuffs will stop? As of now, three weeks into those protests, they show no signs of winding down. It is the government that will have to back down, and reinstate the subsidies that it had removed from eggs, milk, flour, chicken on May 12. Khamenei’s confidence in the regime’s stability is misplaced. The suffering of the Iranians who now live below the poverty line has just been compounded by the rise in food prices; many Iranians feel they have nothing left to lose, and are out on the streets, calling for “death to Khamenei” and the end of the regime. 

Authorities have blamed the collapse of the 10-storey residential and commercial building in Abadan on local corruption and lax safety and say 13 people, including mayors and other officials, have so far been arrested for construction violations,“ Protesters, however, say the disaster stemmed from government negligence and entrenched graft and have chanted slogans against officials, including Khamenei.

Iranians have reported disrupted internet services, an apparent attempt to stop the use of social media to organize rallies and disseminate videos. Authorities have warned people to follow just official media and eschew “rumors” from social media.

It has proved impossible to keep an entire nation from finding out what is on the Internet. Iranians will find a way to inform themselves, even when the authorities try to ban internet service altogether. Authoritarian regimes have learned – see Putin’s vain attempt to prevent Russians from learning the truth about the war in Ukraine, or Chinese attempts to shut down the sources of independent information its own citizens can access about Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the Uighurs.

Will the Iranian regime be able to withstand the current protests over the colossal rise in food prices, and over the Abadan building collapse that has been correctly attributed to the nexus of corrupt politicians and unscrupulous builders? It did, after all, manage to weather the nation-wide protests in 2019 that began when the government raised fuel prices by 50-100%, protests that then morphed into a display of general disgust with the regime. But there is a difference between the protests in 2019 and now. The price of fuel is important to wellbeing, but the price of food is even more important. And Iranians in 2022 are in a much more parlous state economically than they were in 2019. The Supreme Leader is running scared. He can’t blame his own regime. He needs a scapegoat. So he blames the evil foreigners. It’s worked before. But this time, for how long?