A trusted friend called me from Vanak Square tonight and reported what he witnessed with his own eyes: three morality police officers grabbed a young woman carrying shopping bags by her arm and shoved her into the back of a green-and-white police van in front of a stunned crowd her only crime being a spring coat deemed "too short" and a headscarf that had slipped back an inch on her hair.
Tonight, Monday, 23 April 2007 (3 Ordibehesht 1386), spring in Tehran does not smell of blossoms or mountain rain; it smells of fear and humiliation. Since yesterday morning, when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's police commanders launched what they cynically call the "Plan to Promote Public Security," Vanak Square, Valiasr Avenue, and Tajrish have looked like occupied territory — with vans parked at every major intersection hunting down young women and men.
Today police spokesman Colonel Mehdi Ahmadi boasted to reporters that in barely forty-eight hours, officers have already dragged 278 women off the streets of Tehran and forced 231 of them to sign written confessions at police stations promising never again to appear "inadequately dressed in public."
What Happened Today, 23 April 2007, Across Tehran's Squares
278 women detained and over 1,300 accosted on the street: According to police statements confirmed today, nearly 300 women have been arrested since the weekend for wearing fitted spring overcoats (manteaus), cropped trousers, or colorful headscarves, while another 1,347 women have been stopped and issued formal warnings.
Barbershops and clothing boutiques raided over "Western haircuts": Alongside the war on women's coats, reports from witnesses say police are raiding men's barbershops for giving "Western-style" spiky haircuts and threatening shopkeepers who sell T-shirts printed with English words.
Plainclothes squads threatened for next week: Officials warned today that the spring crackdown is only the beginning and announced that starting next week, "plainclothes police will go into action" inside shopping malls and streets.
From the Betrayal of March 1979 to the Vans of Vanak Square Tonight
A trusted friend who took a shared taxi home from Vanak Square tonight told me that an older woman sitting beside him looked out the window at a line of female police officers in black chadors and whispered to no one in particular, "Twenty-eight years they have been fighting our hair, and they still haven't won."
Her words take us straight back to March 8, 1979 when tens of thousands of Iranian women marched through the snow in Tehran to resist Khomeini's first mandatory hijab decree, while regime thugs attacked them chanting Ya roosari, ya toosari ("Either the headscarf or a blow to the head"). And what did Iran's leftist parties and intellectuals do that week in 1979? They abandoned Iran's women in the street, dismissing women's rights over their own bodies as a "bourgeois distraction from the anti-imperialist struggle." Every woman shoved into a police van in Vanak Square today is paying the price for that 1979 betrayal. Yet according to the trusted friend who watched the scene in Vanak Square tonight, as that young girl defiantly pushed her colorful scarf back and the van door slammed shut on her, one thing has never been more certain: one day, the women of Iran will bring this entire regime down over this piece of cloth.
