The Violence That Continues After the Gunfire
Iran's crisis did not end when the gunfire stopped. It continues in grieving families, emptied kitchens and a satirist's prison sentence, while the world sees only oil, uranium and the Strait of Hormuz.
Political violence is usually remembered through its most visible moments: gunfire in a street, a body carried through a crowd, a prisoner behind bars, a mother standing beside a grave. What is harder to see is what follows, when the cameras leave, the streets are cleared and families return to homes where someone is permanently missing. The consequences of repression do not remain where the violence occurred; they enter marriages that will never take place, bedrooms that remain untouched, parents who cannot recover from burying their children, and futures that existed clearly until one bullet erased them.
Iran is living through that quieter catastrophe now.
Black January did not end when the demonstrations disappeared from international television. Twenty-five-year-old Aida Heydari should have been preparing for her wedding this September. Her fiancé, 27-year-old Abolfazl Soleimani Alamouti, was shot dead during the January protests. Instead of beginning the life they had planned together, Aida spent the following months trying to live with his absence. On 3 September, she died by suicide.
Days later came another devastating story. Danial Karimi, whose 19-year-old son Amir-Mohammad Karimi had been shot dead during protests in Marvdasht, also died by suicide. Amir-Mohammad, a former member of Iran's junior national taekwondo team, had been nineteen years old, at an age when life should have been opening before him rather than ending.
Casualty figures can tell us how many people were killed. They cannot tell us how many lives were destroyed around each death. This is the part of political violence that rarely enters diplomatic calculations: its ability to continue long after the street has been cleaned and the blood has disappeared.
For those who remain, another pressure has entered almost every Iranian household: the struggle to afford ordinary life.
Iran possesses some of the world's largest oil and gas reserves, considerable mineral wealth, agriculture, industry and generations of highly educated people. Yet families in this extraordinarily resource-rich country increasingly struggle with rice, bread, eggs, chicken and meat. Inflation has consumed wages and savings so relentlessly that necessities once bought without much thought have become objects of calculation.
At the bleakest edge of this economic crisis lies something even more disturbing. Advertisements offering kidneys for sale have existed in Iran for years, and investigations continue to document people entering organ markets because of debt, unemployment, medical costs and financial desperation. Iran has a legally regulated system of compensated kidney donation, which must be distinguished from illegal organ trafficking, but alongside it there is evidence of desperate sellers and brokers operating in a darker marketplace.
The image is difficult to reconcile with the country beneath their feet: citizens of a nation possessing immense natural wealth reaching a point where their own bodies become one of the few assets they have left to sell.
Perhaps that helps explain the strange humor now circulating among Iranians.
Videos have appeared showing people displaying tiny quantities of groceries, announcing how much they paid and then dancing while sarcastically declaring how happy they are. Iran International documented one purchase of four eggs and a sausage costing five million rials; another showed three small bags of groceries costing close to half a month's minimum wage.
The humor works because everyone understands what lies beneath it. In a society where open anger can carry consequences, absurd enthusiasm becomes a safer form of dissent. People laugh at what would otherwise make them despair.
That makes the case of Shaker Bori particularly revealing. The popular satirist from Abadan has built an audience by turning political hypocrisy, corruption and everyday hardship into comedy. He has now been sentenced to 13 months and 20 days in prison. His response was characteristically sharp: perhaps, he suggested sarcastically, imprisoning him would finally solve the country's inflation, poverty, unemployment, injustice, theft and corruption.
The irony needs little embellishment. The problems remain; the man making jokes about them faces prison.
At the same time, compulsory-hijab enforcement continues through surveillance, prosecutions and the closure of businesses accused of violating state rules. The juxtaposition has become increasingly difficult to defend: families are struggling to maintain an adequate diet while considerable institutional attention is still directed towards the visibility of women's hair.
Iran's petrol system offers another glimpse of the same disorder of priorities. One of the world's great oil-producing nations continues to rely on quotas and tiered fuel pricing while facing recurrent supply pressures. The contradiction would be remarkable in any country; in Iran, where oil has shaped the economy and international relations for more than a century, it carries particular weight.
These conditions cannot be explained by sanctions alone, although sanctions have unquestionably damaged Iran's economy and ordinary Iranians have paid heavily for them. The Islamic Republic has also made political and economic choices of its own, including decades of expenditure on regional influence and armed allies abroad, leaving Iranian citizens with every right to ask why resources have remained available for ideological ambitions beyond their borders while economic security has become increasingly difficult to achieve at home. Yet this question of priorities leads to another, more uncomfortable one, because the way the outside world examines Iran today is strikingly different from the scrutiny applied to the country before 1979.
During the reign of Mohammad Reza Shah, Iran faced intense international attention over political prisoners, restrictions on political freedom and allegations of torture. Western journalists confronted the Shah directly, sometimes with extraordinary hostility; human-rights organizations investigated prisons and trials, foreign governments raised the treatment of dissidents, and international newspapers repeatedly returned to political repression. Such scrutiny was legitimate, and abuses committed by the state should not be denied, but neither should an entire period of Iranian history be flattened until repression becomes almost the only thing remembered about Mohammad Reza Shah's reign.
During those same decades, Iran was undergoing one of the most consequential transformations in its modern history. Universities expanded, healthcare and literacy improved, infrastructure and industries developed, women entered universities and professions in growing numbers, family law was reformed, and a predominantly rural society was moving rapidly towards modern economic and social life.
What is far harder to understand is what became of that fierce international concern for Iranian human rights after 1979. The Islamic Republic has executed political prisoners and protesters, detained lawyers, journalists and human-rights defenders, used torture and coerced confessions, restricted women's freedoms and repeatedly shut down communications during periods of unrest. International human-rights organizations and United Nations investigators continue to document these abuses, but they frequently have to work from outside the country because independent access is severely restricted.
It would therefore be inaccurate to suggest that the Islamic Republic is not investigated at all; it is. The deeper problem is that the regime can restrict access, intimidate Iranian journalists, obstruct independent reporting from scenes of repression and control which foreign journalists are permitted to operate inside the country. This creates an extraordinary imbalance: those responsible for abuses can also exercise considerable control over how those abuses are witnessed by the outside world.
The contrast with the period before 1979 is difficult to overlook. Western journalists could sit opposite Mohammad Reza Shah and challenge him directly about political prisoners. Foreign observers sought access to trials, human-rights organizations pressured his government, and the treatment of Iranian dissidents was regarded as an international issue worthy of sustained attention. The question is not whether that scrutiny should have existed; but the question is why the principle behind it appears so much weaker when confronted with the scale of repression under the Islamic Republic.
If Iranian prisoners mattered then, why should prisoners facing execution matter less now? If allegations of torture justified international outrage in the 1970s, why should torture and forced confessions become less urgent after 1979? If journalists once considered it their responsibility to confront Iran's head of state about the treatment of his opponents, why does so much of today's international conversation take place while independent journalists cannot freely enter the country and investigate what is happening for themselves?
There is a bitter irony in this historical imbalance. Mohammad Reza Shah was judged internationally not only by the country he was building but by the treatment of those who opposed him, and the Islamic Republic should be held to precisely the same standard, not a lower one because decades of executions, imprisonment and repression have made the world accustomed to hearing such reports from Iran.
Yet nearly half a century later, international discussion of the country has narrowed increasingly towards uranium enrichment, missiles, sanctions, regional proxies, oil and the Strait of Hormuz. These are serious matters; governments cannot ignore nuclear proliferation, regional security or international shipping. But when they dominate the conversation almost completely, the people who actually live in Iran begin to disappear behind the geopolitical importance of the territory they inhabit.
Diplomats calculate how much uranium the Islamic Republic can enrich, governments calculate what disruption in the Strait of Hormuz might mean for international security, and energy markets watch Iranian oil because instability can move prices around the world within hours. Inside Iran, people are making very different calculations: whether a salary can cover food and rent, whether meat can remain in the family diet, whether a joke is safe enough to publish, whether appearing without compulsory hijab will bring punishment, whether leaving the country is still possible and, in the darkest circumstances, whether selling a kidney has become one of the few remaining ways of escaping financial desperation.
Somewhere between those two sets of calculations, Iran has gradually been transformed in the international imagination from a country inhabited by nearly ninety million human beings into a security problem to be managed.
Even the language through which the country is discussed contributes to this disappearance. We repeatedly hear that “Iran threatens,” “Iran supports,” “Iran rejects” or “Iran demands” when the decisions being described are those of the Islamic Republic. Iran and the Islamic Republic are not interchangeable. Iran is an ancient civilization whose language, literature, culture and national memory extend thousands of years beyond the political system established in 1979, while millions of Iranians neither chose nor support policies conducted internationally in their name. Those who have been imprisoned, executed or shot while opposing the state can hardly be described as represented by it.
Whenever fundamental political change is discussed, the warning quickly follows that Iran could become another Syria, Iraq or Afghanistan. The danger of war, foreign intervention and state collapse is real and should never be romanticized; Iranians do not need another country to deliver freedom to them through destruction. But fear of what might happen in the future cannot become an excuse for accepting indefinitely what is happening to them now.
Aida Heydari should have been preparing for her wedding, with Abolfazl Soleimani Alamouti standing beside her. Amir-Mohammad Karimi should have been training, competing and discovering adulthood while his father, Danial Karimi, watched his son grow older. Shaker Bori should be free to make people laugh, including when his jokes make powerful people uncomfortable. Their stories belong to the Iran that becomes almost invisible whenever the country is reduced to uranium, oil and strategic waterways.
Iran is not merely a nuclear file or the Strait of Hormuz. It is a country of human beings trying to live ordinary lives under extraordinary pressure: a young woman mourning the future she lost, a father unable to bear the death of his son, a parent watching the supermarket bill rise beyond the family income, a person desperate enough to consider selling a kidney, a woman insisting that her body belongs to her, and a comedian discovering that even laughter can become politically dangerous.
The world does not have to choose between nuclear security, regional stability and Iranian human rights; a serious international order should be capable of caring about all of them. What it cannot reasonably defend is a standard in which Iranian lives appeared worthy of fierce scrutiny before 1979, yet decades of far more extensive repression have gradually become part of the background noise surrounding negotiations over nuclear programs, oil and strategic interests.
Either Iranian lives mattered then and they matter now, or the language of universal human rights was never as universal as the world claimed it to be.
Iran's oil matters, the Strait of Hormuz matters and nuclear security matters, but none of them matters more than the people of Iran.
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