First large protests in Iran since deadly crackdown
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Bye. This is the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service.
I'm Chris Barrow, and in the early hours of Sunday, the 22nd of February, these are our main stories. University students in Iran protest against the government again for the first time since last month's deadly crackdown. President Trump says he's increasing his worldwide tariff to 15% after the US Supreme Court struck down many of his previous trade levies. And there's controversy at the Berlin Film Festival after the head of the jury said cinema should stay out of politics. Also in this podcast... When I used to work, I had a lot of money left for travel, for some fun. But now, almost all my income goes to food. We look at how Russia has changed over four years of the Ukraine war, and what do the Epstein files tell us about the patriarchy?
Let's start in Iran.
Let's start in Iran. Students at several Iranian universities have been protesting against the government again, the first large-scale rallies since last month's deadly crackdown by the authorities. Thousands of people are known to have been killed in the repression. The true figure could be much higher. The BBC has verified footage of demonstrators marching on Saturday on the campus of the Sharif University of Technology in Tehran. Crowds chanted death to the dictator, a reference to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other anti-government slogans. Scaffolds were later seen breaking out between them and government supporters. A sit-in was held at another Tehran university, and a rally was also reported in the north-east.
I asked Bahman Kalbasi from the BBC's Persian service what we know about the scale of these recent demonstrations. What we have seen in the last few days really is an extremely shocking number of families, friends, and also neighbors of each of those killed in Iran spread around small cities, major towns, and also major cities. coming together to commemorate the loss and turning those gatherings into protest. And it has taken in forms of dancing near where they have laid their loved ones to rest. It has turned into somewhat of protests and marches in some cities. And the very same slogans against the Supreme Leader, against the entire Islamic Republic that we heard 40 days ago, right on the days of the massacre, January 8th and January 9th, were all repeated.
So... If the hope of the government of Iran was that with that massacre, they have shut down protests and have instilled the kind of fear that would prevent people from repeating it, that has clearly failed. But what we have seen in the last few days, in the last 24 hours, we've seen this spread to a few major elite universities in Tehran, Sharif University, University of Tehran. Polytechnic University. And these three universities are sort of leading indicators of how much the society, especially students in these universities, are ready to risk it again. And they clearly are. And so that just gives you an indication of that what we've heard from a lot of observers inside Iran, especially in the last month or so, that they have remarked that nothing is going to go back to pre-January 8th, January 9th, given the scale of the massacre, is very true.
The society has changed.
What sparked the recent protests among students in Iran?
Iranian public is furious and infuriated in ways that has never been seen before. And that anger and that mourning, that sense of loss, that sense of shock, of how much the regime was ready to employ the kind of brutality that none of us even thought possible, has changed Iran and has changed the public. Has the government responded yet to these protests? Not with the sort of violence that we've seen before, but we should not... Expect them to, you know, hold fire if this goes out to major streets and major cities again. So they obviously are careful at this point not to immediately employ the kind of violence they did on January 8th and 9th because everybody's watching in ways that has never been, you know, recorded before.
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