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By Hiedeh Farmani
TEHRAN: The police force faced
increasing criticism this week for their handling of a nationwide
crackdown aimed at making women abide by Iran’s Islamic dress
code.
Thousands of women have been
warned and hundreds arrested for wearing overly loose headscarves or
excessively tight coats, prompting warnings in the press that the
authorities should be focusing on other economic priorities.
Even the overall head of the
judiciary, Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi, who is appointed by
supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, cautioned police against
heavy-handed actions against women found to have broken the rules.
“Hauling women and young people
to the police station will have no use except to cause damage to
society,” the reformist Etemad Melli newspaper quoted Shahroudi as
telling a meeting of local governors.
“Tough measures on social
problems will backfire and have counterproductive effects,” he
warned.
Witnesses have said that the
drive, launched last Saturday, has not been universally popular on
Tehran’s streets. Parents of the women apprehended in particular
boldly made their feelings clear to the police.
Reformist newspapers and the ISNA
student news agency reported that 2,000 students at a prestigious
university in the southern city of Shiraz staged a protest on Sunday
night over new restrictions on conduct and clothing.
The protests were triggered by a
new code of conduct banning the students from wearing shorts and
sleeveless vests outside rooms in their strictly segregated
dormitories and an extended curfew.
It is not clear whether the new
directive was in line with the nationwide clampdown on dressing,
which also applies to men.
Critics in the media also
complained that the government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
had more important issues to deal with, citing the country’s
soaring inflation and high unemployment rates.
“Mr President, I wonder if what
the police, supervised by your interior ministry, are doing to women
stems from a misunderstanding?” asked Masih Alinejad, a columnist
in the Etemad Melli daily.
“Or have people’s major
problems of injustice and poverty been resolved?” he asked.
Alinejad recalled that Ahmadinejad
asked during his 2005 electoral campaign whether the problem “in
our country was two strands of women’s hair or fighting poverty,
creating jobs and implementing justice?”
Two-thirds of Iran’s 70-million
population is under 30 and the official unemployment rate stands at
about 11 percent. Economists have warned against rising inflation,
estimated to hit 24 percent in the current Iranian year.
Even the hard-line daily Kayhan
said sarcastically that “being badly veiled is not the only
vice” in the country.
“There are major vices such as
going to bed hungry, being deprived of higher education,
unemployment and the inability of a large number of people to
provide for their basic needs,” it said.
“The officials should prove
they have plans to resolve these as well,” wrote Kayhan, whose
chief editor is also an appointee of Khamenei.
Some conservatives have applauded
the crackdown as important at a time when many women are pushing the
boundaries of what is acceptable by showing off naked ankles and
fashionably styled hair beneath their headscarves.
But Ahmadinejad’s government on
Tuesday sought to distance itself from the clampdown, which it said
was being carried out by police as “agents of the judiciary.”
“The police work as agents of
the judiciary to confront crimes. The government as an executive
body does not interfere in the affairs of the judiciary,”
government spokesman Gholam Hossein Elham told reporters.
Iran has issued 3,500 warnings
nationwide and detained around 200 women in the new drive launched
last Saturday, according to the latest police figures quoted by the
local media.
The campaign is aimed primarily
at women seen to infringe the rules of covering their heads and
bodily contours. These rules have been in place since the Islamic
revolution in 1979.
--AFP
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