As Iran’s presidential vote looms, tensions boil over renewed headscarf crackdown
Associated PressDUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Seemingly every afternoon in Iran’s capital, police vans rush to major Tehran squares and intersections to search for women with loose headscarves and those who dare not to wear them at all. Iran’s national police chief, Gen. Ahmad Reza Radan, has alleged without providing evidence that the country’s enemies plan to transform the nation’s culture by encouraging women to avoid the veil. Already, “tens of thousands of women have had their cars arbitrarily confiscated as punishment for defying Iran’s veiling laws,” Amnesty International said in March. “Others have been prosecuted and sentenced to flogging or prison terms or faced other penalties such as fines or being forced to attend ‘morality’ classes.” On Saturday, police said they would release some 8,000 vehicles held over women not wearing the hijab in them for the Eid al-Ghadir holiday marked by Shiites. Meanwhile, the imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize laureate Narges Mohammadi, a prominent women’s rights activist, has issued a call from prison urging a boycott of the presidential vote, saying it only supports “a regime that believes in repression, terror and violence.” At a recent Friday prayers in Tehran, women uniformly wore the chador while attending, as they always do.