Looking for Peace and not Pity

By Robert Hildman

The Sydney Morning News

February 17, 2007

I met Zarah Ghahramani on Tehran's Revolution Boulevard in June 2003, just down the road from the northern campus of the city's university. She was dressed in the tunic of all young urban women in the Islamic Republic of Iran: dark scarf drawn tight over her head, lightweight coat reaching almost to her ankles. She asked me in her accomplished English whether it would not be too impolite to inquire what I was writing in my notebook. I told her that I was gathering material for newspaper articles on Iranian politics. "I thought as much," she said without explanation, then offered her hand and spoke her name. As we walked along in the gathering dusk for a minute or more, I could only assume that Zarah had made a habit of approaching people who looked as if they might have a newspaper to report to in the West. But why?
At the intersection of Revolution and Azari, where we might courteously have parted, Zarah stopped and made some comment about the rowdy traffic. Then she added that she had a few things to say about Iranian politics. Would I listen? We sat at a kiosk not so far from where we'd met, and Zarah told her story over two hours. All around us, Tehrani mums and dads feted their children on the peculiarly flavourless ice-cream that Iranians favour, while young men in mock-Benetton tops engaged in air-courtship (the right motions, but no action) of young women dressed like Zarah. Sitting hunched over the table, Zarah spoke with astonishing candour of her involvement in reform politics at Tehran University, where she was no longer permitted to study; of imprisonment, torture, severe sexual abuse. As I learned later, her scarf concealed the regrowth of hair shorn from her head in Tehran's Evin Prison 18 months earlier: she had torn her scalp to shreds with her fingernails while awaiting her daily interrogations and had kept her hair short after her release while the wounds healed. Before approaching me, she'd satisfied herself that she was not being followed and filmed. She knew she was watched. Her days and nights were vexed by the need to take care: any infringement of Iran's rigid dress code would be harshly punished, any expression of political dissent would see her returned to Evin for a very long time, or until her interrogators judged her so cowed by certain refinements of the torture she had already endured that she could no longer imagine rebuking her government.
Her story could have been told with variation by thousands of young Iranian men, and without variation by a few young Iranian women. She was 20 and studying languages at university when first detained by state security agents late in 2001. Tehran University had been at that time a centre of student activism. Hundreds of young men and women had raised their voices in the streets around the campus, demanding freedom of choice in what they read, in what they wore, in what they wrote.
Zarah had been one of the leaders of the protests, intense in her political convictions, but not truly aware of just how hard the other side played the game. Twenty-nine days of interrogation in Evin, much of it in a blindfold, had demonstrated to her the savagery of the regime when roused.
By the time her interrogators had finished with her, she had been prepared to confess to anything at all, and confess she had. She had worked as an agent of the United States; she had accepted money from anti-regime organisations in Europe and Britain; she had committed immoral acts with leading male figures in the protest movement; she had attempted to subvert the rule of law in Iran. Her confessions were nonsense, but she signed them. "That is what happened," said Zarah at the conclusion of her story, and she added, with a bestowing gesture of her open hands, "for you to use." Over the next two weeks, Zarah nudged me and my partner, Anni, north, south, east and west in Tehran, then took us down to Shiraz and Isfahan. She introduced us to writers, artists, moviemakers, businessmen, and to her many friends and relatives. Her account of her ordeal was confirmed everywhere. In Shiraz we visited her particularly close friend, Eva, who had shaved her head to satirise the regime's phobias, and to dramatise her solidarity with Zarah. Her own boldness notwithstanding, Eva was worried for her friend, and Zarah's family was more worried still.
Watching Zarah indoors among those who cared for her, bare-headed, laughing, lampooning the regime, I could see what it was that made her friends and family so anxious. Her attachment to the liberty she craved was too intense, almost mad. Her face flashed the rage of the humiliated. Her interrogator in Evin Prison had warned her of the torments to come if she were re-arrested. One day, I felt sure, she would carry her rage outdoors to spite him, and would pay all over again. "Come to Australia," I urged her. "Apply for a study visa."
"Would that be possible?" "Maybe. We should try."
"Then they win," she said, and dismissed the idea.
Anni and I returned to Australia after our month in Iran, but remained in contact with Zarah by email and regular calls from her friend's mobile phone. What she said to me and what she wrote made it more apparent than ever that she was living on borrowed time. And this was something she would have acknowledged herself if she could have set aside her contempt for the people who had harmed her and thought straight for a moment. She spoke of her lapses from the conditions of her release from Evin, and conceded that they were becoming more frequent. She was not supposed to talk to anyone involved in anti-regime politics, for example, but she did. She was not supposed to go anywhere near the university, nor attempt to use its library, but she did. She was not supposed to sign any of the reform petitions circulating in the university precinct, but she did. My response was always a version of "Stop it!"
Then one day, a year after my return to Australia, Zarah sent an me an email to say that she wanted to get out of Iran and would accept any help I could provide. What had changed her mind? "My father," she said. He had taken her by the shoulders and made her stand in front of a mirror.
"Look!" he'd said. He wanted her to see what Evin and the relentless surveillance since her release had wrought on her face and figure. She obeyed her father: she stood there and stared. But it was not the erosion of her beauty that had persuaded Zarah to flee to Australia; it was the grief in her father's eyes, reflected above hers.
Zarah met with a sensitive and sympathetic response from the Department of Immigration. Despite her argument with Iran's regime, Zarah had expected to live her entire life there, regardless of who governed it. Australia was not a deeply meditated destination; its unnewsworthiness was an attraction of sorts. Impediments to the refugee's mission vary from nation to nation, culture to culture. In Australia in the 21st century, the resettled Muslim is up against what appears to be an orchestrated program of state-sponsored harassment. At regular intervals, one government minister or another offers views on the psychology, philosophy and priorities of Islamic militants, often followed by suggestions of ways in which the community's good Muslims might help isolate the bad Muslims. Ministers use every opportunity to remind the electorate that bad Muslims have no idea of where to draw the line, feel licensed to cut the throats of their promiscuous daughters, amputate the hands of robbers, apply the lash with reckless abandon and stone young women to death for the sin of having been raped.
Further advice is offered to a third category of Muslims - those who are good, but not good enough: they are advised to take a long, hard look at themselves; to stop abusing their women; to stop listening with any sympathy at all to Islamist rowdies and firebrands; to learn English quickly, and in general to make a greater effort to assimilate.
Zarah's experience of Australia has been shaped by this climate of harassment, but not entirely in the way that might have been expected. It has been well-wishers who have pressured her to play down the more evident features of her heritage. And no well-wisher has been busier than me.
Well before Zarah left her homeland in 2004, it had been claimed that Muslims of a certain sort were capable of drowning their own children on the high seas, if that was what it took to gain entry into Australia. Further revelations established that this dire practice was a local political concoction, but some Australians, perhaps many, remained persuaded that, under the right circumstances, Muslims would sacrifice their children. Before she left Tehran, I kept Zarah well informed of the toxic anti-Muslim atmosphere building in Australia. My indignation tended to override my judgement. After all, I lived in an area where Muslim women from a dozen countries went about their business traditionally garbed and I'd never witnessed a single incident or insult. If I'd thought about it a bit longer, I would have realised how capable these women were of looking after themselves. I might have reflected on my own experience of living and travelling in Muslim countries, and recalled the wit, humour and cool mockery of male posturing that I'd noticed often enough among Muslim women.
Without intending to, I was contributing to Zarah's anxieties about the reception a young Muslim woman, a citizen of the pariah state of Iran, would meet in Melbourne. My concern for Zarah extended to her wardrobe. I was most relaxed when her choice of clothes matched that of every other casually dressed young woman on the streets of Melbourne: low-cut jeans, broad belt, simple top. Then, perversely, I began to worry that she looked too much like every other young woman. When we went to meet publishers to discuss a book we'd written together, I almost suggested that she wear a head-scarf with her jeans.
I was not only unwittingly amplifying the Government's invidious message, I was on the verge of suggesting that Zarah perform the unspoken obligation of all immigrants to Australia: to be exotic and different - colourful, in fact. We have come to approve of the exotic complement to the Australian way of life; we attend the festivals of colourful newcomers, celebrate their enrichment of our cuisine, endorse their right to be a little bit different. But we ask them, the colourful newcomers, to accept that we are not interested in changing anything. Colour is fine, but we want it as ornament, hundreds and thousands sprinkled on a blancmange, the blandness beneath untouched.
I have retreated from my insufferable supervision of Zarah's resettlement in Melbourne; the Damascus moment came for me a few months ago when Zarah asked me about the term "thought police", which had appeared in a newspaper article on the war in Iraq. I summarised Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, and the conversation led to a discussion on torture, a subject Zarah knew more about than the average person. When I spoke of Room 101, Orwell's vision of the ultimate hell, Zarah nodded and unconsciously put her hand to her head, an associative mannerism she has whenever the subject of interrogation comes up. We have one in Evin, she said, and went on to explain that the chamber had been established by Savak, the Shah's secret police, and was preserved by Iran's present regime. I waited for her to say more, but she didn't.
"You didn't go there?" I eventually asked, and Zarah laughed, not with mirth. "I'm sitting here talking to you, aren't I?"
In the days that followed, I thought of Zarah in her tiny cell in Evin Prison, a prison the size of a city. I thought of her seeking a way she could rest that spared her back and shoulders and arms, where the lash had landed, that spared her bruised legs and ribcage. A few floors below, Evin's version of Room 101 was awaiting her, for all she knew. Her great hope was that she would be asked to confess and sign a document of some sort. At her final interrogation, the document was offered but, before agreeing to sign, she suggested to the interrogator that he simply have her killed. The interrogator declined.
What did I think I was doing in trying to shield a young woman with such wherewithal from the foolish bluster of our politicians? I should have been thinking of the grit and anger and spiritual ambition that Zarah had brought with her to Australia. I had adopted a version of the Australian multicultural conceit: genial assimilation. A cynical reworking of that conceit informs the repeated rebukes of Muslims, but even in its uncorrupted form expressed as a collage of variously pigmented folk singing "We Are Australian" the conceit adds to the sentimentality sloshing about. It does not add to the nation's vigour.
The vital life of any nation is better served by the arrival of immigrants who take a look around and decide to change things, just as they may have wished to do in their first homeland. Or, if they are happy with what they find, well and good. At least let them be free of the pity of people like me. * Zarah Ghahramani now has a visa.

Women in Iran: Repression and Resistance

By Nasrin Alavi

Opendemocracy.net

March 6, 2007

Iranians are the first to know how easy it is for a whole nation to be reduced to the rants of a senseless politician, or for images of a handful of shroud-wearing crazies burning the American flag in Tehran to reach the western media's front-pages. But how easy is it for thousands of Iranian teachers protesting outside the Iranian majlis (parliament) - as they did on Saturday 3 March 2007 - to merit any attention?
Not very, is the answer - and especially when the drums of war are being sounded. At such times, it is more convenient to dehumanize the prospective enemy than to see this enemy as it is - composed not of 70 million Mahmoud Ahmadinejad clones but of diligent nurses, factory workers, dear uncles and aunts, poets, writers, filmmakers, students cramming for their exams, lovelorn teenagers, and, yes, protesting teachers. It is not only teachers who are protesting. On Sunday 4 March, around thirty-three Iranian women - as far removed from Ahmadinejad as you can get - were arrested in Tehran. These women had gathered outside Tehran's revolutionary court in solidarity with five of their friends, charged with organizing a rally in June 2006 against discriminatory laws against women.
Only two days earlier, they had published an open letter asserting their rights to the freedom of peaceful assembly that are afforded them by the Islamic Republic's constitutional laws:
"International Women's Day is soon upon us as our nation endures a grave period. The internal policies of domination, duress and an ineffectual foreign policy - with an insistence on pursuing a nuclear energy program - when we have lost the confidence and trust of the world; as the confrontational issues and the continuous warmongering policies of the United States and its allies around the world with the pretext of exporting democracy and human right through sanctions and military attack has presented us with a mounting predicament. On one side - with the absence of a democratic structure - we witness decisions being made on our behalf without our presence or the presence of our legitimate leaders. While at the other end we feel the circle of the siege around us increasingly tighten as we are threatened with sanctions and the nightmare of war[…]
[…][W]e announce our protest against all paternalistic policies, whether they be in the name of dishonest interpretations of Islam or with the pretext of human rights and democracy and we believe what the world community should insist upon debates on democracy and human rights and not nuclear energy, and all within peaceful diplomatic dialogue, not war and destruction[…] […]Despite all the pressures and obstacles the Iranian women's movement in now within its most enduring and active periods in recent history." On their own terms Iranian women have come a long way in their struggle for rights. Morgan Shuster lived in Iran at the turn of the century and wrote about his experiences. "The Persian women since 1907 had become almost at a bound the most progressive, not to say radical, in the world; that this statement upsets the ideas of centuries makes no difference. It is a fact […] In Tehran alone, twelve women's associations were involved in different social and political activities. [Iranian women] overnight become teachers, newspaper writers, founders of women's clubs and speakers on political subjects."
The westernized lifestyles that were available to some Iranian women were lost with the Islamic Revolution of 1979. But even the most radical clerics realized that Iran's culture would not stand the strictures imposed in such countries as Saudi Arabia. As Nikki R Keddie has observed: "More than many women in the Islamic world, Iranian women occupy public spaces. Even as wives and mothers, they work, vote, drive, shop and hold professional positions as doctors, lawyers, corporate executives and deputies in Parliament."
Before the Islamic revolution of 1979, the majority of women chose to cover their heads in public in some way and the requirement that women wear Islamic covering may have helped some of them to gain an education and emancipation, especially in traditional families, as they did not need to go through a drastic cultural makeover to enter the work force. In 1975, women's illiteracy in rural areas was 90 percent and more than 45 percent in towns. Now, the nationwide literacy rate for girls aged between 15 and 24 has risen to 97 percent; while female students in state universities outnumber male ones. Women have transformed Iran since the revolution. A third of all doctors, 60 percent of civil servants and 80 percent of all teachers in Iran are women. Some people believe the regime is immune to change, but many others, especially women, are experts at finding ways round the constraints of the patriarchal system. These women activists are less interested in whether or not to wear the veil and more concerned with gaining access to education, wider employment opportunities, equality at work and better health care for their families.
Iranian women's advances have not come about overnight; they represent a long history of hard-fought grassroots struggle. Noushin Ahmadi Khorasani, one of the women under arrest tonight, writes in the March 2007 issue of the New Internationalist about a day spent going door to door in Tehran in a campaign to get a million signatures in support of women's rights, and about her apprehension of ringing the first doorbell in her old neighborhood: "What crime am I about to commit that I feel so scared. Why should I be scared when I'm not doing anything wrong? When my government defends its 'inalienable rights' [to nuclear power], why shouldn't I defend my own inalienable rights?
[…]A woman wearing a chador comes to the door. The small flowers on her chador are pretty. She looks apprehensive. Her face is puffy and it seems that just like me, she's not had enough sleep last night. I calm down a bit after seeing her face. I am happy to be able to see her face. I think that had it not been for the womanly bravery of Tahereh a century and a half ago that enabled her to discard her nighab, I would have had to talk to my fellow citizen without being able to see her face. Even talking to someone 'face to face' would have been meaningless then..."
(The reference is to women's-rights activist Tahereh [Qurrat-al-Ain, 1814-1854], whose removal of her veil provoked a huge uproar).
Shadi Sadr, publisher, lawyer and journalist, and another one of the women under arrest, wrote in 2004:
"Today Iranian women […] have imposed themselves on a male-dominated society which still believes women should stay at home. Perhaps nobody sees us, but we exist and we make our mark on the world around us. I assure you that if you look around carefully, everywhere you will see our footsteps."
Noushin Ahmadi Khorasani wrote before her arrest:
"Perhaps we will be imprisoned and become weary with the continuous summons to court. Perhaps we will not be able to continue along our path and educate our female counterparts about the existence of such discriminatory laws. But, what will you do with the countless women who come into contact with the court system - in fact, these very courts are the best educational facilities for women, through which they quickly learn that in fact they have no rights. Yes, perhaps with your security planning and your modern technology, you may be able to isolate and paralyze the current generation of Iranian women's rights activists, and stop the progression of our campaign, but what will you do with the love that we plant in the hearts of our children? Perhaps with your advanced technology, you will be able to attack the hearts of our personal computers, but what will you do with our dreams?"
 

Women's Key Role Against Fundamentalism

By Maryam Rajavi (Speech on March 3rd)

NCRI Website

March 11, 2007

I congratulate you and the activists of the equality movement on International Women's Day. On this day, which rekindles the great hope for equality, we hail all women who are fighting for the realization of this ideal and think of all women who have fallen victim to oppression, discrimination and violence. On this day, we also commend such great women as Clara Zetkin and Olympe de Gouges, each of whom took giant stride to advance the ideal of equality. We also pay homage to Fatemeh Amini, Marzeih Ahmadi Oskoui, Mehrnoush Ebrahimi and other brave women who fell in the path of the struggle against the Shah's regime. We laud Ashraf Rajavi, who was slain 25 years ago by the Revolutionary Guards and who today is the source of inspiration of a great resistance where the Iranian Resistance is headquartered.
We salute thousands of heroic women who have been either hanged or murdered under torture in the struggle against the fundamentalists ruling Iran in the past 25 years. We laud the courageous women in Tehran, who on two occasions last year, on March 8 and June 12, ignored the mullahs' savage repression and staged a daring demonstration in the heart of the capital, chanting "the cry is freedom and the voice is a revolt for awareness." We salute especially the brave women who this very day staged a demonstration in Tehran to protest against the oppression and crackdown by the Ahmadinejad regime. Some 15,000 dignified teachers, including many of our sisters, displayed their anger and disdain for the religious theocracy by staging a protest outside the mullahs' Majlis. They warned the regime's leaders that they will get nowhere with murder and clamping down on voices of opposition.  We also commend our suffering and bereaved sisters in Iraq, and especially the brave Iraqi women who played a special role in organizing the campaign to publicize the declaration by 5.2 million Iraqis against the Iranian regime's meddling in Iraq.
And we salute 1,000 pioneering women in Ashraf City, who lead the resistance against religious dictatorship and for freedom and equality.
In honoring the International Women's Day, we have gathered here to say that equality is women's right. And I have come to say that across the world we have many responsibilities, far beyond women's rights, which we must carry out. Otherwise peace, security and democracy in our world would be endangered. March 8, puts the spot light on women, their achievements and future responsibilities. I think that women's movement has come a long way.  By the end of the 1920s, the equality movement won the right to suffrage for women. By the end of 1960s, this movement had major advances toward attainting legal equality for women. And in the final decades of the past century, the equality movement has struggled against obstacles in the path of women's freedom and equality in various ways.
The question, however, is that what objective should the equality movement pursue today. And why there is the need to ask this question in the present era. Today, major global developments have brought many opportunities and threats for the equality movement: the opportunity to play a role in the future course of the world and the threat of denigration of the equality movement to a lower position.
Now, the fundamental question is that what status the equality movement is searching for.
Do we want to share power as isolated individuals and submit to the continuation of the status quo? Or do we want to suffice by engaging in some reform in women's rights?
A profound observation of the current circumstances faces us with another strategy. We must overcome this crossroads and assume our role to change the world.
This strategy means an active participation in the political struggle in order to cast aside the obstacles to equality and freedom.
The equality movement must not limit itself to the present objectives. Only through advancing toward higher horizons can freedom be achieved.
In her book, "the Second Sex," Simone de Beauvoir considered this reality so important that she stressed that any time advancement is confined to the status quo, there has been a downward spiral. Therefore, although owing to women's struggle in the past decade, much has been achieved, but nothing is permanent. No social progress, even when drafted in law, could be definitive because discrimination and oppression continues to affect women as the dominant culture of our world today.
Indeed, history has taught us that nowhere the oppressors voluntarily give up their privileges. Neither do they voluntarily respect women's privileges and true position.
So far, all of us agree on the fact that women's entry into the realm of an active political struggle is inevitable.
But the main question which this premise immediately confronts us with is that in which direction women's struggle in this era should be pointed.
Should the present campaigns for the right to employment, against violence and aggression and against victimizing children and women in sex-slave trade be expanded?
Should the campaign for abortion and defending the rights of oppressed women be promoted to the next level?
Or is there another objective in the works?
These campaigns are, of course, quite valuable and must continue. On International Women's Day, all such activists must be commended.
In reality, however, in the current circumstances, a cyclone of blood, bombing, terror, rape and poverty which is destroying the lives of the people in the Middle East, should compel the equality movement to engage in an all-embracing and multi-faceted struggle.
Today, the Middle East is burning in the inferno of fundamentalism. The dangers of this ominous calamity have gone beyond the Middle East and from time to time victimize innocent people in Western countries.  This enormous calamity does not leave us with many choices.
Should we surrender to it and allow the achievements of mankind, especially the accomplishments of the equality movement, to be sacrificed under its feet? Or should we rise to resist it with all our might? Here, the question in everybody's minds is that while the fundamentalists target women's freedoms and rights in countries with Islamic orientation, how could women elsewhere in the world, including in Europe and the United States, be affected by them?
In response, I offer three reasoning:
First, the fundamentalists' devastation in Islamic countries, especially regarding the rights of women, benefits the global patriarchal culture. Three decades ago, Susan Brown Miller, the distinguished American feminist, explained an important fact about violence and rape [against women]. She said that because of any violence and rape against a woman, the domination of men who have not themselves taken part in that violence, is strengthened. Similarly, even women who have not been the target of that violence will be intimidated. In my view, this is an important rule from which one can understand the retrogressive impact of fundamentalism on the equality movement the world over.
Second, fundamentalism in Muslim communities of Western countries has emerged as a challenge whose dimensions are spreading by the day.
Third is the spread of the fire of terrorism and the danger of a nuclear war around the globe?
The criminal explosions in different countries which have victimized many innocent people represent the first flames of a huge fire raging in the Middle East at present. When the mullahs, equipped with long-range missiles and nuclear weapons complete their domination of the Middle East, the fire of this ominous calamity will have engulfed European countries as well.
Let me draw two major conclusions from these arguments.
First, women's involvement in a serious political struggle to remove the obstacles to equality is an imperative that could no longer be ignored.
Second, in the present circumstances, the substance of this struggle is confronting the fundamentalist wave that has been roaming the Middle East today.
With these preliminary remarks, today we want to reply to a fundamental question. Has the equality movement done what is necessary in the struggle against fundamentalism? Has it assumed its pioneering role? We will get the answer in due course.
Here, I would like to elaborate on different aspects of the fundamentalist onslaught which at the same time forms different dimensions of today's struggle.
1. Suppression of the Iranian people, especially women;
2. Efforts to acquire nuclear weapons;
3. Dominating Iraq and Lebanon and warmongering in other Islamic countries;
4. The West's policy of appeasement acting as the de facto ally of fundamentalism.
Let us see what atrocities the fundamentalists have committed against women in Iran.
In truth, the people around the world have been informed of a very small portion of the tragedy that has affected women in my country. As you might know, misogyny is distinctive to the fundamentalist ruling Iran. No one but Iranian women have experienced body and soul this misogyny.
The mullahs' rule came down on women's rights, liberties, culture, family and private lives like a huge avalanche.
- Executing thousands of female opponents, which is unprecedented anywhere in the world;
- Torturing tens of thousands of women political prisoners;
- Executing pregnant women, the torture of mothers in front of their children;
- Degrading women's social and economic standing to second class citizens;
- Imposing gender apartheid;
- Controlling women's presence in the streets;
- Imposing compulsory veiling, controlling the color and forms of women's attire;
- Lacerating and splashing acid on women's faces because of their clothing and make up.
- Systematic assault on women in prisons;
- Denial of the right to divorce and the right to custody of children;
- Promoting polygamy and temporary marriage, justified by the mullahs' disgraceful Sharia;
- Applying medieval and painful punishments such as stoning, whose victims are primarily women;
- Injustice and discrimination in economic participation, employment and education;
- The sale of small children by impoverished families and their trafficking to other countries by the mullahs' criminal gangs in a country as rich as Iran;
- Selling innocent girls' body parts due to impoverishment, hunger and many other calamities;
Indeed, these are only parts of the tragedy women have been experiencing under the rule of the fundamentalists. I must emphasize that these come at a time when the Iranian Resistance movement has been waging a relentless struggle against this regime for 27 years. Imagine what the fundamentalist mullahs would have done to women if this resistance did not exist.
The struggle to end these appalling conditions that have prevailed for 28 years relates to the equality movement across the globe and presents us with the question that I mentioned earlier: Has the equality movement done what is necessary in the struggle against fundamentalism? And has it assumed its leading role?
Here, let me tell my sisters across Iran that although the pain of inequality, humiliation and insult is crushing your very existence, and although the mullahs have trampled upon your individual, familial, social and political rights and freedoms, and are hell-bent on denying your human identity, you, nevertheless, possess such power that has turned Iranian women into the force that will overthrow the mullahs.
When you rise up in the heart of Tehran, when in any gathering you target the mullahs' nuclear deception and shout that nuclear program serves the rule of the Velayat-e faqih (absolute clerical supremacy), when you say that liberty and minimum means of subsistence are the undeniable rights of the Iranian people, you shake the mullahs' regime to its foundations.
Your resolve will realize the demands of the Iranian people and you are Iran's future. The mullahs' enmity and crimes against you is because they are afraid of you. Iranian society is thirsty for a new way of life and for change.
The force of change in Iran is compressed in you as the pioneers of this struggle. You can definitively defeat fundamentalism. You are Iran's future. Indeed, the one thousand Mojahed women in Ashraf City, Iraq, have arisen from your ranks. They are the embodiment of your resolve for equality and freedom. They have proven that you will shape the future of Iran.
I salute you and all free-thinking men who are standing with you shoulder to shoulder in this struggle.
Let us address another important issue: the urgent danger of the regime obtaining nuclear weapons.
You already know that the clerical regime is working rapidly to obtain the atomic bomb.  The mullahs' fundamentalist regime can only preserve its survival through warmongering and export of terrorism. The moment the mullahs acquire the bomb is the moment when an uncontrollable war will begin.  We are living at a critical juncture. A sense of urgency surrounds us.
Let us close our eyes and go back to 1938, on eve of the Second World War. Assuming that we knew of the tragedy that was in the offing, would we have spared any sacrifice and effort to prevent such a war then? Our reply to all of this is definitely no.
It is common knowledge that the mullahs' regime, its president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and its Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei are the source of warmongering. Yet, simultaneous with building nuclear weapons as well as meddling and perpetrating atrocities in Iraq, the mullahs regime projects itself a an advocate of peace. This is where the importance of women's movement becomes apparent. Women are the main force of the peace movement. You have the power to engage in campaigns throughout the world to block the path of the mullahs to nuclear weapons and demand that your governments not stand with the fundamentalists ruling Iran. The mullahs' biggest deception is that they portray defending peace as defending their own regime. The mullahs and their allies are saying that you must support the Iranian regime or war would be inevitable.
In the face of this, the Iranian Resistance has put forth the Third Option. Meaning, neither appeasement, nor foreign military intervention is the answer. Change by the Iranian people and Resistance is the viable option. This is the very solution that is intrinsically compatible with the equality movement, for which reason women have a decisive role to play in realizing that option. I call on movements which advocate peace and human rights, especially the equality movement's activists to support this solution. I ask you and all my sisters in Europe and the United States who endeavor for the expansion of the peace movement to rise up and not allow the mullahs' to take advantage of your efforts to preserve their regime. With every slogan for peace, we must chant "no nuclear arms in the mullahs' hands."
I ask my dear sisters here with us today to use the peace movement to rise against the mullahs' crazy insistence to acquire nuclear weapons.
Together, we can stop the outbreak of an ominous war and stop the bloodshed in the Middle East and the barbaric theocracy ruling Iran.
Allow me here to address the situation of a wounded Iraq, where millions of human beings around the world are distressed when witnessing the occurrences in that country.
Today's world has the painful experience of Iraq before it. As part of the appeasement policy, the Coalition forces bombed the centers of the Iranian opposition at the behest of the mullahs. They paved the way for the mullahs' rapid penetration into Iraq. The horrific consequence of this policy is now seen in the bombings which are tearing apart Iraq.
The vast portion of the 650,000 Iraqis murdered in the past four years have been murdered by the mullahs' death squads. Iraqi democratic parties and even the insurgents who vehemently oppose the US presence in Iraq are saying loud and clear that the mullahs' regime is the main occupier.
I want, in particular, to draw your attention to the painful plight of Iraqi women. Thousands of female Iraqi students have quit their studies because of the attacks and threats by the Iranian regime's operatives. Girl schools are completely shut down. Many women have become impoverished and homeless. The gang rape of Iraqi women by the militias on the mullahs' payroll, one example of which was revealed on February 19, dismayed everyone.
As far as the plight of Iraqi women is concerned, we are again faced with the basic question: Has the equality movement done what is necessary in the struggle against fundamentalism? Has it assumed its pioneering role? Regrettably not!
Here, I would like to draw the attention of the equality movement the world over, and especially you free thinking women, to another issue, namely a major obstacle in the path of change in Iran: the policy of appeasement.
First, let us see how this policy has blocked the path of the movement for freedom and women's equality movement in Iran. The issue is simply this: shackling a movement that is seeking freedom and democracy by including it in terrorist lists. At the behest of the mullahs, Western governments included the Iranian opposition movement in their terrorist lists. For many years we challenged the decision of Council of Ministers of the European Union. The terrorism allegation was completely unwarranted and targeted the main opposition movement.  We organized a major social, political and legal campaign in the course of this challenge.
Our several-years-long struggle finally achieved a historic victory when in its ruling last December, the European Court of Justice annulled the terrorist label against the People's Mojahedin. Surprisingly, in line with appeasing the mullahs' regime, the EU Council defied the court's ruling.
Therefore, we have before us an obstacle: the policy of appeasement. I want to elaborate on this issue as it has been the practical policy of the West in recent years. The policy of appeasement has four components:
1. Taking part in the crackdown on the opposition and preventing change in Iran;
2. Paving the way for the spread of fundamentalism and terrorism;
3. Providing political opening for the mullahs to go nuclear; and
4. Violating law, democracy and trampling upon justice in Western countries.
Having referred to these components, I want to explain why the struggle for appeasement should be placed on the agenda of the equality movement urgently. The policy of appeasement, which supports religious fascism, impedes the struggle of Iranian women for freedom and equality. If in the distant past pioneering women, who held aloft the flag of resistance for emancipation and equality, were few in numbers, today, 1,000 brave and selfless women are advancing a progressive movement which espouses noble demands and objectives and is the focal point of the face-off with religious dictatorship ruling Iran. The policy of appeasement has blocked the path of these women. By paving the way for the mullahs, their headquarters in Ashraf City is encircled and under an assortment of conspiracies. Today, they face the threat of expulsion, quid pro quo and various restrictions and shortages.
We need a movement that would rise up across the world and support the bastion, where the flames of resistance for freedom and equality are burning, and herald something new to the world.
We expect that when Iranian women confront religious fascism, you, free-thinking women in Western countries, challenge the policy of appeasement and policy makers who support the mullahs' religious fascism. This is a humanitarian and conscientious responsibility.
Institutions such as the Council of Ministers of the European Union that pursue the policy of appeasement are directly at fault in solidifying religious dictatorship in Iran and in the spread of terrorism and fundamentalism.
They say officially that the Iranian opposition was placed on the terrorist lists at the request of the clerical regime. When they ignore European justice and allow this designation to continue unlawfully, when they deny the opposition movement the right to the freedom of expression in European capitals, they are allowing the values and demands of the fundamentalists have primacy.
In the face of such blatant injustice that has made a mockery of European values, has the equality movement done what has been necessary in the fight against fundamentalism? Has it assumed its pioneering responsibility? I ask you, my dear sisters here, and all equality movement activists across the world not to allow Europe's fundamental values, which your societies cherished and upheld, to become the victim of deals which strengthen fundamentalism. Let us join hands in the face of European government's totalitarianism and institutions which crush the achievements of humanity, especially those of women. Naturally, when we compel the dictatorship in Iran to give way to the rule of freedom and democracy and when Iranian women achieve freedom and equality, we will see a giant leap for the equality movement worldwide, especially as a challenge to the fundamentalists.
Today, we and you and our sisters in Iraq, Lebanon, Egypt, Somalia, Afghanistan and other countries are facing a single danger. We must form a united front in the face of fundamentalists and appeasers. The issue is not merely an expression of sisterhood with oppressed women in Iran, Iraq and other countries in the region. The matter goes far beyond that: it has to do with world peace and security. Activism on the part of women's movement is not complementary to the fight against fundamentalism only. The fact is that without the pioneering role of women, we cannot overcome this monster. Allow me, here, to thank courageous women who have in all these years have been the leading force in the anti-fundamentalist front. I mean Madam Elizabeth Sidney and my dear sisters in the Women's International Federation Against Fundamentalism and for Equality. I also thank the efforts of women parliamentarians and organizations in different countries around the world.
The reality of women's leading role in the struggle against fundamentalism has been proven manifestly in the history of the Iranian Resistance in the past quarter century. Without women's determining role, our movement lacked the capacity to survive against religious fascism.
In truth, the more the fight against religious dictatorship grew more serious and more profound, the role of women became more imperative. The need for greater perseverance and a more hardnosed and serious struggle made women's assumption of responsibility more indispensable.
This is what our era dictates. This is an era that the solutions and thinking which solidify the male-dominated regime have come to an end. This era requires a new solution based on the values of equality. With this mindset, 1,000 courageous and selfless women in Ashraf City, the headquarters for the Iranian Resistance, 50 kilometers from the Iranian frontier, have persevered against the mullahs' regime.
Ashraf City, which has withstood enormous conspiracies in the past four years has been led by brave women such as Mojgan Parsaii, Sedigheh Hosseini and hundreds of other women in positions of responsibility. This thinking in the Iranian Resistance is the source of many achievements and advances each of which require lengthy discourse. Women in the Iranian Resistance have put into practice many ideals of the equality movement. These experiences could only be defined as a "new birth", "creating a new culture" and "human epics." They have overcome women's historical lack of disbelief and fragility. In theory and in social and political praxis, they have come to believe in women's enormous capabilities.
They have shed the fear of failure and weakness in the face of difficulties. Instead of breaking apart, they learned to develop the power to overcome failure. Instead of hopelessness, they opened their eyes and discovered the opportunities and solutions for victory.
When they recognized the extent to which their independent and responsible role offers a breakthrough in the struggle against dictatorship, they stepped into the world of responsible women who assume the leadership of a struggle with all its implications from the world of irresponsibility, passivity; the world of women who have to lean on the other (gender). When they took charge and had to employ all their ability to attain their goals, they realized that they had to change, learn and teach constantly; that they must discover new solutions and new methods. They had entered into a world with new set of rules and laws that was not static. Any stoppage was tantamount to returning to the previous world.
They had stepped into a world where if they did not grapple with all its contradictions and difficulties everyday, they would have gone backwards. Thus, from fragility, they attained steadfastness. They turned the struggle against difficulties into their constant spirit.
These women have pledged that under no circumstance and in no way, would they give up the ideal of freedom, democracy and equality and that they would challenge to the very end any form of dictatorship and pay whatever price it requires, be it their flesh and blood, their emotions, family, father, mother, husband, children or even changing the culture and even the archaic system of patriarchy. This is that new phenomenon, the new creation and a generation that has a wealth of experience; a generation that has overcome many difficulties in traversing this long and historic path with astounding speed; a generation that has turned into a treasure trove of experience for the people of Iran and especially for all free-thinking women in the world. Allow me, as unusual at it may be, to laud a generation of men in the Iranian Resistance movement, who believed firmly in the ideal of equality and distanced themselves from the patriarchal culture and created unmatched values. Those, who by looking at women as equal human beings, attained their true human identity. Women possess a tremendous, yet untapped, capacity to change the world toward freedom and equality; an evolutionary capacity that steers mankind toward genuine freedom. When women rise up in this struggle, they discover their forgotten powers. We can only recognize our real power to the extent that we engage in a serious struggle.
This is the path to attaining new status and new births. In this path, women will overcome the devastating disbelief in themselves and realize that they are not only worthy in this struggle, but that it is they who could be the leaders and the guiding light for freedom.
With this vision, we can now respond to the main question: Does the world need the equality movement to enter the vast spheres of the struggle with fundamentalism? Yes, indeed, because women are the leading force in the fight against fundamentalism. Without women's participation, the world cannot overcome the danger which threatens humanity. The crux of the matter is that the defeat of fundamentalism could only be achieved with the leadership of women.
- Indeed, the equality movement is the source of our power and the basis of our unity in an active struggle.
- It is a movement which enflames the resistance and restores the dignity of human living.
- And it is a movement that constitutes the force of progress, today's victory and tomorrow's hope.
So, let us all rise up together and assume our idealistic and historic responsibility. This is our duty, it is within our capacity. Today's generations and those of the future expect us to realize those ideals.
 

Daughter of Imprisoned Women's Activist: I am Worried about my Mother
March 14, 2007
Rooz Online  Report
Ten days into the arrest of women's rights activists Mahboubeh Abassgolizadeh and Shadi Sadr, disturbing news are heard about the their fate: New charges and possible use of psychological pressures to extract fake confessions from them . On the other hand there are also reports that senior judiciary officials have been approached for the release of these two women. Rooz Online spoke with Abassgolizadeh's daughter, Maryam on the latest developments. Read the excerpts below.
Rooz Online (R): Do you have any direct news from your mother?
Maryam Abassgolizadeh (MA): 8 days have passed and I have not heard from her directly, which makes us very worried. Shadi Sadr has been in contact with her family twice during this period, which raises alarms regarding my mother. In view of my mother's earlier arrest and what happened in that incident, we are concerned that she may be under torture as a way to extract fake confessions from her, or that she is in such bad health that cannot even talk. The last time she was in prison, she spent some 20 days in solitary confinement and a few more days in the general ward. While officials said she was in the general ward, we learned later on her release that she was actually in solitary confinement under very degrading conditions. But even in that incident, she got in touch with us (over the phone) soon after her detention. But this long silence is very suspicious and disturbing.
R: Do you have any news on the charges that have been brought against her and her interrogation procedures?
MA: Initially there were three charges made against her, the same ones that were made against all thirty one arrested women. But in his meeting with the defense lawyers, Judge Haddad added two new charges, which according to the defense attorneys are illegal. One of them is that interrogations begin on the assumption of guilt. During interrogations, they try to fish for other charges to be made against my mother. So they arrested my mother on the pretext of the sit-in of these women activists, but then used their detention to find other things to charge them with. Because they threatened my mother during her previous arrest, we are now afraid they are doing the same thing again. We are afraid that some authorities may succeed in cutting of the support that my mother is currently receiving for her release and that they may trump up new charges against her. Haddad expressly made two new accusations, in the hope of retaining the initial ones.
R: Has any official contacted you? Any contacts regarding bringing a guarantee for the release of your mother?
MA: Nothing. They summoned us to the judiciary to explain some questions. We refused arguing that we would not go unless there was a formal request. They then threatened to arrest us if we did not go there.
R: Do you know whether they asked detainees questions about other people, including your mother?
MA: Yes. The interrogators have tried to divide and rule. They did ask what relationship they had with others. Or whether they or we engaged in any activity for them. They asked why did we even go to their offices.
R: Why do you think the interrogation phase is taking so long?
MA: Two years ago, after repeated acts of torture and cruelty were committed, ayatollah Shahrudi (head of Iran's Judiciary Branch) dismissed my mother's case, as he did the case belonging to the web-bloggers. But some authorities keep returning to the same methods in order to accomplish what they could not attain in the previous incident. When the head of the judiciary of a country rules people to be innocent, then officials should not be pursing revenge over the case. They should accept their mistakes. In the previous incident, it was decided that the wrong-acting interrogators would be punished. But in reality, the same people are now again in charge of interrogations. They will not succeed because the women's calls and their movement are not politically motivated, and they are not part of the opposition movement. In fact its activists all love their country, who will work with any government for justice and equal rights. I am certain that Mr. Shahrudi knows what is going on.
R: How are the other members of the family doing?
MA: My sister's morale is very low and she is depressed. She has to study for her national university entrance exam, but she can't concentrate because of my mother's situation. I am a student in the town of Zanjan but have had to return to Tehran because of all of this. My sister is sitting next to the phone, but hopes that my mother will walk in through the door. Nights are difficult and we cannot sleep. My father does not live with us, so this makes us alone and we are constantly afraid that the police will storm into our house like the Gestapo.
R: How did the meeting between your family and Mrs. Sadr go when you met Mr. Karubi?
MA: I did not go. Other family members did and they said that he welcomed them with full arms. He promised to write a letter to senior judiciary officials. But ward 209 of Evin prison is not under the jurisdiction of Mr. Shahrudi, so a telephone call is not going to change anything. But he is following up the case, as are others such as Mr. Baghi from the Association for the Defense of Prisoners, the Bar Association, etc. The Bar Association is also pursuing Shadi Sadr's case because she was arrested after performing her duties as a lawyer. We love our country. I think that under the current political circumstances that have come up because of the nuclear issue, and when various opposition groups are actively at work, instead of attacking those who are trying to improve the image of the country, officials should be thinking about the country. I cannot remain silent. The press has been silenced. The only places where my message is relayed are the foreign based radio stations. This is not something that I want, but I have no choice because they are not allowing me to make myself heard.
R: Do you think the current media silence and the absence of media coverage of the recent arrests is directed events?
MA: I am sure of this. I spoke with a few journalists who had reported the event, and they said that after their reports, they were told to completely censor the event and not cover it. It is not true that newspapers do not wish to publish. The fact is that they are not allowed to do so. News agencies too publish scattered news under fear. This is going on despite the fact this is an important event. Today, Marzie Mortezai from the Jebhe Mosharekat (Participation Front) said that while a tree is a national resource and there is so much talk about trees, they do not want to talk about these two individuals who remain behind bars. She said that when they were in prison, they learned that they were making preparations for these two activists to ensure that when they are released, they will not be able to continue their work. And this despite the fact that what they have been doing has been for the good of the Iranian woman.