By Majid Mohammadi

The Washington Post

March 15, 2007

Iran: Women’s Movements and the Thousand Mile Journey

By Jamila Kadivar

Asharq Alawsat

March 22. 2007

If you ask me what the most important political issue in Iran is, my answer would be: women. This is because the issue of women has become increasingly complicated, since it is related to other matters such as religious and political issues.
Half of Iran’s population is made up of women, whereas the other half who manage their families in accordance with laws are still associated with the issue of women. During the past few years, demands from women have increased significantly in various general fields. Moreover and for the time being, their demands are attended to in a number of private realms. At present, different movements have emerged to improve the status of women in Iran. These movements were founded by women, for women. The financers of these movements are non-governmental organizations, and are not political or governmental parties. These women have founded these movements for the sake of achieving certain objectives, such as the abolition of stoning, supporting peace, opposing war and calling other organizations to adopt equality to avoid discrimination. There are other movements that provide new interpretations of Islam, as well as others that work to educate people via different means such as through the publication of books, the issuance of magazines and the launching of websites.
One of these movements is a campaign to gather one million signatures. The objective of this campaign is to change laws that discriminate against women. This movement believes that laws such as determining the age of marriage, the need for the father's consent to marriage, the absence of some women’s rights after marriage, divorce, custody of children and the age of criminal responsibility, citizenship, blood money, inheritance, testimony and similar issues are all not free of discrimination against women. It is for that reason that these movements call for changing such laws and achieving equality between genders.
The beginning of this campaign officially began in September 2006, and was then called the ‘one million signatures campaign’. With its inauguration, the campaign began its purposeful activities that aim to change unfair discriminatory laws.
Out of its belief in enlightenment, the campaign began its activities by presenting face-to-face discussions and establishing relationships with people and different groups of women, thus obtaining the assistance of educated volunteers.
This movement aims to lead people, demand change and not acknowledge any borders or limits as they are mobilized in homes, restaurants, streets and schools. Leaders of the movement are convinced that they do not conflict with Islam in any way, but rather that they aim to provide a new interpretation of Islam which supports and believes in the rights of women. After collecting one million signatures, this campaign will move onto the next stage which will privilege and respect the signatories and the concerned organizations.
Along this line, we should refer to similar successful movements from all over the world just as we should refer to the fact that social movements continued to depend on the culture of inauguration and launching campaigns in the same manner as other countries in past decades. The established truth is that these campaigns have yielded substantial positive results. It can be said that these movements were not founded in Western states only; rather many have been established in developing countries and Islamic countries as well.
The idea of collecting signatures was adopted from the women of Morocco, as they had succeeded in reforming laws through campaigns. Also India, Tunisia and Turkey had provided examples of other successful movements in this realm.
Recently, Bahraini women's movements have succeeded to impose some changes to citizenship law.
On the other hand, we must refer to some problems that could hinder the performance of this campaign. Here we must admit that the following problems and obstacles with regards to the Iranian situation could stand in the way of the campaign. For example, I must state that authorities will probably clash with the campaign, cause problems for the campaigners and will resort to arresting them to limit their activities.
But we must say that collective action is essentially difficult to implement, especially when it rallies for a sensitive issue such as women's issues and when the group is composed of women who have different ways of thinking, are from different religious groups, or are secularists.
And finally, the following question has always been posed; is it possible to reform laws relating to the status of women, bearing in mind that the Board of Trustees of the Constitution made it impossible to change any laws?
I believe that such campaign could be deemed a success even if it fails to achieve its objectives since it succeeded to attract several groups of women from different levels of society of different political and ideological affiliations. This is in addition to the fact that this campaign is an experience that was carried out by women without any assistance from men. The campaign has also increased awareness amongst women and has helped them exchange experiences and ideas with one another. There is an effective and practical admission of the campaign into homes yet in a calm manner and this in itself will lead to a change sooner or later.
 

A Year of Suppression of Women in Iran

Complied and Published by NCRI 

March 30, 2007

The NCRI (National Council of Resistance of Iran) Women's Committee drafted an assessment of the repression of women in Iran for the past year. Results of its studies show 88 % of women are victims of psychological violence. They are subjected to harassment, ill-treatment and suppression because of the shape or colour of their clothes. The word "mal-veiling" in the mullahs' jargon, is not only related to the head scarf but to behaviour and all garments covering a woman's body, considered to be the source of temptation and sin.
Last year, (21 March 2006 to 21 March 2007) 317,000 women received a warning in the street about their attire. This took the form of more repressive regulations in offices and Universities.
The Minister of Sciences declared that students' indecent clothes gave a shocking image of Universities: "The university environment is not free of any constraint. Students do not have to come to University with odd clothes and make-up causing disturbance. On the contrary, they have to get dressed in a strict way and respect the seriousness of the University. Students who do not respect University frame by the way they dressed, must be sent back home." (Kargozaran Newspaper, January 21 2007).
Some officials also declared "women in black chador draw less attention" (Iran Press News, January 29 2007)
A regime MP considers "women do not have to wear frivolous and different clothes from each other that make them an object of desire, since religion forbids wearing provocative clothes". (Kargozaran Newspaper, January 21 2007)
Sexual violence accounts for the second largest number of cases of violence, with 76% of cases of violence. This is harder and more frequent than the psychological violence. As sexual problems are in the private domain, women refuse to speak about it. It can therefore be concluded that figures on sexual violence are more important as women's silence on this issue leads to a rise of sexually transmitted diseases and psychic trauma.
Girls consider that the only way of escaping sexual, family and social violence is higher education. They see in University an exit to avoid forced marriages and an opportunity to live in an independent way throughout their course, even if violence at University takes other forms. Therefore we can conclude violence against women has risen dramatically since Ahmadinejad became the mullahs' President.
During the Iranian year 1385 (21 March 2006 to 21 March 2007) women protested throughout the country. On 12 June, 3000 women took to the streets, on March 8, 1000 women demonstrated in Tehran, as well as several thousands more in the Kurdish city of Sanandaj. These movements have been harshly suppressed, leading to hundreds of arrests.
The year 1385 can be summarized in using official figures, raising the veil on a dreadful reality:
Executions and stoning to death: 8
Death sentences and to stoning to death: 52
Number of female prisoners: 5413
Arrested women: 5978
Warnings for mal-veiling: 317,193
Repressive operations against women: 100
Summons in the court and condemnations: 558
Divorces: 2786
Run away girls: 302,399
Women sold daily abroad: 54 women from 16 to 25 years old (19,710 a year)
Unemployed women: 1,300,012
Women in poverty: 8,002,500

What must Iran make of this free woman?

By Janice Turner

The Times

March 31, 2007

They insisted that she conceal her fatigues with a white abaya, cover her hair with a hijab. It was with her soft voice and in her round, girlish handwriting that the apology for her country’s actions had to be made.
This war has a workaday military guise, but as the treatment of Leading Seaman Faye Turney shows, it is a collision between two irreconcilable civilisations. Its spoils are more than oil reserves, disputed waters or regional influence, but, at its very core, the right of dominion over women.
What a perplexing and alien creature Seaman Turney must appear to this Iranian regime. A young woman working close-knit with men, proud to perform her dangerous task of piloting speedboats as well as any one of them. A wife and mother, moreover, away from her small daughter, who has put military career before marital and maternal duties.
The Iranians were satisfied to have her 14 male comrades surrender as sailors or Marines: Seaman Turney had to surrender also as a woman. While the men were free to eat their pitta bread and lamb stew with weary resignation, she had to work out how best to appear adequately humble, grateful and submissive. She must submit not just to Iran’s military authority but its patriarchal might.
After all, here she stood, the end-product of 100 years of bitterly fought — and now mostly unacknowledged — Western female emancipation. In Britain our own reactionaries may finger-wag at the unnatural spectacle of a mother in a warzone, distracting our male warrior caste. One strain of feminism can question why womankind — Nature’s peacemakers, oh Mother Gaia! — would want to fight men’s wars, particularly this one.
While another might point out the sham of Seaman Turney’s equality: the sexual harassment endured by almost all women military personnel and their ban from the front line.
And the tiresome buzz of these debates can distract us from the wholly magnificent truth: the freedom of Seaman Turney and of all of us, our right to make choices — and mistakes — to fight, to study, to work, to stay home, to have children, to remain childless, to wear what the hell we like — whether basque or burka — to live unenslaved by our fertility, our fathers, our husbands, to have equal rights before the law. So languid are we in this warm bath of freedom, that International Women’s Day — March 9 — doesn’t even figure on our calendar. It is some vestigial Seventies feminist joke. We’d be marching for what, exactly? Is there really anything left? Er, more women on the boards of FTSE 100 companies?
In Iran, however, International Women’s Day is as perilous as patrolling any Iraqi foxhole. A week before, to forestall protest on the day itself, police rounded up and arrested 33 women involved in the Campaign for Equality, which aims to get a million signatures on a petition calling for the end of discrimination in Iranian penal and family codes.
In Iran a woman’s testimony is worth half that of a man, her murder requires only half the punishment, girls as young as 9 may be stoned for adultery and mothers after divorce only have custody rights over their children until they reach 7 years old.
On March 9, the few women who dared to gather peacefully outside the parliament building were dispersed or arrested. Any prominent woman lawyer, journalist or politician speaks out at grave personal risk. Five feminist leaders are currently on trial for “propaganda against the system” and “acting against national security.” Compared with their subjugated Saudi sisters, Iranian women have comparative liberty, being permitted to drive, vote and stand for office. Indeed more than half of university graduates in Iran are women. And it is this weight of numbers, a growing confidence and sense of entitlement among these educated women, that threatens the male leadership and has precipitated a recent crackdown.
It is no longer enough, say the mullahs, for women to sit in separate rows from male students in lecture theatres or classrooms. Liberal academics have been purged, there are calls for separate teaching and for CCTV cameras on campuses to monitor “gender-mingling”.
Meanwhile the Islamic dress code is being imposed with renewed zeal. Girls have pushed the rules — as girls eternally will — wearing tight fitting abayas or the sheerest scarves far back on their dark hair, flashing painted toenails in open sandals.
But last year, the police chose the broiling heat of August to caution women deemed “badly veiled” and instructed them to wear the heavy, sweltering full-length chador. In Tehran, in a single month, 63,963 women were given a warning, with some making a written pledge to dress properly. Then, in a move which would be comical if it weren’t so despotic, the police organised a fashion show, displaying examples of outfits considered properly Islamic. Obviously no live models were used.
To think, we live in a parallel universe where “diktats of fashion” mean feeling obliged to succumb to the smock, where “fashion crime” means Christina Aguilera overdoing the sequins and the “fashion police” are a bunch of effete stylists, not zealots wielding night-sticks.
There are, of course, those who have taken up the veil voluntarily in Britain, who fight secularism so bitterly, who would have it that no British Muslim school girl strode to school bareheaded or even barefaced. What would they make of these women who risk a spell in Iran’s notorious Evin prison for supporting a form of political protest as meek as a petition? They might say that these women were infected with Western values — although the richest Iranian women are apparently unwilling to dirty their shoes on this campaign, having the money and connections to skip off abroad at will. And in any case the groundswell of revolt against clerical tyranny comes from the less affluent or educated, who stand to lose most: their children, homes, liberty, lives. Let the women of Beeston in their chadors flick V-signs at us. Let them wear their slave garb and tell us their invisibility is the will of God rather than the rule of man. Let them do so while reaping all the benefits — education, equality — of Western feminism. As long as they acknowledge that thanks to the values they disdain and too often wish to destroy, and unlike the women of Iran and currently Leading Seaman Turney, they do so because they have a choice.
 

The End of the Dispensable Iranian

By Roya Hakakian
The New York Times

April 10, 2007

Dawn had always arrived in Berlin's Turm Strasse with the bustling of shopkeepers and the drowsy hiss of buses pulling into their stops. Always, except on the morning of April 10, 1997. On that day, the street had been cleared of traffic and blocked to anyone but pedestrians. On the rooftop of every building leading to Nos. 91-92, snipers had been stationed.
Turm Strasse 91-92 is the address of Berlin's highest criminal court. It is also the site of one of the least known, yet most momentous events in the contemporary history of Germany and Iran. The 1992 assassinations of four Iranian Kurdish leaders at a restaurant called Mykonos led to a trial that took nearly four years and culminated in a verdict, 10 years ago today, that implicated the Iranian leadership ? the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei; the president at the time, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani; and the foreign minister, Ali Velayati ? as the masterminds of the crime. An arrest warrant had already been issued for the minister of intelligence, Ali Fallahian.
Nostalgia has a way of augmenting reality, which may be why those who were there remember droves of thousands along the street. The crowds were ready for mayhem ? armed with bullhorns, boom-boxes and loudspeakers ? if the verdict were lenient toward the assassins, who had been members of the Hezbollah, or if it failed to address the role of the Iranian leadership in the murders, the latest in a chain of assassinations of Iranian dissidents throughout the world.
Suspense had everyone in its jittery grip. A few with mobile phones anxiously awaited calls from a handful of spectators who had managed to get inside the court. At nearly 9:30 a.m., Parviz Dastmalchi, one of the survivors of the Mykonos shootings, finally heard from a friend. "They named them all," the voice whispered at the other end. A perennial skeptic, Mr. Dastmalchi chalked the statement up to the Iranian penchant for hyperbole. But when the silent throngs on the street broke into cheers, he knew it was true.
Suddenly, the Iranian opposition was united. From one end of Turm Strasse, members of the People's Mujahedeen crossed the street to embrace monarchist sympathizers on the other side. Former enemies linked their arms as a decadent Persian dance tune called "Baba Karam" blared on the loudspeakers. Mr. Dastmalchi and other political activists who had observed the trial with stoicism began to weep. The widows and children of the victims, who had wept for years, were jubilant.
The verdict resulted in almost all the European Union's members recalling their ambassadors from Tehran for several weeks.
The diplomatic blackout is one reason Mohammad Khatami, who was lagging behind the incumbent, Mr. Rafsanjani, in the last weeks of the presidential campaign, pulled ahead. However dead the reform movement now seems ? though many insiders consider it only dormant ? it began with the election of Mr. Khatami and reached its pinnacle in 2000. That is when the investigative journalist Akbar Ganji published his series of books on the assassinations of political leaders and writers within the country. These books, which set off a debate about civil society and the rule of law among Iranian intellectuals, may have never existed without that verdict, the indefatigable German prosecutor, Bruno Jost, and the extensive volumes of testimonies and records that were released.
Through tens of hours of interviews, I have often wondered why I, the supremely squeamish, the one who reaches for the remote when an actor reaches for his revolver, should be interested in the story of so gruesome a murder. The answer came to me as I sat packed among strangers in the coach class of a Berlin-bound Continental flight: Tyrannies strip nations of dignity, as do exile and war. And I have experienced that unholy trinity. I am an exile who has lived through the Iranian regime's tyranny and the early years of the Iran-Iraq war.
The verdict in the Mykonos trial was a victory for every displaced or oppressed Iranian. Through this trial, the German judiciary restored dignity to Iranians by insisting that we were not dispensable beings. If there is one community of Muslim immigrants about whose assimilation Europe needs not worry, it is the Iranian community in Germany. By extending its laws to these immigrants, by giving them justice, the German judiciary gave Iranians a taste of what they could never have in their own country.
More than any assimilation program possibly could, this event turned ordinary Iranian immigrants into loyal German patriots. Former political prisoners, whether under the shah or the current regime, saw how a real court operates. Democracy, many of them believed, was a superior system, the right way to run a society. In this particular case, it was also highly therapeutic.
For once, Iranians had the pleasure of proving to Westerners, who are perpetually consumed by atrocities committed against their own, that the first victims of the Iranian regime and Hezbollah were Muslim Iranians, and that their war with the Western world began much later than their war against Iranians. Had Europe, had the world, spoken against those earlier crimes, the beast of terrorism may not have grown into the multiheaded monster that it is today.
What the Mykonos trial did for the cause of democracy and rule of law in Iran cannot be accomplished by military might. The 1992 case is still open, as are the cases of several other murders throughout Europe. Solving these murders and bringing justice to their victims are among the most effective steps the international community can take to strengthen the hands of the democratic forces in Iran.