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December 15, 2004 VOLUME 7
E-ZAN VOICE OF WOMEN AGAINST FUNDAMENTALISM IN IRAN
To our readers,
As the year 2004 is coming to an
end, there are at least two women facing stoning in Iran and 10 teenagers facing executions
by various means. Among the victims is a 19 year old mentally disabled girl,
Leyla, who was forced into prostitution by her
mother. Leyla has been sentenced to be flogged and executed for
'morality-related' offences.
Violence against women in Iran does not end in the mullahs courts.
There are at least 4000 run away girls and homeless women in Tehran every night. These women are not
only victims of poverty but also victim of physical and sexual violence. Women
and girls are being traded for sex or body parts everyday in Iran. Yet a female puppet in mullahs’
parliament has the audacity to issue a death sentence for these homeless women
and girls because the fundamentalists believe “women have no value without
their families”.
Iran spends millions of dollars every year on
its nuclear technology at the cost of trampling the basic human rights and
needs of Iranians, particularly women and girls. Europeans are talking to the
mullahs everyday, yet the issue of violence against women is
never on their agenda. There is a state-sponsored of violence against women
in Iran and the world community is standing by in silence. Even those women
who flee Iran have no hope. Female asylum seekers
from Canada, Sweden and Australia are extradited back to Iran on daily basis because the West is
not recognizing the plight of Iranian women.
Instead, in 2003, Nobel Peace
Committee offered the women of Iran a token of hope by selecting Shirin
Ebadi as the prize winner. Women of Iran see no value in such tokens and
hollow gestures. Those who believe women’s rights and human rights in Iran can be compromised are gravely
mistaking. Any incentive offered to the fundamentalist regime of Iran will only encourage the mullahs and
endanger women and girls further. The Iranian regime will end sooner or later,
yet the Iranians will not forget those who stood by the mullahs while the most
heinous crimes were committed against the people, particularly women.
WFAFI calls upon the freedom loving
people of the world to join our 2005 campaign and stop violence against women
in Iran. Democracy is the only solution for
Iran. Join us to support the democratic
aspiration of the Iranian people. Please visit our website for more information
on our monthly actions alerts. http://www.wfafi.org/action.html
E-Zan
Featured Headlines
Reuters
News Agency – November
22, 2004
All three
wives of a 67-year-old Iranian man took overdoses in an unsuccessful triple
suicide attempt after the youngest wife bought an expensive pair of boots, a
news agency reported on Sunday. "My two other wives were very jealous
after my 27-year-old wife bought a pair of boots for $450," the husband
was quoted as saying by the ISNA student news agency. "After they had an
argument about the price, they all attempted suicide together," he added. All
three women, now in stable condition in the hospital, have separate apartments
and cars. Men in Iran, where
Islamic law has been in force since 1979, can marry up to four wives…
Iran Focus – November 30, 2004
The
Supreme Court of Iran has upheld a stoning sentence for a woman accused of
adultery. Hajieh Esmailvand has been serving prison time in the town of Jolfa (Northwestern
Iran) since Jan. 2000 for having an affair with a 17-year-old
boy. Originally she had been sentenced to 5 years imprisonment and ‘death by
hanging’; however the Supreme Court subsequently changed the verdict from
‘death by hanging’ to ‘death by stoning. One informed source told Iran Focus
that the Supreme Court has ordered that the remainder of Hajieh’s prison
sentence be annulled so that the stoning sentence can be carried out ‘before 21
December 2004’.The boy whom Hajieh had the affair with is also on death row
awaiting official orders to be hanged in public. His identity has not been made
clear. The Supreme Court has also upheld the death sentence for a 24-year-old
woman called Najmeh Vosoogh Razavi who was studying law in university. Najmeh
is to be hanged in public next week.At least four women have been hanged since
Jan. 2004 with at least a dozen more sentenced to execution. On Nov. 20 a
female member of Iran’s
parliament (Majlis) was quoted by state-run newspapers as saying, “if 10
prostitutes were executed, there would be no more prostitutes on the streets”.
Reuters
News Agency – December 4, 2004
These days Iranian women are not even allowed to watch men compete
on the football field, but 2,000 years ago they could have been carving the
boys to pieces on the battlefield. DNA tests on the 2,000-year-old bones of a
sword-wielding Iranian warrior have revealed the broad-framed skeleton belonged
to woman, an archaeologist working in the northwestern city of Tabriz said on
Saturday. "Despite earlier comments that the warrior was a man because of
the metal sword, DNA tests showed the skeleton inside the tomb belonged to a
female warrior"…
Global BC,
Broadcast News –
December 9, 2004
An Iranian
woman deported from Vancouver was
arrested within minutes of her return to Tehran, but was
released after spending many hours in detention. Haleh Sahba, 30, now faces
charges of leaving Iran illegally.
Sahba lived in the Vancouver area for
three years after fleeing her home country, where she had been jailed for
defending women's rights. She told
Immigration Canada that she feared for her life if she was forced to return to Iran, but was
refused refugee status and deported on Tuesday (December 7, 2004).
Agence France Presse – December 11, 2004
An Iranian
woman arrested in a judicial crackdown on reformist journalists was freed on
bail but needed hospital treatment due to her detention, her husband told AFP
on Saturday. According to Ahmad Beigloo, journalist Fereshteh Ghazi "was
kept in solitary confinement for 38 days and had to be checked into hospital as
she was not in a good physical or mental shape". The woman was arrested
over her articles on women's rights published on Internet sites. She was
released on bail of 500 million rials (about 57,000 dollars).
Radio
Farda – December
11, 2004
Every
night, in Tehran alone, about 4000 street girls and women roam the city while
being subjected to physical or sexual violence. These women and girls are
victims of violence and according to the official report the real numbers are
not known. There have been numerous promises by the government to provide
shelter and resources to these victims, yet none has been delivered. These
women and girls fall in to sex trade business as pay back to anyone who
provides them shelter and support. These women and girls are victim of poverty
and have run away from home or abusive marriages.
Amnesty International – December 15, 2004
Iran plans to execute a mentally disabled 19-year-old woman for
"acts contrary to chastity," alleged crimes stemming from her having
been forced into prostitution as a child, Amnesty International says. Amnesty
cited reports in the Iranian newspaper Khorasan that said social workers
estimated the woman, identified only as Leyla M, had the mental capacity of an
eight-year-old. Amnesty said a November 28 story in the newspaper reported that
Leyla had been sentenced to death by a court in the central Iranian city of Arak when she was 18. Amnesty said the sentence had been passed to Iran's Supreme Court for confirmation. The group said Leyla had been
convicted of "acts contrary to chastity," including controlling a
brothel, having sex with relatives and giving birth outside marriage. It said
she had confessed to the charges and was to be flogged before her execution.
The group said Khorasan had reported Leyla had exhausted her appeals. Amnesty
said Leyla's mother had forced her into prostitution when she was eight. It
said the girl was raped repeatedly and gave birth to a baby when she was nine.
She was sentenced to flogging at the time. Her family sold her to an Afghan man
when she was 12, and his mother forced the girl to continue as a prostitute,
Amnesty said. She gave birth to twins at age 14 and was again punished by
flogging, the group said. Her family later sold her again, to a 55-year-old
man, Amnesty said. Amnesty said that as a party to the International Convention
on Civil and Political Rights, Iran had promised not to execute anyone for crimes committed while
they were under 18. The group said Iran had executed at least three child offenders in 2004. In addition,
it said, a 14-year-old boy died on November 12 after being flogged for eating
in public during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.
E-Zan Featured Reports
Female
Parliamentary Member insists on executing the “street women”
WFAFI
Farsi News Monitoring
November 19-23, 2004
According to
a report by state-run news agency ILNA, Eshrat Shayegh, the female
parliamentary member (PM) of Tabriz, made an
assertion about the rising rate of runaway girls and homeless women in the
streets, an issue known as “street women”. She made her comments about the
increased presence of “street women” suggesting:”if any judge argues we have no
laws to deal with these women, I offer a solution myself.” She added: “If we
execute 10 of these street women, we will no longer face this issue.” She
emphasized, “Women have no value without their families…” Shayegh, the PM from Tabriz, added:
“the 7th parliament has come to a house of disarray and full of
problems” suggesting a much harsher treatment towards women. A government’s atternoy, Mr. Reeyahi, in an interview
with Iran Newspaper replied to Shayegh’s comments by
saying: “If these comments were made by someone else, we would not pay much
attention to it. However, since she is speaking in the capacity of a
parliamentary member who has legislative power, we should pay very close
attention to her comments…we should be particularly worry about such comments
now that it has been reflected in the press”…Comments by Eshrat Shayegh sparked
such an outrage among women’s organizations inside and outside of Iran that she
was forced to rephrase her statement while blaming the press for misquoting
her. However, she still insisted that these women are at fault and should be
“dealt with”.
Leyla, an 18 year old
facing execution by stoning in Iran
Peykeiran Website
December 5, 2004
Website Zananeiran writes: “Execution of an 18 year old girl”;
this is the title that most newspapers chose after Leyla, the 18 year old girl
from Arak was sentenced to execution by the order of the 25th Judicial
district. This sentence was issued without paying attention to Leyla’s mental
disability or her family’s situation.
The 18 year old Leyla in her testimony in the court testified about her
mom selling her body to different men so that their family could survive the
poverty and hardship. Leyla naively described how her father and her brothers
raped her constantly. Would Leyla so honestly and truthfully testify in the
court of law had she known that they would issue her execution verdict because?
Maybe unlike her family, she counted on the justice system to protect her? We
are sure the readers of this piece have a lot of questions in mind to ask
Leyla, her family, her lawyer and her judge. We talked very briefly with Leyla
in her prison cell. This is only a brief chat and will not answer all your
questions. But as advocates of women’s rights, you are at least confronted with
the horrifying situation of this young girl whose body was sold and now she is
being so unjustifiably denied the right to live because of that. What you will
be reading might seem so simple and childish at the first glance but no one can
deny the depth of this disaster. Our Zanan website is in the process of getting
more information on this situation from the parties involved. A conversation
with Leyla:
- Do you know how old you are? 18 years old.
-
Are you aware of your execution sentence? I have been told about the
execution but my friends in the prison tell me that it is not true and I will
be freed soon. I think they just want to scare me. I have done nothing wrong. I
have always listened to my mom. If she told me to go to some man’s house, I
would go. If she said not to go, I wouldn’t.
- Why did you always listen to what she said? I
was scared. All of them would harass me if I did not listen to her.
- What did they do to
you? They would beat me up. Both my
parents harassed me all the time.
-
When was the first time you slept with a man? I was eight years old the
first time my mom took me to a man’s house. It was scary. I cried so much. She
came and picked me up the next morning and bought me chocolate and cheese
puffs.
- Do you like your
children? I love them so much. We used to play a lot of games before I came
to prison.
- How many children do you have? I have two
daughters and a son. They are so sweet.
- Were you raising them by
yourself? My mom took care of them for a little while. Then they lived with
their father for some time. I don’t know where they are now.
-
What about your father, do you like him? He is very bad tempered. He always
beat me up since I was a kid. I liked him whenever he both me something to eat.
-
Does your mother visit you here? Not at all; I have not
seen her since I came to prison. Please tell her to bring me some
chocolate and cheese curls in case you see her. I also want my red dress.
Iranian martyr recruits, man and
woman, vow to attack Americans in Iraq and Israelis
The Associated Press
December
3, 2004
About 200 masked young men and women
gathered at a Tehran cemetery Thursday to pledge their
willingness to carry out suicide bomb attacks against Americans in Iraq and Israelis. The ceremony was
organized by the Headquarters for Commemorating Martyrs of the Global Islamic
Movement, a shadowy group that has since June been seeking volunteers for
attacks in Iraq and Israel. A spokesman, Ali Mohammadi, described the group
meeting Thursday as the “first suicide commando unit,” although another
official has claimed members already have carried out attacks in Israel. “Sooner or later, we will bury all
blasphemous occupiers of Islamic lands,” Mohammadi said. On Sunday, Iran’s deputy interior minister for
security affairs told reporters the movement had no official sanction and said
such groups could operate only “as long as their ideas are limited to theory.”
But the group has the backing of some prominent hard-line Iranian politicians. Iran portrays Israel as its main nemesis and backs
anti-Israeli groups such as Lebanon’s Hezbollah. Wives, husbands and
children accompanied volunteers to the cemetery, which was decorated with
posters denouncing America and Israel. Thursday’s ceremony included the
unveiling of 6-foot stone column commemorating a 1983 attack on U.S. Marine
barracks in Lebanon as a major “suicide bombing operation
against global blasphemy.” On Oct. 23, 1983, a truck carrying more than 2,000
pounds of explosives sped past a sentry post and exploded in the center of the
barracks, killing 241 Marines. In 2003, a U.S. federal judge blamed Iran for the attack.
Mullahs’
Killing Fields
Frontpage
Magazine
Dr. Donna
Hughes, Professor & Carlson
Endowed Chair in Women’s Studies at the University of Rhode
Island.
December
14, 2004
A former
political prisoner and the daughter of two slain parents vowed to make sure the
voices of Iranians who have suffered under the Islamic fundamentalist regime
heard. The two women said they stand by other activists who continue to be
arrested, tortured, and executed in Iran for
supporting freedom and democracy. On the occasion of International Human Rights
Day (Friday, December 10), the torture and execution of political prisoners in Iran was the
focus of a briefing in New York hosted by
the non-governmental organization Women’s Freedom Forum. The treatment of
women, especially women political activists, was featured. The walls of the
room were lined with documentary posters with names and photographs of men,
women, and children who had been killed by the mullahs in Iran. A number
of the photographs were family groups – mother, father, and two, three, four,
five, even six children ‑ that had been killed by the Iranian regime for
their political activism. The program included videos and photographs of
trials, lashings and executions over the past 25 years. Some images were from
the early days of the revolution, some from the late 1980s, and one photograph
showing the hanging of a group of seven men in Zahedan just three days before
the event on December
7, 2004.The victims are hoisted into the air by a crane in a
public place in order to terrorize the population and suppress further
resistance to the regime. Another Iranian-American pro-democracy
non-governmental organization ‑The Committee in Support of Referendum in
Iran‑sends out news clippings on a regular basis that document the
executions of men, women, and sometimes children, as the Iranian regime
executes minors. There are often two or three pages of listings of sentences
and executions. Their most recent report for November 2004 listed 15 executions
or sentences for execution. A number of them are punishment for political
activity against the regime inside and outside Iran. On
November 10 a man in Tehran was
sentenced to death for allegedly killing a Tehran district
mayor. On November 21 a political prisoner was sentenced to death for allegedly
bombing a government building in 1998. He is the brother of man known to belong
to an opposition group who was killed earlier. The report speculated that
issuing a death sentence six and a half years after an alleged crime was
retaliation against the opposition group for revealing information on the
regime’s clandestine atomic sites. On November 22 two men were sentenced to
death for allegedly clashing with security forces. According to state run media
in Iran, 120
people were hanged in public during a recent six-month period.
At
the briefing, Farangis, a former political prisoner described her experience
and treatment by Revolutionary Guards in three different prisons. She was born
in 1959 in the southwestern Iranian city of Masjid
Suleiman in Khuzistan province. She became
a political activist after the revolution when she saw the nature of the regime
that Khomeini was
constructing. She now lives in the U.S. with her
family.
In her own
words:
In
1978, I was accepted to the Medical Sciences University in Ahwaz to study
nursing. At the university, the students were pressured by Hezbollah to join
their Islamic political movement. Within a year, the Shah was overthrown and
Hezbollah called for a cultural revolution in support of the new Khomeini
regime, which included a purge of students from the university who didn’t
support Khomeini. A number of students were arrested. They were abused and a
few were executed. All the universities were then closed. I retuned home where
I joined a union with other students to inform people about the activities of
the regime. At this time, my brother, who was 17 at the time, became
politically active. He was later arrested in 1982, and within five months I was
arrested also for political activity. During questioning, they tortured us to
get information. When we would not answer their questions they said that since
you are Muslims and you are not answering our questions you are subject to “tazir” –flogging. They lashed us 150 times with cables. When
I was whipped, I felt the pain for the first few lashes, then after the 12th or
13th ones, my body would go numb. Eventually, I would faint or
freeze so that I couldn’t move. Then they would throw me back in the cell. At
night, they took us out of the cells and make us stand on one leg in the hall.
When we got so tired we put my legs down, they lashed us. I fainted from this
routine a couple of times. They kept us blindfolded when we were
in the hall so we couldn’t see what was happening.
Several times, I felt something burning my
hands. I didn’t know what it was at the time, but later I learned that they put
their cigarettes out on us. You can still see the scars on my hands. [Farangis
held up her hands to the audience.]They held a kangaroo court for
the political prisoners. They placed a paper in front of me with 40 charges
against me listed on it. I was forced to sign it. I was sentenced to four years
in prison. The arrest of my brother and I placed a lot of pressure
on my family. My father became physically and mentally ill. He eventually had a
heart attack and died. In prison, when I heard about my father’s death, I was
not allowed to cry. Later, when they put me in solitary confinement, I could
cry. As a result of the physical treatment and mental stress, I became
paralyzed in parts of my body. I couldn’t talk, eat, or take care of myself. My
mother requested that I be taken to a hospital, but they wouldn’t do it. They
released me from solitary confinement and put me back in a cell with other
women. The other prisoners helped me to take care of myself and used physical
therapy to help me regain the use of my body. Then some of us were
moved to Evin prison in Tehran. The trip took 12 hours, and every few hours they would stop, take us
out of the car, and beat us. When we arrived at Evin prison, we were beaten
again. No one could stand up. In Evin prison we had to wear a blindfold when we
were out of the cell. We were told that if the blindfold came off we would be
executed. As result of not being able to see, I fell on the stairs and broke my
arm.
I was taken to the prison clinic and treated
by another prisoner. He said my arm needed surgery, but that was not permitted,
so he set it as best he could and sent me back to my cell. You can see the
difference in my two arms. [Farangis held up both arms for us to compare them.
The right arm was visibly crooked.] To
this day, I can’t pick up anything that weighs much with this arm.
After two or three months in Evin prison they moved us to Ghezel Hessar prison
in Karaj, where I was placed in a cell with women as old as 60 or 70 and women
with children aged one to four. One woman in her 60s couldn’t walk, so we
helped her do everything. Babies and children up to the age of four were in
prison with their mothers. They were often malnourished because the food was so
bad. They suffered from the unsanitary conditions and often had fungus
infections.
In 1985, with the promise of my mother to
supervise me, they released me from prison. The first thing I did was go to see
my father’s grave. I felt responsible for his death. I was depressed and
wouldn’t talk to anyone. I just sat in the corner of the house. My mother took
me to a psychiatrist to receive treatment. Five months later, I
married an acquaintance and we moved to Shiraz. My husband is here with me today. [She
pointed him out in the audience.] I had to present myself to the Revolutionary
Guards’ office every week. This was hard for my husband. During this time, I
saw that things had become very difficult for women. I saw women sell themselves
on the street to buy milk for their children. And children dropped out of
school to sell things on the street to earn money for their families. When
I left prison, the Revolutionary Guards made me promise never to reveal
anything that I knew, but I became angry at what I saw and became politically
active again. I decided to tell people what I had seen in prison. I wanted to
defend women in society against what was happening to them. The Guards found
out about my activity so they raided our house and arrested me. I was seven
months pregnant. When they took me for questioning, I could hear
my husband outside yelling for them to release me because I was pregnant.
The second time I was imprisoned I received
worse treatment. Every time I was questioned, I was kicked, whipped, and
tortured. Because of the blows I received to my back, I gave birth to my baby
early. My son was weak. They kept him in the hospital and sent me back to
prison. I was suffering physically and mentally. I was still in pain from
childbirth and then I was separated from my baby. Every day they took me to the
hospital to feed him, and then took me back to prison. Finally, as result of
efforts from my husband I was reunited with my son. At that time I was taken
for questioning for 15 to 16 hours at a time. My son stayed with the
Revolutionary Guards. When I got him back, his diaper had not been changed and
his skin became burned. He was always crying because he was hungry and not in
good condition. As a result of how I was being treated, I didn’t always have
milk. I am still being treated for a condition I developed at that time. I went
to the judge and begged for more food for my son, but he said that my son was a
criminal too, and predicted that when he grew up, he would be against the regime
too, so it was right to treat him as a criminal now. In 1988, my
husband got me out of prison by selling our house to raise enough money to pay
the bribes that were needed. When they released me they told me that I couldn’t
leave the country for 20 years.
If I was arrested again, they would execute
me immediately without a trial. They said they would make my husband ask for me
to be executed. In the
summer of 1988, the Iranian regime executed thousands of political prisoners.
[According to some estimates, 30,000 political prisoners were executed over a
few month period.] My younger brother was one of the
ones killed. [She pointed to a picture of him that she brought with her. The
family resemblance was obvious.] In our small city, 30 people were executed each
night. The whole community was in mourning, but they wouldn’t return the bodies
to the families. They buried them in a mass grave. We were not permitted to
mourn. No one could visit the families or talk about what happened. My brother
had a four-year-old daughter. Every day, she asked me where her father was. I
told her that he had gone to the sky and at night she looked into the sky
trying to find her father. I’m here today to be the voice of all
those in Iran who have suffered and been killed. I’m the voice of young people and
children who grew up in prison. I am one of the victims of the regime. I lost
my father and my brother to this regime. Every time I look at the picture of my
brother, I say, “I won’t forget you.” I won’t let people forget what happened
to him and many others. I know there are people who care. I know
they care about human rights in Iran. I know they care about what is happening to
people in Iran.
The event concluded with Hajar, an 18 year
old woman, whose father, a medical student, was killed by the Iranian regime
when she was two years old and whose mother was killed by the Iranian regime
when she was eight years old, saying that although she was a student with exams
next week, she needed to be at the event to make sure the voices of her parents
are heard. She did not want them to die in vain. She ended by quoting the
lyrics of song by Marzieh, one of the most famous singers from Iran, who supports the overthrow of the mullahs’
regime in Iran.
If I take a stand
And you take a stand
Then everyone will stand with us
But if I sit and you sit
Who will stand?
We have to speak
And we have to speak of the pain
We need the world to know what is going on in Iran
That it is wrong and something needs to be done.
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7, November 15, 2004
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