Lashing Out on Iranian Women's Rights Activists

In 1988, the year I left Iran, thousands of political prisoners were tortured and executed in the notorious Evin Prison. The prisoners were tortured by the intelligence ministry officers to get confessions and repentance. No one dared to say a word as the country was still at war with Iraq and any dissent could have been interpreted as collaborating with the enemy.

Those were the dark days. The practice of lashing gradually became a public ritual for punishing criminals as defined by Islamic law. The country is no longer at war and the grass-roots social movements are nonviolent. Although even now human rights activists are under pressure and union activists are being detained, none has been sentenced to lashing.

This was true until recently when Delaram Ali, a women's rights activist, received a hefty sentence: two and half years in prison and 10 lashes.

Delaram Ali was arrested along with other activists in a demonstration against the discriminatory laws against women in Iran in June 2006. She was severely beaten by police, and her hand was broken. With the help of Nobel Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi, she filed a legal complaint against the head of the police department in Tehran. Not only was Ali's complaint not addressed, she was later charged for "posing threat to national security."

Threats to national security seem to have become abundant during Mr. Ahmadinejad's term. These so called threats come from unlikely sources including but not limited to women's rights activists. The Iranian law forbids women to become president or a judge. The law also requires women to acquire their husbands' permission to exit the country. Women's testimony is worth half of men's and women cannot get a divorce on their own.

Gender inequality embedded in the constitution and the legal institutions in Iran were issues that led these activists to create the One Million Signatures Campaign. The Web site has been filtered six times.

In a campaign that recently reached its first anniversary, activists go around the country (16 provinces in the past year) to gather signatures to change discriminatory laws. Faced with peaceful demonstrations and a campaign for equality that advocates legal change through legal means, the Iranian authorities have responded with the utmost hostility. More than a dozen law-abiding citizens have been arrested while collecting signatures. Most recently, Ronak Safarzadeh and Hana Abdi, active members of the Campaign in Kordestan province, were detained and are currently held without charge or trial in Sanandaj by local officials from the Ministry of Intelligence. On November 18, 2007 Maryam Hosseinkhah, and on December 1st Jelve Javaheri, activists in Tehran were also detained.

The changes that the women's rights activists involved with One Million Signatures Campaign advocate do not involve armed personnel or militancy. There are no opposition underground organizations, militia or hidden cells for which confessions would be needed. In fact, these activists who are mostly in their 20s, insist on being transparent, accountable to the public and quite concerned about the possibility of an unjustified foreign attack on Iran. They also know that if patriotic fervor rises, it becomes easier for the regime to oppress any and all dissent.

The mothers of the young activists now in detention or condemned to receive lashings along with others concerned about the prospects of war, have gathered to form Mothers for Peace. Still remembering the bloody days of the revolution and the repression that followed during the war with Iraq, these mothers object to the regime's punishment for their enthusiast daughters' and sons' activities.

The system seems to have a sinister Déjà vu as it applies punishments previously reserved for organized opposition groups to nonviolent activists. The Iranian authorities need to understand that the return to old methods of repression will lead to more sanctions and growing international condemnation of Iran's violation of human rights. What the Iranian political authority is facing is a growing popular movement triumphing with every obstacle and one that will not succumb.

Comments

[oldpotsmuggler]

In 1995 I filled in as a bartender for a friend of mine that was hosting a wedding for some fellow Persians at a horse ranch in southern Orange County. A good time was had by all, and I felt privileged to have even been invited to the occasion. He and I spent some number of years together at a federal prison in Texas leading up to the wedding.

The Shah of Iran was an issue until he was deposed and many of the better off followed him out of the country. Of course, the whole Iran/Iraq war would never have happened if not for the revolution of 1980.

Back in the sixties, Somoza, Marcos, and Reza Pahlavi, Shah of Iran, I suppose, were the real "poster children" of American imperialism. One hoped that far more might have come from their deserved demises, but can still feel some gratitude that modern abuses can be catalogued in a piece as short as this.

People, we are making progress, even though it mostly looks like 50 steps forward and 49 steps back. One imagines that the tally for the whole planet might have been closer to two steps forward and one back but for the reign of BUSHCO, but who knows.

Hopefully millions of us will at least feel grateful that we are still able to continue the journey, because it seems like a ton of good shit is ready to happen for the whole planet in 2009.