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Women of Iran (Part 1)
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(AP Photo/Ben Curtis)
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Iranians voted in record numbers in the Presidential election on June 12th, 2009. 70% of the 46 million eligible voters went to the polls, according to Fars, a semi-official Iranian news agency. With an unemployment rate of 30% and double digit inflation going into the election, analysts predicted a close race. When the official results were announced two hours after the polls closed, claiming a landslide victory for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a million Iranians took to the street in protest, defying an official ban on post-election political demonstrations.
News about the protests flooded online social media websites within hours. As disturbing images and video appeared on Twitter and Facebook, people went ballistic over the lack of coverage in mainstream media outlets. By the following day, the Iranian protests were the top story worldwide. Despite the widespread popular support for the Iranian protestors, the governments of the world have been slow to criticize the election results or to intervene directly in Iranian civil affairs.
The women and youth of Iran have been at the forefront of the protests since the beginning, though the demonstrations have included citizens from all sectors of Iranian society. Women have clashed with police, been tear-gassed, beaten and killed alongside the men. Students, male and female, have been arrested, beaten, tortured, killed or have mysteriously vanished. Over the last couple of weeks, the Iranian government has aggressively attacked demonstrators. People have been pulled from their homes at night and arrested. Injured protestors have been seized at hospitals and forcibly removed.
The photographs and video of beautiful, proud Iranian women defiantly speaking their minds in a society that views them as second class citizens is awe-inspiring. The passion of Iran’s youth for social change is moving.
The role that women have played in the post election protests is not surprising. Iranian women have been advocating for political reform for over 100 years. Women participated in the Constitutional Revolution of 1906. They were key supporters of the Islamic Revolution in 1979.
Prior to 1979, women had made considerable gains socially and politically. They had greater opportunity in various professions and were allowed to seek office at the highest levels of government. That came to an end in with the Islamic revolution in1979. The Ayatollah Khomeini removed women from the workplace and made veils mandatory.
The Iranian clerics know that women could pose a threat to their authority. Women were instrumental in electing a reformist to the Presidency in 2000 and electing reformist candidates to Parliament in 2001. The clerics have gone to great lengths to crush the women’s movement. As the activist Ladan Boroumand has written, the regime would not bother to brutally repress dissidents unless it feared them.
Neda, the woman allegedly shot by the Basiji, the pro-government militia, while watching a demonstration with her teacher, has become a symbol for all the women involved in the post-election demonstrations. Abbas Milani, the director of Iranian Studies at Stanford University, told CNN that "Neda will become the image of this brutality and the role -- the truly significant role -- that women have played in fighting this regime. I think that women are the unsung heroes of the last few years. They are the ones who began chipping away the absolute authority of the mullahs."
The Wall Street Journal quoted a woman involved in the initial protests as saying,
“At the beginning I thought this was going to be a fight between the lower class and the middle class. What I saw on Monday changed my mind completely. I saw many women, young and old, covered head-to-toe in black chadors shouting and chanting among the demonstrators and joining the young girls who were sitting on the ground in the middle of the street to stop the Basij militia from walking inside the crowd.That image will never be wiped away from my mind. The women on the front line with their loose colorful scarves had opened their arms, ready to be killed, while others were beaten by the Basij on the side of the road.
Another protestor told CNN, "I see lots of girls and women in these demonstrations. They are all angry, ready to explode, scream out and let the world hear their voice. I want the world to know that as a woman in this country, I have no freedom."
Over the last decade, Iranian voters have become increasingly interested in expanding personal liberties, women's rights and in relaxing the strict moral codes dictating everything from acceptable attire to appropriate music. Activists within Iranian society have been alienated and ignored by the oppressive regime.
Under Ahmadinejad, laws discriminating against women have been enforced more stringently. In an interview with CNN Azadeh Moaveni , journalist and author of “Lipstick Jihad,” was quoted as saying, “he mandated the way women dress and even censored Web sites that dealt with women’s health. A woman would be hard-pressed to conduct a Google search for something as simple as breast cancer.”
Reformist candidate and former prime minister, Mir-Hossein Mousavi appealed to female voters with his promise to address the disparity between men and women in Iranian society. He vowed to review discriminatory laws pertaining to women and pledged to support those campaigning for women’s rights. Mousavi’s wife, Zahra Rahnavard, is a well known and popular political scientist and artist. Her active participation in her husband’s political campaign was unusual in Iranian politics. She has been very outspoken on women’s issues, saying “we should reform laws that treat women unequally. We should empower women financially. Women should be able to choose their professions according to their merits. Iranian women should be able to reach the highest level of decision making bodies.”
Lila Ghobady, an exiled Iranian artist, writer and filmmaker living in Canada since 2002, does not believe that either candidate would represent the interests of women. She wrote an essay titled “No matter who is President of Iran, they would stone me.” She listed 10 reasons why it doesn’t matter to her which candidate wins the election.
Iran’s unique political system relies on a balance of power between a democratically elected Parliament and Presidency and the unelected, theocratic supreme ruler. Though Mousavi ran on a platform based on change, including social reform, the Ayotollah is ultimately the one dictating public and political policy.
That power wielded by the clerics was demonstrated when reformist candidates were elected to government in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Unelected, hard-line clerics shut down reformist newspapers, dismissed reformist legislation and blocked all attempts at social and economic reform. Ahmadinejad came to power in 2005 due to the disenchantment amongst reformist voters, who largely boycotted the vote.
Since Ahmadinejad assumed the Presidency, we have seen little positive press in the West about Iran. The focus tends to be nuclear weapons, nuclear ambitions or an inappropriate public comment from tyrannical, Holocaust denying, misogynistic, homophobic President Ahmadinejad. He isn’t exactly the ambassador of charm and diplomacy.
Ahmadinejad has cracked down on the women’s movement. Members of the movement have been harassed, beaten, threatened, arrested, jailed and, in some cases, tortured. In June, 2006 Alieh Eghdamdoost and several others women's rights advocates were arrested at a peaceful women's rights demonstration in Tehran. Eghdamdoost was originally sentenced to 3 1/3 years and 20 lashes. She was the first woman imprisoned in Iran for women’s rights activism.
The International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran has called on President Ahmadinejad to reverse the ruling on Eghamdoost's case and to end the persecution and prosecution of women's rights activists. You can help by signing a petition to Iranian authorities calling for Eghdamdoost’s release and demanding an end to the persecution and prosecution of women's rights activists. Click here to sign the petition.
The Campaign for One Million Signatures was launched on August 27, 2006 as a follow up to the June, 2006 protest. The goal is to collect one million signatures demanding an end to discriminatory laws against women in Iran. The campaign’s website is frequently blocked. 47 members of the campaign have been jailed so far, charged with trying to overthrow the government.
12 women’s rights activists were arrested in late March, 2009 while meeting to go visit families of imprisoned social and political activists. 10 of those arrested were members of the One Million Signatures Campaign.
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