<http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/hossein_derakhshan/2007/03/iran_awakening.html>
Iran awakening?
Hossein Derakhshan
March 16, 2007 11:00 PM
Two well-known and moderate women's rights activists have been
detained in Iran since last week for participating in a peaceful
street protest. The incident has outraged activists in Iran and
elsewhere, but there is much more to it.
On June 23, 2003, after months of heated debate, the then-reformist
parliament in Iran passed a bill, in favor of signing a UN document
that would abolish legal discrimination against women.
It was a big day for the 14 female MPs, who had tirelessly pushed for
the bill in the hope that it would be a serious start to a series of
changes in Iranian legal system - and an attempt to repair the Islamic
republic's terrible international image on human rights.
But the law, to little surprise, was rejected by an ultra-conservative
body (The Guardian Council) which has six top clerics and six lawyers
and oversees parliament to make sure its decisions are not against the
Iranian constitution or the core values of Islam. (Or their reading of
those values.) They said the bill violated both Iran's sovereignty and
Islamic law.
The then-77 year-old secretary of the council, Ayatollah Ahmad
Jannati, an infamous opponent of the reform movement at the time and a
strong supporter of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad now, said it was his saddest
day of his work on the council, according to an Iranian official.
The rejection came after months of lobbying and protests (including
street protests) by ultra-conservative clerics and their supporters
who opposed the bill - despite a small minority of high-ranking
clerics, such as Ayatollah Sane'I, who supported the law and didn't
find it un-Islamic. The unlucky bill has so far been passed between
various legislative councils and bodies and its future is entirely
unclear.
Four years later, women's activists in Iran have tried alternative
routes to abolish the discriminative laws against women, in areas such
as employment, divorce, inheritance and custody rights, among others.
Two different approaches have emerged: One approach believes that the
best way to silence the conservative critics, who accuse the reform
movement of being a Western import with an aim to undermine religious
values, is to construct a broad and inclusive manifesto, from bottom
up, by mostly Muslim Iranian women, based on the experiences of
post-colonial feminists in Asia and Africa.
The other approach is focuses around a campaign that wants to create
local and international pressure on the Islamic republic by collecting
one million signatures from ordinary Iranian women, and use that
leverage to raise awareness of and abolish the discriminatory laws.
While the former approach tries to work within the current social,
political and juridical structure, the latter rejects the structure in
the first place and, by using methods of organised, massive civil
disobedience, tries to force the establishment to accept the changes.
Both approaches have been more or less tolerated by the Islamic
Republic in the past couple of years and, as a result of various
conflicting opinions within the establishment, a neutral position has
emerged in regards to the women's movement.
But in the past few months, there have been some signs that the
American 'pro-democracy' project has developed an appetite for Iran's
women's movement. And why not? What else can potentially mobilise half
the population of a country against its government and possibly foment
Ukranian or Georgian-style coloured revolution?
A Dutch newspaper discovered last year that a controversial Dutch
grant to promote 'pro-democracy' media projects was awarded to an
American organisation, Freedom House, to launch an online
Persian-language magazine (Gozaar) to promote human rights and
democracy.
Immediately, Iranian authorities who were already suspicious of the
Dutch government's intentions (they are the perhaps the only country
other than the US that has publicly created a fund to promote
democracy in Iran) started to closely watch the other projects aided
by the 15 million Euro fund, which was mostly awarded to
European-based Iranian exiles. They began to see the whole budget as a
Dutch cover up for the American regime-change project.
One other grant was awarded to an Iranian dissident to start a web
magazine on Women's issues. But it emerged that the woman in charge of
the web magazine, Shahrzad News, was an active member of what was once
an armed opposition group that was outlawed and dismantled in the
early years after the Iranian revolution.
Shahrzad News developed close ties with some of the women's activists,
mainly with those who favored the civil disobedience approach, and, in
addition to having them write articles, it organised a workshop in
Dubai to improve the journalistic skills of some women's activists.
At the same time, the US State Department announced that it had
created a special office in Dubai to gather intelligence on Iran and
establish easier contact with Iranian dissidents. New York Times
reported last December that US State Department has indirectly funded
workshops on organising civil disobedience, hoping to foment massive
revolts in Iran and overthrow the regime.
A mix of paranoia and intelligence has, ever since, led the Iranian
government to become extremely wary of the activities of the
non-governmental organisations, especially those working on women's
issues. Last month they prevented a group of women from attending a
new workshop in India, organised by Shahrzad News, and detained three
of them for a day. Based on the accounts later published by those
activists, the well-behaved intelligence officers questioned them in
detail about their financial ties with Shahrzad News and other
possible foreign-funded organisations.
And last week they detained over thirty female activists who had
gathered in front of a court to protest the prosecution of a few other
activists, who were charged with disrupting national security by
participating in an street protest on Women's Day in Tehran. They have
now all been released, except for two - Shadi Sadr and Mahboobeh
Abbasgholizadeh. The Islamic republic has lost much of its tolerance.
It's a sad story. On the one hand, foreign 'pro-democracy' groups try
to use women for their regime-change plans. On the other hand, the
ultra-conservative factions in the Iranian establishment have found
new justifications for painting the entire women's movement as a
threat to the national security - which alienates the moderates within
the establishment - and are pushing for a total crackdown on any sort
of women's activism.
The only thing that could save the women's movement from a further
duress is to distance itself from foreign 'pro-democracy' funding and
abandon even peaceful street protests. Going back to lower-profile
types of activism, engagement with moderate conservative officials
(especially in the judiciary) and attempts to enter the local and
national legislature are the most effective and least-costly options
at the moment.
--
Yoshie