Threats Watch:
Iran has executed its Tiananmen Square. Baharestan Square has become synonymous with barbarity, cruelty, massacre and inhumanity.
An Iranian blogger (whose URL I will not publish) live blogging from Baharestan Square in central Tehran today captures but brief glimpses of the unimaginable horror that took place today. Bus loads of protesters were stopped and unloaded from their buses by “black-clad police” and literally herded. When the massing was sufficient, as the barely controllably distraught Tehran caller to CNN described first hand, hundreds of the regime’s Basij thugs poured out of an adjoining mosque and commenced a massacre with axes, clubs, guns and gas.
From the live blogger’s eyewitness account:
More than 10.000 Bassij Milittias get position in Central Tehran, including Baharestan Sq.
Army Helycopters flying over Baharestan and Vali Asr Sq.
The streets, squares and around BAHARESTAN (Approx. South-eastern of Tehran) is swarming with military forces, civilian forces, the security motorists
The croud have moved to the south of baharestan, the situation is bad, the shooting has started
In Baharestan Sq. in the Police shooting, A girl is shot and the police is not allowing to let them help
In Baharestan we saw militia with axe choping people like meat – blood everywhere – like butcher
This is the Iranian regime, wading into its own unarmed people and axing them to death, bludgeoning women (seen as the greatest threat to the regime) and throwing them to their deaths from pedestrian bridges. The same Iranian regime whose embassy officials are invited to American embassies around the world to celebrate on July 4th, of all things, a successful revolution.
This frantic phone call from a Tehran woman will break your heart as you consider our standard response has been “that there are sets of international norms and principles about violence” and that “the international community is watching.” Part of yesterday’s response by President Obama in a press conference included “that there is a peaceful path that will lead to stability and legitimacy (of the Iranian regime) and prosperity for the Iranian people. We hope they take it.” The Iranian theocratic regime clearly is not interested.
Washington Post: Women May Pose the Deepest Threat to Iran’s Regime. We must ask ourselves why this is this happening to prevent it from happening again. The answer is in Applebaum’s article.
Iranian PUMAs:
Who was really cheated in Iran’s vote? Women. The West shouldn’t cozy up to a regime that rigs elections against feminist candidates.
Who was really cheated in Iran’s vote? Women. The West shouldn’t cozy up to a regime that rigs elections against feminist candidates.
What is striking about the Iranians protesting fraud in the June 10 “election” is the number of women on the front lines. Among all those cheated at the polls, they may feel the most denied.
For the first time in one of the Islamic Republic’s controlled presidential campaigns, the women’s movement was able to raise its demands clearly and independently – even though the unelected, 12-member, all-male Guardian Council did not allow any female candidates to run.
The movement’s courage to confront the patriarchal theocracy (in which “morality police” still roam the streets looking for women with make-up) may have been a big reason why the regime rigged the vote count – and why supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was forced to make a show of ordering a probe of the fraud.
During the campaign, Iran’s feminists found a voice in the popular opposition candidate, Mir Hossein Mousavi, a former prime minister. He promised to disband the morality police, reform the many laws that treat women unequally, and appoint women to high posts. He campaigned with his wife, Zahra Rahnavard, a prominent academic and author of 15 books. The two appear to be a loving couple, displaying a modern equality to Iranian women. But he “lost” the vote – even in his hometown, which was yet another sign that the fix was in.
USAToday: Iranian women take key role in protests
Negar Mortazavi, who lives in Washington, D.C., stays in touch with Iranian friends who have been protesting in Tehran. On Saturday, a male student described on the phone violent clashes between protesters, police and plainclothes militia.
One scene stood out, and “he couldn’t believe his eyes,” said Mortazavi, 27, who came to the USA from Iran in 2002 and is helping to coordinate protests in the United States. “He decided it was time to start running when the police were coming. He turned back and saw some women still standing,” she says. “These women are not afraid.”
Iranian women have been on the front lines of anti-government protests challenging the official results of the June 12 election, in which President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was declared the victor.
US News: Iranian Women’s Key Role in the Iran Election Protests
Ms. Mariam Memarsadeghi: Iranian women, and their long stifled demands for legal equality, greater individual rights and democratic development for the country, have been at the core of the “green movement” behind the candidacy of Mir Hossein Mousavi. A Campaign for One Million Signatures was launched by leading Iranian feminists under the presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Though the leaders behind this grassroots civic campaign were subject to intense surveillance, intimidation, imprisonment, exorbitant bail fines and restrictions on their right to travel abroad, they managed to make their struggle a broad based one that penetrated the intensely male dominated political sphere by calling on presidential candidates to engage with them and address their demands for reform of the constitution and laws affecting women’s rights. They also demanded that Iran sign on to the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women as a means to force the Islamist regime to bring its laws and practices affecting women in line with international norms. Women themselves have never been permitted by the theocracy to run for president as their judgment is deemed inferior.
It is important to note that before the 1979 Revolution, Iranian women were making great strides toward equal opportunity in education and the world of work. Women could be seen in positions of leadership in various fields of work and at the highest levels of government. Islamist ideology and the totalitarian state changed that reality virtually overnight as Ayatollah Khomeini and his followers ushered in a constitution and new laws which reversed the gains women had made and virtually expelled them from the work force. Mandatory veiling and a fiercely repressive police state, not to mention the eight year war with Iraq and Iran’s international isolation, caused deep setbacks for women. Under Mohammad Khatami’s presidency, women managed to create some space for greater civic organizing and personal liberties, though at the legal level, little progress was tolerated by the ruling clerical establishment.
The current crisis in Iran profoundly affects women as the differences between Ahmadinejad and Mousavi are stark when it comes to women’s rights and women’s role in society. Mousavi’s outspoken wife, Zahra Rahnavard, has made the status of women a core theme of her president’s campaign, while Ahmadinejad, with his barely visible spouse and radical Islamist outlook, has ruled with a certain contempt for women’s leadership in the public sphere. If Ahmadinejad’s coup succeeds, Iranian women will suffer tremendously.
Slate: Woman Power: Regimes that repress the civil and human rights of half their population are inherently unstable.
I don’t know whether the girl in the photographs is destined to become this revolution’s symbolic martyr, as some are already predicting. I do know, however, that there is a connection between the violence in Iran over the last week and the women’s rights movement that has slowly gained strength over the last several years in Iran.
In the United States, the most Americo-centric commentators have somberly attributed the strength of recent demonstrations to the election of Barack Obama. Others want to give credit to the democracy rhetoric of the Bush administration. Still others want to call this a “Twitter revolution” or a “Facebook revolution,” as if zippy new technology alone had inspired the protests. But the truth is that the high turnout was the result of many years of organizational work carried out by small groups of civil rights activists and, above all, women’s groups, working largely unnoticed and without much outside help.
Not Obama, not Bush, and not Twitter, in other words, but years of work and effort lie behind the public display of defiance—and in particular the numbers of women on the streets. And their presence matters. For at the heart of the ideology of the Islamic republic is its claim to divine inspiration: The leadership is legitimate, and in particular its harsh repression of women is legitimate, because God has decreed that it is so. The outright rejection of this creed by tens of thousands of women, not just over the last weekend but over the last decade, has to weaken the Islamic republic’s claim to invincibility in Iran and across the Middle East. The regime’s political elite knows this well. It is no accident that the two main challengers to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the Iranian election campaign promised to repeal some of the laws that discriminate against women—and no accident that the leading challenger, Mir Hossein Mousavi, used his wife, political scientist and former university chancellor Zahra Rahnavard, in his campaign appearances and posters.
The Iranian clerics know that women pose a profound threat to their authority: As activist Ladan Boroumand has written, the regime would not bother to use brutal forms of repression against dissidents unless it feared them deeply. Nobody would have murdered a young woman in blue jeans—a peaceful, unarmed demonstrator—unless her mere presence on the street presented a dire threat.
New York Times: Iran’s Second Sex . Beautiful article about Iranian women.
Christiane Amanpour (who’s Iranian) on the Iranian crisis and the dominant role of women
CNN: Women in Iran march against discrimination
CNN: Iranian women stand up in defiance, flout rules
CNN: Women in Iran march against discrimination
Women, regarded as second-class citizens under Iranian law, have been noticeably front and center of the massive demonstrations that have unfolded since the presidential election a week ago. Iranians are protesting what they consider a fraudulent vote count favoring hardline incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but for many women like Parisa, the demonstrations are just as much about taking Iran one step closer to democracy.
“Women have become primary agents of change in Iran,” said Nayereh Tohidi, chairwoman of the Gender and Women’s Studies Department at California State University, Northridge.
The remarkable images show women with uncovered heads who are unafraid to speak their minds and crowds that are not segregated — both the opposite of the norm in Iran, Tohidi said.
She said a long-brewing women’s movement may finally be manifesting itself on the streets and empowering women like Parisa.
“This regime is against all humanity, more specifically against all women,” said Parisa, whom CNN is not fully identifying for security reasons.
“I see lots of girls and women in these demonstrations,” she said. “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.”
Though 63 percent of all Iranian college students are women, the law of the land does not see men and women as equal. In cases of divorce, child custody, inheritance and crime, women do not have the same legal rights as men.
In the past four years, Ahmadinejad has made it easier for men to practice polygamy and harder for women to access public sector jobs, according to CNN’s Chief International Correspondent Christiane Amanpour.
Amanpour, who has reported extensively from Iran, describes Iranian women as “very strong.” In 1997, it was women who came out along with young people to put reformist candidate Mohammed Khatami into the presidency, Amanpour said.
Increasingly, women’s voices are gaining power as their numbers rise and their demands grow louder.
Even the granddaughter of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the architect of the Islamic republic, voiced frustration at the way women are treated.
“Women are just living things,” Zahra Eshraghi told Amanpour. “A woman is there to fill her husband’s stomach and raise children.”
For the first time, women were allowed to register for the presidential race, though none, including Eshraghi, were deemed fit to run by the religious body that vets candidates. But women’s issues surfaced in the campaign.
That was partly the result of a women’s movement comprised of educated, urban, middle-class women that has grown in recent years with the addition of more conservative and poorer women, said Tohidi, a longtime observer of women’s rights in Iran. Ironically, traditional women first gained voice under the clerics.
“Khomeini needed their votes, so he encouraged them to be publicly active,” Tohidi said.
The middle-class women who enjoyed certain freedoms in prerevolutionary days refused to turn back, while a new generation of conservatives were awakened to feminism.
In 2003, lawyer and women’s rights activist Shirin Ebadi won the Nobel Peace Prize, providing a “big boost” for Iranian women, Tohidi said.
At the same time, private organizations and charities that deal with women’s issues blossomed under the presidency of reformist Mohammed Khatami, growing by as much as 700 percent, Tohidi said.
Marriage age increased as more women opted to marry for love, instead of entering arranged marriages. The One Million Signatures Campaign officially launched in 2006 sprouted new discourse and attention with a petition that asks the parliament to reform gender discriminatory laws.
In this year’s presidential campaign, Iranian women pressured candidates to agree to ratify the U.N. Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. The 1979 treaty has been ratified by 186 nations, including several Islamic states.
Two opposition candidates, Mir Hossein Moussavi and Mehdi Karrubi, vowed to look into parts of the Iranian constitution that defer women’s rights to what is regarded as an outdated version of sharia, or Islamic, law. Moussavi had even promised to appoint women as cabinet ministers for the first time.
Some women in Iran looked to Moussavi to carry their banner, perhaps because they were inspired by his wife, Zahra Rahnavard, a much-admired academic who told CNN’s Amanpour that Iran’s 34 million women want civil laws and family laws revised.
Author and journalist Azadeh Moaveni, who spent several years working in Iran, said Ahmadinejad’s fundamentalism has pushed Iranian women to the edge.
“He has been a catastrophe for women,” said Moaveni, who wrote “Lipstick Jihad” and co-authored “Iran Awakening” with Nobel laureate Ebadi.
The weight of discrimination against women is felt most profoundly through Iran’s legal system, but Moaveni said Ahmadinejad added to the hardship by clamping down on women’s lifestyles. He mandated the way women dress and even censored Web sites that dealt with women’s health, Moaveni said. A woman would be hard-pressed to conduct a Google search for something as simple as breast cancer.
Moaveni was almost arrested because her coat sleeves were too short and exposed too much skin. In that setting, she said, it’s striking to see women protesting, especially without their hijabs, or head coverings.
“While it’s not at the top of women’s grievances, the hijab is symbolic. Taking it off is like waving a red flag,” Moaveni said. “Women are saying they are a force to be reckoned with.”
Azar Nafisi, a professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies and author of “Reading Lolita in Tehran,” said she has been watching the footage from Iran with “inordinate pride.”
She marched on the streets during the 1979 revolution because she believed in greater freedoms for her people, only to see her dreams shattered as hardline clerics took hold of Iran. “Reading Lolita” is largely a memoir of her harrowing days in Iran until 1997, when she immigrated to the United States.
“The way I walked down the street became a political statement,” Nafisi said.
She recalled her own mother being a devout Muslim who chose not to wear a veil. Her grandmother, like more traditional women in Iran, wore a veil but resented the government ordering her to do so. Covering up, Nafisi said, was a matter of faith, not politics.
Nafisi believes that women have become a symbolic statement of the power of the Islamic state. She called Iranian women canaries of the mind — barometers of how free society is.
It’s impossible to predict what will transpire in Iran in the coming days.
Nafisi believes a regime change will not be enough; that only a change in mindset can lead to greater freedoms for women.
Moaveni said the sheer scale of the demonstrations assures her that the political and social climate will never again be the same in Iran.
Tohidi is keeping her fingers crossed that the protests won’t prompt Iran’s hardliners to clamp down and rule by repression.
But all of them shared the hopes of the women — like Parisa — who are marching on the streets.
“Today, we were wearing black,” Parisa said, referring to the day of mourning to remember those who have died in post-election violence.
“We were holding signs. We said, ‘We are not sheep. We are human beings,’” she said.
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Parisa was thankful for all the images being transmitted out of Iran despite the government’s crackdown on international journalists. She was thankful, too, that the world cared.
“Today,” she said, “I had this feeling of hope that things will finally change.”
Salon: Clinton, Biden want Obama to take stronger stance on Iran
Obama’s also hearing from senior officials within his administration, including Vice President Biden and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, that he should rethink his current stance.
According to the Times, its sources within the administration say that Clinton and Biden, among others, “while supporting the president’s approach… would like to strike a stronger tone in support of the protesters.” There’s also some concern, the paper reports, that the president “run[s] the risk of coming across on the wrong side of history at a potentially transformative moment in Iran.”
Bonnie Erbe, US News: A Peaceful Conclusion to Iran Election Results Does Not Seem Possible
I would like to chime in on my colleague Peter Roff’s Tuesday blog, predicting the mullahs may yet be ousted in Iran. He wrote:
“The millions of Iranians who are the streets this week may bring down the regime. Toppling the mullahs would have a profound impact on U.S. security, potentially removing from the scene one of this country’s major enemies and what is perhaps the world’s principal terrorist-supporting state.”
Here, here! I am listening to a public radio report as I write this, about the importance of the Internet and social networking in organizing the Iranian protests. The government is aware of this and cracking down on internet usage as a result. This is fomenting more calls for outright rebellion.
President Obama made, as Peter Roff noted, wishy-washy remarks, but his former opponent, Sen. John McCain, came out stronger, calling on the President to call the Iranian election what it was: a sham.
Meanwhile, the protesters continue their anti-government work:
“Tens of thousands of supporters of Mir Hossein Mousavi , the defeated main challenger in the disputed Iranian presidential election, rallied in central Tehran, video on Iranian state television showed, after the biggest protest in 30 years led to as many as 15 deaths.”
Let’s all hope this is resolved peacefully and no more blood is shed. But that does not seem possible from here.
“The candidates are the same.” A sham election. Where have we heard this before?
The protest is not just students and the highly educated. It’s spreading to everyone:
MSNBC: Women in chadors join Iran’s opposition: Protesters say they want their votes counted and their voices heard
It’s not just young, liberal rich kids anymore: Whole families, taxi drivers, even conservative women in black chadors are joining Iran’s opposition street protests.
They say they want something simple: their votes counted and their voices heard. What they will settle for — or push for — is a far bigger question.
Boorghani is typical of the young reformists who initially backed Mousavi — but that support is growing to include grandmothers, government employees and hotel clerks.
The last time Iran was engulfed in similar anti-government action was a decade ago when a deadly raid on a Tehran University dorm sparked six days of nationwide protests. At the time, they were considered the worst since the 1979 revolution that toppled the pro-U.S. shah and brought hard-line clerics to power. But the student-driven movement eventually fizzled, leaving many people more bitter but the system intact.
This time, though, the protesters are not just affluent students and youth. The middle class is also flooding the streets and even conservative religious Iranians are joining the Mousavi supporters.
Swathed in a long black chador, 21-year-old Saman Qahremani said she wanted to let the government know that many Iranians from all walks of life are angry.
“When I learned about the result I just felt hatred. They cheated us,” said Qajremani, who held a sign at Monday’s rally that read in English, “We just want our vote.”
“If they do not count the votes of people, Iran will not be a republic any more, it will be a monarchy,” she said.
Her friend, also dressed in a chador, nodded in agreement.
Municipal worker Reza Hosseini, 37, cheered for Mousavi as he passed through the rally in a convoy of cars.
“I voted for Mousavi in hope of a better life, more freedom, security and relief,” said Hosseini, who wore a button-down shirt with stripes in Mousavi’s signature color, green. “All the people I knew voted for Mousavi.”
Nearby, a taxi driver shouted out his window: “Everybody should join! Don’t just watch, join!”
“This (the Mousavi opposition) is completely different to 1999. That was between the students and the government. This is between the people and the government. This time it is all of Iran. This is a historic movement,” Boorghani said.
Iranian Nobel Peace Prize-Winner Ebadi Calls For New Elections
Iranian Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi has told RFE/RL that the Iranian authorities should hold a new election and allow monitoring by international observers. She also called for the release of everyone the regime has arrested, which includes several human rights activists.
Shirin Ebadi: The Iranian people are expressing doubt and questioning the election [results]. Millions of people have come to the streets and expressed their demands in a very peaceful manner. Unfortunately, their peaceful demands have been met with violent reactions; we saw at least [seven people] killed in the streets and a number of dead at Tehran University [during an attack by security forces]. There are also many injured.
[The violent response by the authorities] has been so intense that it has caused anger and has been questioned among the members of the parliament. Some of the professors have protested against it and I hope the situation will move in a direction that the people’s demands will be taken into account.
First of all I have to say that of those who have been arrested [in recent days] must be released without any conditions. Why have the [authorities] arrested people? Just because they have been expressing their protests in a civic and peaceful manner — including [protesting] the arrest of human rights advocate Abdol Fatah Soltani, former vice president [Mohammad Ali Abtahi], and [senior reformist figure] Said Hajarian — who is in poor physical condition — and all the others who have been arrested. Citing the names of all of them would take too long.
Why there should be such a reaction? So all those arrested must be released and then the demand of the people and of the [defeated] presidential candidate should be met in way that the public is satisfied.
I believe that a recount of the votes under the current conditions won’t solve anything. A new election must be held and this time it should be under the monitoring of international organizations so that all participants would be contented that the votes that come out of the ballot boxes are the real votes of the people
Iranian Protest Photos
