From the Women’s Forum Against Fundamentalism In Iran (WFAFI):
“In recent weeks, there has been more arrests and death sentences against women. Tehran’s fundamentalist regime is so fearful of women, that it even barred a women’s rights activist’s travel to participate in the Swedish award ceremony. The regime took extra steps to prevent any gatherings or public events on March 8 commemorating the International Women’s Day. There is no doubt that defending women’s rights is a threat to the fundamentalist regime in Tehran.
For years, the “moral” police in the streets used women to set the bar for suppression and crackdown. While Ahmadinejad and his thugs claim to be defending Islam, their un-Islamic and misogynous practices now faces an interesting challenge: In recent days, Ahmadinejad’s “moral enforcer”, Brigadier General Ali Reza Zarei, who led the sever crackdown on women failing to adhere to Iran’s strict Islamic dress codes, has been arrested in a Tehran brothel. Zarei, 53, the Tehran police chief and a close confidant to Ahmadinejad, was caught with six prostitutes performing nude “Islamic” prayers. There has been no mention of the case in the official Iranian media but a spokesman for the justice ministry admitted last week that an unnamed senior official had been arrested. While it is clear what will happen to the six women arrested with Zarei, there is no word on what will happen to the vanished police chief.”
WFAFI also forwarded these news items about women in Iran:
WFAFI News Service – February 18, 2008 Although the Iranian regime claims that it halted the practice of stoning, the stoning verdict of a 14 year old girl was approved and carried out by her father in city of Zahedan in Sistan-Baluchistan province. The security forces took no action to stop the killing of the young girl despite the desperate plea by her mother. The father admitted to the head of Zahedan police that he killed his daughter for her “illicit relation with a man, indecency and lack of morality”. According to the father, he stoned his own daughter first and then killed her by four bullet because “he had no other choice but to defend his honor.” According to Article 220 of Iran’s Penal code, the father will not face any punishment for taking matters in to his own hands.
NCRI Website – February 19, 2008 In the latest plan introduced by the Iranian regime to deepen gender segregation in the society, telephone booths are targeted, the state-run website Farda reported on Monday. Following such previous plans as buses, taxies, schools, public service offices, and text books segregations, now telephone booths are divided between males and females in the holy city of Qom, in central Iran for the first time according to Farda. Imposing strict gender segregation in all social activities involving women has been the practice since the early days of the mullahs’ regime in Iran. However, going as far as segregating the phone booths is a new measure to deepen the gender discrimination in Iran.
NCRI Website – February 21, 2008 The State Security Forces (SSF) arrested a woman for not wearing socks. When her sister attempted to get her detained sister released by taking a pair of socks to the SSF local station where the woman was held, both women were beaten up by male agents and imprisoned until next morning. The two were referred to a judge for arraignment the next day. Compliance with the so-called Islamic dress codes by Iranian women is a must and the violators will be punished accordingly. Thousands of women have been warned for wearing tight outfits, short coats and skimpy headscarves and for flouting the Islamic dress code, which requires every post-pubescent woman to cover their hair and body contours. Wearing boots with short pants, hats or scarves which do not fully cover hair and neck instead of the proper head veil and putting on unusual make-up that contradicts public chastity is forbidden. The mullahs’ regime has in recent months stepped up execution of youths in a clear warning to those deemed to be a threat to the society.
Malaysia Sun – February 25, 2008 A video has emerged which shows crowds rioting against the Iranian regime. The riot broke out in Tehran on the weekend when the Iranian Chastity Police attempted to arrest a young woman they said was inappropriately dressed. Witnesses say the young woman resisted arrest, which caused the police to push and beat her. The sight of the woman being beaten prompted a bystander to come to her aid, but he was also roughed-up by the security forces. Dozens of Iranians who were present at the scene began rioting and setting rubbish on fire. The riot was captured on numerous cell-phone cameras and shows people shouting slogans against the police and government. The crowed reportedly called out against Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Efforts by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and Chastity Police to enforce the Islamic dress code on Iranian women has caused thousands of women to be detained for failing to uphold the dress code.
BBC News – February 25, 2008 Homosexual relationships are banned in Iran, but the country allows sex change operations and hundreds of men have elected for surgery to change their lives. Ali Askar had a sex change operation and is now called Negar “He wants to kill me. He keeps telling me to come home so he can kill me. He had put rat poison in my tea.” For Ali Askar, at age 24, the decision to become a woman came at a heavy cost. His father threatened to kill him if he went ahead with surgery. Now renamed Negar, she says she would not have had the operation if she did not live in Iran. Today, Iran carries out more sex change operations than any other nation in the world except for Thailand.
Agance France Presse – February 25, 2008 Iran is to impose a quota that men and women form a minimum of 30 percent in university courses, partly in a bid to prevent women dominating the medical profession, a newspaper reported on Monday. Women currently outnumber men at universities in Iran and the imbalance has become especially acute in medicine, creating fears that the vast majority of medical professionals could be women in the future. ‘There will be a minimum 30 percent admission for men and women each and the rest will be chosen competitively,’ Etemad newspaper quoted the head of Iran’s Academic Testing Organisation, Abdolrasool Pour Abbas, as saying. ‘The law will guarantee the entrance of both genders in medical, engineering and humanities fields,’ he said. He argued that the measure was not discriminating against women, pointing out that they would benefit in disciplines where they are still outnumbered by men. But some hardline MPs-not always men-have branded women’s increased numbers a dangerous phenomenon, arguing that men as traditional bread winners had to have a guaranteed place in higher education and the workforce.
WFAFI News Service – February 28, 2008 Two women have been handed their death sentence in Evin prison. Shahbanoo Nedam, after being in prison for 11 years, is now condemned to death by execution. Another woman, Tayebeh Hojjati, has also been sentenced to death after 8 years of being in prison. They are both in in the section 3 of Evin prison, and have been convicted of murder. Currently there are more than 57 women who are facing execution in Iran. Among those, there are 11 women facing death by stoning. Iran holds the highest number of female execution in the world.
Voice of America – February 28, 2008 Iranian women are getting more vocal in their demands for equality before the law. The Amnesty International report says dozens of activists and supporters have been arrested in connection with their activities for the Campaign for Equality, founded in 2006. As of January 2008, the Campaign’s website had been blocked by the authorities at least seven times, the report says.
Agance France Presse – February 28, 2008 Iranian security forces arrested 10 people who clashed with police in Teheran after they arrested a woman deemed to be badly veiled as part of a moral crackdown, a deputy police chief said on Friday. “A sister was warned over her dress but she resisted. She refused to cooperate while being transferred to the patrol car and made a scene,” the ISNA news agency quoted Commander Hossein Zolfaghari as saying. “Some people were affected by the noise and clashed with the police and were eventually arrested,” he said. Nine people as well as the woman in question had been detained, he said, without giving further details.”Even if the police’s actions had been not merited that girl should not have resisted,” he said. “If an official warns a driver about going through a red light should he get out and grab the official by the neck?” Thousands of women have been warned over insufficient covering of hair and bodily contours in Iran, which launched a nationwide moral crackdown in April 2007 in a drive to “elevate security in society.”
The New York Times – March 2, 2008 American officials charge Iran with meddling in Iraq by facilitating the importing of powerful weapons into the country and training Iraqis to set the armor-piercing roadside bombs known as explosively formed penetrators…In Diyala Province, still one of the most violent areas, American forces were detaining a man believed to be in charge of a cell that recruited women to carry out suicide-vest bombings, the military said Saturday in a statement…Women have carried out six attacks or attempted attacks so far this year, according to the United States military. The bombers of the Baghdad pet markets were two women with a history of psychiatric treatment.
Reuters – March 3, 2008 An Iranian women’s rights campaigner said police prevented her from flying out of Tehran on Monday to pick up a $75,000 human rights award in Sweden. Parvin Ardalan, who was awarded the Olof Palme Prize for 2007, said she had boarded the Air France plane at Tehran’s international airport when aircraft crew told her that police had informed them she could not leave.
International Herald Tribune – March 6, 2008 An Iranian-American radio journalist who is facing a yearlong prison term for her broadcasts to Iran through Radio Free Europe said yesterday that Iran had threatened to seize her 95-year-old mother’s home in Tehran if she did not return to serve a sentence for propaganda. The journalist, Parnaz Azima, 59, who works for the Persian-language service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in Prague, said her lawyer in Iran was appealing her conviction Saturday by Tehran’s 13th Revolutionary Court for spreading propaganda and working for the “anti- revolutionary” Radio Farda, the Persian-language station of Radio Free Europe. “The interrogation was about everything, about my own life,” she said. “What was I doing before leaving Iran 25 years ago. What I was doing in my life before coming to Radio Free Europe. And then about what was I doing in Radio Free Europe. And they were always insisting that if I cooperated with them, everything would be closed.” She noted that officials particularly urged her to avoid covering sensitive issues like human rights.
IPS News – March 11, 2008 Suppression of women’s movements and refusal to allow women to rally in public places by Iran’s hard line rulers kept celebrations of this year’s International Women’s Day confined to small gatherings in private residences. The fear of harassment or arrest was real. Memories are fresh of the arrests of 10 women at a Mar. 8 rally in front of the Iranian Parliament, last year. Four days prior to that, 33 women’s rights advocates, who had rallied in front of a revolutionary court to protest the trial of five women’s rights activists, were arrested on charges of ‘jeopardising national security’. Since then, tens of more rights activists have been arrested, summoned by courts or security bodies, imprisoned, tried by revolutionary courts or prevented from leaving the country.
The Toronto Star – March 12, 2008 Soroya Malekzadeh wanted to test Iran’s claim to being an open democracy, so she submitted her nomination papers to be a candidate for this month’s parliamentary elections. The reply came from the Interior Ministry, formally disqualifying her for failing to meet Iran’s strict Islamic requirements. Now, exhausted by state harassment and imprisonment, she has submitted another set of papers, this time to the Canadian embassy in Tehran in hope of obtaining refugee status. From a small, one-bedroom apartment in central Tehran, Malekzadeh trembles and blinks nervously as she describes her failed bid to run in Iran’s elections. Visibly exhausted from years of run-ins with the authorities, Malekzadeh, 38, says her vocal stance on women’s issues in Iran has left her with little option but to leave. “I have lost almost everything,” she says. “My job, my future, everything,” the medical nurse adds. “Women can’t do anything in this country. The government tells us how to dress, whether we can see boys and what we can say … I want to go to Canada where I can have freedom.” The former lecturer and author with a Masters degree in medicine now spends her days reading and pleading her case for asylum. “I am not a criminal,” she says, sipping tea.
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