IRAN: The nation of horror
Iran, known as Persia until
1935 is now officially called the Islamic Republic of Iran. It is the
second-largest nation in the Middle East by population (80.9 million). Iraq shares its western border,
along with historical and religious ties, with Iraq and its eastern border with Afghanistan.
Iran has been a quasi-theocracy since the Islamic Revolution
of 1979, when Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran was deposed.
Democratically elected President Hassan Rouhani is head of the republic, but
the nation’s divine leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei controls the military, the judiciary and the state
broadcasting services. Shiite Islam is the state religion of Iran, with Sunni
Muslims comprising of a very small minority of Iranians.
Iran continued to face international criticism for not
adhering to the requirements of United Nations Security
Council resolutions regarding its nuclear
facilities and its uranium enrichment program. Because Iran refused to
adhere to the UN’s demands, many countries brought sanctions against Iran which
almost bankrupt Iran. Finally in July 2015, Iran decided to cooperate and
agreed to the terms of settlement worked out. I am not convinced it was the
best deal for the Middle East since Iran will be free in 15 years to create
enriched Uranium again which is used in creating atomic bombs. However, this
article isn’t about that issue. It is about the injustices plaguing the
citizens and others in that country.
Amnesty International continues to
document serious human rights violations in Iran including detention of human
rights defenders and other prisoners of conscience, unfair trials, torture and
mistreatment in detention, deaths in custody and the application of the death
penalty. Iran executes more people than any country in the world, other than
China. Ethnic, religious and linguistic minority communities face persistent
persecution.
Reported abuses falling outside of
the laws of the Islamic Republic that have been condemned include the execution of thousands of political prisoners in 1988, and the widespread use of
torture to extract repudiations by prisoners of their causes and comrades on
video for propaganda purposes.
Under the administration of
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s human rights record had deteriorated markedly,
according to Human Rights Watch and following the 2009 election protests, there were reports of the killing
of demonstrators, the torture, rape and killing of detained protesters, and the arrest and publicized mass
trials of dozens of prominent opposition figures in which defendants were
forced to read their confessions that bore every sign of the defendant’s being
coerced.
In October 2012 the United Nations
human rights office stated that Iranian authorities had engaged in a “severe
clampdown” on journalists and human rights advocates. Canadian photojournalist
Zahra Kazemi was beaten to death in the
infamous Evin prison by a high ranking official in the Iranian government.
Officials of the Islamic Republic
have responded to criticism by stating that Iran has “the best human rights
record in the Muslim world”. If that was true then the other Middle East
nations must really be bad when it comes to human rights abuses. The Iranian
officials even had the audacity to claim that Iran is not obliged to follow the
West's interpretation of human rights. If Iran did follow our interpretation of
human rights, they wouldn’t have so many of its citizens wanting to flee from
Iran.
After the election of President
Hassan Rouhani, he stated "Women must enjoy equal opportunity, equal
protection and equal social rights", although Iran still has "a long
way to go" to achieve gender equality.” The topic of women's reform is
still contentious in Iran, with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameini saying that
gender equality was “one of the biggest mistakes of Western thought.”
In 1993, The United Nations Declaration on the
Elimination of Violence against Women identified domestic violence as
one of three contexts in which violence against women occurs, describing it as:
“Physical, sexual and
psychological violence occurring in the family, including battering, sexual
abuse of female children in the household, dowry-related violence, marital rape, female genital mutilation and other traditional practices
harmful to women, non-spousal violence and violence related to exploitation.” unquote
Kofi Annan, Secretary-General of the United Nations, declared in a 2006 report posted
on the United Nations Development Fund for Women that violence against women and
girls is a problem of pandemic proportions. At least one out of
every three women around the world has been beaten, coerced into sex, or
otherwise abused in her lifetime with the abuser usually being someone known to
her. It shouldn’t be a surprise then that in Iran, these figures apply to the
women in that country also.
The lives of
Iranian women are filled with difficulties that go beyond the boundaries of
their homes and streets. These obstacles, more than any other challenge, point
to their treatment as sex objects in the societies governed by Shi’a and
male-dominated customary laws. The most noticeable difficulty of Iranian women
is the sexual aggression and harassment they face.
The only policy
that has been followed relentlessly by the government in the Iranian Islamic
Republic is the imposition of limitations on women through mandatory hijab, gender segregation
in public places and service centers, and deprivation of the opportunity to
pursue certain occupations, political, and social activities.
In Iran, domestic relations within
the lives of a couple are regulated by the Iranian
Civil Code which describes marriage as a hierarchic institution where
the husband has absolute authority over his wife. Article 1105 reads: “In
relations between husband and wife; the position of the head of the family is
the exclusive right of the husband.” unquote The husband is obligated to
maintain his wife, but this obligation ceases to exist if the wife does not
perform her duties. Article 1108
states: "If the wife refuses to
fulfil duties of a wife without legitimate excuse, she will not be entitled to
the cost of maintenance.”
The most urgent and pivotal
policy of the followers of Islam in the past and during this present century
has been to curtail the freedom and rights of women. They justify this policy
by calling it their campaign against moral corruption and promiscuity, and
preserving women’s status and dignity.
From the point of view of the
religious leaders in Iran, this moral corruption and promiscuity has its roots
in the western world rather than in the Muslim nations. The freedom that women
enjoy in the West is often used as an example of moral corruption. They believe
that in the West. women are turned into sex objects. They then conclude that
the salvation of society lies in returning women to their homes, covering the
different parts of their bodies, hiding their shape, and putting a limit on
their freedom in the public domain.
The followers of Islam in Iran
consider women to be satanic, seductive, and the origin of sin. When referring
to women appearing in Western advertising and movies, their public appearances
in fancy clothes and makeup and their open relationships with men. they first
generalize those characteristics to all liberated women in the west. Secondly,
they look down on their freedom and rights as signs of corruption,
glamorization, fashion, and sexual perversion. Their concept of the roles of
women in Iran is that they procreate, have sex with their husbands on demand
and do all the housework and cooking. And to accomplish this, it means that for
most of the time, they are to remain in their homes.
The religious laws being the
prevailing customary laws of most Muslim nations, regards a woman as a second
class citizen. In her role as a housekeeper, a caretaker for children and
the elderly, and a sex object, she is at the service of the man and the family,
with no recognized rights such as guardianship over her children. She also
lacks any entitlement to pursue her own sexual desires freely or any
entitlement to the fruits of her labor at home.
Although the Iranian society is
starting to recognize the issues surrounding the beating of women by their
husbands in the Islamic households in Iran, many Iranian men are reluctant to
admit such issues exist. The Census Bureau in Iran, an official government
agency, has precluded international organizations from performing studies of
domestic violence in Iran and has never conducted their own study of violence
against women. The prevalence of domestic violence has been cited as a cause of
high rates of suicide, mostly through self-immolation, among Kurdish women in Iran.
As many as 66% of married
women in Iran are subjected to some kind of domestic violence in the first year
of their marriage, either by their husbands or by their in-laws. The more
children that are in a family, the more likely domestic violence will occur
towards these women.
The chief
of police for Iran stated that 40% of all murders in Iran happen due to
domestic violence and that 50% of all women who are murdered are done so by
someone in their immediate family and mostly inside the woman’s home.
Existing laws (Iranian Code of Criminal Procedure articles
42, 43, 66) intend to prohibit violence in the form of kidnapping,
gender-based harassment, abuse of pregnant women and "crimes against
rights and responsibilities within the family structure," but due to
cultural and political culture, these laws rarely protect women, prosecute
their abusers or provide services to the victims.
Child abuse takes place on a daily basis in Iran.
Unfortunately the government sponsors these abuses to some extent, mainly under
the guise of the laws of Islam. This is done by allowing under-aged marriages,
executions and not taking proper actions against physical abuses done by the
parents (especially the father), that are the most commonly observed cases of
abuse against children in Iran. In 2010, the state
Welfare Organization announced that there have been almost 150,000 cases of
child abuse recorded in Iran over a six-month period.
These abuses include; failing to provide the child with basic
needs (i.e. proper clothing, hygiene and so forth), causing physical harm or
injuries to the child, causing emotional or psychological damages to the child
which may lead the child to suffer lifelong psychological difficulties and
exposing a child to sexual situations whether or not touching is involved. I
would be less than honest if I didn’t admit those kinds of abuses are common in
most countries but the Iranian authorities don’t appear to be overly concerned
about those abuses against children.
As a 14-year-old girl, Razie
Brahimi’s father arranged for her marriage to an older neighbor, a
schoolteacher with a university education. Razie gave birth to a son just a
year after the wedding but for the duration of her marriage, she reportedly
experienced physical and mental abuse at the hands of her husband, who would
beat and insult her at the slightest provocation.
Three years into the marriage on one night after she returned from a party at
her husband’s aunt’s house after three years into her marriage, she was beaten
by her husband. Razie says she snapped. She said later, “I couldn’t sleep all
night and in the morning I was sitting above him looking at him. I was looking
at him and I was thinking of what he had done to me and thinking about why he
humiliates me and thought, what could I do and what should I do? Every single event that happened to me was
rolling in front of my eyes like a film and so I took a gun and I shot him.” She then buried him in their backyard. She
told her family what she had done so they turned her in to the police.
If she had killed her husband for that reason in Canada, she
would have been sent to prison. However in Iran, justice is far more severe.
She was tried for murder and sentenced to hang.
For the past five years, Razie
has awaited execution by hanging for her crime. Razie came close to the noose in
May 2013 on the day her execution was scheduled. She informed the prison guards
that she had only been 17 at the time of her crime so they stopped the
proceedings and brought her back to her prison cell. If children under 18
aren’t sentenced to death in Iran, then why was she sentenced to death at age
17? At the time of this writing, she is still alive in prison waiting for her
date with death by hanging.
Executions
in Iran are commonplace in Iran. Reyhaneh Jabbari, a 26-year-old woman was convicted and subsequently hanged for killing a
man who she said tried to sexually abuse her. The man she killed was Morteza
Abdolali Sarbandi, a former employee of Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence. Her
mother was allowed to visit her for one hour, a custom that generally precede
executions in Iran.
Iran trails only China in regards to the number of people
executed per year. Amnesty International reports that Iran executed at least 289 people in 2014. The United States, for
example, executed 35 people in 2014, compared to Iran's 289, even though the
American population is five times as large as Iran's.
It isn’t uncommon for condemned prisoners to be hanged publicly. They are generally hanged in a public square and are hoisted in the air by a crane for all to see. One man who raped and murdered a young woman was flogged a hundred times by guards the night before his execution then while in the public square the next morning, he was flogged by relatives of the victim a hundred times before he was hoisted into the air by a crane. Homosexuals are continuously being hanged in public.
On one
occasion, a four foot long metal bench was taken from a police van in
the city of Qazvin,
90 miles west of the capital Tehran and a convicted man was made to
lie on it on his stomach with his shirt pulled-up to his shoulders to expose
his back and waist. Two police officers held the legs of 25-year-old Saeed Ghanbari and
another, his arms to ensure there was no escape from the punishment of 80
lashes handed down by a religious court. An official brandishing a flexible cane
repeatedly lashed the back of a man found guilty of breaking Iran's morality
laws. Apparently he had been convicted
of abusing alcohol and having sex outside of marriage.
Traffic was
brought to a halt in, as more than 1,000 men gathered behind barricades to
watch the public flogging. Two men t00k turns lashing Ghanbari by taking the
cane back behind their heads to guarantee maximum impact with each stroke thereby
leaving a distinctive red mark and bruising on his back. Several wounds were
bleeding. Although men and women convicted of flouting public morals
are routinely flogged in detention centres, public since public floggings are
considered rare.
The Qercheck Prison has earned a moniker as “the end of the
world” due to harsh conditions and the fact
that many of the prisoners sent there are ultimately executed. The
prison is a former poultry farm that was converted in 2011 to house female
prisoners. Conditions in the prison are said to rival those of a concentration
camp, with prisoners suffering from poor hygienic standards, a lack of access
to proper nutrition, and harsh treatment. The
prison holds approximately 40 female prisoners. The children of some female
prisoners are also locked up with their mothers. This ensures that the children
have access to their mothers and thus parental care, but also means that they
are subject to the harsh conditions of the prison.
With a capacity now detaining 15,000 people, the Evin Prison has built a reputation of being Iran’s most notorious prison. Located in northwestern Tehran, the facility has been nicknamed “Evin University” due to the large number of intellectuals, political prisoners, journalists and academics that have been incarcerated there.
Prisoners
held in Section 350 of the prison, where political prisoners and intellectuals
are usually held, are subjected to assault, beatings, verbal abuse and some of
those injured have been denied access to medical care.
As I see it, Iran is a backward country.
Other than modern buildings and means of transportation along with radios and
television, etc., living in Iran is not unlike living in medieval times.
One year when the United Nations planned to
have an international conference on the prevention of crime and the treatment
of prisoners in Iran, there were so many countries that balked at attending
that conference so the conference was held elsewhere. I certainly wouldn’t have
attended that conference in Iran and like all the delegations from around the
world, I later attended the conference in a more civilized country.
I honestly don’t believe that Iran will be a
suitable country to visit or even live in as long as it is a theocracy and men are considered more superior than women.
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