Iran
A female protester shouts slogans during an anti-government demonstration in Tehran, Iran, Hune 13, 2009. File photo: Olivier Laban-Mattei / AFP
SANANDAJ, Iran – International Women’s Day celebrations are officially prohibited in Iran, yet activists refuse to remain silent, using the occasion to highlight the persecution of women in the Islamic Republic, including gender-based violence, self-immolation, honor killings, and inequality.
The first celebration of International Women’s Day (IWD) was on February 28, 1909 in New York, organized by the Socialist Party of America. The tradition soon caught on and today it is celebrated throughout the world, even in the most patriarchal and conservative of societies.
In a letter from Iran’s Evin Prison, published this week by Time magazine, women’s rights activist Nasrin Sotoudeh said: “Iran is a country where violations of women’s rights are systemic. This makes it even more important to honor and commemorate International Women’s Day.”
Gulala Watan Dost, who has been fighting for women’s rights in Iran for 15 years, attributes the problem in Iranian Kurdistan to the society’s social conservatism and the absence of laws guaranteeing equality between the sexes.
“Apart from suicide, self-immolation, and honor killing that are a daily occurrence across the cities and villages of Rojhelat [Iranian Kurdistan], women also suffer many other issues including child marriage and forced marriage, as there is no law in the country to defend women to reject such marriages,” Dost told Rudaw English.
“According to Iranian law, the decision for a daughter to get married is vested in the hands of the father regardless of her age,” she said. “This is an outright violation of women’s rights.”
This rigid patriarchy has ruined the lives of many girls, Dost said, relating one “heartbreaking” example.
“Last year in the village of Sardosh in Mariwan, a 17-year-old named Chro who was forced to marry her cousin self-immolated a week after the wedding,” she said.
“Another problem that causes girls to suffer psychological trauma from childhood is that [families] test their daughters’ virginity. And due to this trend, hundreds of girls were killed last year in Kurdistan,” murdered by family members after failing virginity tests, Dost added.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), virginity testing is a human rights violation.
“But this trend has traditionally been the case in Kurdistan and it still continues,” Dost said.
Patriarchal injustices also impact the economic independence of women.
According to Islamic inheritance jurisprudence, women receive just half the share given to men. This law is implemented in theocratic Iran.
“Although this law itself does women injustice, women don’t even get that half share in a just way and sometimes they are not given any share thanks to the backward tradition of our society,” Dost said.
‘Education key to freeing women’
Zhina Mudaras Gerci is a women’s rights activist and bookseller in Sanandaj. She will be selling books at discount prices on March 8 to mark International Women’s Day.
“The original definition of March 8 is that women must pour into the streets and fight for their rights, but unfortunately there isn’t a glimmer of a chance of that in Kurdistan and Iran,” Gerci said.
Iranian officials routinely arrest women for breaking or protesting the country’s strict Islamic codes of conduct.
In one recent case, three women were charged with “inciting prostitution” for not wearing veils in public and sentenced to 42 years in prison between them, according to human rights monitor Amnesty International.
The women had taken off their headscarves and handed out flowers on a commuter train in an act of peaceful protest on International Women’s Day 2019.
“Women in Iran are forced to wear the hijab, the headscarf worn by some Muslim women, in public,” the New York-based monitor Human Rights Watch says in its profile of women’s rights in Iran. “This even applies to young schoolgirls, who are required to wear the head covering to attend elementary school.”
Gerci, who was a member of One Million Signatures Campaign organized in 2008 to demand gender equality in Iran, said: “Since Iranian laws have been taken from the Islamic Sharia, women’s activities have been strictly limited.”
“Unfortunately the majority of our women in Rojhelat are not familiar with their basic rights, which have not been given to them under Iranian laws,” she said.
“Therefore, education is key to freeing women from oppression,” she added.
Prostitution
Shiler Rashidi, 45, another female activist in Saqqez, who was herself married off when she was just 13 years old, today holds a bachelor’s degree in sociology. She believes there has been a degree of progress in the position of women in recent years compared to the earlier years of the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
“More women are out working to have economic independence. In this sector, there have been developments as more and more women do work,” Rashidi said.
“But there are still some trends that have not ended such as honor killing and suicide among women, including self-immolation,” she said.
Rashidi is a poet. She says her writing sheds a light on the sufferings of women in Iranian Kurdish society. One subject she returns to regularly is prostitution – a booming trade in Iranian Kurdistan where poverty and sex tourism meet.
“What is really hurting me is the inappropriate act of prostitution of women in the society. Those women who escape the prison in their houses sometimes end up in brothels which I call a trap against women,” she said.
“This is very dangerous and I hope women never get trapped by such acts,” she added.
Sanctions imposed by the US to deter Iran from building a nuclear weapon have impacted all aspects of life in the Islamic Republic, especially among the most vulnerable in society.
The value of the nation’s currency has plummeted leaving daily essentials unaffordable, driving many into sex work.
READ MORE: Sex industry grows in Iran’s Kurdish region under US sanctions
Although there is no precise data on the suicide rate among women or honor killings, Hengaw Organization for Human Rights has documented 34 cases of women across the five different provinces of Iranian Kurdistan who were murdered in 2019, the majority of them by members of their immediate family.
From March 2019 to March 2020, at least 114 women have committed suicide in the same region, the monitor says.
Translation by Zhelwan Z. Wali, editing by Robert Edwards
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