Only those who have already paid the price of standing up to authority, with
prison sentences and other sanctions, or those who enjoy some degree of
protection from retribution thanks to powerful family connections, seem
prepared to voice their opinions freely. Among them is Zahra Eshraghi,
granddaughter of Ayatollah Khomeini, the country’s first supreme leader and
author of the 1979 Islamic revolution. With rare candour she says she
believes her grandfather, whose own brutal suppression of dissent led to the
death of tens of thousands of political opponents, would disapprove of the
repressive methods of Iran’s current regime.
Her black chador slips constantly down the back of her head and shoulders as
we sit talking, revealing a bright silk Burberry headscarf knotted under her
chin and an elaborate diamond brooch in the shape of a flower beneath her
religious garb. “Please don’t take any photographs of me like this,” she
asks politely of the photographer.
Eshraghi, 45, refuses to be drawn on her feelings about wearing the black
veil, despite confessing in an interview with The New York Times six
years ago that she hated wearing it and regretted the fact that the chador
had been forced on women. “There must have been some mistake in the
translation,” she says disingenuously. Voicing such views about a garment
symbolic of the sacred is clearly more problematic in the current climate.
When she spoke openly of her frustration at having to wear the chador —
which she said she only did because of her family status — her husband was
one of the most visible reformist politicians in the country, and his brother,
Khatami, was president. As former head of the interior ministry’s youth
department, Eshraghi has also been an influential figure in the reformist
movement. But her outspoken criticism has led her more recently to be
disqualified from running for parliament by the Council of Guardians — the
powerful and deeply conservative body loyal to Iran’s current supreme
leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, which vets, and can block, potential
candidates.
Yet Eshraghi cannot contain herself when I ask what her grandfather would
think of Iran’s present state of affairs. “Things would not be the same if
he were still alive. I would talk to him and he would listen to me, as he
always did,” she says, glancing across at a photograph in a cabinet of her
daughter as a young girl curled up beside Ayatollah Khomeini, who died aged
86 in 1989. She implies her grandfather mellowed with age, astounding as
that might sound to relatives of thousands of political prisoners he ordered
killed in mass executions the year before he died. She says if Khomeini were
still alive, he would have adjusted his views to take in some of the rapid
changes of the past 20 years, especially the expectations of more freedom
among the young.
“For the past four years, we have been living in the most closed society we
have had since the revolution,” she continues. “That is in stark contrast to
the ideals of the revolution, which were freedom and independence.”
Eshraghi’s hazel eyes take on a piercing quality when she talks about the
way women activists have been harassed and imprisoned in recent years for
trying to improve women’s rights — which she supports in her work for an NGO
promoting the education of women.
In the lead-up to this month’s presidential election, a renewed government
crackdown on those who oppose or challenge the ruling conservative forces
has led to repeated waves of arbitrary arrests and harassment directed not
only against women’s-rights activists, but also student leaders, trade
unionists and human-rights workers. Even Shirin Ebadi’s Centre for the
Defence of Human Rights was closed down six months ago because it allegedly
“threatened national security”.
Dozens of women working on a controversial petition, the “One Million
Signatures Campaign”, calling for equal legal rights for women, have landed
in jail, some subject to 20 lashes, beatings and solitary confinement. One,
Alieh Eghdam-Doust, is now serving a three-year sentence in Tehran’s feared
Evin prison — notorious for torturing, raping and killing inmates. Most
legal changes the campaign is seeking are rights women in the West take as
given. These include equality in divorce (even the law amended under Khatami
holds that a man can divorce his wife at will whereas a woman must prove her
husband guilty of misconduct); more equality in child custody, normally
granted to fathers after children reach the age of seven; and fairer
inheritance legislation. Currently wives are entitled to only one-eighth of
a husband’s estate when he dies, this to be shared between wives if the
marriage is polygamous, the rest going to the children; daughters are only
entitled to half of what sons inherit.
The petition also calls for the age at which a girl can be married to be
raised from 13 to 18, and the age of criminal responsibility for girls to be
raised from 9 to 18 (it’s 15 for boys). Iran is the only country in the
world that still executes child offenders; one young woman, 22-year-old
Delara Darabi, was hanged in early May, while her appeal was still being
heard, for a murder she vehemently denies having committed at 17. The
petition also calls for honour killings, the stoning to death of women for
adultery and polygamy to be banned, and the wearing of the hijab to be a
personal choice.
“I don’t think anyone should be arrested for what they believe in,” says
Eshraghi, who has also signed the petition. “You may live in paradise, but
if you’re not free you have nothing.”
Among those who’ve paid for supporting the campaign is Parvin Ardalan, one of
its founders. She was held in solitary confinement at Evin prison after
being charged with threatening national security with her work on the
petition. She is appealing against three separate jail sentences, totalling
more than three years, on related charges. “We’re challenging the status
quo, and as far as the government is concerned that threatens national
security. If these laws are changed then Iranian society will change
fundamentally,” she says. But one lawyer supporting some of those jailed
goes further, explaining the authorities justify their crackdown by claiming
the campaign is a front for foreign intervention: “They still do not believe
this is a domestic, grass-roots movement. They accuse us of instigating a
‘velvet revolution’ and say we’re under the influence of foreign countries
trying to subvert the regime.” In recent years the campaign has opened
branches in Europe and the US to collect signatures from Iranian women
living abroad, which, she argues, “hardly constitutes subversive activity”.
“At the heart of this is the fact that if women are given equal rights, it
will open the way for more democracy in this country, and those who oppose
women’s rights here in Iran oppose democracy,” says Narges Mohammadi,
vice-president of Shirin Ebadi’s now-banned Centre for the Defence of Human
Rights. “But people, especially women and the young, are now so fed up with
the constraints and injustices they face, I believe we’re near to a tipping
point, and if changes don’t come soon, Iran will face a very serious
crisis.”
Two days after we sit talking in Mohammadi’s office she is stopped trying to
board a plane to attend a Nobel-committee peace conference for women in
Guatemala. Her passport is confiscated and she is forbidden from further
travel abroad.
