A Sociological Picture of Iran

About the size of Alaska, lying north of the Persian Gulf And the Oman Sea, west of Pakistan and Afghanistan, east of Iraq and Turkey, and south of the newly independent republics of Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan, Iran was known to the world as Persia until 1935 when the name was changed to Iran to reflect the country’s history as the land where the Aryans originated from.

The reason for this name change seems to have been twofold: The land that is today known as Iran is home to a number of ethnic groups only one of whom are the Persians. There are the Azeris, the Kurds, the Baluchis, etc.[1] Persia did not reflect the multiculturalism of the country. Iran did.

It also reflected the inclination of Iran’s monarch – Reza Shah Pahlavi - towards the Nazi Germany, which resulted in the occupation of the country by the Allies during the Second World War and the replacement of Reza Shah with his young son, Mohammad Reza, who later crowned as Pahlavi II.

The US-backed Monarch ruled without much opposition until 1953, when a national movement headed by Mohammad Mosaddegh demanded the nationalization of the Iranian oil industries and a curtailing of the Shah’s authority to the level of a figurehead symbolizing the nation’s unity. Under pressure from massive demonstrations, the Shah left Iran leaving the rule to Prime Minister Mosaddegh, who then declared the oil industries nationalized after a referendum and demanded that foreigners – mainly the British – who were involved in its operation leave Iran.

In a concerted act, the beneficiaries of the Iranian oil, chiefly Britain and the United States, boycotted the Iranian oil, which deprived Iran of its sole source of revenue. The Prime Minister levied a very small amount of sales tax on tea in effect raising enough revenue to compensate for the loss of the oil income. For the first time in the contemporary history of the country, Iran became independent of the oil income.[2]

Many historians believe that this was the juncture when the old imperialist, Britain, lost grounds to the emerging imperialist, the United States, in the arena of Iranian diplomacy. It is famously said that the CIA helped Iranian generals stage a coup against the elected government by spending a mere $20,000 to recruit a mob of criminals and lumpens thereby reinstating the Shah, who then ruled as a close ally of the US until 1978 when he was toppled as a result of an upheaval, which later came to be known as the Islamic Revolution.

Mohammad Mosaddegh was taken into custody and placed under house arrest until his death in 1967.

The 1978 upheaval had an anti American undertone which was the result of over 30 years of American support for the Shah, who had brutally suppressed any freedom movement throughout his reign. Iranians saw the Shah as the puppet of the United States. One of the slogans shouted out in demonstrations prior to the victory of the revolution explicitly said, “After the Shah, it will be America’s turn.”

With the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979 under the supreme leadership of Ayatollah Khomeini, that turn certainly came when the US embassy was occupied by a motley group of radical university students, among whom one could even find some proponents of the USSR-backed Marxists/Leninists. These students used the term “spy nest” to refer to the US embassy and took hostage 52 US diplomats calling them “American spies,” starting a period of turmoil and unrest in the Iran-US relations that came to be known as the Hostage Crisis and lasted for 444 days.

In what proved to be a desperate attempt to rescue the hostages Entebbe style, the Carter administration orchestrated an invasion of the US embassy site in Tehran by deploying a small group of Special Forces. The effort failed miserably due to a sand storm, which crippled the helicopters and caused their crash leaving a number of American fatalities.[3]

The next year, in September of 1980, the US-backed Saddam Hussein of Iraq invaded Iran, imposing a war on the country which lasted until 1988 leaving 300,000 dead and half a million crippled, and a legacy of trauma, violence, and aggression that will take years to heal. Before the war, Iran was walking on a path that would have probably led to a democracy in the Middle East. The war gave the radical and fundamentalist fractions of the rulers of the Islamic Republic an excuse to curtail the newly found freedoms of the post revolution era. Under the pretext of war circumstances they brought back the reign of tyranny and terror, which has lasted until today.

The US-supported Shah’s reign, followed by the revolution and the eight-year war, has left the country with a legacy of social problems that, to this day, remains unresolved: women’s rights and their role in the economic and political arena, the role of religion, minority issues, children’s rights, education, unemployment, population growth, the youth and substance abuse, and a plethora of other social problems.


Women in the Social, Economic, and Political Arena

“In the creation of Islamic foundations, all the human forces, which had been in the service of general foreign exploitation, will recover their true identity and human rights. In doing so, women who have endured more tyranny up till now under the idolatrous order, will naturally vindicate their rights further. The family unit is the basis of society, and the true focus for the growth and elevation of mankind. Harmony of beliefs and aspirations in setting up the family is the true foundation of the movement towards the development and growth of mankind. This has been a fundamental principle. Providing the opportunities for these objectives to be reached is one of the duties of the Islamic Government. Women were drawn away from the family unit and (put into) the condition of "being a mere thing", or "being a mere tool for work" in the service of consumerism and exploitation. Re-assumption of the task of bringing up religiously-minded men and women, ready to work and fight together in life's fields of activity, is a serious and precious duty of motherhood. And so acceptance of this responsibility as more serious and - from the Islamic point of view -a loftier ground for appreciation (lit: value) status (lit: greatness) will be forthcoming.” (From the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran)[4]

With the presumption that the western style, modernist regime of the Shah had turned women into “mere objects” and “tools for the workplace,” the new constitution alleged that by putting them back into the “family,” where they belong, women would be emancipated, and their rights would be further vindicated. It was under this guise that women were forced into the handicapping Islamic attire, long robe-like apparel that should cover them from head to toe, only revealing the face and the hands.

Out of a population of a little over 68 million (68,017,860) close to half are females. According to the CIA World Factbook, the estimated ratio in 2005 has been 1.04 males for every female. In spite of all their attempts, the rulers of the Islamic Republic have been unable to throw women out of the work force.

Unlike other Islamic countries, such as Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, women in Iran are quite active in the job market. There are, of course, some professions that women are not allowed to engage in based on Islamic laws. Women cannot be judges. They are not conceived to have sound judgments by the Islamic laws.

According to a recent survey, female students comprise 60% of the population in the institutes of higher education. Women are also an indispensable part of the labor force.

“In recent years, the number of young Iranian women who have been admitted to universities has risen dramatically. In the last five years alone, Iranian women have made up more than 60 percent of university entrants. It's a surprising development for the Islamic Republic. Experts say education has a strong social value for the country's women, who see it as a way to gain greater freedom. But some Iranian officials have expressed concern about the trend.”[5]

Yet women are discriminated against systematically in almost every aspect of their lives not only by the laws of the Islamic Revolution, which are based on the quranic teachings, but also by a long tradition of male chauvinism and bigotry. “Although the forms of discrimination vary tremendously among regions, ethnic groups, and age levels in the developing world, Shahla Zia, an attorney and women’s activist in Islamabad, Pakistan, says there is a theme: ‘Overall, there is a social and cultural attitude where women are inferior – and discrimination tends to start at birth.”[6] (Anderson, J. W. and Moore, M. “The Burden of Womanhood,” The Washington Post National Weekly Edition, March 22-23, 1993, pp. 6-7.) This is certainly true of the situation of women in the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Islamic laws consider a woman’s worth to be half that of a man therefore the share of a daughter from the inheritance of a deceased parent is half that of a son’s. By the same token, the testimony of two women is considered equal to that of one man. In other words if a woman comes forward and testifies that she has been the eye witness to a murder, her testimony is legally worthless unless it is corroborated by another woman and a man, since there should be two witnesses to a murder.

“And call to witness, from among your men, two witnesses. And if two men be not (at hand) then a man and two women, of such as ye approve as witnesses, so that if the one erreth (through forgetfulness) the other will remember. And the witnesses must not refuse when they are summoned.”[7]

The law of Blood Money is still legally practiced in the Islamic Republic. A person that has been convicted of an act of murder can pay the relatives of the victim a blood money and walk a free man. The blood money of a female is half that of a male.

In many cases, where a woman is murdered at the hands of her husband, or a girl by her father or male siblings, the murderer can walk away with impunity if he can prove that his motive was protecting his honor. There are numerous “reports that many women in southwestern Iran are beheaded by their male relatives for real or imagined sexual misconduct and that killers often went free.”[8]

Many crimes against girls and women go unreported because families prefer to withstand the pain than undergo the shame of investigation, the stigma, and the fear of being ostracized.


Children and Human Rights issues

According to the Islamic laws[9] a girl reaches the age of puberty at nine and a boy is deemed capable of being legally held accountable at the age of 14. This opens up a whole Pandora’s box of human rights violations in the name of religion and traditions. Although it is very uncommon for educated, urban Iranian families to marry their nine-year-old daughters off, the practice is still widely carried out in rural areas, where a girl is an economic burden on the farming family, which they will gladly get rid of at the earliest opportunity.

During the Iran-Iraq war many of the 300,000 Iranians who lost their lives were young boys of 14 to 18, who were sent out to fight a war that had been sold them through religious indoctrinations at schools and mosques. Many of these teenagers were used as human waves to walk into mine fields in front of tanks, which the Islamic Republic could not afford to lose to mines. “Adolescents are often selected for suicide missions, and some commanders view adolescents as mentally predisposed for such duty.” (Wessells, Mike. “Child Soldiers,” The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Nov/Dec 1997, pp. 32-39.)

Many young girls and boys have been convicted by Iranian Islamic courts and sentenced to capital punishment. Such executions are carried out on a regular basis in the Islamic Republic despite protests by Amnesty International and other NGO’s involved in the campaign for human rights in Iran. [10]

Children are widely used in the labor force. Although education is free up to the high school level, it is not mandatory. Therefore parents that are burdened by the high cost of living in the face of a 15.5% inflation rate and 11.2% unemployment (CIA World Factbook) do not think twice if they can pull their daughter or son out of school and have them work as coolie workers in some rich person’s home or yard.


Rights of Religious Minorities

The constitution of the Islamic Republic[11] establishes the Shiite Islam as the official religion of the Islamic Republic while acknowledging Sunni Islam, Christianity, Judaism, and Zoroastrianism as minority religions. It states that the followers of such religions are free to practice their faith as long as they do not propagate it attempting to convert Muslims.

According to the Shiite laws, a Muslim that converts to any other religion is automatically sentenced to death without court proceedings or formalities. Such a person’s blood is “Halal” – there is no sin in killing him/her - and any Muslim can carry out the execution upon sighting this person. This was the basis of the “Fatwa” – the decree – that Khomeini issued against Salman Rushdi, the author of Satanic Verses.

Although the followers of these faiths are guaranteed freedom of practicing their religious and cultural beliefs by the constitution, they are often persecuted by Islamic fanatics, and oftentimes formally prosecuted by the regime as agents of foreign countries. Jews have especially been the target of these prosecutions and unofficial persecutions. They are considered to be the spies of Israel, a country with which the Islamic Republic has been at odds from its early days.

As was stated before death is the punishment for anyone that converts from Shiite Islam to any other type of religion. Naturally the followers of the Baha’i[12] faith, who believe that their prophet, Baha’Allah, came to perfect the teachings of Muhammad are, without question, the prime candidates for the death sentence. Ever since the victory of the Islamic Revolution, Baha’is have been systematically the target of persecution and abuse. Their businesses have been looted and their houses have been burned. Their places of worship have been torn down or otherwise turned into public restrooms. They have been deprived of studying or working in the Islamic Republic. Whereas the followers of other religions have been reduced to second-class citizens, Baha’is have been deprived of all their rights as citizens.


Rights of Ethnic Minorities

“Ethnicity refers to a category of people who are regarded as socially distinct because of their shared cultural heritage, customs, dress, religion, and food preferences.” [13]

The world is learning today that as bad as dictators are, they have been the most effective unifying element in a third world that was cut up into pieces by the colonial powers to reflect their political and economic interests and not so much the ethnic makeup of these regions. Borderlines were drawn on maps in the capital cities of previous colonizers without regard for the territories occupied by ethnic groups.

Therefore, regardless of today’s disingenuous outcries against dictators and tyrants, rulers like the Shah of Iran, Pinochet of Chile, Somoza of Nicaragua, Marshal Tito of Yugoslavia, Marcos of the Philippines, or for that matter Saddam of Iraq were cine qua non to the neo colonists who needed a gluing agent to prevent the countries that they had left behind from disintegration.

Right after the revolution of 1978, which ousted the Shah and sent him on the run to Panama and the United States, voices could be heard among the Kurdish, Azeri, Arab, Baluchi, and Turkmen minorities which demanded the establishment of a kind of federal government allowing for a level of autonomy to these groups. Such demands were brutally suppressed, resulting in some of the most outrageous carnages in the history of these ethnic groups.

Although these peoples were once again brought into a loose unity with the rest of the nation as a result of oppressive measures, as soon as the central government’s grip weakens, the separatist demands will be raised one more time: The Kurds of the western provinces will want to unify with their “brothers” in Iraq, Turkey, and Syria, forming what they refer to as the Greater Kurdistan; the Azeris will ask for unification with Azerbaijan, which has just recently become independent from Russia; and the Arabs will want their own Arab, Shiite state with their brothers on the Iraqi side.

It is in the light of these facts that the state of human rights among ethnic groups within the Islamic Republic should be considered.

After the fall of the Shah and once the Islamic Republic was able to establish its authority, it embarked on a systematic suppression of the ethnic groups. Many Kurdish activists were imprisoned and executed. The Arab minority in the southwestern province of Khoozistan was ruthlessly put down. Many Turkmens were mass murdered.

This systematic suppression continues to this day. The provinces populated by ethnic groups are among the most underprivileged regions of the country. Just recently there were some demonstration in Kurdistan and Khoozistan against the deprivation and discriminatory policies of the central government. A number of demonstrators were arrested and have been held in custody incommunicado for quite some time now. Most recently, Amnesty International has demanded the Islamic Regime release information about the condition of these prisoners.


A Young Population and Unemployment

A simple glance at Iran’s population pyramid for the year 2000 shows that the country simultaneously enjoys a young population with a 23-million-large labor force, and suffers a high child-dependency ratio, “a large number of children who must be supported by adults.”[14] Unfortunately, as a result of a devastating eight-year war and unwise economic policies combined with many years of US economic sanctions, Iran has been unable to maintain a level of economic growth proportionate with the growth of the population.


[15]

Today, Iran suffers from an alarming 11.2% unemployment rate. So far an explosion of dissatisfaction has been avoided by the introduction of many government subsidies aimed at keeping the price of staples at an affordable level.

The very subsidies that are meant to keep prices down and dissatisfaction at bay have now come back to haunt the Islamic Republic in that they take up most of the resources of the government not allowing investment in areas of agriculture and industry that can create jobs for the 23-million-large labor force. The fallacious circle seems to continue without any end in sight.


Human Rights and the Islamic Republic

Since its beginning in 1978, the Islamic Republic has incessantly and tirelessly engaged in a policy of suppression and elimination of its political and ideological dissidents.

In its early days, the newly founded regime hastily executed the remnants of the Shah’s regime upon hurried court proceedings in which these people were hardly allowed any legal representation or defense despite the pleas of many international organizations that warned the regime to demonstrate a level of patience and sensibility.

Once everyone that had been somehow involved with the Shah had been disposed of, then the Islamic Republic engaged in a process of purging and purifying within its own ranks through a process of systematic elimination, execution, and assassination. It was during this process that Mohammad Ali Bazargan, the first prime minister of the Islamic Republic and Bani Sadr, the first democratically elected president of the regime were eliminated through mobilization of mobs; and Sadegh Ghotbzadeh, the general manager of the Iranian Radio and Television Service was hastily prosecuted and executed. Many other in-group members of the regime, who had accompanied Ayatollah Khomeini back to Iran from his exile in Paris, were one by one either imprisoned or otherwise eliminated through assassinations or forced exiles.

Once the in-group had been purified, the Islamic regime turned its attention to the many groups and organization with which it had formed a tactical alliance during the struggle against the Shah’s regime. Using the pretext of the state of war, the regime arrested, assassinated, sent into exile or underground activity many of the members and sympathizers of these groups and organization. Most of the sympathizers of these organizations were teenagers who had been attracted to the slogans of freedom and equality adopted by them. By some accounts, in 1988 alone, the regime executed as many as 6,000 people[16] it was keeping in custody in its torture chambers.

Torture and abuse is still widely used in the prisons of the Islamic Republic. Iran is declared by the Reporters Without Border to be the country with the most number of journalists and writers held in prisons. Some of these people have never had an arraignment nor been told what their charges are. They are seldom allowed legal representation. Many of them are held incommunicado for many months.


Environmental Issues: The Destruction of Wildlife and Wildlife Habitat

Although parts of Iran are covered by lush forests and vegetation, the country is generally considered to be arid or semiarid. Out of an area of about 1.648 million sq. km. only 75,620 sq. km. is irrigated.

According to the constitution of the Islamic Republic, forests, lakes, rivers, and mountains are public property and therefore managed by the government. After the revolution, the new regime that was rubbing its citizens of every political freedom that they had risen against the Shah’s regime for, loosened its control over natural resources and stopped exercising the laws that regulated their harvest. As a result territories that were once run with deer, mountain goats, wild boars, and many other species of wildlife are today almost entirely lifeless. Rivers and lakes that were at one time the envy of the European angler do not breathe with life any longer. Forests that were lush with oak and elm and maple and many other types of wood rendering trees are today reduced to cosmetic patches of park-like strips along the highways.

Eight years of war and the extensive use of chemical warfare by the Iraqi side in the southern parts of the country have left the terrain useless for agricultural activity, not to mention the many diseases and ailments that the population of these areas has been suffering.

The industry is old and unregulated. Emissions are not controlled. Solid and chemical waste is dumped into landfills and rivers without any reservation and with impunity. Every now and then, an inconspicuous newspaper title, somewhere overshadowed by the news of a writer or journalist who has deviated from the way of God and is therefore arrested and imprisoned, there is the unimportant news of thousands of fish that mysteriously died in a river or a lake. Who cares?


Addiction as a Social Problem

In the absence of civil and political freedoms, with the economic horizon clouded up by uncertainty, with no hope of improvement in sight, with unemployment standing at 11.2%, many young Iranians have resorted to drugs to help them temporarily escape from the dire situation that they are stuck in.

Geographically on the trafficking route to Europe from Afghanistan, a good amount of the narcotics find their way into the Iranian market. Opium and opium related drugs such as heroin are cheaply available to the Iranian youth, who find them to be a way of dissociating themselves from the harshness and bitterness of realities that are imposed on them.

Official statistics recently provided by the Iranian Ministry of Health put the number of people that are engaged in some type of substance abuse at 6,000,000 people. Unofficial figures are alarmingly higher.

Although alcoholic beverages are tabooed by Islam, and therefore not allowed by the Islamic Republic, bootlegging is a lucrative trade. There are no official data available regarding the number of people that consume alcohol. Alcoholism is a stigma that Iranians do not want to be associated with. Drinking is punished by 80 whiplashes.


Non-Governmental Organization: A helping Hand

The Iranian Association of Lawyers, the Iranian Association of Writers and Journalists[17], and the Office of Solidarity for Iranian University Students are some of the non-governmental organizations that are involved in the political arena of the Islamic Republic, although the first two have been declared illegal and the third is now barely active as a political party rather than an NGO. Many of the members of the Iranian Association of Lawyers and the Iranian Association of Writers and Journalists are now behind bars or spending their lives in exile.

Last year the renowned Iranian lawyer and writer, Shirin Ebadi [18], won the Nobel prize for peace for her efforts towards increasing awareness about the condition of children in Iran and other parts of the world. Shirin Ebadi is the first Iranian woman – the first Iranian for that matter – to receive the Nobel Prize. This did not sit well with the Islamic Republic, which saw it as a gesture of disregard for Islam by the Nobel Foundation.

The result was that more pressure was exerted on the Iranian Association of Lawyers whose members have taken up the defense of arrested political dissidents without expectation of remuneration. Many of these attorneys have found themselves behind bars only because they have volunteered to represent political dissidents pro bono.

In the absence of domestic NGO’s, Amnesty International and some other international organizations such as Reporters Without Borders [19] and Human Rights Watch [20] have been actively monitoring the conditions of human rights in the Islamic Republic. These organizations do not have offices in Iran and therefore they have to depend on reports that leak out of the country for their information about the conditions of women, children, political prisoners, and ethnic and religious minorities.

Based on the information that they collect, these organizations periodically issue reports on the condition of human rights inside Iran bringing the attention of the world to such issues as women’s rights, executions of minors, persecution of religious and ethnic minorities, and torture of prisoners of conscience, thereby demanding some level of accountability on the part of the Iranian regime, and in some instances they succeed in effecting some improvement in these conditions.


What Does the Future Hold?

The future is bleak. With a fast growing population, rising unemployment rates, a constitution that maintains a medieval outlook towards the modern world, ethnic and religious minorities that rightfully demand a level of autonomy, and a regime that does not appear to be willing to relinquish its grip on monopolized power, the future does not seem to hold much hope for a peaceful transition to a political state that will guarantee the freedom and dignity of the Iranian people. Any state of equilibrium, any synthesis out of the antagonistic factors that are intertwined into today’s texture of the Iranian society does not seem to be possible without a struggle aimed at re-stratification of the classes.

It appears to be even bleaker when one considers the prospects of an Iraq-like invasion of Iran by the United States. Accounting for 10% of the world’s oil production, and ranking second only to Russia in natural gas reserves,[21] the imminence of an invasion is not entirely groundless.

Knowing my country and its people, I can assure you that they will unite behind any ruler – even the worst and most tyrannical ones - in the face of a external threat. The United States has made many mistakes in its assessment of the Iranian sociopolitical circumstances. Starting with the coup that ousted Prime Minister Mosaddegh and the reinstated the Shah in 1953, the approach and attitude towards the revolution of the 1978, the instigation of Iraq into commencing a war against Iran, and now the inclusion of Iran in “the Axis of Evil,” the United States’ diplomacy towards Iran has always been one of bullying when they can or otherwise hostility when they fail to bully.

The war that Saddam Hussein started against Iran only solidified the foundations of the Islamic Republic. Many Iranians rightly believe that if such a war had not been imposed on the country, Iran would have walked a completely different path in the past 25 years.

It appears that the only way out of the present impasse in the Iran problem is the empowerment of domestic dissident groups and organizations. The alternative to the Islamic Republic cannot be very much different from the Islamic Republic. Iran is still an agricultural country with the majority of its population in rural areas. Traditional, religious based beliefs are deep-rooted in this population. Even the urban population is deeply vested in tradition and religion. The introduction of a Western style democracy will immediately set into motion a spectrum of resistance, which even the Shah – a fearful dictator with the unconditional support of the U.S. – was not able to surmount.

Furthermore, as was stated in the overview section of this paper, Iran consists of multiple ethnicities. Any weakening of the central government will activate centrifugal forces, which will call for the autonomy of regions occupied by these ethnic groups necessitating an entirely different political system and maybe even new geopolitical realities which will pose novel and unprecedented problems in this part of the Middle East.



Referrences:

· Moulder, V. Francis, “Social Problems of a Modern World: A Reader” 2000, Wadsworth, a Division of Thomson Learning

Summary: The book consists of 66 articles written by thinkers, sociologist, and human rights activist, who examine the problems of the world from different sociological perspectives.

Analysis: Although there is very little consistency in the writing style of the many articles that have been selected, the sociological outlook brings them together into a consistent collection that sheds light on social problems of a modern world from different sociological viewpoints.


· Peterson, R. Dean, Wunder, F. Delores, Mueller, L. Harlan, “Social Problems: Globalization in the Twenty-First Century” 1999, Prentice-Hall, Inc. Simon & Schuster.

Summary: A textbook of sociology, it examines social problems in the context of globalization, acknowledging that “most – if not all – of the social problems that we face are immersed in a global context.” (From the Preface of the book.)

Analysis: the writers have chosen each issue addressed in the book as part of the interrelated group of problems that form a “larger puzzle.” The whole textbook is geared towards making the students realize that unless social problems are examined within the larger context of globalization, resolving them will be in effect impossible.


· Amnesty International USA, www.amnesty.org “2001 report on Iran” December 2001

Summary: The report examines the condition of Human Rights in Iran. It covers such areas as the circumstances of political prisoners including prisoners of conscience, unfair trials, women’s rights, and the rights ethnic and religious minorities in Iran. The report covers events from January to December of 2001.

Analysis: In the absence of NGO’s active within Iran, Amnesty International plays a precious role in bringing the attention of people of the world to the human rights issues in the Islamic Republic of Iran. Though at times Amnesty International – and for that matter any group active outside Iran – may be out of touch with the realities in the country, its efforts in shedding light on the plight of human rights activist in Iran are invaluable.

Reporters Without Borders, www.rsf.org “Iran, 2005 annual Report.” Sep. 2005.

Summary: The report examines the situation of journalists, reporters, and writer in Iran. The Islamic Republic continues to be the country with the most number of reporters and journalist spending time behind bars, the most severe type of censorship, the most number of journals, magazines, and newspapers banned and closed down.

Analysis: Like Amnesty International, Reporters Without Borders plays a great role in keeping the attention of human rights activists around the world focused on violations of human rights in the Islamic Republic.


[1] Persian 51%, Azeri 24%, Gilaki and Mazandarani 8%, Kurd 7%, Arab 3%, Lur 2%, Baluchi 2%, Turkmen 2%, other 1% (CIA World Factbook)
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran

[3] http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2005%5C11%5C03%5Cstory_3-11-2005_pg4_16
[4] From the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran http://www.iranchamber.com/government/laws/constitution.php
[5] http://www.parstimes.com/women/women_universities.html
Esfandiari, Golnaz
[6] Moulder, V. Francis, “Social Problems of the Modern World,” 2000, Wadworth, A Division of Thomson Learning, Inc. p. 93.
[7] The Holy Quran, Surah 2:282, http://www.answering-christianity.com/bassam_zawadi/testimonyofwomen.htm
[8] From a report prepared by Committee for Humanitarian assistance to Iranian Refugees to be used by USCIS Resource Information Center, PDF file can be found at http://uscis.gov/graphics/services/asylum/ric/master_exhibit_pdfs/MEIRN97001.pdf
[9] http://www.iranchamber.com/government/laws/constitution.php
[10] Amnesty International USA, www.amnesty.org “2001 report on Iran” December 2001
[11] http://www.iranonline.com/iran/iran-info/Government/constitution.html
[12] http://bahai-library.com/?file=kazemzadeh_bahais_iran_repression
[13] Peterson, R. Dean, Wunder, F. Delores, Mueller, L. Harlan, “Social Problems: Globalization in the Twenty-First Century” 1999, Prentice-Hall, Inc. Simon & Schuster.

[14] Peterson, R. Dean, Wunder, F. Delores, Mueller, L. Harlan, “Social Problems: Globalization in the Twenty-First Century” 1999, Prentice-Hall, Inc. Simon & Schuster.

[15] http://www.census.gov/cgi-bin/ipc/idbpyrs.pl?cty=IR&out=s&ymax=250


[16] http://www.m-hekmat.com/en/1910en.html
[17] http://www.iwae.org/
[18] http://nobelprize.org/peace/laureates/2003/ebadi-bio.html
[19] http://www.rsf.org/
[20] http://www.hrw.org/
[21] http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/cabs/iran.html

Media, Conservative or Liberal?

It is amazing how Aldous Huxley was able to prophesy in 1931 with such assurance that the controllers of the world had their eye on homogenizing humankind into a creature of needs and desires that can only be quenched by tools and means that are in their control.

Out of the artificial wombs of Huxley’s brave new world came the Alphas, the Betas, and the Gammas, who were each preconditioned to take over a certain aspect and task of the humongous production lines, and take pleasure in doing the task that they were charged with as if they were predestined into a modern caste system to do what they were assigned to without a word or a sign of discontent and discomfort.

Aldous Huxley had no clue that information technology would some day become so complex and encompassing that in effect it will take over the task of homogenizing humankind in thought, expression, and deed thereby eliminating the need for many of the civic and political rights. Who would need freedom of expression when everyone is brainwashed to voluntarily say the same things?

This is the role and the goal of the corporation owned media of today’s world. Conservative or liberal falls secondary to this initial goal. While the conservatives want this objective to be attained as quickly as possible and are not willing to give an inch to any other idea, the liberals are simply saying that this end can be reached in a more gradual way, allowing some breathing space for those ideas that are against this huge uniformitarian effort. The aspired ends are the same; the means are just a little different.

The Pide Piper is enchanting all of us to be drowned in the same river. Does it matter if his tunes are conservative or liberal? He picks up a conservative tune when he wishes to accelerate the process, and a liberal one when he feels like rejoicing in our long and tormenting drowning death.

Dimentions of Torture, a personal account

“…States should ensure the following minimum guarantees, which are not dependent on the political, social, or cultural backgrounds of the country concerned:

· The absolute prohibition of incommunicado detention;
· The right of arrested persons to immediately contact relatives, a lawyer, and a doctor.
· The right of arrested persons to be brought promptly (within 48 hours of arrest) to a judge and to have a medical examination.
· Supervision of interrogations by an independent authority.
· Prohibition of the use of statements obtained by torture as evidence before court.” Manfred Nowak, States of Bondage, 1994.

Late in 1997, on the evening of a cold autumn day, a few hours after I had returned home from work, I heard a faint knocking on my apartment door. Who could it be? I was not expecting company. Could it be one of the neighbors who needed to borrow something?

I asked my 15-year-old daughter to open the door and see who it was.

During the next two hours, my two children stood in a corner watching in fear as the Iranian Revolutionary Guards ransacked the apartment, tearing open every mattress, every cushion, bagging every item that they found suspicious, mostly books and scraps of paper here and there, the family album, the music CD’s, the video tapes, the computer, etc.

Then, quite unceremoniously, as if engaged in an over rehearsed, mundane routine, they handcuffed and blindfolded me. I was put on the back seat of a car, and it wasn’t until a month and twenty days later when I found out where I had spent my time in custody.

I spent the next month and twenty days in a 5X8 square foot cell. I was never charged with anything, nor did I appear before a judge in the first 48 hours after my arrest, or for that matter throughout my entire confinement. The only people that I did come in contact with were the prison guards and my interrogators. I was not allowed representation nor was I allowed a phone call to my family. All along my family thought I had been executed.

Many a time, during the night, I would be awakened by the loud banging of a baton on my cell door. On a daily basis I would be hosed down with cold water. Then as I was shivering with cold, I would be dragged to the interrogation room where I would be asked the same questions over and over:

Who pays you to write the nonsense that you write?
How come you can get a visa to the United States every time you apply?
Are you willing to sign a letter distancing yourself from what you have written in your articles?
Are you willing to say that you have been wrong about the Islamic republic?

The only book that I was allowed was the Quran, even though I am not a Muslim. The food consisted of bread and water and sometimes rice, twice daily. Occasionally even that was denied me. In such cases I knew that I had to be expecting some tougher interrogation sessions.

Eventually I decided that all my ideals, no matter how noble, were not worth the humiliation that I was being subjected to. Early in the spring of 1998, in one of the daily Q and A sessions, I broke and told my interrogator that I was willing to sign anything that they wanted. I was ready to repudiate any ideology that they thought I was associated with.

They had me participate in a video taped interview where they forced me to read a prepared statement, which basically said that I was wrong in my criticism of the Islamic Republic, and that I had been enlightened by my jailers to the fact that Islam is the only ideology that can bring prosperity and happiness to its followers. I was also forced to say that during my captivity I had been treated with the utmost respect and integrity, which is part of the teachings of Islam.

Ten days later I was released just as unceremoniously as I had been arrested.

I learned later that during the period of time that I had spent in my 5X8 square foot solitary confinement, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture had traveled to Tehran twice. My name, however – and I am sure that of many others - was not included in the list of the prisoners of conscience that was given to him. My brother and a few of my friends had attempted to present a letter to him at his place of stay. They had been arrested and kept in custody until after the UN Rapporteur had departed.

Not a single one of the provisions set forth by all the UN agreements and protocols, or other international covenants (the 1949 Geneva Convention, the 1969 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the 1984 UN Convention against Torture, the European Convention on Human Rights of 1950, the American Convention on Human Rights of 1969, or the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights of 1981) were observed in my case. Nor are they observed in the case of any of the political prisoners in the Islamic Republic of Iran, or for that matter, in China, Burma, North Korea, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Sudan, etc.

The list is now enhanced with the addition of the United States and its treatment of the prisoners in Guantanamo Bay and Abu Gharib detention centers, not to mention the outsourcing of torture as a means of eliciting information to countries such as Egypt and Jordan where many kinds of physical abuse are deemed appropriate in the handling of prisoners.

“The detention camp at the US Naval Base in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba has become a symbol of the US administration’s refusal to put human rights and the rule of law at the heart of its response to the atrocities of 11 September 2001. Hundreds of people of around 35 different nationalities remain held in effect in a legal black hole, many without access to any court, legal counsel or family visits.” From the Amnesty International report UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, Guantanamo and beyond: The Continuing Pursuit of Unchecked Executive Power, May 13, 2005.

“Whereas slavery and the slave trade were explicitly prohibited by a number of bilateral and multilateral treaties culminating in the 1962 Slavery Convention, torture was so much regarded as a phenomenon of the past that neither international human rights law nor even the most domestic bills of rights of this period contained explicit prohibitions.” Manfred Nowak, States of Bondage, 1994.

The problem of addressing human rights as pertain to torture does not appear to be lack or absence of sufficient international covenants and treaties that appropriately define and condemn torture. The issue seems to be twofold:

Firstly, the international definitions of torture come in clash with domestic cultural and religious practices. Examples of this include limb amputations, flogging, and stoning in Muslim countries, and female genital mutilation among some North African peoples. The elimination of such practices should comprise an immense effort in educating the people involved in them.

And secondly, but probably more important is the fact that in many cases confronting the countries where torture is commonly practiced is compromised for expediency. The trade agreements between China and the United States in effect brought about an attitude of indifference and an implicit condoning of all the atrocities that are being exercised in China against human rights activists. The heroes of Tianamen Square were soon forgotten in favor of lucrative trade agreements.

During the apartheid years in South Africa, many of the UN resolutions in condemnation of the South African regime’s inhumane handling of the anti apartheid activists were vetoed or otherwise suppressed by Britain, which was directly benefiting from the state of apartheid in South Africa.

Likewise the European Community has long overlooked all the torture and human rights abuses that are systematically practiced by the rulers of the Islamic Republic in exchange for the petroleum trade and lucrative contracts with Iran.

The campaign for human rights and irradication of all kinds and forms of torture and humiliation of human dignity has had some highlights in the past 10 years. “The CAT – UN Convention Against Torture – provides for universal jurisdiction, which means that torturers can be detained, prosecuted, and punished in all State Parties regardless of nationality of the torturer or his victims or the territory in which the act of torture was perpetrated.” State of Bondage, Manfred Nowak, 1994.

An example of this happened in 1998 when Augusto Pinochet, the Chilean general, who had staged the U.S. backed coupe of 1973 against the democratically elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende, and is known to have been the perpetrator of the mass killings of the many Chileans in the years that followed the coupe, was arrested in London, thousands of mile outside Chile, where the crimes had been committed, on orders from a Spanish judge. To the despair and dismay of human rights activists, after about 16 months, a British court ruled that Pinochet was too old and too feeble to stand trial.

Pinochet’s case aside, many violators of human rights and perpetrators of torture and abuse still freely travel around the world with impunity. Only last month, the newly “elected” president of the Islamic Republic, Mahmood Ahmadinejad was given a visa to attend the General Assembly of the United Nations in New York while at the same time many Iranian dissidents are enduring the darkest and most inhumane forms of torture and abuse in the dungeons of the Islamic Republic.

Neo Cons

I am greatly troubled by the fact that hard-core Democrats make no differentiation between the honest, decent, hard-working republicans and the ruling gang of falsifying, canard loving, smear-mongering Neo Cons. The latter have meerly stolen the Republican party from Americans and pawned it to their money grabbing, corporation owning masters.

Before long Americans are bound to take back the party of Lincoln. Before long the lies will be revealed, and the deceptions will be uncovered. Until then, just love thy republican neighbor who has been swindled by the Neo Cons. Don’t alienate him by ruling him the same way as you would the Carl Roves, Paul wolfowitz, et al. These are a gang of usurpers. They are not Republicans.

I fail to understand why anyone would vote for the Neocons. Except for the wealthiest Americans who see their prosperity in the annihilation of the Middle and lower classes, whom they can then enslave, voting for this breed of Neo Cons, who call themselves Republican, is analogous to sitting high on a tree limb while cutting it off the trunk with a chainsaw. Personnally I should only be drunk and out of my mind to be able to vote into the White House an average joe that I can go to a bar and drink a beer with. Who in their sound mind would want a beer drinking average joe for the president of the wealthiest and most pwerful nation in the history of mankind?

Conservatism vs Liberalism

Suddenly, during the presidential election campaigns, “Liberalism” became a profane word, a stigma that no-one except the brave Howard Dean wished to be associated with.

All the liberals out there that shy away from being called liberal should reexamine what “Conservatism” and “Liberalism” stand for. It is as simple as looking up the definition of these words in your Meriam-Webster dictionary:

Conservatism is a political philosophy based on social stability and tradition with a tendency to prefer any existing situation to change.

Liberalism is a political philosophy based on belief in progress, the essential goodness of the human race, and the autonomy of the individual.

Go ahead; make my day. Stigmatize me with liberalism. I am proud to be a liberal.