I found President Carter's stance on the Mid East crisis the most rational one among all views expressed on the issue by American politicians. It makes one hopeful that there are still some vestiges of sanity left in this country. This article was copied from Washington Post:
Stop the Band-Aid Treatment
We Need Policies for a Real, Lasting Middle East Peace
By Jimmy Carter
Tuesday, August 1, 2006; Page A17
The Middle East is a tinderbox, with some key players on all sides waiting for every opportunity to destroy their enemies with bullets, bombs and missiles. One of the special vulnerabilities of Israel, and a repetitive cause of violence, is the holding of prisoners. Militant Palestinians and Lebanese know that a captured Israeli soldier or civilian is either a cause of conflict or a valuable bargaining chip for prisoner exchange. This assumption is based on a number of such trades, including 1,150 Arabs, mostly Palestinians, for three Israeli soldiers in 1985; 123 Lebanese for the remains of two Israeli soldiers in 1996; and 433 Palestinians and others for an Israeli businessman and the bodies of three soldiers in 2004.
This stratagem precipitated the renewed violence that erupted in June when Palestinians dug a tunnel under the barrier that surrounds Gaza and assaulted some Israeli soldiers, killing two and capturing one. They offered to exchange the soldier for the release of 95 women and 313 children who are among almost 10,000 Arabs in Israeli prisons, but this time Israel rejected a swap and attacked Gaza in an attempt to free the soldier and stop rocket fire into Israel. The resulting destruction brought reconciliation between warring Palestinian factions and support for them throughout the Arab world.
Hezbollah militants then killed three Israeli soldiers and captured two others, and insisted on Israel's withdrawal from disputed territory and an exchange for some of the several thousand incarcerated Lebanese. With American backing, Israeli bombs and missiles rained down on Lebanon. Hezbollah rockets from Syria and Iran struck northern Israel.
It is inarguable that Israel has a right to defend itself against attacks on its citizens, but it is inhumane and counterproductive to punish civilian populations in the illogical hope that somehow they will blame Hamas and Hezbollah for provoking the devastating response. The result instead has been that broad Arab and worldwide support has been rallied for these groups, while condemnation of both Israel and the United States has intensified.
Israel belatedly announced, but did not carry out, a two-day cessation in bombing Lebanon, responding to the global condemnation of an air attack on the Lebanese village of Qana, where 57 civilians were killed this past weekend and where 106 died from the same cause 10 years ago. As before there were expressions of "deep regret," a promise of "immediate investigation" and the explanation that dropped leaflets had warned families in the region to leave their homes. The urgent need in Lebanon is that Israeli attacks stop, the nation's regular military forces control the southern region, Hezbollah cease as a separate fighting force, and future attacks against Israel be prevented. Israel should withdraw from all Lebanese territory, including Shebaa Farms, and release the Lebanese prisoners. Yet yesterday, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert rejected a cease-fire.
These are ambitious hopes, but even if the U.N. Security Council adopts and implements a resolution that would lead to such an eventual solution, it will provide just another band-aid and temporary relief. Tragically, the current conflict is part of the inevitably repetitive cycle of violence that results from the absence of a comprehensive settlement in the Middle East, exacerbated by the almost unprecedented six-year absence of any real effort to achieve such a goal.
Leaders on both sides ignore strong majorities that crave peace, allowing extremist-led violence to preempt all opportunities for building a political consensus. Traumatized Israelis cling to the false hope that their lives will be made safer by incremental unilateral withdrawals from occupied areas, while Palestinians see their remnant territories reduced to little more than human dumping grounds surrounded by a provocative "security barrier" that embarrasses Israel's friends and that fails to bring safety or stability.
The general parameters of a long-term, two-state agreement are well known. There will be no substantive and permanent peace for any peoples in this troubled region as long as Israel is violating key U.N. resolutions, official American policy and the international "road map" for peace by occupying Arab lands and oppressing the Palestinians. Except for mutually agreeable negotiated modifications, Israel's official pre-1967 borders must be honored. As were all previous administrations since the founding of Israel, U.S. government leaders must be in the forefront of achieving this long-delayed goal.
A major impediment to progress is Washington's strange policy that dialogue on controversial issues will be extended only as a reward for subservient behavior and will be withheld from those who reject U.S. assertions. Direct engagement with the Palestine Liberation Organization or the Palestinian Authority and the government in Damascus will be necessary if secure negotiated settlements are to be achieved. Failure to address the issues and leaders involved risks the creation of an arc of even greater instability running from Jerusalem through Beirut, Damascus, Baghdad and Tehran.
The people of the Middle East deserve peace and justice, and we in the international community owe them our strong leadership and support.
Former president Carter is the founder of the nonprofit Carter Center in Atlanta.
Tuesday, August 15, 2006
Sunday, July 09, 2006
Chomsky on the Iranian Crisis
The following is an article written by Noam Chomsky about the Iranain nuclear crisis. The original article was posted on ZNET.
The urgency of halting the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and moving toward their elimination, could hardly be greater. Failure to do so is almost certain to lead to grim consequences, even the end of biology's only experiment with higher intelligence. As threatening as the crisis is, the means exist to defuse it.
A near-meltdown seems to be imminent over Iran and its nuclear programmes. Before 1979, when the Shah was in power, Washington strongly supported these programmes. Today the standard claim is that Iran has no need for nuclear power, and therefore must be pursuing a secret weapons programme. "For a major oil producer such as Iran, nuclear energy is a wasteful use of resources," Henry Kissinger wrote in the Washington Post last year.
Thirty years ago, however, when Kissinger was secretary of state for President Gerald Ford, he held that "introduction of nuclear power will both provide for the growing needs of Iran's economy and free remaining oil reserves for export or conversion to petrochemicals".
Last year Dafna Linzer of the Washington Post asked Kissinger about his reversal of opinion. Kissinger responded with his usual engaging frankness: "They were an allied country."
In 1976 the Ford administration "endorsed Iranian plans to build a massive nuclear energy industry, but also worked hard to complete a multibillion-dollar deal that would have given Tehran control of large quantities of plutonium and enriched uranium - the two pathways to a nuclear bomb", Linzer wrote. The top planners of the Bush administration, who are now denouncing these programmes, were then in key national security posts: Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz.
Iranians are surely not as willing as the west to discard history to the rubbish heap. They know that the United States, along with its allies, has been tormenting Iranians for more than 50 years, ever since a US-UK military coup overthrew the parliamentary government and installed the Shah, who ruled with an iron hand until a popular uprising expelled him in 1979.
The Reagan administration then supported Saddam Hussein's invasion of Iran, providing him with military and other aid that helped him slaughter hundreds of thousands of Iranians (along with Iraqi Kurds). Then came President Clinton's harsh sanctions, followed by Bush's threats to attack Iran - themselves a serious breach of the UN charter.
Last month the Bush administration conditionally agreed to join its European allies in direct talks with Iran, but refused to withdraw the threat of attack, rendering virtually meaningless any negotiations offer that comes, in effect, at gunpoint. Recent history provides further reason for skepticism about Washington's intentions.
In May 2003, according to Flynt Leverett, then a senior official in Bush's National Security Council, the reformist government of Mohammad Khatami proposed "an agenda for a diplomatic process that was intended to resolve on a comprehensive basis all of the bilateral differences between the United States and Iran".
Included were "weapons of mass destruction, a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the future of Lebanon's Hizbullah organisation and cooperation with the UN nuclear safeguards agency", the Financial Times reported last month. The Bush administration refused, and reprimanded the Swiss diplomat who conveyed the offer.
A year later the European Union and Iran struck a bargain: Iran would temporarily suspend uranium enrichment, and in return Europe would provide assurances that the United States and Israel would not attack Iran. Under US pressure, Europe backed off, and Iran renewed its enrichment processes.
Iran's nuclear programmes, as far as is known, fall within its rights under article four of the non-proliferation treaty (NPT), which grants non-nuclear states the right to produce fuel for nuclear energy. The Bush administration argues that article four should be strengthened, and I think that makes sense.
When the NPT came into force in 1970 there was a considerable gap between producing fuel for energy and for nuclear weapons. But advances in technology have narrowed the gap. However, any such revision of article four would have to ensure unimpeded access for non-military use, in accord with the initial NPT bargain between declared nuclear powers and the non-nuclear states.
In 2003 a reasonable proposal to this end was put forward by Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency: that all production and processing of weapon-usable material be under international control, with "assurance that legitimate would-be users could get their supplies". That should be the first step, he proposed, toward fully implementing the 1993 UN resolution for a fissile material cutoff treaty (or Fissban).
ElBaradei's proposal has to date been accepted by only one state, to my knowledge: Iran, in February, in an interview with Ali Larijani, Iran's chief nuclear negotiator. The Bush administration rejects a verifiable Fissban - and stands nearly alone. In November 2004 the UN committee on disarmament voted in favour of a verifiable Fissban. The vote was 147 to one (United States), with two abstentions: Israel and Britain. Last year a vote in the full general assembly was 179 to two, Israel and Britain again abstaining. The United States was joined by Palau.
There are ways to mitigate and probably end these crises. The first is to call off the very credible US and Israeli threats that virtually urge Iran to develop nuclear weapons as a deterrent.
A second step would be to join the rest of the world in accepting a verifiable Fissban treaty, as well as ElBaradei's proposal, or something similar.
A third step would be to live up to article six of the NPT, which obligates the nuclear states to take "good-faith" efforts to eliminate nuclear weapons, a binding legal obligation, as the world court determined. None of the nuclear states has lived up to that obligation, but the United States is far in the lead in violating it.
Even steps in these directions would mitigate the upcoming crisis with Iran. Above all, it is important to heed the words of Mohamed ElBaradei: "There is no military solution to this situation. It is inconceivable. The only durable solution is a negotiated solution." And it is within reach.
The urgency of halting the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and moving toward their elimination, could hardly be greater. Failure to do so is almost certain to lead to grim consequences, even the end of biology's only experiment with higher intelligence. As threatening as the crisis is, the means exist to defuse it.
A near-meltdown seems to be imminent over Iran and its nuclear programmes. Before 1979, when the Shah was in power, Washington strongly supported these programmes. Today the standard claim is that Iran has no need for nuclear power, and therefore must be pursuing a secret weapons programme. "For a major oil producer such as Iran, nuclear energy is a wasteful use of resources," Henry Kissinger wrote in the Washington Post last year.
Thirty years ago, however, when Kissinger was secretary of state for President Gerald Ford, he held that "introduction of nuclear power will both provide for the growing needs of Iran's economy and free remaining oil reserves for export or conversion to petrochemicals".
Last year Dafna Linzer of the Washington Post asked Kissinger about his reversal of opinion. Kissinger responded with his usual engaging frankness: "They were an allied country."
In 1976 the Ford administration "endorsed Iranian plans to build a massive nuclear energy industry, but also worked hard to complete a multibillion-dollar deal that would have given Tehran control of large quantities of plutonium and enriched uranium - the two pathways to a nuclear bomb", Linzer wrote. The top planners of the Bush administration, who are now denouncing these programmes, were then in key national security posts: Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz.
Iranians are surely not as willing as the west to discard history to the rubbish heap. They know that the United States, along with its allies, has been tormenting Iranians for more than 50 years, ever since a US-UK military coup overthrew the parliamentary government and installed the Shah, who ruled with an iron hand until a popular uprising expelled him in 1979.
The Reagan administration then supported Saddam Hussein's invasion of Iran, providing him with military and other aid that helped him slaughter hundreds of thousands of Iranians (along with Iraqi Kurds). Then came President Clinton's harsh sanctions, followed by Bush's threats to attack Iran - themselves a serious breach of the UN charter.
Last month the Bush administration conditionally agreed to join its European allies in direct talks with Iran, but refused to withdraw the threat of attack, rendering virtually meaningless any negotiations offer that comes, in effect, at gunpoint. Recent history provides further reason for skepticism about Washington's intentions.
In May 2003, according to Flynt Leverett, then a senior official in Bush's National Security Council, the reformist government of Mohammad Khatami proposed "an agenda for a diplomatic process that was intended to resolve on a comprehensive basis all of the bilateral differences between the United States and Iran".
Included were "weapons of mass destruction, a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the future of Lebanon's Hizbullah organisation and cooperation with the UN nuclear safeguards agency", the Financial Times reported last month. The Bush administration refused, and reprimanded the Swiss diplomat who conveyed the offer.
A year later the European Union and Iran struck a bargain: Iran would temporarily suspend uranium enrichment, and in return Europe would provide assurances that the United States and Israel would not attack Iran. Under US pressure, Europe backed off, and Iran renewed its enrichment processes.
Iran's nuclear programmes, as far as is known, fall within its rights under article four of the non-proliferation treaty (NPT), which grants non-nuclear states the right to produce fuel for nuclear energy. The Bush administration argues that article four should be strengthened, and I think that makes sense.
When the NPT came into force in 1970 there was a considerable gap between producing fuel for energy and for nuclear weapons. But advances in technology have narrowed the gap. However, any such revision of article four would have to ensure unimpeded access for non-military use, in accord with the initial NPT bargain between declared nuclear powers and the non-nuclear states.
In 2003 a reasonable proposal to this end was put forward by Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency: that all production and processing of weapon-usable material be under international control, with "assurance that legitimate would-be users could get their supplies". That should be the first step, he proposed, toward fully implementing the 1993 UN resolution for a fissile material cutoff treaty (or Fissban).
ElBaradei's proposal has to date been accepted by only one state, to my knowledge: Iran, in February, in an interview with Ali Larijani, Iran's chief nuclear negotiator. The Bush administration rejects a verifiable Fissban - and stands nearly alone. In November 2004 the UN committee on disarmament voted in favour of a verifiable Fissban. The vote was 147 to one (United States), with two abstentions: Israel and Britain. Last year a vote in the full general assembly was 179 to two, Israel and Britain again abstaining. The United States was joined by Palau.
There are ways to mitigate and probably end these crises. The first is to call off the very credible US and Israeli threats that virtually urge Iran to develop nuclear weapons as a deterrent.
A second step would be to join the rest of the world in accepting a verifiable Fissban treaty, as well as ElBaradei's proposal, or something similar.
A third step would be to live up to article six of the NPT, which obligates the nuclear states to take "good-faith" efforts to eliminate nuclear weapons, a binding legal obligation, as the world court determined. None of the nuclear states has lived up to that obligation, but the United States is far in the lead in violating it.
Even steps in these directions would mitigate the upcoming crisis with Iran. Above all, it is important to heed the words of Mohamed ElBaradei: "There is no military solution to this situation. It is inconceivable. The only durable solution is a negotiated solution." And it is within reach.
Thursday, July 06, 2006
Human Trafficking
When I finally managed to get out of Iran in 1998, the first place that I ended up in was Larnaca, Cyprus. Larnaca is a small city on the southern coast of Cyprus Island, with beaches of white sand that shine in the Mediterranean sun. Before northern Cyprus was taken over by Turkey, and the island was brutally divided along ethnic lines, Famagusta was the most thriving Mediterranean resort town, but alas, Famagusta is now turned into a ghost town and can no longer be the destination for the British tourists who long for the white sand, azure waters, lots of sunshine, and young, plump, voluptuous Ukrainian, Belarusan, Hungarian, Romanian, or Albanian girls.
At the customs in Larnaca airport, there were at least ten gates were new arrivals were processed. Eight of these had signs that said “EU Arrivals.” The other two said “International Arrivals.” Tourists from European Union countries were quickly processed and allowed entry through the “EU Arrivals” gates. Everyone else, including me, had to wait their turns in the “International Arrival” lines.
On that particular day there were the passengers from my flight, mostly richer Iranian families, who could afford to spend their vacation in Cyprus, far from the harsh access of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards who seem to have nothing better to do than to make sure that not a single strand of hair can be seen from under the headscarf of a woman in the streets; there were simultaneously two British Airway arrivals, and a Russian Aero Float landing.
As I was waiting my turn in the line, I could not help but notice that most of the British Airway passengers were middle-aged men while the Aero Float seemed to have been an all female flight of young girls.
On my way to my hotel, I expressed my astonishment to the cab driver who spoke some English – everyone in Cyprus speaks some English. He told me that quite a few British men actually move to Cyprus after retirement. With their retirement pension they can enjoy a high standard of living in Larnaca, and get to have as much fun as they will with the East European girl that flood into the Island every day. Later through a restaurant owner, who took me out to a nightclub one evening, I found out that these girls are flown in through visas sent out on their behalf by Cypriot entertainment industry owners. Just as the article by Goodwin reveals “commonly the passports of these ‘guest workers’ are confiscated on arrival and the salaries [are] withheld.” The customs officers know that these young girls are not tourists. They know why they are in Cyprus. The police know too. They simply condone. The Russian Mafia has a strong presence in Cyprus, and bribing government officials is a very common practice.
Between sex entertainment, prostitution, forced marriages, domestic work, and forced labor in sweetshops, women and children seem to be the prime victims of human trafficking and the number one targets of the new wave of slavery around the world. Feminization of immigration appears to be another way of perpetuation of patriarchy. What with the upper-middle class males in the developed countries who, faced with the increasing expectation of egalitarianism on their wives’ part, seek to use the domestic labor of trafficked women from third world countries, and with the morally corrupt men from the wealthier countries, who want to gratify their sick desires by objectifying helpless women and children of poorer nations, it appears that the interplay of gender, race, and class simply works against the women.
The governments of the developing countries usually find the sex trade a lucrative source of hard currency, and despite the illegality of prostitution, they not only turn a blind eye on it, but at times cooperate with the owners of such businesses as brothels, and night clubs. “The government periodically promises to crack down on the industry, but because of the amount of money it generates, invariably looks the other way.”
At the customs in Larnaca airport, there were at least ten gates were new arrivals were processed. Eight of these had signs that said “EU Arrivals.” The other two said “International Arrivals.” Tourists from European Union countries were quickly processed and allowed entry through the “EU Arrivals” gates. Everyone else, including me, had to wait their turns in the “International Arrival” lines.
On that particular day there were the passengers from my flight, mostly richer Iranian families, who could afford to spend their vacation in Cyprus, far from the harsh access of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards who seem to have nothing better to do than to make sure that not a single strand of hair can be seen from under the headscarf of a woman in the streets; there were simultaneously two British Airway arrivals, and a Russian Aero Float landing.
As I was waiting my turn in the line, I could not help but notice that most of the British Airway passengers were middle-aged men while the Aero Float seemed to have been an all female flight of young girls.
On my way to my hotel, I expressed my astonishment to the cab driver who spoke some English – everyone in Cyprus speaks some English. He told me that quite a few British men actually move to Cyprus after retirement. With their retirement pension they can enjoy a high standard of living in Larnaca, and get to have as much fun as they will with the East European girl that flood into the Island every day. Later through a restaurant owner, who took me out to a nightclub one evening, I found out that these girls are flown in through visas sent out on their behalf by Cypriot entertainment industry owners. Just as the article by Goodwin reveals “commonly the passports of these ‘guest workers’ are confiscated on arrival and the salaries [are] withheld.” The customs officers know that these young girls are not tourists. They know why they are in Cyprus. The police know too. They simply condone. The Russian Mafia has a strong presence in Cyprus, and bribing government officials is a very common practice.
Between sex entertainment, prostitution, forced marriages, domestic work, and forced labor in sweetshops, women and children seem to be the prime victims of human trafficking and the number one targets of the new wave of slavery around the world. Feminization of immigration appears to be another way of perpetuation of patriarchy. What with the upper-middle class males in the developed countries who, faced with the increasing expectation of egalitarianism on their wives’ part, seek to use the domestic labor of trafficked women from third world countries, and with the morally corrupt men from the wealthier countries, who want to gratify their sick desires by objectifying helpless women and children of poorer nations, it appears that the interplay of gender, race, and class simply works against the women.
The governments of the developing countries usually find the sex trade a lucrative source of hard currency, and despite the illegality of prostitution, they not only turn a blind eye on it, but at times cooperate with the owners of such businesses as brothels, and night clubs. “The government periodically promises to crack down on the industry, but because of the amount of money it generates, invariably looks the other way.”
Wednesday, July 05, 2006
These Boots Are Made for...
The corporation-controlled media would like people to believe that the Cold War era was a period of tension and hostilities between the good and the evil, good being the free market block led by the United States and evil being communism represented by the USSR and its satellites. What a lot of people fail to realize, however, is that the very existence of the Eastern Block was the underlying reason for all the welfare programs that were put into place to benefit the poor and to afford them a minimal standard of living so that any fermentation of uprising in the face of dire living circumstances could be prevented. It is not coincidental that immediately after the demise of the USSR and the Eastern Block, a lot of the welfare programs in this country were either completely stopped or substantially cut down. There was no longer a model to look up to; the inspiration had been removed; the evil empire, which could instigate the workers in the so-called free nations to raise their voices in demand for a fairer share of the outcome of their labor, had been obliterated. Although the Republicans started the downsizing of welfare programs, Democrats were also quick to follow through realizing that they no longer needed to bribe the poor into remaining calm.
Interestingly the call for democracy also started with the collapse of the evil empire of communism. During the Cold War, all over the world, the United States found dictators very efficient in curbing and containing movements of the working people who, every now and then, rose in pursuit of fairer wages and better working conditions. It was immediately after the fall of communism that the call for US-style democracy was placed at the top of the US foreign policy agenda.
It is no coincidence that both Reebok and Nike went into South Korea during the death throes of communism, when dictators were still very congenial with the US, and Human Rights were a commodity that the free market economy was not very interested in.
Reebok and Nike, correctly assessing the situation in host countries such as South Korea, China, Indonesia, Taiwan, or Thailand, refused to capitalize on building factories in these countries, but instead just subcontracted local entrepreneurs to take over the manufacturing aspect of their enterprise. “Let them be responsible for workers’ health and safety. Let them negotiate with newly emergent unions. Nike [Reebok, and others] would retain control over those parts of sneaker production that gave its officials the greatest professional satisfaction and the ultimate word on the product: design and marketing.”
Interestingly, American men running companies such as Reebok and Nike, whose business practices align them with the structural-functional frame of reference, and as such should support an expressive role for women and should, in principle, be against the participation of women in the paid labor force, have no qualms when the women in question are from some developing or underdeveloped country. Do these corporate men think of South Asian or South American women as something less than human beings? Isn’t this the new type of slavery?
The outsourcing of footwear production started in South Korea and Taiwan, but as women in South Korea organized against the injustice of their wages and working conditions despite the fact that “at the first signs of trouble, factory managers called in government riot police to break up employees’ meetings,” US-based companies decided to move the factories to totalitarian countries where labor unions were against the law and labor strikes could be punished severely. The exodus out of South Korea left quite a number of women unemployed. These women who had initially moved to cities to work in sneakers factories were now absorbed in the “entertainment industry, the kinds of bars and massage parlors offering sexual services that had mushroomed around US military bases during the Cold War.”
In a competition to bring foreign investment into their countries, South Asian countries made all sorts of concessions to foreign capitalists. These concessions included low wages, long working hours, no health benefits, few regulations, and a tacit pledge of suppression of any labor strikes or attempts to form unions. With governments propagating that women who worked in these factories were in effect carrying out their patriotic duty towards their country, any attempt by women to organize for better wages and working conditions could be punished as treason. Thus the race to the bottom assumed unprecedented proportions.
As accounts of inhumanities and unfair working conditions were reflected in reports that appeared in Western media, US-based footwear-producing companies refused to acknowledge any responsibility by rationalizing that these factories did not belong to them and they were run according to the laws and labor regulations of the host countries. Reebok presented human rights awards to Chinese dissidents while hypocritically turning a blind eye on the atrocities that were perpetrated in factories that in had subcontracted to foreign investors.
Despite all the ongoing injustice, there is hope. Women in all the host countries are gradually becoming aware of their plight. Feminist activist groups are helping to organize them and raising their consciousness.
Sunday, July 02, 2006
Women Living under Muslim Laws
A sociologist and activist, Farida Shaheed, who lives in Lahore of Pakistan, works with Women Living Under Muslim Laws (WLUML), an international solidarity network that attempts to provide legal help to muslim women who get caught in the midst of the relentlessly patriarchal Islamic and Quranic codes. Quoting Deniz Kandiyoti, she says “most Muslim states have failed to generate ideologies capable of coping realistically with social changes.” This has resulted in Muslim countries adherence to Islam not just as a “coherent ideology” but also as “a symbol of their cultural identity.” Shaheed believes that the patriarchal structure of Muslim societies is not much different from that of any other society and “like elsewhere, women’s subordination occurs at multiple levels (kinship structures, state-building projects, etc.). She also correctly maintains, “The idea of one homogeneous Muslim world is an illusion.” She argues that simply because a country is made up of a Muslim population does not necessarily make it an Islamic country. Absence of homogeneousness, lack of laws to properly cope with modernization, the urge for identity, and diversity of political structures demand a legal network that can provide support to suffering women throughout the Muslim world.
Women living in Islamic countries – regardless of whether their political systems allege secularity, as in Turkey, or whether their government is inspired by Quranic laws, as in Saudi Arabia – are helplessly fettered by reactionary customs and traditions that adversely affect their lives every day. The existence of a solidarity network that can provide them with support is an imperative.
Women living in Islamic countries – regardless of whether their political systems allege secularity, as in Turkey, or whether their government is inspired by Quranic laws, as in Saudi Arabia – are helplessly fettered by reactionary customs and traditions that adversely affect their lives every day. The existence of a solidarity network that can provide them with support is an imperative.
Wednesday, June 28, 2006
Patriarchy
Many, especially among men, make the mistake of regarding patriarchy as a personal problem that may be corrected if individuals who practice and benefit from it stop their meanness and greed. “If evil exists in the world, it’s only because there are evil people who have entered into an evil conspiracy (Allan G Johnson, Patriarchy the System: An It, Not a He, a Them, or an Us. 1997).”
Allan G. Johnson argues that patriarchy should be examined as a system in whose light such social institutions as family, religion, and economy can be studied and understood. A system is a different entity from the sum total of the individuals that comprise it and acts independently from them. Individuals in a system unconsciously form their personalities and regulate their interactions in accordance with the roles that are expected from them by the system. It lives on even as individuals that make it up may change their minds about it. Such individuals are then pinpointed by the system as anomalies and abnormalities.
An individualistic perspective fails to account for such patterns of behavior as rape, sexual harassment, wife beating, macho violence, male anger, etc. it is only by understanding patriarchy – the larger encompassing system – that we can understand in what context and to what end such patterns of behavior exist and even flourish despite legislations that outlaw them.
To understand patriarchy, one needs to identify what its components are and how they are tied together to form it. “Patriarchy’s defining elements are male-dominated, male-identified, and male-centered character.” Patriarchy closely associates manhood and masculinity with humanness. It is this viewpoint that puts the control of everyone and everything in the world, including women, in the hands of men. “Patriarchal culture is about the core value of control and domination in almost every area of human existence.” In this system having power and being ready and willing to use it is a value and characteristically “masculine.” Lacking power and reluctance to use it is regarded as weak and characteristically “feminine.”
Patriarchy empowers the males and in return feeds on their desire to continue to cling on to the position of power and domination, and it lives on in this way. “By participating in patriarchy, we are of patriarchy and it is of us. Both exist through the other and neither can exist without the other.”
Allan G. Johnson argues that patriarchy should be examined as a system in whose light such social institutions as family, religion, and economy can be studied and understood. A system is a different entity from the sum total of the individuals that comprise it and acts independently from them. Individuals in a system unconsciously form their personalities and regulate their interactions in accordance with the roles that are expected from them by the system. It lives on even as individuals that make it up may change their minds about it. Such individuals are then pinpointed by the system as anomalies and abnormalities.
An individualistic perspective fails to account for such patterns of behavior as rape, sexual harassment, wife beating, macho violence, male anger, etc. it is only by understanding patriarchy – the larger encompassing system – that we can understand in what context and to what end such patterns of behavior exist and even flourish despite legislations that outlaw them.
To understand patriarchy, one needs to identify what its components are and how they are tied together to form it. “Patriarchy’s defining elements are male-dominated, male-identified, and male-centered character.” Patriarchy closely associates manhood and masculinity with humanness. It is this viewpoint that puts the control of everyone and everything in the world, including women, in the hands of men. “Patriarchal culture is about the core value of control and domination in almost every area of human existence.” In this system having power and being ready and willing to use it is a value and characteristically “masculine.” Lacking power and reluctance to use it is regarded as weak and characteristically “feminine.”
Patriarchy empowers the males and in return feeds on their desire to continue to cling on to the position of power and domination, and it lives on in this way. “By participating in patriarchy, we are of patriarchy and it is of us. Both exist through the other and neither can exist without the other.”
Thursday, June 08, 2006
Immigration
Unlike race, nationality is not a genetic trait imposed upon humankind by fate. One has no option as to the choice of one’s race. Nationality, on the other hand, just like religion, ought to be one of choice, a freedom that every human being ought to be afforded by international laws. A breach of this freedom ought to be considered a human rights violation, and those policies and laws that aim at containing this freedom, regardless of what country puts them in place, should be considered contradictory to basic human rights, and strongly campaigned against.
Many generally endorsed documents of the United Nations, including the Charter of the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, clearly support the right of individuals to travel and to choosing the place of their residence. Article thirteen of the latter document, of which the United States is a signatory, clearly articulates the basic right of human beings to travel and to choose their place of living:
“Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state. Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.”
Pursuit of happiness is a generally accepted right of every man and woman, of every race and ethnicity, regardless of language and place of origin. People ought to be able to freely move from any part of the world to any other part of the world in their never-ending quest for better lives.
Thousand of years ago, the European ancestors of many present-day Americans, migrated from an area east of the Caspian Sea to what later came to be known as Europe. All Americans living in the United States today, with the exception of the native aborigines already living on this continent, are the descendents of immigrants who ran away from the despotic political systems of Medieval Europe to pursue happier and freer lives here in the United States of America.
The plaque at the foot of the Statue of Liberty boasts a poem by the 19th century American poet, Emma Lazarus, with words that will forever reverberate throughout the world:
“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your Huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”
What happened to that spirit? Whatever became of the safe haven for the poor, the tired?
Today, the rhetoric in the media is relentlessly targeting the very people that make up the United States of America, the immigrants, portraying them as the cause of the misery and pain that the lower middle class in this country is grappling with. Politicians of every political party and inclination tend to find a scapegoat in the people whose only fault is their attempt to secure better lives for their families – pursuit of happiness.
Criminalizing immigration is a violation of the very laws that this country was founded on. It is the breach of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But perhaps more importantly, it is a shameful attempt by politicians to divert the public attention away from the main causes of the economical pain and misery that are taking a toll at their wellbeing.
Are immigrants the reason why Americans are losing their jobs? Are immigrants accountable for a shift from manufacturing industries and production to financial institutions and banking in this country? Are immigrants to be held responsible for “wealth fare” programs and policies put in place to ensure that the one percent wealthiest Americans continue to accumulate more wealth at the expense of the socio-economically poor and needy masses who have to struggle at multiple jobs to barely make ends meet? Are immigrants the reason why welfare programs are constantly being truncated? Why does the average American worker have to work harder and more hours than his/her European counterpart?
The corporation-owned media and the politicians stop short of nothing to give the public to think that “illegal aliens” are responsible for their misery. Yes, they are the ones that are depriving you of your jobs; if they are thrown out of the country, you will be able to fill up the gap. They are taking advantage of your resources. They are like leaches.
And, unfortunately, in the absence of a class struggle awareness, as a result of years of anti socialism rhetoric of the cold war era, the American public is entirely blind to the fact that the cause of their misfortune is not immigration – documented or undocumented – but rather the very people who take advantage of the immigrants as long as they need them for their modern day model of slavery, and throw them defenseless at the mercy of an ignorant populace when they no longer need them, or when they intend to divert the attentions from an ill-fated war, which is gnawing at the resources that would otherwise enhance the lives of the general public.
So frankly, the question should not be whether or not the United States benefits from immigrant. It is obvious that this country benefits from immigrants. Anyone that dispels this fact closes his/her eyes on the very nature of this country. The question is why, every now and then, the immigration issue is put at the foreground of the conflicts present in this society, and who benefits from doing so. The culprits are not the immigrants but those who attempt to criminalize immigration despite the very nature of this society.
Many generally endorsed documents of the United Nations, including the Charter of the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, clearly support the right of individuals to travel and to choosing the place of their residence. Article thirteen of the latter document, of which the United States is a signatory, clearly articulates the basic right of human beings to travel and to choose their place of living:
“Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state. Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.”
Pursuit of happiness is a generally accepted right of every man and woman, of every race and ethnicity, regardless of language and place of origin. People ought to be able to freely move from any part of the world to any other part of the world in their never-ending quest for better lives.
Thousand of years ago, the European ancestors of many present-day Americans, migrated from an area east of the Caspian Sea to what later came to be known as Europe. All Americans living in the United States today, with the exception of the native aborigines already living on this continent, are the descendents of immigrants who ran away from the despotic political systems of Medieval Europe to pursue happier and freer lives here in the United States of America.
The plaque at the foot of the Statue of Liberty boasts a poem by the 19th century American poet, Emma Lazarus, with words that will forever reverberate throughout the world:
“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your Huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”
What happened to that spirit? Whatever became of the safe haven for the poor, the tired?
Today, the rhetoric in the media is relentlessly targeting the very people that make up the United States of America, the immigrants, portraying them as the cause of the misery and pain that the lower middle class in this country is grappling with. Politicians of every political party and inclination tend to find a scapegoat in the people whose only fault is their attempt to secure better lives for their families – pursuit of happiness.
Criminalizing immigration is a violation of the very laws that this country was founded on. It is the breach of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But perhaps more importantly, it is a shameful attempt by politicians to divert the public attention away from the main causes of the economical pain and misery that are taking a toll at their wellbeing.
Are immigrants the reason why Americans are losing their jobs? Are immigrants accountable for a shift from manufacturing industries and production to financial institutions and banking in this country? Are immigrants to be held responsible for “wealth fare” programs and policies put in place to ensure that the one percent wealthiest Americans continue to accumulate more wealth at the expense of the socio-economically poor and needy masses who have to struggle at multiple jobs to barely make ends meet? Are immigrants the reason why welfare programs are constantly being truncated? Why does the average American worker have to work harder and more hours than his/her European counterpart?
The corporation-owned media and the politicians stop short of nothing to give the public to think that “illegal aliens” are responsible for their misery. Yes, they are the ones that are depriving you of your jobs; if they are thrown out of the country, you will be able to fill up the gap. They are taking advantage of your resources. They are like leaches.
And, unfortunately, in the absence of a class struggle awareness, as a result of years of anti socialism rhetoric of the cold war era, the American public is entirely blind to the fact that the cause of their misfortune is not immigration – documented or undocumented – but rather the very people who take advantage of the immigrants as long as they need them for their modern day model of slavery, and throw them defenseless at the mercy of an ignorant populace when they no longer need them, or when they intend to divert the attentions from an ill-fated war, which is gnawing at the resources that would otherwise enhance the lives of the general public.
So frankly, the question should not be whether or not the United States benefits from immigrant. It is obvious that this country benefits from immigrants. Anyone that dispels this fact closes his/her eyes on the very nature of this country. The question is why, every now and then, the immigration issue is put at the foreground of the conflicts present in this society, and who benefits from doing so. The culprits are not the immigrants but those who attempt to criminalize immigration despite the very nature of this society.
Monday, May 29, 2006
James Kunstler
About six months ago, James Howard Kunstler, the author of "The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century" was here in Spokane. He gave a lecture at Gonzaga University. The following is what I wrote after I had attended his lecture:
“It may be easy for people to misunderstand where I am coming from. I am certainly not a science writer per se. I’m a—really I consider myself a prose artist who went into journalism and then became a novel writer and then returned to journalism. My first eight books were novels, and then I re-embarked on a journalism career. And I wrote several books about the fiasco of suburbia, and where that came from was my experience as a young newspaper reporter in the ‘70s and I covered the OPEC oil embargo of 1973—right on the ground, and I watched the people fight on the gas lines while I was waiting on the lines. The whole spectacle made an impression on me, that this was a serious problem and probably a dress rehearsal for a much bigger problem later on. Although at the time I knew nothing about the scientific modeling that has come to be known by the name of its originator, Hubbert’s Peak. It was also obvious to me at the time that suburbia was a tremendous problem—an economic problem, an ecological problem, and a spiritual problem. And that it was connected, obviously, to the energy issue.” (From an interview with Robert Birnbaum on the online magazine, the Morning News[1], 24 August 2005)
American geophysicist King Hubbert predicted that the US oil production would peak between 1965 to 1970. U.S. oil production actually peaked in 1971. He also predicted that the global oil production would peak in the year 2000. This did not happen mainly due to the OPEC oil embargo of 1973, which led to a temporary but effective reduction of dependence on fossil energy in the few years that followed. However, "fossil fuels currently supply most of the world’s energy, and are expected to continue to do so for the foreseeable future. While supplies are currently abundant, they won’t last forever. Oil production is in decline in 33 of the 48 largest oil producing countries.” (The International Energy Agency's (IEA) World Energy Outlook 2004) This means that the global peak has already happened though not exactly in the year that Hubbert said it would.
It is based on these facts that Kunstler draws a grim perspective of the future that is awaiting the United States and the world. He predicts that unless a change in the way of life is attempted, Americans will not be able to sustain their present standard of living for much longer.
Although he had to leave his speech at SFCC rather incomplete due to time circumstances, he did make it clear that the current standard of life in the U.S. is not sustainable even if new sources of energy can be found before the world runs out of fossil energy. Oil is not only the source of the energy that is currently running our factories, lighting and warming our houses, and transporting merchandise and people from place to place, but it is also the basis of petrochemical industries without which industrial production, transportation, and construction of residential homes and businesses will be rendered impossible.
Solar energy, wind and tide wave energy, and even nuclear energy may be able to run our cars and light and warm our houses, but they will not give us the rubber that we use in our tires, or the plastic products that are used in almost everything that we find necessary for our way of life today.
Kunstler argues that either we have to urgently change our way of living by minimizing our dependency on oil and oil-based products, or soon witness the decline of our standard of living.
Kunstler’s seems to be strongly critical of the globalization process. He favors a trend towards localizing production and a belief that, with the gradual trend towards the scarcity of oil, it will be more and more difficult for communities to depend on merchandise that is imported from faraway places.
Kunstler blasts the urban structure of American communities and calls for the “deconstruction” of the suburbia. He argues that aside from being ugly and impractical, the suburbia puts a heavy strain on the community’s resources in terms of urban services such as utilities, waste management, transportation, etc. not to mention that this sort of urban sprawl forces the constant retreat of nature as people demand more and more residential space.
Kunstler strongly favors the introduction of public transportation – city and inter-city transportation - as a way of conserving in energy consumption and reducing pollution. In his SFCC speech, he compared public transportation in Europe to that of the U.S. He made the point that while Europeans have maintained and expanded their public transportation system, in the U.S. the trend has been the contrary: public transportation has systematically lost grounds to the ownership of automobiles.
Kunstler predicts that, at the present rate of fossil energy consumption, giant retailers such as Wal-Mart will not be able to remain in business much longer since it will become more and more costly to transport merchandise from remote places.
Deglobalization, localization, and deconstruction of the suburbia seem to be quite reasonable suggestions in the face of diminishing fossil energy reserves. What Kunstler seems to be leaving out of the argument is the type of political system that will be capable of putting these goals on its agenda. With the present political structure in the United States, I seriously doubt that Kunstler’s ideas can ever be systematically realized before a decline in the living standards actually demand them, although, as Marx would put it, economic realities will eventually determine political decisions.
[1] http://www.themorningnews.org/archives/birnbaum_v/james_howard_kunstler.php
“It may be easy for people to misunderstand where I am coming from. I am certainly not a science writer per se. I’m a—really I consider myself a prose artist who went into journalism and then became a novel writer and then returned to journalism. My first eight books were novels, and then I re-embarked on a journalism career. And I wrote several books about the fiasco of suburbia, and where that came from was my experience as a young newspaper reporter in the ‘70s and I covered the OPEC oil embargo of 1973—right on the ground, and I watched the people fight on the gas lines while I was waiting on the lines. The whole spectacle made an impression on me, that this was a serious problem and probably a dress rehearsal for a much bigger problem later on. Although at the time I knew nothing about the scientific modeling that has come to be known by the name of its originator, Hubbert’s Peak. It was also obvious to me at the time that suburbia was a tremendous problem—an economic problem, an ecological problem, and a spiritual problem. And that it was connected, obviously, to the energy issue.” (From an interview with Robert Birnbaum on the online magazine, the Morning News[1], 24 August 2005)
American geophysicist King Hubbert predicted that the US oil production would peak between 1965 to 1970. U.S. oil production actually peaked in 1971. He also predicted that the global oil production would peak in the year 2000. This did not happen mainly due to the OPEC oil embargo of 1973, which led to a temporary but effective reduction of dependence on fossil energy in the few years that followed. However, "fossil fuels currently supply most of the world’s energy, and are expected to continue to do so for the foreseeable future. While supplies are currently abundant, they won’t last forever. Oil production is in decline in 33 of the 48 largest oil producing countries.” (The International Energy Agency's (IEA) World Energy Outlook 2004) This means that the global peak has already happened though not exactly in the year that Hubbert said it would.
It is based on these facts that Kunstler draws a grim perspective of the future that is awaiting the United States and the world. He predicts that unless a change in the way of life is attempted, Americans will not be able to sustain their present standard of living for much longer.
Although he had to leave his speech at SFCC rather incomplete due to time circumstances, he did make it clear that the current standard of life in the U.S. is not sustainable even if new sources of energy can be found before the world runs out of fossil energy. Oil is not only the source of the energy that is currently running our factories, lighting and warming our houses, and transporting merchandise and people from place to place, but it is also the basis of petrochemical industries without which industrial production, transportation, and construction of residential homes and businesses will be rendered impossible.
Solar energy, wind and tide wave energy, and even nuclear energy may be able to run our cars and light and warm our houses, but they will not give us the rubber that we use in our tires, or the plastic products that are used in almost everything that we find necessary for our way of life today.
Kunstler argues that either we have to urgently change our way of living by minimizing our dependency on oil and oil-based products, or soon witness the decline of our standard of living.
Kunstler’s seems to be strongly critical of the globalization process. He favors a trend towards localizing production and a belief that, with the gradual trend towards the scarcity of oil, it will be more and more difficult for communities to depend on merchandise that is imported from faraway places.
Kunstler blasts the urban structure of American communities and calls for the “deconstruction” of the suburbia. He argues that aside from being ugly and impractical, the suburbia puts a heavy strain on the community’s resources in terms of urban services such as utilities, waste management, transportation, etc. not to mention that this sort of urban sprawl forces the constant retreat of nature as people demand more and more residential space.
Kunstler strongly favors the introduction of public transportation – city and inter-city transportation - as a way of conserving in energy consumption and reducing pollution. In his SFCC speech, he compared public transportation in Europe to that of the U.S. He made the point that while Europeans have maintained and expanded their public transportation system, in the U.S. the trend has been the contrary: public transportation has systematically lost grounds to the ownership of automobiles.
Kunstler predicts that, at the present rate of fossil energy consumption, giant retailers such as Wal-Mart will not be able to remain in business much longer since it will become more and more costly to transport merchandise from remote places.
Deglobalization, localization, and deconstruction of the suburbia seem to be quite reasonable suggestions in the face of diminishing fossil energy reserves. What Kunstler seems to be leaving out of the argument is the type of political system that will be capable of putting these goals on its agenda. With the present political structure in the United States, I seriously doubt that Kunstler’s ideas can ever be systematically realized before a decline in the living standards actually demand them, although, as Marx would put it, economic realities will eventually determine political decisions.
[1] http://www.themorningnews.org/archives/birnbaum_v/james_howard_kunstler.php
Saturday, May 27, 2006
Brokeback Mountain - a Gender Story
Brokeback Mountain
Directed by Ang Lee
Heath Ledger: as Ennis Del Mar
Jake Gyllenhaal: as Jack Twist
Against the backdrop of the awe-inspiring and rugged expanse of Brokeback mountain in Wyoming, in the summer of 1963, while tending a herd of sheep, two young men – a cowboy and a ranch hand – forge a relationship and a bond that will change their lives forever. Ironically the formidable challenges of Brokeback mountain turn into the most welcoming and accepting aspect of the men’s lives as they escape from the unfriendly societal laws and norms to resort to the place where they first met and renew their bond.
By the end of the summer, when the two men say goodbye not knowing if their roads will ever cross again, against their rough upbringing, they are both visibly morose. Ennis Del Mar, who is supposed to marry soon, hides behind a wall and starts crying noisily, only to be reminded by his socialization that “men don’t cry” when a passing man stops to find out what is wrong.
The two men continue seeing one another once or twice a year despite both being married and having children now. They marry because that is what the society expects them to do. That is what they should do as men. That is what they have been socialized to do. Though they don’t seem to be consciously aware of it, they both know unconsciously that marrying a person of the opposite sex is not what they really want. They both know deep within them that they love each other. They keep testing the invisible conformity wall of the society. And eventually they both fall victim to the harsh and unyielding realities of the norms of the society. Jack Twist is lynched on the way to Mexico where he sometimes goes to seek homosexual intercourse. And Ennis Del Mar’s marriage breaks up in acrimony when his wife finds out about the nature of his relationship with Jack.
Though the movie portrays the doomed love of two homosexual men, you cannot but shed a few tears at the end when Ennis buries his head in the bloodied denim jacket of his murdered lover and voraciously takes in the scent of the body that he has so dearly loved for so long.
I went to the movie with an open mind, as a person that is very tolerant of homosexual behavior. I truly think of gays and lesbians as a minority that should be protected by civil rights laws. But let me be honest with you; even I was initially taken aback by the explicit love making of two men. One thing is certain: being gay is not equivalent to being effeminate. “Contrary to common myths about gay male effeminacy, masculinity also plays a powerful role in shaping gay and bisexual men’s identity and behavior” (Don Sabo 547). Throughout the movie, one can observe many manifestations of masculine socialization in the behaviors of Ennis and Jack: the Rough-and-Tumble play, aggression and violence, and control and domination.
A very controversial movie because of the subject that it presented, it instigated a wide variety of responses in the society. The conservatives vehemently dispelled and condemned it reasoning that it is detached from mainstream America. The liberals and gay and lesbian community welcomed it as a movie that can bring awareness about homosexuality and create a level of acceptance of this minority group in the society.
Just as this movie was being screened in cinemas across the United States, it coincided with an event that made it obvious how intolerant and zealous some members of the society can be as a result of the way they have been socialized by the culture of male domination and masculinity. Early in February, an 18-year-old male teenager walked into a gay bar in Massachusetts and injured some of the customers using a hatchet. Later he gunned down a police officer during a traffic stop. When he was finally stopped by the police after a high speed chase in Arkansas, he shot and killed the woman who was traveling with him before he was killed in a shootout with the police. Three lives in one week! Not bad for manhood!
Works Cited:
Sabo, Don. “Masculinity and Men’s Health: Moving toward Post-Superman Era Prevention.” Reconstructing Gender: A Multicultural Anthology. 4th Ed. Estelle Disch. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2006. 541-558.
Directed by Ang Lee
Heath Ledger: as Ennis Del Mar
Jake Gyllenhaal: as Jack Twist
Against the backdrop of the awe-inspiring and rugged expanse of Brokeback mountain in Wyoming, in the summer of 1963, while tending a herd of sheep, two young men – a cowboy and a ranch hand – forge a relationship and a bond that will change their lives forever. Ironically the formidable challenges of Brokeback mountain turn into the most welcoming and accepting aspect of the men’s lives as they escape from the unfriendly societal laws and norms to resort to the place where they first met and renew their bond.
By the end of the summer, when the two men say goodbye not knowing if their roads will ever cross again, against their rough upbringing, they are both visibly morose. Ennis Del Mar, who is supposed to marry soon, hides behind a wall and starts crying noisily, only to be reminded by his socialization that “men don’t cry” when a passing man stops to find out what is wrong.
The two men continue seeing one another once or twice a year despite both being married and having children now. They marry because that is what the society expects them to do. That is what they should do as men. That is what they have been socialized to do. Though they don’t seem to be consciously aware of it, they both know unconsciously that marrying a person of the opposite sex is not what they really want. They both know deep within them that they love each other. They keep testing the invisible conformity wall of the society. And eventually they both fall victim to the harsh and unyielding realities of the norms of the society. Jack Twist is lynched on the way to Mexico where he sometimes goes to seek homosexual intercourse. And Ennis Del Mar’s marriage breaks up in acrimony when his wife finds out about the nature of his relationship with Jack.
Though the movie portrays the doomed love of two homosexual men, you cannot but shed a few tears at the end when Ennis buries his head in the bloodied denim jacket of his murdered lover and voraciously takes in the scent of the body that he has so dearly loved for so long.
I went to the movie with an open mind, as a person that is very tolerant of homosexual behavior. I truly think of gays and lesbians as a minority that should be protected by civil rights laws. But let me be honest with you; even I was initially taken aback by the explicit love making of two men. One thing is certain: being gay is not equivalent to being effeminate. “Contrary to common myths about gay male effeminacy, masculinity also plays a powerful role in shaping gay and bisexual men’s identity and behavior” (Don Sabo 547). Throughout the movie, one can observe many manifestations of masculine socialization in the behaviors of Ennis and Jack: the Rough-and-Tumble play, aggression and violence, and control and domination.
A very controversial movie because of the subject that it presented, it instigated a wide variety of responses in the society. The conservatives vehemently dispelled and condemned it reasoning that it is detached from mainstream America. The liberals and gay and lesbian community welcomed it as a movie that can bring awareness about homosexuality and create a level of acceptance of this minority group in the society.
Just as this movie was being screened in cinemas across the United States, it coincided with an event that made it obvious how intolerant and zealous some members of the society can be as a result of the way they have been socialized by the culture of male domination and masculinity. Early in February, an 18-year-old male teenager walked into a gay bar in Massachusetts and injured some of the customers using a hatchet. Later he gunned down a police officer during a traffic stop. When he was finally stopped by the police after a high speed chase in Arkansas, he shot and killed the woman who was traveling with him before he was killed in a shootout with the police. Three lives in one week! Not bad for manhood!
Works Cited:
Sabo, Don. “Masculinity and Men’s Health: Moving toward Post-Superman Era Prevention.” Reconstructing Gender: A Multicultural Anthology. 4th Ed. Estelle Disch. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2006. 541-558.
Sunday, May 21, 2006
A Tribute to Shirin Ebadi, the Iranian Nobel Peace Laureate
All Iranians experience the bitter and brutal rule of the Islamic Republic and are to some degree, in one way or another, affected by its devastating impacts. Since 1978, when the so-called Islamic Revolution successfully derailed the democratic uprising of the people by taking advantage of their religious faith and usurping the much longed for findings of their efforts, many Iranians have had to voluntarily or involuntarily quit Iran and live in exile in Western Europe or the United States and Canada. According to some estimates the number of Iranians living in the United States alone was well over 1,560,000 in the year 1996 (Wikipedia.org).
But women and children have had to bear the brunt of this Orwellian, reactionary, and medieval rule much more harshly than other members of the society. Trapped in the quagmire of their socioeconomic status, their class, and their gender, women have been the prime victims of a corrupt regime that claims that it draws its mandate from the will of God – Allah as they refer to Him!
Many Iranian women have been executed by hanging, shooting, or stoning since the Islamic Republic assumed the reigns of political power in 1978. An example of the savagery with which the Islamic Republic subjugates women in Iran was the public hanging on August 15, 2004 of Atefeh Sahaleh Rajabi, a 16-year-old girl whose only charge was an out-of-wedlock relationship with a young man of about her own age. Her hanging came despite the repeated pleas of Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and other international human rights monitoring groups.
As the late Iranian poet, Ahmad Shamloo, says in a poem reflecting the practice of Revolutionary Guards in stopping cars at checkpoints late nights to make sure their occupants have not been drinking any alcoholic beverages,
“They smell your mouth, my love,
Lest you may have said ‘I love you!’
Love has to be hidden deep in the closet at home.”
In the face of increasing unemployment - as high as 15% by some estimates – many women and young girls fall prey to the prostitution imposed on them by the poverty that has been the direct result of the economic policies and political isolationism of the Islamic Republic (Amuzegar). Ironically, they are then shamelessly held accountable for trying to feed themselves and their children by the same regime that has induced their misery and suffering.
Conformity to the laws of Islamic Sharia is demanded from Iranian citizens in every aspect of their public and private lives. This includes such details as facial hair and long sleeve shirts for men, headscarves and hejab – Islamic covering – for women, type of music listened to by people, the contents of the books that they read, as well as much more important issues like sexuality and sexual partners. Homosexuality is punished by death. As a rule all Iranians know that if the title of a newspaper reports that a certain man has been hanged or executed by shooting after having been found guilty of sodomy, another execution will soon follow, that of his sexual partner.
With schools segregated by gender, some believe that the rate of homosexual relationships has increased in the past 27 years since the Islamic revolution, though, due to the illegality of such relationships and the stigma that is associated with them, no statistical data have been collected, and therefore there is only subjective speculation as to the verity of this matter.
It is against this dire and bleak backdrop that Shirin Ebadi became the first Iranian woman – the first Iranian for that matter and the first woman in the Middle East - to be awarded the Nobel Prize for peace 10, 2003. And when she appeared at a press conference in Paris not wearing a headscarf, she deliberately pushed against the conformity walls of the Islamic Republic setting an example for all the Iranian women and girls who long to be able to withstand the chains of restraints that the regime has fettered them with (Esfandiari 57).
Over the past century, patriarchy has had to give up many of its long-held strongholds throughout the world, and though it has been very unyielding in the Islamic world, it has lost a lot of ground even among the Muslim populations of these countries. Fundamentalism appears to have been the desperate response of Muslim patriarchy to the ever-tightening noose of egalitarianism around its convulsive neck, one last effort to hold on to its domination.
Fundamentalism is misogynous in nature. “A parliamentarian in Iran is on the record as saying, ‘Women must accept the reality of men dominating them, and the world must recognize that men are superior’” (Chitsaz and Samsami). Ironically the Iranian fundamentalists, who so belligerently oppose any notion of equality with women and do not fall short of making every effort to pass laws that will further subjugate them, greatly owe their success in the revolution of 1978 to the vast participation of women (Moghadam 458). Women activists like Shirin Ebadi, who had been in and out of prison for her support of democracy during the Shah, actively took part in the efforts that culminated in the toppling of the Pahlavi Dynasty only to find out that their efforts were being used to their detriment.
Shirin Ebadi, however, did not despair. She knew well that the very women that made the defeat the Shah’s tyranny possible by their participation in all the million-person demonstrations can someday win a victory against the male domination of the Islamic republic too.
Born in 1947, Shirin Ebadi became the first Iranian female to preside over a court as a judge paving the way for many women that followed. Later when the Islamic Republic declared that women could not hold the position of a judge – an attempt to perpetuate male domination – she worked as a university professor, a writer, and a defense attorney. Her publications became torchlight in the hands of the activists who sought to use the very laws of the Islamic Republic, however antiquated, to fight for the rights of women and children across the country.
Shirin Ebadi chose to undermine the Islamic patriarchy by exploiting the very laws of the patriarchal system. She educated herself in the Sharia taking advantage of the more progressive aspect of Islam to fight its reactionary side. After all Islam is the same religion whose preaching terminated the practice of infanticide among Arab Muslims; it is the religion that taught people to free their slaves and treat them with respect; it is the religion that held that all men – yes men – are equal in the eyes of Allah regardless of the color of their skin; the very same religion that cultivated the grounds for the flourishing of literature and science in the Islamic lands when Europe was burning in the ignorance of the dark ages and any voice of ration was shut down by the inquisition courts of the Catholic Christianity. Yes, however patriarchal, Islam does have a more moderate reading too, which accounts for the vast differences in the state of human rights and women in the Islamic countries.Ebadi’s books and writing shed light on the ongoing spousal abuse in Iran and set clear ways for women to fight their abusive spouses in Islamic courts that do not hesitate to interpret everything in favor of the husband. She found ways around the patrilineal inheritance laws of Islam that assign the share of a girl from the deceased parent’s wealth at half that of a male child.
Her international recognition and her affiliation with human rights organizations put her in a position where she could act as defense attorney for many a political prisoner when no one else dared walk into a so-called revolutionary court to defend a detainee whose charges had been trumped up to include “conspiracy to overthrow the Islamic Republic,” a charge that can be punished with the death penalty if proven.
Interestingly, just as the Second World War provided the American women with an opportunity to acquire paid employment on a vast basis, the eight-year war with Iraq and the engagement of the male population in the war through mandatory draft cleared the way for many Iranian women to get absorbed in the job market. According to Valentine M. Moghadam this was a factor that “undermined the [Islamic Republic’s] policies on women” and “created some employment opportunities for educated women in the public sector and particularly in health, education, and (t0 a lesser extent) public administration.”
Despite the Islamic revolution and the enforcement of Islamic laws, which drastically reduce women’s chances and their upward mobility, the long period of modernization during the Shah’s regime resulted in the education of girls and women on a large scale. This made their involvement in paid employment possible. And although the Islamic Republic has been hard at work to throw women out of labor force, Iranian women, under the guidance of female activists like Shirin Ebadi, have been able to guarantee their continued presence in the job market by steadfastly adhering to opportunities of furthering their education. For the first time, in recent years, the number of female students in institutes of higher education has topped that of male students.
Recent family planning policies in the face of the rising population, increasing poverty, and towering foreign debt have made it possible for Iranian women to have easier access to contraception thereby empowering them to remain more reliably in their employments. By defining labor laws that directly and indirectly affect women and their families, Shirin Ebadi has been able to educate women regarding their rights in the labor market.
When Shirin Ebadi was declared by the Nobel Foundation as the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, Iranians in Iran and around the world welcomed the decision with extreme joy and pride. Iranian women in particular embraced Ebadi’s Nobel Prize as a victory for the feminist movement in Iran and the Middle East. Shirin Ebadi’s contributions to women’s and children’s welfare in Iran and around the world have inspired many a woman who might have otherwise found it rather daring to engage in any sort of empowering activity in the face of the fundamentalist misogyny.
“In all her roles, she seeks to interpret Islam in a way that is harmonious and co-exists with the so-called notions of Western thought, such as human rights, democracy, freedom of speech and religious freedom” (Manish Verma). Despite all her deeds, this reading of Islam by Shirin Ebadi has put her at odds with those activists that think of the Islamic Republic as an incorrigible political system that should be replaced with a secular and democratic regime. many of Ebadi’s critics, including the writer of this paper, are of the opinion that Dr. Ebadi is too accepting of the Islamic Republic, and in effect contributing to the lengthening of its power.
Regardless of whether one agrees with Shirin Ebadi’s political stance, there is no doubt that her publications and actions have greatly helped to ease the pain and suffering of many women and children in Iran. Every Iranian, men and women alike, will always be proud to be associated with Dr. Ebadi as an Iranian.
Works cited:
Amuzegar, Jahangir. “Iran’s Unemployment Crisis.” Middle East Economic Survey 41. 2004.
Esphandiari, Helen. “the Woman Question.” The Wilson Quarterly 28.2 2004: 56-63. Spokane Falls Community College Library, Spokane, WA. 25 Feb. 2006
Chitsaz, Sarvnaz and Soosan Samsami. “Iranian Women and Girls: Victims of Exploitation and Violence.” Coalition Against Trafficking Women. 1999:
Moghadam, Valentine M. “A Tale of Two Countries: State, Society, and Gender Politics in Iran and Afghanistan.” The Muslim World. 2004. Spokane Falls Community College Library, Spokane, WA. 25 Feb. 2006
Verma, Manisha. “What Is the Significance of Shirin Ebadi Winning the Nobel Prize for Peace in 2003?” Association for Women’s Rights in Development. 2005:
But women and children have had to bear the brunt of this Orwellian, reactionary, and medieval rule much more harshly than other members of the society. Trapped in the quagmire of their socioeconomic status, their class, and their gender, women have been the prime victims of a corrupt regime that claims that it draws its mandate from the will of God – Allah as they refer to Him!
Many Iranian women have been executed by hanging, shooting, or stoning since the Islamic Republic assumed the reigns of political power in 1978. An example of the savagery with which the Islamic Republic subjugates women in Iran was the public hanging on August 15, 2004 of Atefeh Sahaleh Rajabi, a 16-year-old girl whose only charge was an out-of-wedlock relationship with a young man of about her own age. Her hanging came despite the repeated pleas of Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and other international human rights monitoring groups.
As the late Iranian poet, Ahmad Shamloo, says in a poem reflecting the practice of Revolutionary Guards in stopping cars at checkpoints late nights to make sure their occupants have not been drinking any alcoholic beverages,
“They smell your mouth, my love,
Lest you may have said ‘I love you!’
Love has to be hidden deep in the closet at home.”
In the face of increasing unemployment - as high as 15% by some estimates – many women and young girls fall prey to the prostitution imposed on them by the poverty that has been the direct result of the economic policies and political isolationism of the Islamic Republic (Amuzegar). Ironically, they are then shamelessly held accountable for trying to feed themselves and their children by the same regime that has induced their misery and suffering.
Conformity to the laws of Islamic Sharia is demanded from Iranian citizens in every aspect of their public and private lives. This includes such details as facial hair and long sleeve shirts for men, headscarves and hejab – Islamic covering – for women, type of music listened to by people, the contents of the books that they read, as well as much more important issues like sexuality and sexual partners. Homosexuality is punished by death. As a rule all Iranians know that if the title of a newspaper reports that a certain man has been hanged or executed by shooting after having been found guilty of sodomy, another execution will soon follow, that of his sexual partner.
With schools segregated by gender, some believe that the rate of homosexual relationships has increased in the past 27 years since the Islamic revolution, though, due to the illegality of such relationships and the stigma that is associated with them, no statistical data have been collected, and therefore there is only subjective speculation as to the verity of this matter.
It is against this dire and bleak backdrop that Shirin Ebadi became the first Iranian woman – the first Iranian for that matter and the first woman in the Middle East - to be awarded the Nobel Prize for peace 10, 2003. And when she appeared at a press conference in Paris not wearing a headscarf, she deliberately pushed against the conformity walls of the Islamic Republic setting an example for all the Iranian women and girls who long to be able to withstand the chains of restraints that the regime has fettered them with (Esfandiari 57).
Over the past century, patriarchy has had to give up many of its long-held strongholds throughout the world, and though it has been very unyielding in the Islamic world, it has lost a lot of ground even among the Muslim populations of these countries. Fundamentalism appears to have been the desperate response of Muslim patriarchy to the ever-tightening noose of egalitarianism around its convulsive neck, one last effort to hold on to its domination.
Fundamentalism is misogynous in nature. “A parliamentarian in Iran is on the record as saying, ‘Women must accept the reality of men dominating them, and the world must recognize that men are superior’” (Chitsaz and Samsami). Ironically the Iranian fundamentalists, who so belligerently oppose any notion of equality with women and do not fall short of making every effort to pass laws that will further subjugate them, greatly owe their success in the revolution of 1978 to the vast participation of women (Moghadam 458). Women activists like Shirin Ebadi, who had been in and out of prison for her support of democracy during the Shah, actively took part in the efforts that culminated in the toppling of the Pahlavi Dynasty only to find out that their efforts were being used to their detriment.
Shirin Ebadi, however, did not despair. She knew well that the very women that made the defeat the Shah’s tyranny possible by their participation in all the million-person demonstrations can someday win a victory against the male domination of the Islamic republic too.
Born in 1947, Shirin Ebadi became the first Iranian female to preside over a court as a judge paving the way for many women that followed. Later when the Islamic Republic declared that women could not hold the position of a judge – an attempt to perpetuate male domination – she worked as a university professor, a writer, and a defense attorney. Her publications became torchlight in the hands of the activists who sought to use the very laws of the Islamic Republic, however antiquated, to fight for the rights of women and children across the country.
Shirin Ebadi chose to undermine the Islamic patriarchy by exploiting the very laws of the patriarchal system. She educated herself in the Sharia taking advantage of the more progressive aspect of Islam to fight its reactionary side. After all Islam is the same religion whose preaching terminated the practice of infanticide among Arab Muslims; it is the religion that taught people to free their slaves and treat them with respect; it is the religion that held that all men – yes men – are equal in the eyes of Allah regardless of the color of their skin; the very same religion that cultivated the grounds for the flourishing of literature and science in the Islamic lands when Europe was burning in the ignorance of the dark ages and any voice of ration was shut down by the inquisition courts of the Catholic Christianity. Yes, however patriarchal, Islam does have a more moderate reading too, which accounts for the vast differences in the state of human rights and women in the Islamic countries.Ebadi’s books and writing shed light on the ongoing spousal abuse in Iran and set clear ways for women to fight their abusive spouses in Islamic courts that do not hesitate to interpret everything in favor of the husband. She found ways around the patrilineal inheritance laws of Islam that assign the share of a girl from the deceased parent’s wealth at half that of a male child.
Her international recognition and her affiliation with human rights organizations put her in a position where she could act as defense attorney for many a political prisoner when no one else dared walk into a so-called revolutionary court to defend a detainee whose charges had been trumped up to include “conspiracy to overthrow the Islamic Republic,” a charge that can be punished with the death penalty if proven.
Interestingly, just as the Second World War provided the American women with an opportunity to acquire paid employment on a vast basis, the eight-year war with Iraq and the engagement of the male population in the war through mandatory draft cleared the way for many Iranian women to get absorbed in the job market. According to Valentine M. Moghadam this was a factor that “undermined the [Islamic Republic’s] policies on women” and “created some employment opportunities for educated women in the public sector and particularly in health, education, and (t0 a lesser extent) public administration.”
Despite the Islamic revolution and the enforcement of Islamic laws, which drastically reduce women’s chances and their upward mobility, the long period of modernization during the Shah’s regime resulted in the education of girls and women on a large scale. This made their involvement in paid employment possible. And although the Islamic Republic has been hard at work to throw women out of labor force, Iranian women, under the guidance of female activists like Shirin Ebadi, have been able to guarantee their continued presence in the job market by steadfastly adhering to opportunities of furthering their education. For the first time, in recent years, the number of female students in institutes of higher education has topped that of male students.
Recent family planning policies in the face of the rising population, increasing poverty, and towering foreign debt have made it possible for Iranian women to have easier access to contraception thereby empowering them to remain more reliably in their employments. By defining labor laws that directly and indirectly affect women and their families, Shirin Ebadi has been able to educate women regarding their rights in the labor market.
When Shirin Ebadi was declared by the Nobel Foundation as the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, Iranians in Iran and around the world welcomed the decision with extreme joy and pride. Iranian women in particular embraced Ebadi’s Nobel Prize as a victory for the feminist movement in Iran and the Middle East. Shirin Ebadi’s contributions to women’s and children’s welfare in Iran and around the world have inspired many a woman who might have otherwise found it rather daring to engage in any sort of empowering activity in the face of the fundamentalist misogyny.
“In all her roles, she seeks to interpret Islam in a way that is harmonious and co-exists with the so-called notions of Western thought, such as human rights, democracy, freedom of speech and religious freedom” (Manish Verma). Despite all her deeds, this reading of Islam by Shirin Ebadi has put her at odds with those activists that think of the Islamic Republic as an incorrigible political system that should be replaced with a secular and democratic regime. many of Ebadi’s critics, including the writer of this paper, are of the opinion that Dr. Ebadi is too accepting of the Islamic Republic, and in effect contributing to the lengthening of its power.
Regardless of whether one agrees with Shirin Ebadi’s political stance, there is no doubt that her publications and actions have greatly helped to ease the pain and suffering of many women and children in Iran. Every Iranian, men and women alike, will always be proud to be associated with Dr. Ebadi as an Iranian.
Works cited:
Amuzegar, Jahangir. “Iran’s Unemployment Crisis.” Middle East Economic Survey 41. 2004.
Esphandiari, Helen. “the Woman Question.” The Wilson Quarterly 28.2 2004: 56-63. Spokane Falls Community College Library, Spokane, WA. 25 Feb. 2006
Chitsaz, Sarvnaz and Soosan Samsami. “Iranian Women and Girls: Victims of Exploitation and Violence.” Coalition Against Trafficking Women. 1999:
Moghadam, Valentine M. “A Tale of Two Countries: State, Society, and Gender Politics in Iran and Afghanistan.” The Muslim World. 2004. Spokane Falls Community College Library, Spokane, WA. 25 Feb. 2006
Verma, Manisha. “What Is the Significance of Shirin Ebadi Winning the Nobel Prize for Peace in 2003?” Association for Women’s Rights in Development. 2005:
Monday, May 15, 2006
Robert Bly
A while back Robert Bly was here in Spokane. I had the opportunity of attending one of his poetry reading sessions at Spokane Falls Community College. I wrote the following after that session:
Art is a form of non-conformism, defiance against accepted norms and rules, a violation of what is commonly considered normal. Repetition of what already exists cannot be considered as art. At best it is copying. An artist should be able to deliberately infringe upon the rules and norms of his art, and establish new rules and norms that can be repeated by others. Only then can a person call him/herself an artist.
Art is the creation of beauty; it is the expression of feelings and emotions; it is the kind of communication that addresses the most subtle aspects of human desire for perfection and elation.
Poetry, among other forms of art, is the use of language in a way that can affect the feelings and emotions of the reader or listener. It is the most emotional way of using the language. It arises from the emotions of the poet and targets the emotions of the person that is exposed to it. It can make you feel sad, happy, angry, agitated, relaxed, proud, humble. In a nutshell, poetry is all about the expression of emotions.
How is it then that despite their socialization, there have historically been more poets among men than among women? How come most poets are men? One may argue that in the past men had access to education and literacy, and women did not, and therefore men wrote poetry and women did not. But most poetry of the olden times was memorized. People memorized a poem and it went from one person to another like a current of emotions and feelings. Poetry does not necessarily have to be written language. Why then do we not have more women poets that men? Aren’t women the ones that are socialized to be able to express their emotions? Aren’t men supposed to have been reared to suppress their emotions? How come then Robert Bly can express and stir so much emotion? Why is it that he can make me laugh, cry, get angry, move, stop moving, get disappointed, or become filled with hope?
In my culture, men who choose to read or write poetry are thought of as being effeminate, womanish, yet almost all poets are men. Even in this day and age when men and women have equal access to education, still most poets are men.
True, men are historically socialized to suppress their emotions. Men cannot cry. Men find it difficult to express their love towards their mates. It is not manly to express ones emotions openly. Men should not let others find out that they feel sad. It is a sign of weakness and is not masculine. But men can make use of a legitimate means of expressing their emotions. Are there more poets than poetesses because men find in poetry a legitimate outlet of emotions and feelings without being found guilty of unmanly behavior?
Smart men like Robert Bly beat the system by expressing their emotions in the form of poetry and at the same time retaining their masculine image. Isn’t that smart?
Art is a form of non-conformism, defiance against accepted norms and rules, a violation of what is commonly considered normal. Repetition of what already exists cannot be considered as art. At best it is copying. An artist should be able to deliberately infringe upon the rules and norms of his art, and establish new rules and norms that can be repeated by others. Only then can a person call him/herself an artist.
Art is the creation of beauty; it is the expression of feelings and emotions; it is the kind of communication that addresses the most subtle aspects of human desire for perfection and elation.
Poetry, among other forms of art, is the use of language in a way that can affect the feelings and emotions of the reader or listener. It is the most emotional way of using the language. It arises from the emotions of the poet and targets the emotions of the person that is exposed to it. It can make you feel sad, happy, angry, agitated, relaxed, proud, humble. In a nutshell, poetry is all about the expression of emotions.
How is it then that despite their socialization, there have historically been more poets among men than among women? How come most poets are men? One may argue that in the past men had access to education and literacy, and women did not, and therefore men wrote poetry and women did not. But most poetry of the olden times was memorized. People memorized a poem and it went from one person to another like a current of emotions and feelings. Poetry does not necessarily have to be written language. Why then do we not have more women poets that men? Aren’t women the ones that are socialized to be able to express their emotions? Aren’t men supposed to have been reared to suppress their emotions? How come then Robert Bly can express and stir so much emotion? Why is it that he can make me laugh, cry, get angry, move, stop moving, get disappointed, or become filled with hope?
In my culture, men who choose to read or write poetry are thought of as being effeminate, womanish, yet almost all poets are men. Even in this day and age when men and women have equal access to education, still most poets are men.
True, men are historically socialized to suppress their emotions. Men cannot cry. Men find it difficult to express their love towards their mates. It is not manly to express ones emotions openly. Men should not let others find out that they feel sad. It is a sign of weakness and is not masculine. But men can make use of a legitimate means of expressing their emotions. Are there more poets than poetesses because men find in poetry a legitimate outlet of emotions and feelings without being found guilty of unmanly behavior?
Smart men like Robert Bly beat the system by expressing their emotions in the form of poetry and at the same time retaining their masculine image. Isn’t that smart?
Monday, April 10, 2006
A Sociological Review of the movie "Osama"
Osama
Director: Sadigh Barmak
The background is all indicative of death and destruction. People walk out of half destroyed houses. Everything is squalid and neglected. You can see an expression of fear and desperation in the faces of the passers-by. A young boy is burning “espand” – an herb whose smoke is believed to keep the evil eye away when burned. He seems to be burning the espand for a photographer who has dared to come out and film what is going on. Soon a group of burqa-clad female demonstrators appear, who are demanding jobs and food. Their placards read, “We are not political; we are hungry; we want jobs.”
Before long, shots echo in the sordid streets followed by the bearded Taliban, who disperse the crowd of women by opening water on them. In the midst of all this, a young girl of about eleven and her mother, who used to be a nurse, are returning from the mother’s last day on the job. The hospital has been shut down due to lack of funding. Besides women are no longer allowed to work as nurses. The girl’s father has been killed in the fighting against the soviet occupation.
Afghanistan is a horticultural/pastoral country north of Pakistan and East of Iran with no access to the ocean. Maybe it is this lack of access to free waters that has historically isolated this nation and has limited its exposure to modernization. When India and Pakistan were still colonies of Great Britain, Afghanistan had a strategic role for Britain who did not want the Russians and later the Soviets to gain access to the south. With its rugged and unfriendly mountains and hostile terrain, Afghanistan was a natural impediment keeping the Russians away from India and Pakistan.
The Soviets, who had never given up their desire to control Afghanistan, staged a coup in 1978, which resulted in the ousting and murder of the entire royal family. The communist takeover of Afghanistan lasted for 10 years during which an Islamic resistance, secretly armed and aided by the United States and its allies, specifically Saudi Arabia, engaged in fierce fighting against the USSR, eventually forcing the communists to withdraw.
Though the western media would give you a dark picture of the communist years of Afghanistan, the fact is that during the reign of the communists, education was declared free and mandatory for both boys and girls. Women and girls were literally emancipated and encouraged to attend schools. Poverty was brought under control. Farming and agriculture was improved; existing roads were repaired and many new ones were constructed; warlords and tribal heads were contained and their power was limited. Opium plantations were burned down and farmers were encouraged to switch to alternative crops that were just as profitable due to the subsidy policies. The age-old patriarchy was curbed.
So when the United States decided to turn Afghanistan into the Vietnam of the USSR, it found quite willing allies in the warlords and tribal patriarchs whose powers had been curbed by the communist regime. The plan was simple. For years, communism had been introduced as the fiercest enemy of God and religion. Therefore the most effective way of containing communism seemed to be the rise of fundamentalism in the Islamic countries. Some people still talk about a CIA plan called the Green Belt, which aimed at creating fundamentalist Islamic Regimes South of the Soviet Union to bar the communist access to the warm waters of the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean. This Islamic Belt was supposed to include Afghanistan, Iran, and Turkey. Sure enough they succeeded in two out of three – Iran and Afghanistan – and by the time they had to start working on the Third, the USSR had already collapsed. Mission accomplished!
Aided by the United States, the patriarchy in Afghanistan set out to undo every achievement that women had made during the Soviet occupation. They tied the noose so tight that this time women had to depend on men for their mere existence. Polygamy became the most prevalent form of marriage in the face of the high sex ratio caused by the many years of fighting. Those women that resisted the polygamous marriage were left to die of hunger.
It was in this setting that the mother in the movie “Osama,” who had lost her job and her breadwinning husband, decided to dress her 11-year-old daughter as a boy and send her out to work and make money.
The young girl who was dressed as a boy was then forced along with the rest of the boys in the city to attend the madrassa – the Islamic school – and learn the Quran to become Taliban later. This is where she came to be called “Osama.” When her secret was finally revealed, she awaited the most savage punishment in jail along with many other women and girls. She had violated the strictly defined gender roles of the most fiercely patriarchal society on earth.
The Islamic court convened in a city square. A crowd of men stood in the square waiting for the judge, who was half lying on a bed on a platform, to decree the punishments. After a short indictment spoken by a bearded prosecutor, the old judge ordained that the female correspondent – a foreigner – who had been arrested filming the demonstrations was an infidel and had to be stoned. The woman was then put in a hole that had been dug in the middle of the square with only her head out of the ground and was stoned by the Taliban. When Osama’s turn came, the prosecutor told the judge how blasphemously she had violated gender roles and how she deserved to die. But the judge decided to have mercy on Osama and wed her to an old man that already had a few wives.
The sad story of girls and women in Islamic societies such as Afghanistan was best portrayed when Osama’s husband directed her into the room which was to be hers, and presented a few padlocks telling her that she could choose her own padlock, giving her a choice as to which one she wanted to be locked up by.
Director: Sadigh Barmak
The background is all indicative of death and destruction. People walk out of half destroyed houses. Everything is squalid and neglected. You can see an expression of fear and desperation in the faces of the passers-by. A young boy is burning “espand” – an herb whose smoke is believed to keep the evil eye away when burned. He seems to be burning the espand for a photographer who has dared to come out and film what is going on. Soon a group of burqa-clad female demonstrators appear, who are demanding jobs and food. Their placards read, “We are not political; we are hungry; we want jobs.”
Before long, shots echo in the sordid streets followed by the bearded Taliban, who disperse the crowd of women by opening water on them. In the midst of all this, a young girl of about eleven and her mother, who used to be a nurse, are returning from the mother’s last day on the job. The hospital has been shut down due to lack of funding. Besides women are no longer allowed to work as nurses. The girl’s father has been killed in the fighting against the soviet occupation.
Afghanistan is a horticultural/pastoral country north of Pakistan and East of Iran with no access to the ocean. Maybe it is this lack of access to free waters that has historically isolated this nation and has limited its exposure to modernization. When India and Pakistan were still colonies of Great Britain, Afghanistan had a strategic role for Britain who did not want the Russians and later the Soviets to gain access to the south. With its rugged and unfriendly mountains and hostile terrain, Afghanistan was a natural impediment keeping the Russians away from India and Pakistan.
The Soviets, who had never given up their desire to control Afghanistan, staged a coup in 1978, which resulted in the ousting and murder of the entire royal family. The communist takeover of Afghanistan lasted for 10 years during which an Islamic resistance, secretly armed and aided by the United States and its allies, specifically Saudi Arabia, engaged in fierce fighting against the USSR, eventually forcing the communists to withdraw.
Though the western media would give you a dark picture of the communist years of Afghanistan, the fact is that during the reign of the communists, education was declared free and mandatory for both boys and girls. Women and girls were literally emancipated and encouraged to attend schools. Poverty was brought under control. Farming and agriculture was improved; existing roads were repaired and many new ones were constructed; warlords and tribal heads were contained and their power was limited. Opium plantations were burned down and farmers were encouraged to switch to alternative crops that were just as profitable due to the subsidy policies. The age-old patriarchy was curbed.
So when the United States decided to turn Afghanistan into the Vietnam of the USSR, it found quite willing allies in the warlords and tribal patriarchs whose powers had been curbed by the communist regime. The plan was simple. For years, communism had been introduced as the fiercest enemy of God and religion. Therefore the most effective way of containing communism seemed to be the rise of fundamentalism in the Islamic countries. Some people still talk about a CIA plan called the Green Belt, which aimed at creating fundamentalist Islamic Regimes South of the Soviet Union to bar the communist access to the warm waters of the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean. This Islamic Belt was supposed to include Afghanistan, Iran, and Turkey. Sure enough they succeeded in two out of three – Iran and Afghanistan – and by the time they had to start working on the Third, the USSR had already collapsed. Mission accomplished!
Aided by the United States, the patriarchy in Afghanistan set out to undo every achievement that women had made during the Soviet occupation. They tied the noose so tight that this time women had to depend on men for their mere existence. Polygamy became the most prevalent form of marriage in the face of the high sex ratio caused by the many years of fighting. Those women that resisted the polygamous marriage were left to die of hunger.
It was in this setting that the mother in the movie “Osama,” who had lost her job and her breadwinning husband, decided to dress her 11-year-old daughter as a boy and send her out to work and make money.
The young girl who was dressed as a boy was then forced along with the rest of the boys in the city to attend the madrassa – the Islamic school – and learn the Quran to become Taliban later. This is where she came to be called “Osama.” When her secret was finally revealed, she awaited the most savage punishment in jail along with many other women and girls. She had violated the strictly defined gender roles of the most fiercely patriarchal society on earth.
The Islamic court convened in a city square. A crowd of men stood in the square waiting for the judge, who was half lying on a bed on a platform, to decree the punishments. After a short indictment spoken by a bearded prosecutor, the old judge ordained that the female correspondent – a foreigner – who had been arrested filming the demonstrations was an infidel and had to be stoned. The woman was then put in a hole that had been dug in the middle of the square with only her head out of the ground and was stoned by the Taliban. When Osama’s turn came, the prosecutor told the judge how blasphemously she had violated gender roles and how she deserved to die. But the judge decided to have mercy on Osama and wed her to an old man that already had a few wives.
The sad story of girls and women in Islamic societies such as Afghanistan was best portrayed when Osama’s husband directed her into the room which was to be hers, and presented a few padlocks telling her that she could choose her own padlock, giving her a choice as to which one she wanted to be locked up by.
Saturday, November 26, 2005
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
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
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