To: Retort From: BK [Who can forget the courageous voice and extraordinary dispatches last year from the streets of Tehran? Here Bani reports on her return trip to Iran. The text to which Bani refers - 'There is a third voice in Iran' - is attached below. IB] January 28, 2010 Initially, I wanted to write a report from Tehran, but the situation there has become so tough that I decided to wait until I was outside of the country to send anything via Internet. Since then, daily events and human fragility have made me slow to muster up the energy to write my observations, reflections, and feelings on what is going on. I also wanted to respond to a piece that Eddie sent out called “There is a Third Voice in Iran”, but as I tried to gather my thoughts and muster the energy in order to manage to write a dispatch and a reaction to that text, I woke up to the news that two people were executed today in Tehran. They were charged with being “mohareb”, an Arabic word that basically means 'enemy of God', or in this case, 'enemy of the state' or 'armed militant'. The two men, who had appeared in a mass trial back in July of last year, were supposedly arrested before the elections took place last June. The details of their cases remain a mystery, as does the situation of most of those detained on political pretext these days. But now, it almost does not matter much: they have been killed cruelly, as examples for others to see. Unfortunately, their executions mark just another moment in this nightmarish ambience that Iranians are living in today, and a beginning of darker days yet to come. But I did not want this to become a completely pessimistic text, despite how I have been feeling recently, but rather a clearer reflection on my recent trip. So let me go back a bit… Late last week, I sat in the Imam Khomeini Airport, idly wasting my last couple of hours before I was to board the plane to leave Tehran once again. As I sat in a European style café, ironically watching - on the state-owned satellite channel, Press TV, and broadcast on a giant Plasma screen - a foreign made documentary about the Iranian Revolution (in English), I thought back to the last time I had left the city and how different it felt then. Although anxious to get my materials and myself out of the country last June, I felt a certain strength that I can’t say was with me this time. Things have changed quite a bit in the last few months, and will continue through the turbulence until real change can take place. When that will be and what form the change will take are unclear to everyone, and the main issue now is precisely not to lose hope and to put together survival kits to make the day-to-day livable, and to give each other the support and community that the regime is trying so hard to break. With regard to Gita Hashemi’s article on the “Third Voice”, I would say that I agree with her in many ways, and I would support her call for the people of the world to pay more attention to grassroots struggles of women and minority groups in Iran. What bothers me a bit is the return to, the focus on, women’s issues (only) in a time when people are disappearing and being executed just for having expressed their dissent or for having participated in a public gathering. Also, there is this false idea that women at the beginning of the revolution were an organized political body in society that became invisible or pushed aside afterward. Since she mentions it, it is important to note that the marches against obligatory veiling or the suppression of women’s rights just after the Revolution came as a reaction to a Revolution gone wrong, astray, when people began blindly accepting leadership and ideology without precisely knowing why. The “mistakes” of the past continue to haunt Iranian society today, and it is no longer possible to see things in such black and white or binary terms: men versus women, archaic versus modern. Things are much more complex than that. The 1979 demonstration that Hashemi talks about in her article was an important event, one that marks a moment when many women came together to show their disapproval of what signalled the beginning of an authoritarian, religious regime. But let’s not forget (without criticizing them for it) that those women were speaking from a specific and privileged place. The majority of them was from the middle or upper-middle strata and had access to higher education. Whether we like it or not, they did not represent the majority of Iranian women, and no matter how correct they were in predicting what would follow in terms of women’s legal, social and political rights, back then their work was not grassroots, but a reflection of the ideas and lifestyle of an elite. Iran’s modern history is very complex and turbulent. Foreign influence has always been an issue and a problem, and the numerous independent endeavors at establishing a republic had failed because of foreign meddling, until the revolution in 1979. Unfortunately, the last thirty years have also proven to be a failure in many ways, but what can be said of society today could not have even been thought of back then. The “Third Voice” that Hashemi speaks of is bigger than what she herself is describing. I prefer not to call it "third" voice, but “a" voice, or “the” voice, that is just as much embedded in this present Green Movement as anything else. She draws a strict line, trying to separate social activists from those who continue to play the political game (elections, etc.) within the Iranian context by pointing out the recent candidates and their obvious shortcomings in terms of real social issues like those regarding women. I don’t think that it is so easy to separate the good from the bad apples. This is where we have always gone wrong in Iran, in thinking that we are not in any way related to or similar to those who currently hold power, or that we, critical and radical intellectuals, know more or better what the country should be moving towards. Not to scandalize or provoke, but I truly believe that the corrupt and violent oppressor in Iran today is a recycled version of what had existed before. A new form of authoritarianism, one that went from a monarchical dynasty to a nationalist kingdom with foreign support, to a populist, yet religious republic with a dictatorial base, and now to a remodeled version of that with a strong military arm. Against the “Third Voice” proposal, I want to push for an idea of the Green Movement (“Jonbesh-e-Sabz”) that is now in the forefront of resistance. The Green Movement is amorphous and it is everywhere. It is a unified idea in the sense that it seeks to break the current fascistic monopoly over Iranian society without replacing it either with another monopoly, or with a Western model of capitalist democracy. Beyond that, it is unsure and unclear about the extent to which it actually represents the people in terms of a collective desire or will, and if these can even exist. Even the current “women’s movement” in Iran is very different in its socio-economic make-up than it was in 1979. Back then, women who were not wearing the veil and who attended university, were doing so because their mothers and grandmothers were part of a modernization process that included the ban of the veil by Reza Shah in 1934, and access to higher education, if they were lucky that is, on account of their class and/or anomalies in their cultural background at home. The women who were not wearing the veil had not fought for that right, as they had not fought for equality under the law that women were benefiting from as well. Whether we like it or not, the legal and political status of women (and some minorities) were the way they were before the revolution because they were shaped by Western democracies, and not because they had come about through social struggle. This is why they were so easily lost in 1979 and afterwards, and that is why the Green Movement surpasses a Third Voice today. The Green Movement is not based on a defined or common ideology, nor guided by leadership that seeks to replace the one currently in power. It is not feminist, nor foreign-influenced. Such, in my opinion, is what Hashemi calls the “Third Voice”. We are not in a context where black and white or left and right are playing push and pull, and where the opposition falls outside it all. Without justifying the Islamic fascists in power today, I do believe that we should look more closely at where their genesis lies and what they represent in our long and conflicted modern history. This is material for a book…I won’t even venture into it here. What the Green Movement is fighting for, in its unorganized and fragmented way, goes beyond women, beyond veils or no veils. What Hashemi is right about is the strength and the role of women within the Green Movement, before and after the elections. The tireless and dangerous work and campaigns that Iranian women have led, not to mention treacherous daily life in a patriarchy that also uses religion to oppress, are all part of the strength and solidarity that bring people out into the streets with well-informed critique today. The women’s movement, like so many other important movements in Iran – those of the students, journalists, ethnic minorities, workers, teachers, artists, filmmakers, bus drivers, etc.- are being played out, or publicly activated, under the Green banner that reminds everyone that no one battle is separate in the face of fascism. Side by side in the demonstrations, and sometimes even more courageous than the men, Iranian women are activating their movement on the streets of Tehran and in the provinces today, not making a claim to women’s liberation, but demanding freedom for all. The veil, a leftover symbol of this regime’s machinery of oppression, will soon be a remnant of a time when freedom of _expression_ was not allowed. But right now is not the time for that, as so many Iranian women show us. If the veil were the only problem, than it would have been discarded long ago, or on the first day that we took to the streets last June. It is something that will be gone sooner than later, once people are not being executed as a threat to a whole population in dissent. But this optimism should not disguise what I saw and felt on the streets of Tehran as recently as last week. I will give a brief account of those days, just to draw a picture of the darkness that we are being pushed into: a darkness that we are familiar with but one that we did not expect to descend upon us so violently once again. The last big demonstrations on December 27, coinciding with the celebrations of Ashura, the most important Shi’ite holiday that commemorates resistance, struggle, and martyrdom, were definitely a turning point. Some demonstrators’ anger and frustration turned to violence, and many police and militiamen were beaten. Although this violence was controlled or stopped by other demonstrators, the majority of whom are calling for non-violent actions, I cannot deny my own satisfaction at seeing people’s strength in the face of authority. But that was soon followed by shock and dismay at the government’s harsh backlash. What has happened since December 27 is a setback for the opposition, as the regime tightens its control and deploys its fascist mechanisms once again. Fear prevails. Since the last election, not only has there been a political and social crackdown, but the economy is also being restructured. The Pasdaran Corps or Iranian Revolutionary Guards are now taking ownership of most everything telecommunications based. Everything. The “state” as we know it has slowly strengthened its military side. The police and military display almost arbitrary power on the streets these days. Actually, there are barely any officers present. Although we’d like to believe that many of them have resigned or refused to serve (there are reports of this, with military trials following, of course), the reality is a darker portrait of a dictatorship reclaiming that name, and strengthening its fear tactics. Intelligence services are in full effect. Besides the beeping one hears on the telephone, there are reports of oddly disguised people roaming neighborhoods, sitting amongst fans in the soccer stadium, riding in taxis and infiltrating meetings. How much of this is true and how much is paranoia based on the recent collective past, is unclear. What is certain is that people are disappearing, being arrested, and receiving threats on a daily basis. The day after I arrived in Tehran just two weeks ago, a friend sent an SMS saying that she was coming over. We keep our phone communications minimal and banal, for a good reason, so we had to wait to see her to hear what was wrong. She arrived at the house in a sort of panic. Her friend, a young photographer and active protestor, had disappeared, along with her husband, and nobody had any word from them in four days. Having had access to their apartment, we knew that their computers were gone, as were the negatives of photographs that the girl had taken during the last demonstrations. Could they have possibly gone into hiding? Maybe… We decided to be a little hopeful, imagining them getting rid of their material or at least hiding it while keeping a low profile. But these illusions did not last long. The next day, after five days with no word from them, the husband of our photographer friend had made a phone call to his mother. He was only allowed to utter three words into the telephone before hanging up: “I’m in prison”. Our panic quickly led to a number of group sessions trying to figure out what to do, who to call out to, and what strategies to adhere to now that we knew that they were being detained in Evin Prison, which, in this context, is a good thing. At least knowing that they are in section 209 of Evin Prison gives us the assurance that they are being fed and are accounted for, although that does not mean that the torture is less harsh, just less of a secret. After days of debates, letter- and petition-writing, we came to the conclusion that there was not much we could do. Making a ruckus around their arrest could now be detrimental, since letter writers and petitioners had begun to be arrested as well, and pressure on the detained augmented. Two of our friends who edit a music magazine in Tehran had been arrested two weeks earlier for doing just that. But there was no way to keep silent (despite their parents’ fearful requests), and we knew that no support would mean that they would go completely forgotten inside those prison walls. What had become of the civil actions that we had been practicing for the last ten years? How could we keep silent now, but on the other hand, how were we to put pressure on the authorities, if that meant that someone would have to be doing the same for us a week later, and so on? Bani |
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gitaHashemi_third_voice.pdf
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