Subject: [fem-women2000 543] Fw: Iranian Women's Brief #30, Please Read and Pass on
From: lalamaziwa <lalamaziwa@jca.apc.org>
Date: Fri, 13 Oct 2000 10:25:31 +0900
Seq: 543
Forwarded by lalamaziwa <lalamaziwa@jca.apc.org> ---------------- Original message follows ---------------- From: AIWUSA <aiwusa@aiwusa.org> To: aiwusa@aiwusa.org Date: Thu, 12 Oct 2000 17:05:55 -0400 Subject: Iranian Women's Brief #30, Please Read and Pass on -- AIWUSA-ASSOCIATION OF IRANIAN WOMEN-USA WEBSITE: WWW.AIWUSA.ORG E-mail: aiwusa@aiwusa.org TEL: 703-941-8485 CONTACT PERSON:BEHJAT DEHGHAN IRANIAN WOMEN BRIEF #30 OCTOBER 2000 -MORE RESISTANCE OF IRANIAN WOMEN -A GENERATION IN REVOLT -TEN YEAR OLD BRIDE -TWO EDITORS IN PRESS COURT MORE RESISTANCE OF IRANIAN WOMEN PROTESTER HURLS EGGS AT KHATAMI DURING OPEC SUMMIT, REUTERS, SEPTEMBER 28 CARACAS - A woman with a grudge against Iranian President Mohammad Khatami said on Thursday she had thrown three paint-filled eggs at him after breaching security at this week's OPEC summit in Caracas. Laila Jazayeri, 39, an Iranian who lives in London, told reporters she hit Khatami with three eggs filled with red paint as he arrived for a dinner hosted by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Jazayeri, a British citizen, said she blamed Khatami for the death of her husband. She said the first egg knocked off Khatami's turban and the other two hit him on the back, causing him to yell out in surprise. "I shouted that Khatami is a murderer and a torturer, not a reformist," she said. "He is a fundamentalist and not a moderate." Iranian Oil Minister Bijan Zanganeh, evaded questions about the attack in an interview with local television. He declined to say who had been the target of the attack. ********************************************************* A GENERATION IN REVOLT, WOMEN BUL.NO. 6, WOMEN COMMITTEE OF NCRI, OCT 2000 on the morning of Friday, August 18, an extensive clash broke out in the city of Javanroud in Kermanshah province (western Iran) between a unit of woman Mojahedin fighters, a Revolutionary Guards Corps' Division and Intelligence Ministry agents. Dozens of Guards and agents were killed and wounded in the clashes. Two Mojahedin women, Monireh Akbari and Mojgan Zahedi, were also slain. The news of the heroic battle waged by Mojahedin women rapidly spread in the entire region, forcing the regime to report the clashes on the state television the next day. In announcing the news, the deputy commander of the Revolutionary Guards' ground forces expressed regret that the Mojahedin used women as "human shield" for their operations. He was trying to downplay the role of women in the Resistance movement and minimize its impact on the public. A glance at the situation of women in Iran explains why. With eighty percent of the Iranian population living below the poverty line, millions of women who need to feed their families are driven into beggary, prostitution and drug trafficking. With the legal age of marriage being 9 until just very recently, many poor families wed their little girls for small amount of money to feed their other children. Other women face numerous restrictions in education, employment, travel, sports, etc. There are strict regulations on women's dress and conduct in society. Laws deny women their basic rights. No matter how much they are battered and abused at home, they cannot file for divorce unless in very exceptional circumstances. When a man kills a woman, the victim's family has to pay the equivalent of her blood money to the murderer so that the court can carry out the death verdict, because a woman's blood money is half that of a man. So much for the mullahs' Heavenly Justice!! Such omnipresent discrimination and women's lack of recourse before the law contribute to the high rate of suicide among women. Monireh and Mojgan were typical of thousands of young, energetic, educated and enlightened women of Iran who decided to challenge the mullahs' medieval oppression. Monireh Akbari, 29, was a fourth-year physics student from Tehran when she joined the Resistance. She was born the seventh child to a low-income family in South Tehran. She did not surrender to family pressure and social restrictions which acted as impediment for her to continue beyond primary school. She overcame these difficulties and made her way to college and studied physics. Mojgan Zahedi, 28, was born to a middle-class family in the oil-rich southwestern Iranian city of Ahwaz. Mojgan was only five years old, when she and her family became homeless and were forced to move out of their hometown because of the Iran-Iraq war. Mojgan and her family had an extremely difficult time to earn a descent living. She became acquainted with the Resistance during her college years when she studied library sciences in Arak (central Iran). Having grown up under the misogynist rule of the mullahs, Monireh and Mojgan felt the depth of the mullahs' discrimination and injustice with their flesh and bone. They fought back vigorously to open their path and finally decided to join the Resistance as the ultimate solution. The dramatic rise in the participation of women in the Resistance's operations has prompted many young women to join the ranks of the opposition movement. This ticking time bomb has terrified the mullahs as never before. ********************************************************* TEN YEAR OLD BRIDE TEHRAN, AFP, SEPT 26,2000 A 10-year-old Iranian girl has filed for divorce from her 15-year-old husband after only eight days of marriage on grounds of mistreatment, the government-run Iran paper said Tuesday. It quoted the boy as saying that the day after the wedding they had had a fight because she wanted to play with her dolls. "On the last day, I beat my wife and my mother-in-law and ran off to my mother's house," the paper quoted him saying, while the girl said: "I was married before, but not any more." Iran's reformist-dominated parliament last month approved a motion to allow the judiciary and not parents to decide whether boys under 17 and girls under 14 years of age can marry. Several religious MPs belonging to parliament's conservative minority expressed their disapproval with the motion, saying that Islam's sharia law which sets the marriage age at nine for girls and 14 for boys should apply. Before the 1979 Islamic revolution, the age of majority for both sexes was 16 years. Iranian officials regularly propagate marriage as a means to prevent "social corruption" among young people. ********************************************************* TWO EDITORS IN PRESS COURT TEHRAN, AFP, AUG 21,2000 The editors of two magazines, both of them women, appeared in press court Monday to face charges ranging >from defamation to publishing anti-Islamic propaganda. Taraneh Behzadi, head of the scientfic and cultural monthly Danestaniha, which is considered close to the reform movement, has been accused of defamation and publishing false information. Fatmeh Farahmandpour, head of the banned publication Gunagun, is charged with having created the magazine specifically to replace four other pro-reform newspapers , which had been closed by the conservative courts. The press reported earlier this month that she has also been accused of insulting officials of the regime, spreading false information and publishing anti-Islamic propaganda. The trial is continuing. Gunagun was closed in late July in line with a law passed by the previous conservative-majority parliament barring banned publications from re-appearing under a different name. _________________________________________________________________________ fem-Women2000@jca.apc.org for Women 2000, UN Special Session on Beijing+5 Searcheable Archive http://www.jca.apc.org/fem/news/women2000/index.shtml visit fem-net HomePage for other mailing lists http://www.jca.apc.org/fem