This summer, the Iranian government brutally suppressed citizen unrest following an election that incumbent president Mahmoud Ahmedinejad won in a landslide. The consensus — on the left, on the right, and everywhere in between — is that the election was rigged.
Five months later, the anti-Ahmedinejad protests have become more muted — probably due in part to the hundreds or thousands of protesters who have been killed or arrested. But Iranians are still seething about the stolen election, and the government seems to be worrying about its weakening grip on the Iranian people. Dissidents and reformers are still being arrested and sentenced to death, and last week Iran took the unprecedented step of seizing a Nobel Peace Prize awarded to one of its most famous dissidents: Shirin Ebadi. They also froze her bank account, claiming that she owes some $400,000 in taxes on her Nobel prize money, and according to the Norwegian officials who award the Nobels, have arrested her husband and beaten him badly. Her human rights group says Iran has no tax on awards, and that in any case, Ebadi has already used the prize money to support Iran’s many political prisoners and their families.
Last year, I wrote that my favourite books are usually the ones that make me angry, and that Shirin Ebadi’s Iran Awakening is one of those books. Since losing her job as a judge — women were no longer allowed to fill important posts after the Revolution — Ebadi has fought hard to secure divorce and inheritance rights for Iranian women and children, freedom for political prisoners, and tolerance for religious minorities like Iran’s much-persecuted Baha’i community. In spite of jail time, death threats, constant surveillance and intimidation from the authorities, she has been a vocal and visible champion of basic human rights in a country where those rights are trampled on a daily basis. She’s no fan of the West either, and I can’t say I agree with her defence of Iran’s nuclear program. But for some 20 years she has been a brave, lonely champion of citizens’ rights, pointing out the many flaws of a country that could and should be a model for human rights in a region that sorely needs an example to follow.
Before the Revolution, Iran showed the world that deep-seated faith can co-exist with night clubs, miniskirts and a healthy respect for personal freedom, and if it ever does again, it will be due in large part to Ebadi’s decades-long struggle. But by confiscating the most visible symbol of her work, Iran only shows us that there’s a long way to go yet.
Story via the Daily Beast.
Image via Payvand’s Iran News.
2 responses so far ↓
1 Asher Vijay // Dec 1, 2009 at 3:10 pm
*utter shock*
2 maya // Dec 3, 2009 at 7:41 pm
that’s pretty dismal
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