The International Women’s Day
The choice is ours! The choice is yours!
In 2008, on 8th March we intend to exclaim ‘Enough is enough’! We no longer want to tolerate the hell created by the patriarchal systems stretching from Kosovo to Iraq, Afghanistan to Philippines, the USA to France, Britain to Turkey and Iran to Pakistan.
The year behind us was a bitter year for majority of women in the world:
· ‘Doa’ a young Kurdish woman was brutally battered, trampled and stoned to death by her tribe and became the code-name for hundreds of Kurdish women who were cruelly murdered to preserve the men’s ‘honour’ under the protection of the American-backed Kurdish government in Iraq.
· Thousands and thousands of Iraqi women sought refuge in Syria just to find themselves dancing in Damascus’s night clubs with their frail bodies in order to attract preying clients for pitiful survival money.
· The Afghan women were repeatedly raped in ‘Pol charkhi’ prison by the police trained by the so-called ‘peace keeping’ forces.
· The Western countries had a fierce competition with each other to win the trophy for ‘domestic violence’. In the USA, a woman was raped every four minutes and in France a woman was killed every three days as a result of domestic violence.
· In Tabriz, a woman was barbarically left suspended on a loosely fastened rope from a gallows and torturously struggled until she died. Afterwards, the Islamic regime exhibited her body at a prominent place so that other women could learn a lesson and not challenge the Islamic regime.
· The Islamic patrol guards arrested Zahra, a young Iranian woman, raped and murdered her. She joined thousands of other women who have been raped in the Islamic regime’s prisons in the last 28 years.
· As Iranian women intensified their struggles against their unequal status, the regime also stepped up its suppression and violence against them. Tens of women activists were arrested and sent to prisons charged with fictitious ‘unlawful conduct’.
· Thousands of women in Iran were beaten and arrested for not following the proper Islamic code of dressing.
In spite of all the atrocities women of Iran, Iraq, Kurdistan, Turkey and Afghanistan are not silenced. In the heart of the Middle East, the Iranian women endeavour to send the news of their struggles against the misogynist and religious regime in Iran to the progressive forces all over the world. They try to connect the stream of their struggles to the global sea of the women’s struggles.
The reactionary regimes in the USA and Iran are each offering different versions of the hell to us: either stoning to death, the gallows, forced veil and rape by the ‘Revolutionary Guards’ in Iran or, like Iraq, a regime supported by the USA and its allies under the economic sanctions, bombing and military attacks and the obvious enslavement of women. Should we allow the ranks of the women’s movements to be shattered by the two dreadful options of imperialists and the reactionary Islamic regime in Iran? Or should we rely on 28 years experience, knowledge and struggles of Iranian women to prove that both hostile poles are the two versions of the patriarchal and anti-woman systems and any support for one will inevitably strengthen the other?
Can we convey the demands of the majority of Iranian women who are determined to get a future, independent of both the Islamic regime and the patriarchal forces of the USA and its allies to the people all over the world? Can we be the bearers of the positive news that the Iranian women have chosen a separate path independent of the dominant reactionary world order?
Theo choice is ours! The choice is yours!
On 8th March, we will be on the streets to proclaim our choice: We are determined to write some pages of Iran’s contemporary history by achieving our emancipation and equality. Our minimum demands are abolition of all barbaric and unequal laws against women including stoning, forced veiling, gender apartheid and securing right to divorce, right to keep children after divorce, total control over our bodies, right to choose our partners as heterosexual or lesbians and elimination of any religious control over or interference in various aspect of women’s lives. We demand women’s freedom and emancipation from any oppression and exploitation. These demands are achievable only with the overthrow of the Islamic regime in Iran.
The presence of each one of us at the 8th March demonstration will reinforce our demands and determination to achieve those demands. Our Campaign is planning a march from Belgium the details of which will be announced later.
The Campaign for abolition of all misogynist gender based legislation & Islamic punitive laws in Iran
Karzar2005@yahoo.com
www.karzar-zanan.com