In justifying the US-led invasion of Afghanistan, the warmongers claimed "liberation" of the women of that country to be a motivating factor. In justifying their campaign to put in place a pro-US puppet regime in Iran, the imperial warmongers are likely to make a similar cynical manipulation of the plight of women in that country.
There is no shortage of evidence that Iranian women are subject to discrimination under Iran's Islamist regime.
Many public spaces are gender segregated. Women must use different areas at the beach, and sit in different areas of university lecture halls. Women must ride in the back of buses.
In courts, a woman's testimony counts for half that of a man's. A woman must attain permission from her father (if single) or husband (if married) in order to leave the country.
Until December last year, when the head of the judiciary instructed judges not to impose the sentence, women found guilty of adultery could be sentenced to death by stoning.
There is a strict dress code for women in Iran, which demands the wearing of a long, loose-fitting black coat and a head covering that conceals a woman's hair. The penalty for deviation from this code is 74 lashes. Public beatings by the morals police and Islamist vigilante groups for violating the dress code are common place.
In May this year, clothing stores and factories were issued with orders to halt the production and sale of any clothing that was not in line with the dress code. This order was backed up with raids of factories and clothing stores.
The current regime and the implementation of Islamic law date back to 1979 when the clergy were able to gain leadership of the popular revolutionary movement that ousted the pro-US Shah of Iran — who had been installed in power through a CIA-organised coup in 1953.
Working-class and peasant women were at the forefront of the struggle to overthrow the shah's dictatorship — and they were also the first to be targeted by the reactionary pro-capitalist forces led by the Islamic clergy.
Ayatollah Khomeini, who had won authority through his long history of opposition to the shah, was the key leader of this pro-capitalist counter-revolution, and his first declaration as the country's leader was that women must wear the veil.
The day after this declaration, tens of thousands of women took to the streets of Tehran in protest for International Women's Day. In a film of this demonstration, women can be heard crying out "We did not make a revolution to go backwards", "Death or freedom" and "Women's liberation is neither Eastern nor Western — it is universal".
The US rulers want "regime change" in Iran, not in order to "liberate" Iranian women, and men, from the medieval customs imposed on them by Iran's Muslim clerics, but to take control of Iran's vast oil and gas reserves.
Where US corporations have control over the export of oil from other Middle East countries, Washington has done nothing to promote the democratic rights of women.
Kuwait, for example, was twice used by the US as a staging post for invading Iraq — in 1991 and this year — and in 1991 the US military restored the al Sabah family to power in Kuwait. Yet, Kuwaiti laws prohibit women from engaging in public affairs and public service, including voting and standing for election; assign lesser weight to women's legal testimony than men's; demand that a woman must have the consent of a male guardian to marry, regardless of the woman's age; make obedience of wives to their husbands enforced by the courts; and condone male violence against women, including "honour killings".
The latest threats by Washington against Iran will only strengthen the hold of the Islamic clerics in the regime who cloak their anti-democratic and anti-woman policies in anti-imperialist rhetoric.
Feminists throughout the world should stand by our sisters in Iran in their struggle for freedom — and against any US-led war on Iran.
BY KATHY NEWNAM
From 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly, June 18, 2003.
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