Middle East is in state of flux

DAVE GORDON

Speaking on a panel about Canada’s Human Rights Challenges in the New Middle East, author and activist Marina Nemat described her life prior to the Iranian Revolution in 1979 – before she was arrested as a teenager and jailed as a political prisoner.

One of about a dozen speakers at the March 28 Toronto conference Canada and the New Middle East, presented by Advocates for Civil Liberties and the Atlantic Council of Canada, the author of the 2007 memoir Prisoner of Tehran and 2010’s After Tehran: A Life Reclaimed said that the pre-Revolution Persian way of life somewhat mirrored that of the West. Her father was a ballroom dancer, her mother, a hairdresser. They watched Little House on the Prairie on television, and listened to the Bee Gees on the radio.

Religious and gender discrimination were nearly nonexistent during that era, she said. “[W]omen could become judges, in theory, even the prime minister ... we could talk of the government freely,” before the Islamic revolution overthrew the more liberal shah.

Despite the fact that 98 percent of the 1979 population voted for an Islamic Republic, she said, no one knew what was to become of the country under the ayatollahs. It was the slow, creeping undoing of human rights that crumbled Iran, she explained.

“Horror and history don’t happen overnight,” she said. “Democracies aren’t immune. [Fascism] is a process, not an event.” The march to totalitarianism began, she said, with foreign journalists being expelled from Iran and was followed by “rules where people lost personal freedoms.”

As for the lack of significant protest at the time, she said, “grown-ups were too busy paying their bills” to worry about political upheaval; children, however, paid dearly under totalitarian rule. “Each day, we went to school and another chair was empty. This was 1982,” she said.

Sometimes never to return, teens and young people were hauled away from their homes by agents of the state, oftentimes with parents watching on, as was her case. Disappearing more quickly were youth who dared to rally against the government.

Nemat was taken to Evin prison – where 98 percent of the inmates were teenagers, she said – her small hands cuffed so violently that her 15-year-old bones cracked. And that was just the beginning. “Torture isn’t for information. It’s to break your soul,” she said of her two-and-a-half-year incarceration. Nemat had no information to share.

Nemat said she feels that it is her duty to share her firsthand knowledge of the Islamic Republic’s human rights violations, which continue until today. (Also in Toronto this month is a play adapted from her first book, Prisoner of Tehran.) Nemat said she believes that it is the state’s widespread brutality that should be on the world’s radar, rather than its nuclear ambitions.

Joining Nemat on the human rights panel were moderator Nazanin Afshin-Jam, president of the group Stop Child Executions, and Raheel Raza, author of Their
Jihad, Not My Jihad.

Raza, a human rights activist, specifically spoke about Syria, where “women are abducted ... there is arbitrary detention, executions and rape,” she said. So, too, in Libya, where “rape is used as a weapon of war [and] victims are stigmatized,” she added. As for Saudi Arabia, she said, that country’s human rights violations “need a separate two-day conference.”

There is one Middle East country, though, where a woman isn’t a walking target, Raza said. “As a Muslim woman, I’ve traveled several times to Israel. I feel safer there than in my country of birth [Pakistan].”

On the panel about Canada, Iran and the Arab Spring, moderator Peter Goodspeed, senior reporter on international affairs for the National Post, spoke of the “relentless poverty, unemployment, economic need, social despair and political rage” in the Middle East today, where “police brutality and humiliation” are commonplace. Also on this panel was Boaz Ganor, founder and executive director of the International Policy Institute for Counter-terrorism, and Dr. Ramin Jahanbegloo, who, like Nemat, had been imprisoned at Evin, and is now professor of political science at the University of Toronto.

Goodspeed suggested that Canada and other developed countries could play important roles vis-à-vis the Arab Spring, and ought to be to offering “aid, knowledge, friends and hope to transform the region.” As for previously moderate Arab countries, such as Egypt, which had maintained good relations with Israel “irrespective of popular feelings,” he said, today, “things couldn’t look much bleaker.” In his opinion, the Arab Spring has been an unfortunate “backwards step,” replacing stable relations with “anti-Israel and anti-democracy” sentiments.

The daylong conference covered various topics examining the “challenges and opportunities facing Canada’s national interests ... in the backdrop of the Arab Spring,” according to Atlantic Council materials. Speakers also included representatives from the RCMP, the Mackenzie Institute and the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service, discussing economic, political and security concerns, as well as the “importance to remain vigilant in [the] ongoing pursuit of peace, security and trade between Canada and the wider Middle Eastern region.”

Dave Gordon is a freelance writer. His website is davegordonwrites.com.

^TOP