Is Wikileaks taking attention from persecution of the Baha'is in Iran?

Yaran

This excellent article from today's Huffington Post makes an intriguing point about the damage that the media focus on the Wikileaks revelations may be doing to less high profile human rights abuses. Amongst the victims of those abuses are the Baha'is in Iran.

Wikileaks has revealed government and diplomatic violations of the truth while paradoxically keeping their own sources secret. In the process, editor in chief and whistleblower Julian Assange has become a hero for human rights defenders. Sadly, the intense publicity surrounding Wikileaks diverts attention from serious injustice and continuing human rights violations, some already on the back burner and badly neglected. A good example is the state-sponsored persecution of Baha'is in Iran.

The 300,000-strong Baha'i community, the largest religious minority in Iran, represents less than 1% of the population. Over the past 30 years, they have suffered torture and execution. They have been denied tertiary education and government jobs, their shops and properties are often seized, cemeteries desecrated and children harassed at school. In addition, Bahai's are facing stepped-up persecution and have been falsely blamed for organizing and inciting anti-government protests although they abstain from partisan political activity on religious principles. Charges against them include espionage, "propaganda activities against the Islamic order" and "corruption on earth," the latter a capital offence. Baha'i communities around the world insist these charges are spurious and part of a campaign to scapegoat members of the faith.

During the Shah's era, Baha'is strove for education and became successful and prominent, creating envy and suspicion, and although police sometimes protected them against Islamic extremists, they were victims of periodic outbreaks of violence. A major source of ideological friction with Islam is the doctrine of a hierarchy of traditions that subsumes previous ones. According to Baha'is, the Prophet Mohammad was not the last prophet but one in a progressive line, and the next one is not due for a thousand years!

Women's rights are central to Baha'i teaching and in stark contrast to the discriminatory sharia laws implemented by the Islamic Republic of Iran. These rights include full support for the U.N. Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW).

There are numerous documented stories of violent arrests and incarcerations in the hundreds of prisons situated in basements of houses in Tehran.

Rozita Vasseghi is a Baha'i prisoner. In Kafkaesque fashion, a man claiming to be a 'postman' arrested her three years ago after a knock on the door, and during repeated interrogations while blindfolded, her captors threatened her with death. Throughout her ordeal, she was denied a lawyer. Following release from prison, she found a job but government authorities exerted pressure on her employers to have her fired. A few years later, she was arrested at her home, and for the next six months, found herself in solitary confinement. Her elderly mother, who was allowed visits of only five minutes, was horrified by her wasted appearance. Accused of insulting Islam, acting against national security and teaching the Baha'i religion, she is serving a five-year sentence.

Rozita's sister Rosa, suffered multiple incarcerations before escaping Iran. She was on her way home in a shared public taxi when the driver asked about her religion. Discovering she was a Baha'i, he stopped and made a phone call. A car with several people soon showed up, the women fully covered in chadors. Rosa was blindfolded and forced into the vehicle and when they reached their destination, she was thrown onto the pavement, her hands were tied and she was dragged down stairs to a room and beaten. Her captors repeatedly called her an infidel and declared her blood would be impure until she renounced her faith and converted to Islam. Over several years, she was repeatedly arrested and imprisoned.

As proponents of a religion originating from Islam, stamped by modernity, universal human rights and compatibility with many Western values, Baha'is are vulnerable targets for persecution by the Iranian theocracy. Baha'i women are doubly at risk, being female and Baha'i, and as victims of severe injustice, they deserve more outrage and support than Assange and Wikileaks.

Ida Lichter is the author of Muslim Women Reformers: Inspiring Voices Against Oppression, published by Prometheus Books, New York.

Human rights and the media 

In the years that I worked on the protection of the human rights of the Baha'is in Iran, I came to the conclusion that the media generally want to see blood on the floor - or at least the threat of blood on the floor - before they will get excited about human rights abuses.

Slow-burn abuses, such as are suffered by the Baha'is in Iran, are not usually dramatic enough to reach the front or centre pages of the broadsheets or make the evening news on TV. 

The case of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, the Azeri-Iranian mother who was sentenced to a death by stoning understandably - and rightly - grabbed the headlines. She is an identifiable person, a mother, subject to flagrant neglect of the rule of law and sentenced to an utterly barbaric form of execution.

At the same time as the Ashtiani case took the interest of the media, the seven former members of the Yárán, the national-level group that helped to see to the minimum spiritual needs of the Baha'is of Iran, were undergoing trial and had been sentenced to 20 years in jail (subsequently reduced to 10 years) for no good reason other than they are Baha'is. This trial and the sentences handed down to the seven are, it should be noted, part of a long-term campaign by the Iranian authorities to stifle and ultimately to eradicate the Baha'i community in Iran.

Like Ashtiani, the seven had been put through a trial that clearly lacked what we would consider due process.

Unlike Ashtiani, they were not sentenced to death, but "only" to prison. However, prison in Iran is not a healthy place to be, and the original twenty-year sentences were long enough to ensure that the oldest member of the seven would have died in jail.

Dying by degrees and constructive resilience

A recent open letter from the Baha'i International Community (BIC) to Ayatollah Mohammad Sadeq Larijani, the head of Iran's judiciary, makes it clear that the seven are now languishing in the most appalling prison conditions.

"They are now effectively placed in exile in contravention of Iran's statutes governing the transfer of prison inmates," says Bani Dugal [BIC Principal Representative to the UN]. "Amongst other indignities, they are forced to endure appalling filth, pestilence, exposure to disease, and quarters so crammed that it is difficult for them to lie down or even to perform their daily prayers."

"It is clear from recent reports that their health has deteriorated and they have no access to adequate medical treatments," she says.

The seven may be dying by degrees. At least, that's what the Iranian authorities hope. However, the Baha'is are constructively resilient people and the community will continue to flourish, even under the severe repression it currently suffers.

Baha'is are the litmus test

The Ashtiani case is clearly more dramatic and immediate and symbolises something appalling about the Iranian regime's attitude to human rights.

However, the Baha'i situation is a better litmus test for human rights in Iran. There is a long history of persecution of Baha'is in Iran and a state that expressly wishes to extirpate the community from the land of its origin. This is a form of cultural cleansing and the Iranian regime keeps working away, hoping that no one will notice what it is doing to the Baha'is.

It's a vain hope. Governments around the world know what is going on and have raised their voices in protest. The media do report the suffering of the Baha'is from time to time. But when the attention of the media is drawn by Wikileaks and the like, the life of those who are trying to keep the Baha'i situation in Iran in the public eye is made just that little bit more difficult.

Violence: let’s separate the men from the boys | Camila Batmanghelidjh - Times Online

From The Times

November 26, 2009

Violence: let’s separate the men from the boys

Posters, T-shirts and education campaigns won’t do. Only robust child protection will break the cycle for boys – and girls

Camila Batmanghelidjh

It is wonderful to hear that the Government is launching an “ambitious strategy aiming to bring an end to violence against women and girls”. The agencies that championed this should be congratulated. It is the result of the most effective campaign spearheaded by the End Violence Against Women Coalition, as well as years of work done by refuges working with vulnerable women and children.

We are told that the strategy will make available £13 million to support victims of sexual and domestic violence; there will be a national communications strategy to educate children and the general public to understand that violence against women is abhorrent. In addition, there will be helplines supporting those who are being stalked and those who have experienced sexual violence. Domestic violence protection orders or “go orders” will be put in place to allow victims to stay in their homes and make perpetrators leave so that long-term plans for protection can be made. The NHS will also be asked to examine its role in responding to female victims of violence.

As I was reading through the announcement, I had a sense of joy but also of regret. I am happy for women but sad for boys and men. They too experience so much violence, but no one seems to be rising up to protect them. There is a risk that the analysis of violence stays embedded in simplistic narratives.

The perpetrator is often thought to be the male and the victim the female. Undoubtedly, women suffer across the world at the hands of men who perceive themselves to be superior, and whose perverse sense of “biological elitism” gives them permission to harm, control and minimise women.

However, the violence afflicting Britain is much more complicated. It is important to understand that, broadly speaking, there are two types of people involved in violence; the more disturbed I call the initiators of violence; the less disturbed are the imitators, who rise in defence when they have been attacked themselves.

 

via timesonline.co.uk

Ending violence against women is profoundly important. But, then, so is ending violence against children, against men, boys, girls - against people altogether.

Camila Batmanghelidjh offers some very helpful and thought-provoking observations about how violence grows and is perpetuated within families. Girls as well as boys can be violent.

In the service of truth, I would like to point out that violence is not just an issue for boys. Girls can also be extremely violent — they often harm younger children as well as each other. Shockingly large numbers of boys and girls are constantly harmed by drug dealers, child abusers and through gang violence.

Campaigners have done a great job representing the women victims of domestic violence, but we need a broader commitment to reduce violence, one that is not simply a cosmetic campaign based on posters, concerts and life-not-knife T-shirts.

We need more of this kind of clear-headed thinking about one of the most damaging and often hidden aspects of family life and the bringing up of children.

The Baha'i perspective is that we are all born with latent virtues and that we all have the potential to rise to great heights of nobility. But we can also fall to great depths of depravity. It takes courage and commitment by adults to work with children and young people - particularly those aged 11-15 - to break the cycles that perpetuate violent behaviour, to transform individual, family and neighbourhood culture away from contest and violence to mutuality and support.