Iran can calm the US … but it can’t ignore this lawyer
Sunday Herald
19 October 2003
A human rights lawyer who won the Nobel peace prize has captured Iranian hearts … and the ruling clergy are getting nervous. By Dan De Luce in Tehran
For a fleeting moment last week the grim authority of Iran’s theocratic system seemed to fade away. Instead of riot police or dreary speeches, there were women wearing white headscarves and throwing white flowers.
The night Shirin Ebadi returned to Iran, Tehran’s airport virtually shut down as thousands of people came to greet the winner of the Nobel peace prize. Parents held their children up to catch a glimpse of the human rights lawyer who had embarrassed the ruling clerical establishment.
“I love her,” said one middle-aged woman. “We feel somehow that someone is going to explain to the world what is in our hearts.”
The jubilant scene at the airport was beamed around the world, but Iranian television ignored it. When the Nobel decision was announced it took the state broadcasting monopoly several hours to acknowledge the news, and then only briefly. Like Andrei Sakharov in the former Soviet Union, Ebadi poses an awkward dilemma for the theocratic regime.
There are Nobel prizes that are predictable and soon forgotten, and there are those that thrust people fighting repression and injustice into the spotlight. By awarding the prize to Ebadi, the Norwegian Nobel committee has sent a tremor through the Islamic republic.
“This can help unify the groups trying to push for reform,” said Issa Sah arkhiz, editor of the weekly Aftab. “This gives us energy to go forward.”
Ebadi does not speak in polemics and has never held elected office. It is her relentless focus on legal principles that makes her so formidable.
She carries a simple but powerful message: Iran must grant all its citizens freedom of expression and civil rights. She has set up a centre to promote children’s rights and an office that provides legal aid to political prisoners.
She argues her cause in the courtroom, at the university and in her books, case by case, penal section by penal section.
Unlike many Iranian dissidents, Ebadi has never changed her colours, compromised her beliefs or emigra ted. She has remained in the trenches, patiently but firmly insisting that Islam and human rights are complementary and compatible. She cites moderate clerics who say equal legal status for women is in keeping with the spirit of the Islamic faith.
“My problem is not with Islam,” she often says. “My problem is with the culture of patriarchy.”
Her ideas were ignored in the fanatical climate following the 1979 revolution that toppled the Shah, but she now speaks for a younger generation of women who are educated and working outside the home. She has ruled out political activity, but the ultimate effect of her campaign for human rights is nothing but political.
Ebadi’s award comes at a time when Iranians feel let down by the reformists they elected over the past six years, especially President Moh ammad Khatami. Expectations that he would deliver dramatic change have given way to contempt for his cautious approach. There is a sense that his time has passed and the torch is being passed to the likes of Ebadi.
“The first chapter is over, we are entering a new stage in the reform movement,” Saharkhiz said.
With the reformist majority in parliament stymied by unelected bodies that wield blanket veto power, acti vists have given up on the ballot box. Now they are talking about hunger strikes and sit-ins and openly calling for restricting the authority of supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
The president’s brother, Mohammad Reza Khatami, who leads the biggest reform party, is more forth right than his sibling. He boldly spoke out on Thursday for amending the constitution.
“Hardliners say the supreme leader is above the law and not responsible to any elected bodies,” Reza Khatami told his party’s annual meeting. “We believe the leader can’t be above the law.”
Conservative newspapers have predictably attacked Ebadi as a tool of western governments, trying to undermine traditional Islamic values. The hardline daily Jomhuri-ye Eslami referred to her as an “ex-convict”.
Yet Ebadi is not an easy target. She uses the Koran and Islam to support her calls for reform and has never entered the partisan political fray. And she has refused to bow to intimidation or pressure, once spending several weeks in solitary confinement.
She received a suspended sentence for publicising an interview with a former paramilitary who provided detailed accounts of repression against students and an assassination attempt against the former vice-president. Her name appeared on an intelligence ministry document that was an apparent hit list of political enemies.
Recognition from the West was once the kiss of death in Iran’s revolutionary climate, but times are changing. With its human rights record and nuclear programme increasingly com ing under international scrutiny, the clerical establishment will be forced to tolerate Ebadi now that she has won the Nobel.
“ Iran’s situation deeply depends on international public opinion. Iran can no longer ignore what’s going on in the world,” said Ebrahim Yazdi, leader of the liberal Freedom Movement.
The world signalled it was losing patience with Iran last month when the UN nuclear agency demanded Tehran prove it has no nuclear weapons programme by October 31 or face possible UN Security Council action. After sending out conflicting signals for months, Iran appears to have got the message.
The political leadership has invited the foreign ministers of Britain, France and Germany to Tehran this week to discuss a possible compromise designed to resolve the crisis over the nuclear programme. The deal was first proposed by the three European governments over the summer, but Iran failed to take up the offer.
Now the threat of UN-imposed sanctions has forced Iran to reconsider. The night Ebadi came back to Tehran, European diplomats arrived to lay the groundwork for negotiations on an arrangement that would give Iran access to civilian nuclear technology in return for agreeing to snap inspections and handing over spent nuclear fuel.
Such a compromise would require Iran to divulge its nuclear secrets and make it much more difficult to pursue a secret weapons project. It remains to be seen if the more hardline elements of the leadership are ready for such a painful climbdown.
If they want to, the conservative clerics who rule Iran can easily defuse the nuclear issue. But the fearless 56-year old woman who has won the Nobel represents something much more threatening and much more difficult to counter. She exudes the quiet confidence of someone who knows time is on her side.
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