There’s a real problem in the world when a lawyer and a human rights campaigner believes the only viable option for attention and for action is a hunger strike for 28 days.
That problem is worsened when the world refuses to be an audience to the action, where passivity is preferred over action, where Kardashian is the word first spoken and a name like Nasrin Sotoudeh’s isn’t last, it’s unheard of.
On Monday, a collective of Iranian-Australians from the Free Iran Project joined in peaceful protest outside parliament house to bring the plight of Narin Sotoudeh to our attention and despite their efforts and the worthiness of the cause, few will listen. Most won’t even know about it.
But you will.
You’ll hear about how Nasrin was arrested on the 4th of September 2010 for ‘spreading propaganda’ and for ‘conspiring to harm state security’ (meaning she refused to live in a world that impeded on her civil right to an education, to an opinion, to exist self-sufficiently and to challenge authority). This awarded her 11 years in prison and a 20 year ban on her legal practice and foreign travel. Muted, molested and detained…all necessary precautions I’m sure to silence and still a national ‘threat.’
How threatening she is, to want to educate the women of her nation. How frightful it must be to a nation run by men, for a woman to have a thought beyond her domestic sphere. How destabilising and disrespectful to the ‘natural order’ to have a woman seek progression beyond her potato peeler.
Although Nasrin’s sentence was reduced from 6 years to 11, and the ban on her legal practice was halved, Nasrin has spent over 100 days in solitary confinement during her time in prison.
Broken but not defeated, Nasrin’s resistance had both her husband and children placed under strict governmental watch. They can’t travel. They can’t visit. Her two children are motherless because of her fight for freedom.
Nasrin reportedly wrote to her children saying, “ I know that you require water, food, housing, a family, parents, love, and visits with your mother," she empathised, but "just as much, you need freedom, social security, the rule of law, and justice." She is a revolutionary but without the world’s attention, her fight is futile.
She lives by faith everyday with a fervent belief in the bettering of a nation that has ostracized her and demonized her thoughts but she perseveres knowing that living by faith includes the call to something far greater than the very human, and very common but (comparatively) cowardly goal of self-preservation.
Iran more than funding, and even more than food if Nasrin’s hunger strike is anything to go by, needs political reforms where power shifts from the Ayatollah and onto the democratically elected representatives. These representatives need recognition of their mothers, sisters, aunts, grandmothers as equals, as humans and as deserving of civil freedoms that we take for granted.
It’s so easy to create an “us and them” in a nation with no reverence to the opposition (women). It’s easier still for a man to call himself such, when fighting with a woman, but genitalia should not give the illusion of strength or superiority. It’s so easy to deflect attention from your own shortcomings by pointing the finger elsewhere or silencing her and placing her in prison.
Winning the Sakhorov Prize for ‘Freedom of Thought’ with film maker Jafar Panahi, Iran has shown Nasrin that her castle is also her prison.
The fight for human rights should mean freedom .
They should never mean the right to shoot 14 year old Malala Yousafzai. The irony and the hope is that her wounds will also be her healers. Ignorance bred violence. Education would ideally mean peace.
Education would have prevented Mohammad Zafar and his wife Zaheen from pouring acid over their daughter’s body and murdering her for simply glancing at a boy.
This is more than just a Pakistani issue. It is bigger than Iran. It is not religion. It is not faithful. It is ignorant and just as we shake our heads at global atrocities, just as we cry foul at the denial of civil rights, we too need a reeducation. We too need a global conscience. We too need to speak up for every mother that can’t see her child.
For every child that will be subjected to the enslavement of the Middle East’s archaic governments, we should speak up.
For every mother who is removed from her child and like Nasrin, abused, tortured and exiled for her belief in human rights, we should speak up.
For every honour killing.
For every beating.
For every child-bride.
For Nasrin.
We should speak up.
