On Tuesday, November 15, Dr. Kylie Moore-Gilbert gave a talk on the occasion of the International Day of the Imprisoned Writer. The event was organized by Sydney PEN International at the New South Wales State Library. British-Australian academic, Moore-Gilbert was captured by the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in September 2018 and detained as a political prisoner on charges of espionage in Tehran’s Evin prison until November 2020. She is one of the signatories to an open letter entitled “J’accuse”, referring to Emile Zola’s famous article of 1898 in the Dreyfus affair to protest the abuse of authority. The open letter, dated of October 18 and signed by nearly one hundred Iranians in exile and Western supporters, is an unprecedented initiative that brought together the divided and dispersed Iranian opposition movement in exile. The signatories call on the “free world” to act and support the people of Iran in its struggle against dictatorship and four decades of oppression: “While Ukrainians are battling an outside invader, Iranians are fighting an inside enemy – the regime.” They praise the young Iranians who “are fighting for their life and they are fighting with their lives.”
Protests in Iran began on 16 September after Mahsa Amini’s funeral in Saqqez, in the western part of the country. The 22-year-old Kurdish woman, who had just been accepted to study at Urmia University in North-West Iran, was arrested by morality police in Tehran on 13 September for allegedly violating Iran’s rules requiring women to cover their hair with a headscarf. Amini was reportedly beaten by the police. The latter said that she suffered a heart attack. The footages released by the police to reject allegations enraged Iranians which led to nationwide protests against gender apartheid in Iran and ultimately against the Islamic Republic itself. According to Nazanin Boniadi, an Iranian-born actor and Amnesty International ambassador, there is something new emerging on the streets of Iran: “Never in my 14 years working on human rights advocacy I have witnessed such disillusionment with, and opposition to, the Islamic Republic Regime. While Iran has become accustomed to mass protests every decade, neither the student protests of 1999 nor the Green movement of 2009 or even more recently the November 2019 protests compare in fervour or magnitude to current protests.” (The Guardian Weekly, AU Edition, 14 October 2022)
The most unprecedented part is that the protests are female-led ‒ its slogan is “woman, life, freedom”, which is antithetical to the Islamic Republic ‒ and widely spread on university campuses. So far, nearly 500 demonstrators have died and nearly 15,000 people have been arrested, fearing public trials as the government seeks to suppress the demonstrations. Two Iranian journalists, who first reported the death of Amini, have been arrested and labelled as foreign CIA agents. They are now detained in Evin prison, also known as the University of Evin for imprisoning political dissidents and intellectual opponents of the Iranian regime.
Meanwhile, demonstrations in support of Iranian protesters were being held and continue around the world. On Saturday, October 22, the largest gathering in the history of Iranians opposing the Islamic Republic took place in Berlin. 80,000 demonstrators marched in the German capital, many of whom came from neighboring European countries. The demonstration was organized by the Association of Families of Victims of Flight PS752, named after the Ukraine International Airlines flight from Teheran to Kiev that was shot down by the Revolutionary Guards in January 2020. The spokesman of the demonstration was the association’s president, the Iranian-Canadian social activist Hamen Esmaeilion.
After the Arab Spring of 2011, Berlin has become the capital of the exiled Arabs, just like New York City of the 1930s for Jewish intellectuals who forced to flee Europe. In an essay published in 2019, the Egyptian sociologist Amro Ali called on Arab intellectuals to gather and launch an initiative in Berlin: “This may include a school of thought, political philosophy or even an ideational movement – all cross-fertilized through a deeper engagement with the Arab world.”
As for the future, “Iran will be democratic one day”, Shirin Ebadi said. The 2003 Nobel Peace Prize laureate and Iranian human rights activist received on October 21 the Honorary Award for Democracy and Freedom of the Human Rights Film Festival in Berlin “on behalf of the countless courageous women who protest the regime in Iran”. Ebadi said she was going to give the award to Amini’s family in Iran. Throughout her career, Ebadi has defended intellectual dissidents tortured for criticizing the system of the Islamic Republic. In her speech, she was talking about the great number of educated Iranian youth who have no future in their country and, as a result, are taking to the streets to protest. Ebadi is now calling for a UN-supervised referendum, which would allow a peaceful transition from the Islamic Republic to a “secular parliamentary democracy”.
While Ebadi is optimistic about Iran’s future, the democratization of the country will be a long path. Maryam Rajavi is one of the most influential figures of the opposition with 40 years of activity in Iran and in exile. She is the president-elect of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, founded in Tehran in 1981 and based in France. Her international grassroots movement called Iran Freedom Network is supported by American and other Western politicians. The book of Iranian-American scholar Kian Tajbakhsh, entitled Creating Local Democracy In Iran: State-Building and the Politics of Decentralization, was published this year at the Cambridge University Press. A former political prisoner held in the Evin prison, which he calls Iran’s Bastille, Tajbakhsh was arrested in Tehran in 2007 because of his work supporting democratic groups in Iran for George Soros’s Open Society Institute, and later in 2009 because of his participation in the Green Movement protests.
A decisive step towards Iran’s future democratic generation was taken in 2012 by establishing the Iran Academia, based in The Netherlands. Run by mainly Iranian scholars, the first Persian online university for Social Sciences and Humanities offers learning opportunities, which are free of charge. The university’s mission is “to encourage critical thinking and build capacity for Iran’s youth by increasing access to uncensored knowledge” through various platforms.
Veronika Durin-Hornyik PhD
Photograph: “Free Iran” air protest over Sydney on 29 October 2022