The ongoing women’s revolution in Iran has been running by the civil resistance of unveiling women in public sphere lately. The unveiled women have been confronting many police and military forces including the arrival of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) to street. Sent by the Iranian state under new campaign of Nur plan, the IRGC have been harassing and arresting women with no proper veil or without veil on the street. However, the determined women appear in public with no veil in their everyday life. Despite paying a high price for such resistance, women keep practice and internalize their own established freedom since Jina’s revolution. More importantly, these women started to write their own experience of confronting the state forces by unveiling on street in different parts of the city and sharing it on their social media.
The state pursues setting and imposing new rules and restrictions for unveiled women by stopping their civic life. For women with no veil, their employment status got suspended and their bank accounts got shot down, their cars were confiscated, they got beaten to death on the street, got arrested and charged with long prison term. Some of anti-veil women got new punishments of biological attacks by forced injection or were forced getting tablets administered in prison. As soon as these women were released, they either committed suicide or got health problems. Even the school girls challenging only the veil rules have been banned from continuing their education.
Recently, the young generation of civic society’s members in the Northern province of Gilan, 11 members together received the highest charges of long-term prison of 60 years and another women activist in Northwest province of Kurdistan received 11-year prison sentence. Obviously, the state fears the new determined free will of young women’s generation, who have been challenging and sweeping away 45 years’ mandatory fascist religious guideline. The state recently targeted the collective activists, in particular, because women leftist collective as such who entangle their activism with other collective struggles among civil movement.
A serious concern of women activists these days are the increasing number of honor killing (Zan Koshi) in different parts of Iran. Every week, there is news of femicide by their male family members, about which the state is so silent. In addition, the numbers of execution of political and non-political prisoners are increasing, which is another serious concern of human right activists.
It is important to follow the news of the Afghan women who have been suffering of harsh oppression of another version of Islamist extremist group. The Afghan girls and women got removed entirely from education system by Taliban. Recently, even Taliban’s group stopped Afghan women attending to discuss women’s rights at the United Nation meeting at the end of June in Doha. Palestinian women in Gaza and Rafah have no even daily life, home and right to exist. International community should not be silenced about women’s situation in the Middle East. They should be heard, and not to be undermined and buried under any economic and political deals with the West and the East.
