Webinar: The Kurdish Question in Iran After Amini’s Murder September 29, 2022
First of all, I just want to say thank you to the Washington Kurdish Institute for arranging this well-needed and important webinar we are having today. And thank you for inviting me. What we’ve seen in the past days has been ongoing for so many days in Iran, starting in the Kurdish areas, where men and women were chanting: “Woman, Life, Freedom.” Their chanting made it all the way from Kurds to Iran where demonstrations and people who participated from different minorities in Iran, were chanting in Kurdish and Farsi “Woman, Life Freedom.” So this really created a women’s rights movement that united the people of Iran that united them in their fight against injustice, their fight for basic human rights, and in their fight for accountability. The death of Jina [Amini], who was a young Kurdish woman, really created rage among the Iranian people.
Not only the Kurdish people would see that all over Iran. I think that the Iranian people have suffered from oppression for so many years, that they’ve had enough of systematic discrimination. They’ve had enough of something that we’ve been talking more about recently, intersectional discrimination. They’ve had enough of what also Dr. Philip mentioned, gender apartheid in Iran. So all of these factors, but also we have to mention the bad economy in the country. The high rate of unemployment in the country, well-educated women and men being unemployed, especially lack job opportunities in remote areas outside of Iran. They lack equal political participation for all of Iran’s people. So I think all of these factors, alongside Mini’s death, created a rage and a movement that we see is hard for the Iranian regime to stop.
I think that the uprising and the struggle in the Kurdish areas also go back to the establishment of the Iranian regime. Many people in Iran never voted for this constitution. They’ve never voted for this loss that is constantly discriminating against women. Women’s rights are severely restricted in Iran. This is not something new, and we’ve seen demonstrations in the past in Iran. But what’s interesting with these events and these demonstrations is the international attention of it, the attention that human rights organizations, human rights lawyers, and the reports that we are receiving from Iran, despite the restriction of internet access in Iran. We have received a lot of information about severe human rights violations and the regime cracking down on certain areas such as the Kurdish areas, but also other minorities in Iran.
We have to remember that I think more than half of the population in Iran belongs to an ethnic or religious minority. So this struggle is five decades against injustice unifying the country. And this is, of course, a threat to the Iranian regime. They’re cracking down on severe human rights violations. I get a lot of reports from organizations, and different well-established organizations; although I cannot independently verify these numbers, but we’ve seen in the past days that they’re cracking down on some parts of the country, such as the Kurdish areas, using severe violence against protestors. I’ve had experience in different areas and countries working with human rights. Women are targeted. These are intersectional perspectives that I would say in the past demonstrate that we’ve been observing human rights violations in Iran, and have not been applied that much.
But now that’s a positive effect. People are talking about increasing the intersectional perspective when we’re reporting about human rights violations in Iran today. The international community is giving more attention to what’s going on in Iran. There’s unification in the international attention which is very good, through social media, journalists, and human rights activists. So I think that human rights reporting and monitoring is one thing. And that needs to be continued the upcoming day. We need to follow the situation in Iran, but also when we have this attention and these reports, this also makes it easier for us to make sure that perpetrators can be held accountable in the future.