Women’s resistance in Iran, and why it matters for women’s rights everywhere

"We should all be feminists" is a slogan often seen on placards and t-shirts since the book that immortalised these words, by Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was released in 2014. Since this, and in tandem with the global visibility of fascism and discrimination, we have seen several female icons emerge as emblems for the toppling of conservative oppressive governments.

There were the 2018 protests and riots of women in Chile decrying the government in their failings for women's safety; the "Nubian Queen" of Sudan's anti-government protests in 2019; Pussy Riot's anti-Putin protests in Russia in 2021 and, most recently, a female-led uprising in Iran against the authoritarian government, provoked by the murder of a young Kurdish woman by police for "failing to cover her hair properly".

What unifies these acts of female resistance is the brave dissent against the state-sanctioned subjugation of women and femicide perpetuated by ultra-patriarchal regimes. Nationalism and patriarchy come hand in hand. Female protesters are protesting for their human rights regardless of nationalist agenda, that is why we need to listen to them the most.

It is easy to see these feminist issues as "over there" feminist issues, but they further demonstrate the insidious nature of patriarchy. The more we allow these atrocities to slide without the scrutiny of Human Rights Law, the more dangerous it becomes for us all, wherever we live in the world.

How do I know? Because I am a Kurdish woman myself, born in the UK, raised in New Zealand. I am forever remembering and feeling these painful legacies of femicide and genocide colour my days. My grandmother who had her children robbed from her by the Baathist regime in Iraq and was tortured in jail is one of the many women under these oppressive regimes that are weaponised and crushed, and so when they resist, at great personal risk, we had better listen.

There has been a lot of media circulating about the murder of a young woman at the hands of the "morality police" in Iran, some of it obfuscating the racist as well as misogynistic motives of this truly reprehensible regime.

On 13^th September, 2022, Jîna Emînî, was arrested while in Tehran, visiting from her home town of Seqiz in Iranian Kurdistan. Under the Mandatory Hijab Law of 1981, she was arrested under the pretext of improper hair covering, whereas, her mother reported, she was wearing a loose, full length hijab. Witnesses have reported that her brother challenged the police as they heavy-handedly seized her, beating him up also and taking Jîna away to be horrifically tortured, leading to her murder.

I say murder, because death is a neutral term. Her life was violently taken through beatings that left her in a coma for three days before she died, delivered by a police force that perpetuates violence against women, especially Kurdish women.

Since then, women have been taking to the streets of Tehran decrying the government for their appalling inaction and denial of the violence Jîna underwent. They have been bravely singing the words: "Jin, Jiyan, Azadi!" in Kurdish, which translates as: "Women, Life, Freedom".

In Geneva, in 2010, the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD), a group of 18 independent rights experts at the UN reported "the limited enjoyment of political, economic, social and cultural rights by... Arab, Azeri, Balochi, Kurdish communities and some communities of non-citizens" in Iran and urged the government to comply with the 1969 international treaty banning racism (International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination).

The discrimination entails banning Kurdish from being spoken in schools to the exemption of Kurdish people from standing for parliamentary elections. The Kurdish regions of Iran are also peppered with landmines, remnants from the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, which the Raisi administration refuses to remove.

Every day Kurdish people die from 'arbitrary' and 'accidental' discrimination; every day Kurdish women are beaten by the Iranian 'morality police'.

We have an opportunity to stand behind Jîna Emînî and her family to demand the fair and non-discriminatory operation of politics in Iran, and, by extension, in all parts of the world merely by demanding their cohesion to internationally agreed human rights legislation. This high-profile event is just the spark that can catalyse an uprising against a truly criminal government.

"What we see right now happening in Iran is historic. A revolution led by women, beginning in Kurdistan, spreading across the nation in the face of torture and death. They stand for their equality and human rights," says Golriz Ghahraman, Member of Parliament for the NZ Greens and a human rights lawyer, in her appeal to UN and NZ government.

The government in Iran is a government that supports femicide and racism and Kurdish women are overrepresented in this cruel campaign.

"Rojhelati women [from Eastern Iranian Kurdista],"  Kurdish activist Raz Xaidan says, have "...picked up arms since 1940s" in resistance against successive discriminatory governments who saw Kurdish people as subordinate citizens. "Stop acting like this is the first time they've known resistance," Xaidan tweeted last Wednesday. So what happened to Jîna is a particularly nasty example of state-sanctioned racist and misogynist violence, which shows just how dangerous it is for these Kurdish women to be protesting in public in Tehran.

Iranian women from all walks of life have taken to the streets of Tehran to riot, and high-profile women, such as Bella Hadid and Golshifteh Farahani, have rallied behind the cause, but many world leaders have been disturbingly mealy-mouthed over the issue.

The USA has placed quiet sanctions on the "morality police" since the protests. The Iranian leader Ebrahim Raisi has since shut down the internet to many parts of Tehran and Iranian Kurdistan, despite saying the death of Jîna "must certainly be investigated". It is really important that we continue to sanction the government and police forces in Iran and bring them to the table at UN for their repeated atrocities against women and in particular Kurdish women.

"I still remember being a child in Iran and the terror that every woman felt… my mum, my aunts, having to check their dress again and again…now, Iranian women fight back and we must stand with them." Ghahraman says. And we must, with every fibre of our moral being, lest our own sisters, mothers and daughters and we suffer like these women in the slow slide from patriarchy to misogyny, which happens everywhere.