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'.