Dr Elaheh Rostami-Povey gave this briefing on Iran to Media Workers Against the War on March 5:
Will the US bomb Iran? To be honest I don’t know. I have a daughter and granddaughter in Iran, and every night I go to bed fearing that I will wake up in the morning and they’ll all be dead.
The logic is that they won’t bomb, but they did it in Afghanistan and they did it in Iraq. It is a dangerous situation. I remember the Vietnam war. Only afterwards did we discover that a lot of the infighting among the Vietnamese had been manufactured by the CIA. Even Saudi Arabia has suggested that the entire region will be in chaos if there is an attack on Iran.
The US wants to control resources from North Africa to China. So their logic is to attack Syria and Iran.
Before the 1979 revolution some 60-70,000 US advisers were working in the government ministries and big companies, there were CIA and Mossad headquarters in the country. Now they are gone. That’s one reason why the US wants war – they want them back.
They are talking about a massive bombing campaign, nothing would be left. The result would be millions dead across the region.
Some of Iran’s nuclear installations are near centres of population. Take Esfahan’s Nuclear Technology Research Centre – it is close to the ancient city of millions of people.
And Iran is capable of retaliating, which means regional as well as global economic and environmental disaster.
Ahmadi-Nejad has made rhetorical comments about Israel. His comments about “wiping Israel off the map” were a miss-translation. He was talking about regime change, like when the Soviet Union collapsed and the end of fascism in Europe.
The British media plays an important role in misrepresenting Iran. For example, we heard lots about Ahmadi-Nejad’s conference denying the holocaust. But we heard much less about the Jewish MP in the Iranian parliament who challenged him on this, and he retracted. We didn’t even hear that Iran has a Jewish, Armenian (i.e. a Christian) and Zorastrian MPs.
Many Jewish Iranians have returned to Iran from Israel because they find the racism is worse in Israel. The minorities would rather be in Iran than in Pakistan or Saudi Arabia, let alone Iraq.
The issue of nuclear power unites the country – everyone is in favour. Regarding a nuclear weapon it’s much les clear-cut. But the experts say Iran is anywhere between 2 and 10 years from a bomb.
The real danger to peace are the US neocons and Israel, both of whom have nuclear weapons and both of whom have the real option of attacking Iran. How do we stop them? The media can play an important role by telling the truth about Iran: namely, the fact that there is a growing democracy movement headed by a strong women’s movement, but also student movement and trade union movement.
Last week Channel 4 broadcast Rageh Omaar’s excellent documentary on Iran (watch it here). But even in Omaar’s film we only see two groups of women – those who queue up for plastic surgery and to have nose jobs, and the others who burn US and Israeli flags. He didn’t show the majority, who are in between these two extremes.
Under the Shah, there was 30% literacy in Iran; now there is 94% literacy — more than the US and UK. There are criticisms of this post-revolutionary system. But the schools and universities were none the less opened to women (as long as they wore the hejab); 64% of university students are women. The 1980s saw a flourishing of women in Iranian society, access to employment and education increased.
Iran’s parliament has just 13 women MPs. But so does Turkey! Yet Turkey is supposed to be a “democracy” while Iran has to be bombed…
Women in Iran are fighting for their rights and have gained hugely – they have won access to divorce, custody of their children, the right to stop the man marrying a second wife. Recently it became law that a woman married to a non-Iranian can claim Iranian nationality for her children – this is unknown in other Muslim majority societies. One million people have signed a petition against execution by stoning to death.
Women have a bumpy road to travel – 31 leading members of the women’s movement were arrested before March 8, international women’s day. Nevertheless they continue their struggle.
Then there are the student organisations. They are Islamic, but they don’t see this as a problem: they want change, they want reform. But we don’t hear about them in the Western media.
A third group are the trade union organisations, they play and important role. The journalists’ union in Iran is one of the oldest. But the Iranian diaspora hijack these workers’ protests: they use them to demonstrate how bad the regime is, they even use the struggle of these movements to justify war on Iran.
So it is very important to tell the truth about Iran and not only concentrate on the negative issues. The question is not whether there will be a war or sanctions on Iran. The question is that Iran is a dynamic society and is changing for the better and we must not allow sanctions or war on Iran.
