Iran International
A former president of Iran's football federation has strongly criticized hardliner religious authorities for insisting on banning women from soccer stadiums.
Speaking to the reformist Eslahat Press website, Mohammad Dadkan criticized the authorities for claiming that it is against Islam to allow women to join men in watching games at stadiums.
Dadkan argued that those who oppose women's presence in stadiums, on the grounds that it is against their dignity to be present where male fans swear profanities, should feel more concerned that so many Iranian women have to be sex workers abroad, such as in Dubai and Turkey.
Dadkan went on to point out that women had to go abroad as sex workers because the government failed to provide decent jobs to them and added that officials are not ashamed about their failure but are concerned about women watching a game.
"There is so much prostitution, in the Mashhad (a Shiite religious center) where women were not allowed into the stadium, and no one protests about [disrespect to women or] religious dignity. Does watching a match cause harm to religious sanctities?" Dadkan who served as the president of the Iranian football federation from 2003 to 2007 said.
Hundreds of female fans were once again denied entry into a soccer stadium on Tuesday in Mashhad in northeastern Iran to watch a World Cup qualifier between Iran and Lebanon, despite FIFA’s pressure to lift the ban on women entering stadiums. The fans, with tickets in their hands, were stopped and were pepper-sprayed when they demanded to be allowed in.
In an unprecedented turn of events, many Iranians urged FIFA to ban their country from the World Cup for forcibly barring women from the match.
Mashhad is home to numerous hardliner clerics who are against the presence of women in male dominated places. Firebrand representative of the Supreme Leader in the city, Ayatollah Ahmad Alamolhoda has been banning concerts and cultural events for years.
It was during Dadkan's tenure as federation president in 2005 that a group of Iranian women for the first time managed to get into a stadium in Tehran to watch a World Cup qualifier match between Iran and Bahrain.
The renowned director Jafar Panahi made Offside, a film about the incident which won the Sliver Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2006.
"I stood against the authorities who were saying women should not enter the stadium and [ordered] to open the gates … President [Mohammad] Khatami was also present [at the stadium] … I said I would take responsibility for all the consequences," Dadkan said about the event.
The clerical establishment was outraged by the incident and used it as an excuse to attack the reformist government.
Female fans had to wait until October 2019 to be allowed to enter a soccer stadium again when authorities had to relent under pressure from FIFA, which threatened to penalize the Iranian federation for gender discrimination.
For nearly a decade the world’s soccer authority has tried to convince Iran’s clerical rulers to lift the unwritten, four-decade-old ban, which has led to arrests, beatings, detentions, and abuses against women.
In September 2019, a female football fan, Sahar Khodayari, who came to be known as the “Blue Girl” after her favorite team, Esteghlal FC, was reportedly sentenced to jail for trying to enter a stadium disguised as a man. She died by self-immolation, causing a domestic and international outcry.
Niki Karimi, Hedieh Tehrani, Sahar Dolatshahi and Taraneh Alidousti are among the Iranian superstars who have signed the statement.
While male artists and most film industry personalities such as male producers as well as most state officials have ignored the protest so far, the Iranian Judiciary's deputy for human rights, Kazem Gharibabadi, and former Deputy Interior Minister Mostafa Tajzadeh have expressed their support for female artists. Gharibabadi said the judiciary is prepared to take action if the artists file complaints against the aggressors, and Tajzadeh said that "all freedom-loving and responsible citizens should defend the rights of film industry women."
Nima Hasani Nasab, the editor of the Cinema Daily, posted the pictures of a number of female Iranian filmmakers and movie actresses on his Instagram page on March 31 along with the text of a statement issued by more than 150 women involved in the industry against violence and sexual harassment. The number of signatories reached 300 by April 2.
The artists said in their statement, "We have a right to have a safe working environment free from sexual blackmailing,” and called on the Cinema House, which operates as a trade union for film industry workers, to "set up a committee with mainly female members to investigate the cases of sexual abuse, violence and harassment against women in the film industry."
The statement was issued after a well-known female assistant director, who is among the signatories of the statement disclosed that an Iranian actor had bullied and harassed her and attempted molestation and exhibitionism behind the scenes of an Iranian movie. She repeated the accusation in conversations with foreign-based Persian media.
Iranian actress Shaghayegh Nowrouzi, told Iran International TV in an interview it was important that "female artists have stressed the women's movement in their statement and the mechanism they have provided to voice their protest against sexual violence." She said "women artists explained the problem in plain terms so that it could be understood by the public. They had also explained why the problem was important and finally they issued a warning to Iranian society about the spread of such violence in a systematic form."
Nowrouzi praised her colleagues for putting forward a practical solution in the form of suggesting setting up a professional investigation committee at their trade union.
Meanwhile, women's right lawyer Pegah Banihashemi told Iran International television in another interview: "The social movement Me Too, paves the way for taking cases of sexual abuse at workplace to the courts. The movement provides documentation for taking the problem to a judicial level for investigation." She added that the process of collective witnessing that is inherent in the Me Too movement can help the judicial investigation particularly when time has passed since the sexual violence took place.
The Iranian Me Too movement during the past two years was limited to a few revelations made about a few cases of sexual abuse and rape and at least one of them was investigated in courts in Tehran, but other cases have been largely ignored. Two years after its launch, the Instagram account of the Iranian "Me Too" movement, @me_too_movement_iran, got its first recognition on March 28 from a vocational association, the Trade Union of Production Designers and Assistant Directors of the Iranian cinema.
While the account's posts and disclosures generated very few comments, a disclosure in a March 25 post about several cases of harassment and sexual abuse during the past few years received widespread comments, endorsements, and "likes" by Iranian artists and fans.
The post about the recognition of the movement and its Instagram account on March 28 was liked by 4,779 users in less than three days. Meanwhile, the number of the account's followers jumped from 29,000 on March 25 to more than 42,000 on March 28, which means the latest revelation by the well-known female assistant director has received social attention.
Nonetheless, as women's rights activist Mahdiyeh Golrou told the Iran International Television, "the efforts are unlikely to leave the right impact as long as Iran lacks punitive and preventative laws to restore justice regarding sexual predators and there are no NGOs to lend their support to women who are subjected to sexual violence and harassment."
In a Friday meeting with officials of Denmark's foreign ministry and ministry of immigration and integration, Afsaneh Nadipour conveyed Tehran's strong protest and called on the Danish authorities to apologize for the "inhumane behavior" against the Iranian asylum-seeker, punishment of the perpetrators of violence, and ensuring that similar incidents would not happen in the future.
"The Iranian ambassador's protest to Denmark is ridiculous," the family's translator in Denmark, Reza Asoudeh, told Iran International TV on Saturday, adding that in his view it is the government of the Islamic Republic that must apologize for making it impossible for this family to live in their own country and driving them to seek political asylum elsewhere.
Danish immigration authorities on Tuesday tried to deport Ghadamkheir Haghanizadeh, 37, and her two ten-year-old sons, Yousef and Younes back to Iran. Danish authorities rejected the political asylum application of Ghadamkheir and her two sons in 2017.
In the early hours of Monday, four Danish deportation agents dragged Ghadamkheir, a refugee from Iran's western province of Kermanshah, out of one of Denmark's refugee camps where she had been living for six years.
A video recorded by a resident of the camp where Ghadamkheir and her family lived appeared on social media that suggests Danish deportation agents used unnecessary violence against her. She was then shipped off to the airport with her two sons to be sent back to Iran through Istanbul, Turkey.
When in Istanbul, Ghadamkheir resisted boarding a flight to Iran and according to Kurdistan Human Rights Network injured herself in what could have been suicide attempt. She was returned to Denmark a few hours later where she is receiving medical treatment at a hospital now.
The family of five have sought refuge in Denmark since mid-2010s but her asylum request was rejected while the husband and a younger child are still living in Denmark.
After forcibly separating Ghadamkheir and her two older sons from her husband, Sirus, and their younger child, Danish authorities contacted her husband, and gave him two options: to either accept repatriation money and return to Iran, or to never see his wife and children again, Rudaw, a news agency in Iraqi Kurdistan claimed Friday.
According to Rudaw, Sirus who is currently held at a location close to the camp where they lived with the couple's infant son and the two older boys after their return from Istanbul.
Rudaw said Sirus entered Denmark illegally after travelling through several countries in 2015 to seek political asylum, while his wife and two sons entered the country legally and then requested asylum. Since she did not break Iranian law by travelling without a passport, she can return, Danish authorities say.
The couple's one-year-old baby was born in Denmark which explains why he was not deported with the mother.
The Iranian intelligence ministry arrested Sirus, a blacksmith in Kermanshah province, in 2014 on suspicion of having ties with the outlawed Kurdistan Democratic Party of Iran (KDPI) and his father had been hanged in 1984 for the same reason, while Ghadamkheir's father, an active member of the party, was shot dead by security forces in 1985.
“Due to the fact that our fathers were members of the party, they would blame us whenever something happened in the area,” Sirus told Rudaw. The family belongs to the Yarsani religious minority whose followers are discriminated against in Islamic Iran.