ON IRAN: Marston investigates gender inequality

Mr. Wayne Marston: Thank you for the comprehensive testimony today. I believe, Canada, when we speak out we are at our best.

I come from a labour background. Dialogue and negotiations are something that I've seen day to day that have been very effective. When you talk revolution though and you think of Lek Walesa and solidair noche and the fact that they controlled the economy and it was how they were successful, I have trepidation about Iran at that level.

I was in Saudi Arabia in 1979. When I heard you refer to accidents and payments for injury, at the time I worked for the telephone company. If we ran over a Saudi by accident we paid $30,000. If they ran over one of us it was one riel which was 30¢. Of course the Canadian dollar was worth more then.

I saw an example too of the nose to nose confrontational style that the fundamentalists had. In fact I was threatened with death by the chief of the secret police myself. In Saudi at that time the Moolas were strengthened by what was happening in Iran. There was a great fear in the regime that it would spread.

I am going to quote something and I don't suggest that it is precise, but the prophet, may peace be upon him, said that men go before women in all things. That is roughly the context. This was what was told to me by a person I worked with in Saudi.

With that kind of view can we really expect to return to equality for women in this country?
Then the other side is, with the terrible human rights record of this regime, would we not be facing a popular revolution put down similar to what happened in China?

The Chair (Mr. Jason Kenney, MP -- Calgary Southeast, Alberta): If I could, at the Chair's discretion, you said that if the president had supported the '99 uprising that it could have succeeded. But don't forget that Jai Jang supported the student uprising in Tiananmen Square 10 years prior to that and all he got was house arrest for the rest of his life.

Ms. Nazanin Afshin-Jam (Human Rights Activist -- Stop Child Executions Campaign): Can we expect equality for men and women after? Definitely 100% because already the popular feeling is that there's equality between men and women. It is just that Iran right now is under sharia law which spells out that there is no equality and that women can't become presidents or judges and all the other facts that I've mentioned.

But the people want this and not everybody. Obviously some of the more fundamentalist, religious people who live in the villages, still think that men are greater than women. But they've already lived this. They've already lived with equality between men and women. It is just in the last 27 years that this has been taken away from them.

It is not a part of their being like I was saying in Saudi Arabia where women have been repressed for hundreds of years. Men and women perceive themselves as equal I think in Iran, in answer to that question.

Mr. Jared Genser (President -- Freedom Now): Let me add, I agree with Ms. Afshin-Jam, completely. Unfortunately, Iran has seen some terrible swings in how it's been governed. The Shah was way far out beyond the people from a secular perspective and was seen as being excessive in his lifestyle and in his approach to the world in a way that was embarrassing to many Iranians. And at the same time, in order to suppress domestic dissent, he had a very firm grip on the SAVAK, on the secret police, to oppress people who opposed him.

As a result of that, after the Islamic revolution the mullahs were able to take control and go to the other end of the spectrum from an Islamic fundamentalist standpoint. What I think isn't known as much is that back in 1979 there were various moderate elements within Iran that were struggling to be heard. Massoud Rajavi rallied 500,000 people in a soccer stadium in 1979 and ultimately, the Mojahedin-e Khalq-e, one of the opposition groups that had been in prison under the Shah as well alongside the mullahs, was unable to persuade the Iranian people to support them.

Ultimately, I think the Iranian people from all the conversations I've had with Irans, with Iranian-Americans, want a more moderate middle. They want a moderate version of Islam where they can have their lipstick Jihad, as the book goes, where they have a state that has fundamental precepts of Islam respected, but isn't going so far as to impinge on the rights of people, yet at the same time isn't going so secular that they lose their Islamic identity.

From what I hear, I think that is what most Iranians are seeking to achieve and it's the question of how are we, in the west, as well as others in the Islamic world, going to support those moderate elements within Iranian society that are seeking support. Because I know, myself, I am not going to persuade any Iranian to do anything nor is, frankly, the Government of Canada or the Government of the United States.

But I think what we can do is support those Iranians in Iran who have a vision of the world that seeks to achieve equality and to support them however we possibly can in a way that will not get in their way of persuading the Iranian people, but in a way that will help them, for example, radio broadcasting in Farsi. Being able to have people broadcasting in Farsi what is happening in the world into Iran so that people hear about the human rights abuses, they hear about the violations of human rights and they have the information they need to make decisions and they hear about how Iran is being viewed by the rest of the world. Those are kinds of things I think we can do to be supportive of the aspirations of the Iranian people.

Prof. Payam Akhavan (Faculty of Law -- McGill University): If I may briefly interject, I think we need to appreciate that the Islamic Middle East is a highly diverse society and the parallels between Saudi Arabia and Iran I think, with due respect, are quite inapposite. They are completely different societies. Saudi Arabia has a conservative brand of Islam. It's a society that was largely Bedouin some generations ago.

As Ms. Afshin-Jam explained, Iranian women until the 1979 revolution included nuclear physicists, judges, politicians, ministers. There was a 1967 family act in Iran which essentially liberalized sharia law in terms child custody, divorce, and what has happened, if you speak with sharia about the Nobel Prize laureate, you will see that what the Iranian women have done is from 1979 to date piece by piece they've tried to go back to where the law stood in 1967.

I think that we should also understand the reality that Iranian women are at the forefront of the democratic movement. Of course, we all know about Shirin Ebadi, but there are many, many other women that one can speak about. The fact that the government went out of its way to put all of these women in prison on International Women's Day is a sign of the ominous threat that they represent to the sort of patriarchal, autocratic structures that they are putting in place.

The other mistake, I believe, is to look at Islam or any other culture as an artifact in a museum that we study as if it is static, it is never changing. Islam, like any other religious cultural system, is evolving. It's going through the dislocations of the transition from tradition to modernity.

In Europe in the 18th century people were punished in the streets of Paris by being quartered by horses and by being impaled. Are we to say that that is the authentic European tradition which we must preserve at all costs? That's absolute nonsense.
In the same way there is a doctrine of severability in constitutional law. We can sever parts of Islam which may have been appropriate 1,000 years ago, but which clearly are not appropriate today and there is a transcendent universal message which is more important in terms of understanding the core of those teachings.

In that respect, there is not a single immutable, incontestable interpretation of Islam. There are Islamic feminists who believe patriarchy is a completely man-made invention which has been imported into Islamic traditions and then there are secular feminists who believe that one shouldn't have to worry about Islam at all. So here are the multiplicity of voices and we need to engage all of them.

The velvet revolution question: Can it be suppressed? Yes, perhaps, but only temporarily. The situation of China, of course, is considerably different, a population of 1.3 billion, and the question of control and stability understandably gives rise to a very different reality. You don't have in Iran a population which is overwhelmingly rural. You have a very different reality.

The point is that at the end of the day, even if you can suppress political freedoms, the economic wants of the people cannot be suppressed because, ultimately, most revolutions are about bread and butter issues. The man who wakes up in the morning in Tehran who is a government bureaucrat says, “I have to drive a taxi and work in a bakery and sell things on the street to be able to afford my rent while Mr. Rafsanjani lives in a magnificent palace and mansion in a revolution which was supposed to be about the poor people”.

So at the end of the day if the fourth largest exporter of oil in the world cannot provide a basic standard of living for its people, where increasing numbers of people are sinking into abject poverty, one of the highest rates of drug abuse, prostitution, incredible social woes in Iran, this is a time bomb which is going to explode sooner or later and it may not be because of lofty principles of human rights but because you cannot govern a modern society based on some kind of incompetent and corrupt mullocracy .

One final point relating to what Mr. Sorenson said about the worsening situation through international attention. On the whole, I would say that is not the case and the case of sort of the rescue of Nazanin from impending execution is a perfect case in point. So many other women in the position of Nazanin Fatehi were executed in Iran. The fact that she was not executed is solely because of the incredible international attention that was drawn to her cause.

For Rahmine Jahan Biglu initially there was concern, “We should try quiet diplomacy in order not to exacerbate the situation”.

It became very clear, including by immediate members of his family after quiet diplomacy did not work, that you have to publicize the situation. If the Canadian government had not publicized the situation, if the media had not publicized the situation he could have had the fate of Zahra Kazemi.

The fact that he was only subjected to psychological torture through prolonged solitary confinement, relatively speaking is a success, because otherwise they would have broken his bones and extracted his fingernails, if I may be so gruesome. But that is a reminder that international attention does work. It needs to be applied studiously with great forethought, but at the end of the day silence is the worst possible option.