Security Forces Threaten Teachers Protesting Against Poisonings

In a ceremony hosted by First Lady Jill Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken at the White House on Wednesday, US Ambassador to UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield presented the inaugural Madeleine Albright Honorary Group International Women of Courage Award to the women and girls in Iran, who embarked on months of grassroots rallies following the death of Mahsa Amini, the 22-year-old Iranian woman died in ‘hijab police’ custody.

The United States also honored 11 global women leaders -- some from countries hit by crises -- to mark International Women's Day and recognize those with "exceptional courage, strength, and leadership in advocating for peace, justice, human rights, gender equity and equality, often at great personal risk and sacrifice."

Earlier in the day, US State Department Spokesperson Ned Price announced the new annual award in honor of Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s legacy and her championing of women’s rights and universal rights around. “Given her longstanding support for women’s empowerment and leadership, we can’t think of someone who exemplifies the goals and values of the IWOC Award better than Former Secretary Albright,” he said, adding, “We’re proud to recognize the women and girl protestors of Iran with the inaugural Madeleine Albright Group Honorary Award this year.”

Price said that over the course of the past six months, the world has witnessed the bravery, the determination, the resilience of the protesters in Iran, so many of whom are women, noting that the leadership of this movement is in some ways dominated by women as they are at the vanguard of this movement. 

“We have seen the remarkable courage of these protesters, including these women who have taken to the streets at no shortage of personal risk to themselves," he added, highlighting that “They are in prison; they’ve been harassed; they’ve been injured. In too many cases, the regime has ended their lives prematurely for doing nothing more than exercising a right that is as universal to them as it is to women and girls here in this country.”

In a statement to mark the occasion, US President Joe Biden said, “ We see it in Afghanistan, where the Taliban bars women and girls from attending school and pursuing employment. We see it in Iran, where the regime is brutally repressing the voices of women who are courageously standing up for their freedom.”

This year’s International Women's Day saw activists holding demonstrations all over the world from Jakarta and Singapore to Istanbul, Berlin, Paris, Rome, Caracas, Montevideo, and so many others with a focus on Iran, embroiled in antigovernment protests, and Afghanistan, where girls are denied the right to education. 

In London, protesters marched to the Iranian embassy in costumes inspired by the novel and television series "The Handmaid's Tale", while in Valencia, Spain, women cut their hair in support of the Iranian women.

In recent days, the Islamic Republic has faced renewed global pressure amid public anger over a wave of chemical attacks on girls in dozens of schools. The regime has arrested several people it accuses of connections to the poisonings as well as to "foreign-based dissident media".

Also on Wednesday, Farhan Haq, the deputy spokesperson for the United Nations secretary-general, said the UN is following the reports about poisoning among schoolchildren and the UN Country Team has offered support to speedily and accurately ascertain the facts of this issue. "It's important for the Iranian authorities to investigate this fully and transparently, but we'll continue to monitor what's going on there,” he said. 

In a tweet on Wednesday, UNESCO urged thorough investigations and immediate actions to protect schools and facilitate the return of affected students in Iran to their safe and healthy classrooms. UNESCO Director-General Audrey Azoulay expressed deep concern “about the reported poisoning of schoolgirls in Iran over the past three months,” describing the attacks as “a violation of their right to safe education.” 

The UK and the US, the European Union, and Australia issued sanctions on the Islamic Republic to mark International Women's Day. The UK targeted global violators of women’s human rights, including Iran's morality enforcing outfit and its top official, while the US imposed sanctions on Iranian officials and companies over serious human rights abuses.

“Feminist struggles must continue against all forms of core patriarchy upon which the regime is founded,” it announced on International Women’s Day.

The statement called the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ movement a turning point in the struggles of the LGBTQ community of Iran in the fight against sexual and gender apartheid and patriarchal structures.

“This year's International Women’s Day is an opportune moment to voice our common struggle louder and more expressively and renew our commitment to our joint struggle. It is a struggle that is symbolically and actually inclusive of all women,” it added.

Since the beginning of the uprising in September, Iranian LGBTQ activists have expressed their demands after the fall of the Islamic Republic by participating in popular struggles inside and outside the country.

Prominent opposition figures, including Prince Reza Pahlavi and Masih Alinejad, have repeatedly emphasized the need to support the rights and freedoms of the queer community in Iran should the Islamic Republic collapse.

In a statement to mark International Women’s Day, the Etehad-e Mellat party strongly criticized the many discriminatory laws of the Islamic Republic against women including the compulsory veiling laws and called for their abolition or change.

Etehad-e Mellat, formed in 2015, is the only major Iranian political party with a female secretary general, Azar Mansouri, who was elected by the party’s congress in December 2021. Many of the party’s members are veteran reformist politicians and activists and members of the Islamic Iranian Participation Front (Mosharekat) which was banned in 2009.

In the past few years the anti-compulsory hijab movement which took root with a social media campaign in 2017 called White Wednesdays, has hugely grown. The movement has gained greater momentum since the death in custody of the 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in September and the protests that her death sparked.

Many women now are adamant to be hijab free in public. They can be seen defiantly rejecting the head scarf everywhere, from restaurants to banks and in parks where previously, they could not even enter without a head covering.

To re-establish its control over women, authorities have resorted to threats against women again. After the video of a female pharmacist’s argument with a customer who demanded that she should wear the hijab went viral recently, authorities ordered all female pharmacists and pharmacy workers to wear maqna’e, a black veil with stitched front coming down to the chest that is much more conservative than the headscarf, and threatened to shut down the pharmacies if their staff did not comply.

Family laws give men the right to make decisions about women’s lives and Etehad-e Mellat wants to see this change. In a statement, it says that state-sponsored cultural entities and media help promote fundamentalist views and provoke the religiously-minded to restrict women’s rights and freedoms.

The party has also criticized discrimination against women in higher education as women are barred from studying certain subjects or given limited acceptance opportunities to allow more men to enrol. There is also discrimination against women when it comes to holding teaching positions in universities and higher government positions.

Etehad-e Mellat also criticized the authorities for trying to cast women in the role of housewives and men as breadwinners and giving the men the right to stop their wives from working after marriage while also encouraging marriage of girls as young as thirteen.

Iran's state media often air the views of fundamentalist clerics and others who tell women and girls that it is their religious duty to obey and serve their husbands, to marry young and to raise many children.

Many in Iran are critical of the population policy espoused by the regime to boost the country’s population growth as Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has always demanded. Khamenei has repeatedly said that Iran’s population should increase from 80 million to 150 million.

In a statement released on Sunday, some women’s rights activist groups vowed to continue their struggle against the regime until the victory of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement. In their statement, they enumerated the various discriminations against women in the Islamic Republic including the right to travel abroad without their male family members or husbands’ permission, discriminatory inheritance laws in favor of male inheritors, restrictions on women’s right to seek divorce and to have custody of their children.

According to the Ukrainian military, Russia used 81 missiles and eight Iranian-made Shahed kamikaze drones in the attack.

The attacks were mainly on energy facilities and hit more than half a dozen regions, striking the capital Kyiv, the Black Sea port of Odesa and the second-largest city Kharkiv.

Ukraine's military said air defenses knocked out at least 34 missiles and four Shahed suicide drones, but regional officials said five people were killed in the western region of Lviv and one in southeastern Dnipropetrovsk in southeastern Ukraine.

"This was a major attack and for the first time with so many different types of missiles...The enemy launched six Kinzhals," air force spokesperson Yuriy Ihnat said. "It was like never before."

Iran has supplied hundreds of Shahed and other drones to Russia since mid-2022, and although Ukraine is capable of shooting down most of the slow-moving UAVs, Russia relies on the Iranian weapon to swarm Ukraine’s air defenses.

The United States and its European allies have imposed a series of sanctions on Iranian individuals and companies involved with the drone program and shipments of the weapon to Russia. They have also warned Tehran that one of the conditions to restart nuclear talks is ending its weapons supplies to Russia. A nuclear agreement between Iran and West could suspend most economic sanctions and boost the country’s economy.

In a tweet on Wednesday, UNESCO urged thorough investigations and immediate actions to protect schools and facilitate the return of affected students in Iran to their safe and healthy classrooms. UNESCO Director-General Audrey Azoulay expressed deep concern “about the reported poisoning of schoolgirls in Iran over the past three months,” describing the attacks as “a violation of their right to safe education.”

Demonstrators on the International Women's Day in many countries called for solidarity with women's rights protests in Iran as well as with Afghanistan’s girls who are banned from education. In cities, including Berlin, Cologne, Paris and several others, people carried banners in support of the “Women, Life, Freedom” movement in Iran, the antigovernment protests ignited by the death in custody of 22-year-old Iranian woman Mahsa (Zhina) Amini in September. 

While the Islamic Republic has been fiercely cracking down on dissent and seems to be involved in serial chemical attacks on schoolgirls that have reportedly affected thousands of students, activists and right groups have called on the international community to pressure the regime over the issue.

Dozens of Iranian women activists and lawyers have launched a petition, calling for the formation of a crisis management taskforce comprised of independent doctors, lawyers and experts as well as parents of the affected students to investigate the poisoning. 

The petition said that during the past three months of attacks, more than 2,000 students have been affected with many hospitalized, claiming that these are undoubtedly an orchestrated operation to terrorize society. 

In a separate open letter issued on Wednesday, a group of prominent Iranian and Afghan female activists called on the world to hold the Islamic Republic accountable for the attacks and help to end them. They urged governments to acknowledge “the gender apartheid” in Iran under the Islamic Republic and Afghanistan under Taliban. 

The signatories, which include opposition figures such as Iranian Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Shirin Ebadi and activist Masih Alinejad and Afghan activist Fawzia Koofi, said in their letter, "Looking at the example of condemnation of apartheid in South Africa by the international community, women living in Iran and Afghanistan are demanding similar responses to end these gender apartheid regimes."

They emphasized that the rights violations by the Islamic Republic and the Taliban are not limited to cases of gender discrimination, but these governments have waged a "more extreme, systematic and structural war" against women to suppress them. In addition to support from the international community, they want the world to criminalize “gender apartheid” in Iran and Afghanistan according to international conventions. 

Foreign governments and officials have been vocal about the mass poisonings and other women’s rights violations by the Islamic Republic and Taliban. In a statement on International Women’s Day, US President Joe Biden said, “Despite decades of progress, in far too many places around the world, the rights of women and girls are still under attack, holding back entire communities. We see it in Afghanistan, where the Taliban bars women and girls from attending school and pursuing employment. We see it in Iran, where the regime is brutally repressing the voices of women who are courageously standing up for their freedom.”

The UK and the US, the European Union, and Australia issued sanctions on the Islamic Republic to mark International Women's Day. The UK targeted global violators of women’s human rights, including Iran's morality enforcing outfit and its top official, while the US imposed sanctions on Iranian officials and companies over serious human rights abuses.

Also on Wednesday, Member of the European Parliament Hannah Neumann said the Parliament will debate the poisoning of schoolgirls in Iran Wednesday next week, followed by a resolution, adding, “This provides another important opportunity to raise awareness about the repression in the country -- and the brave opposition to it.”

On Tuesday, 20 prominent Iranian lawyers and human rights advocates has issued a joint letter, calling on the WHO, the UNESCO, the UNICEF and the International Committee of the Red Cross to immediately visit Iran and probe into the serial poisoning of schoolgirls.