These two women are the most serious challenge to Ayatollah's brutal regime in Iran
By Paul Baldwin
Women accused of adultery are routinely stoned to death in Iran. Neither domestic violence nor marital rape are crimes. Women face punishment for refusing to wear the veil, and they can be forced into marriage at the age of nine.
Female court testimony carries only half the weight of a male’s, they are banned from many vocations, cannot ride motorcycles and the state dictates the way they must dress. Almost every credible human rights group agrees women in Iran are very much second-class citizens, and effectively the property of men.
Which makes it all the more astonishing that the biggest and most serious challenge to both the mullahs’ religious dictatorship and the medieval-style male hegemony comes from two women.
Dissident Iranians in the UK on Sunday helped voice support for 67-year-old woman Mahnaz Maimanat in her role in the fight against both the Ayatollah and his brutal attack dogs, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
Maimanat joins Maryam Rajavi, President-elect of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), as one of the most prominent female voices in the organised opposition to Tehran. She was elected Secretary General of the People’s Mojahedin Organisation of Iran (PMOI/MEK).
The PMOI is Iran’s best-known organised resistance movement, operating an underground network of “Resistance Units” inside the country while campaigning internationally for the overthrow of the Islamic Republic and its replacement with a secular democratic state. Decades ago it was an armed movement and was proscribed by the US and EU, but it was removed from their terrorism lists in 2012 and 2009 respectively by court rulings which described it as a legitimate resistance movement. The organisation now promotes Maryam Rajavi’s Ten-Point Plan for a future democratic republic that calls for free elections, religious freedom, gender equality and abolition of the death penalty.
Rajavi, for her part, has been President-elect of the international opposition coalition, the National Council of Resistance of Iran, for more than three decades. The PMOI is a member organisation of this political coalition.
Maimanat’s election came as the regime faces extraordinary pressure from opposition forces at home, a battered economy and a renewed military confrontation with America in the Gulf.
Tehran threatened retaliation against US energy interests following American strikes on Iranian tankers and attacks by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps on US warships.
Against this explosive backdrop, the symbolism of women occupying senior positions in the opposition could hardly be more striking.
Maimanat was elected at PMOI gatherings simultaneously staged across seven European countries. She won 56 per cent in the first round, rising to 65 per cent in the second before securing near unanimous backing in the final ballot, according to the NCRI Women’s Committee.
Her personal history is entwined with Iran’s brutal political past.
Her mother, Akhtar Mowlavi, was killed by the IRGC in 1988, while two brothers were executed. Massoud Maimanat was 19 when he was shot by firing squad at Tehran’s Evin Prison in 1983 after, according to the PMOI, seven months of torture.
Her brother Mahmoud, aged 28, was executed during the 1988 massacre of political prisoners.
MP for Strangford Jim Shannon, a long-time supporter of the NCRI, said Maimanat’s leadership and the strong role of women in the Iranian Resistance send a powerful message of equality, courage and hope.
Women’s rights have been diminished almost out of existence since Ayatollah Khomeini took over Iran in the 1979 revolution.
But absolute gender equality is one of the cornerstones of Rajavi’s Ten-Point Plan for a democratic post-Ayatollah Iran, framed as a secular democratic republic with free elections, abolition of the death penalty and equality between men and women.
The NCRI said Resistance Units inside Iran carried out 150 actions across Tehran and 27 other cities to mark the PMOI’s 61st anniversary, including demonstrations, graffiti, banners and projections.
The slogan running through the actions was: “No to the Shah, No to the Mullahs”, explicitly rejecting both the existing Islamic Republic and restoration of the monarchy.
Female opposition extends into Iran’s prisons too. Three women political prisoners issued defiant messages this week, including Afsaneh Fallahi, who the NCRI says is under sentence of death at Evin Prison.
Meanwhile Iran’s confrontation with Washington is again escalating dangerously. Shipping through the Strait of Hormuz has plunged following attacks on vessels, while US Energy Secretary Chris Wright suggested that a nuclear agreement might ultimately have to await a future Iranian government.
It is probable that a future government may be shaped by Rajavi and Maimanat.
This article was first published by Daily Express
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