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NEWS & LETTERS, April - May 2007Woman As ReasonIWD 2007: the struggle continuesby Terry Moon In Asia and the Middle East, International Women's Day (IWD) demonstrations and demands reveal the revolutionary nature of women when they are determined to create a new human world. It was just this determination expressed on IWD 2006 in a highpoint that has been brutally attacked ever since. Last IWD, we wrote, "What was new internationally was the breadth and depth of the demonstrations; the new leadership, some of which arose from the poorest, most exploited; and that the Reason expressed revealed a new militancy, and demands so total that to meet them would mean a transformation of existing society." The demonstrations in 2006 had been extraordinary, especially in IRAN, where over 1,000 marched for freedom in Tehran and demonstrations for Iranian women's freedom stretched from Germany to Canada and from The Hague to cities throughout the U.S. Now Iran's totalitarian government is trying five women and holding four others for participating in a legal demonstration in June 2006--a demonstration brutally attacked by police, including women police recruited to deliver just such beatings (see February-March N&L, "Restive currents below Iran's theocratic rule". While such beatings and arrests are meant to cow the thousand who demonstrated on IWD last year, they have not stopped women from fighting a law permitting the stoning of women to death for adultery, or the "One Million Signatures Campaign" demanding an end to discriminatory Shari'a laws. Furthermore, women continued their remarkable defiance at a new demonstration at the site of the trial for the five feminist organizers and 33 more women were hauled off to Evin prison, where the torture of political prisoners is common, and immediately began a hunger strike. RETROGRESSION REIGNS To see how badly retrogression has taken hold in IRAQ, compare IWD today to 2004, when almost 1,000 women marched through the streets and the poster of the Organization of Women's Freedom in Iraq (OWFI) showed a woman with her hair blowing in the wind. This year, so dangerous has it become, Yanar Mohammed, president of OWFI, tells us: "We are preparing for a symbolic IWD event in our Baghdad headquarters. We are not sure how many of us can make it on that day." Yanar describes this year's poster: "Although the poster may look gloomy, still it reflects our turbulent reality and a strong determination that our struggles continue until a better day comes." Yanar has been under a death threat from Islamic fanatics for over a year, and recently Houzan Mahmoud, an OWFI organizer and speaker based in London, was also threatened with death. In AFGHANISTAN, the Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan also decided it was not safe to celebrate IWD with a demonstration and held their event of speakers, theater and song in a Kabul hotel. Malalai Joya, the young woman who has ceaselessly challenged the Northern Alliance thugs that the U.S. continues to fund lavishly, is also under death threat, must change sleeping places nightly, wear the burka that she hates, and travel with bodyguards. Last year, PALESTINIAN women challenged Hamas supporters who called IWD "alien to Palestinian culture and tradition." But after the criminal bombing of Lebanon by Israel, Hezbollah's shelling of Israeli civilians, the increased support won by the fundamentalists of Hezbollah and Hamas, and most recently the assassination by suspected Hamas security forces of three women believed to be prostitutes--execution-style--Palestinian women this year confined their demonstration to protesting Israeli checkpoints. SECOND NEGATIVITY IS KEY What is undeniable after 40 years of the Women's Liberation Movement is the development of women's internationalism: masses in action and IDEAS which pass back and forth, get developed and deepened, and have become the dominant force today. The desire to be comprehended as whole human beings takes on more meaning as women in country after country take up the cry and develop it anew for their own circumstances. When rulers and reactionaries are confronted by a highpoint of women's militant internationalism, they react with brutal repression aimed at killing any thought of revolution, and any person who holds that thought. Women as force and revolutionary Reason means not only witnessing oppression and extending solidarity. It means participating in the dialectics of revolution, working out the second negation--the creating of the new--in life and thought. It is why the Left--in the U.S. and worldwide, if they are actually FOR a new human society--must stop ignoring or belittling women's struggle for freedom and see, as Marx did, that not only is women's freedom a measure of how free a society is, it is the measure of how deep and total revolution must become. |
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