"Any attack on Iran will be good for the government"

Nobel laureate and human rights activist Shirin Ebadi discusses the plight of women in Iran, Bush's similarity to Ahmadinejad and why direct negotiations are the only solution.

By Michelle Goldberg

Read more: Books, Iran, Michelle Goldberg, Interviews, Authors, Books Interviews, Iraq War

Photo of Shirin Ebadi from shirinebadi.ir

May 15, 2006 | Shirin Ebadi's new book, "Iran Awakening: A Memoir of Revolution and Hope," opens with a chilling scene that underlines just how hazardous her human rights activism has been. In the fall of 2000, Ebadi, one of Iran's leading reformist lawyers, represented Parastou Forouhar, whose parents, dissident intellectuals, were butchered by government assassins. Their killings, part of a string of murders of regime critics carried out by the Ministry of Intelligence in the late '90s, were perpetrated with particular sadism -- the aging couple were stabbed repeatedly and then hacked to pieces.

In 2000, some of those involved in the murders were finally brought to trial. "The stakes could not be higher," writes Ebadi. "It was the first time in the history of the Islamic Republic that the state had acknowledged that it had murdered its critics, and the first time a trial would be convened to hold the perpetrators accountable."

The victims' lawyers were given 10 days to review massive stacks of government files on the case. Recalling an afternoon bent over the dossier, Ebadi writes, "I had reached a page more detailed, and more narrative, than any previous section, and I slowed down to focus. It was the transcript of a conversation between a government minister and a member of the death squad. When my eyes fell on the sentence that would haunt me for years to come, I thought I had misread. I blinked once, but it stared back at me from the page: 'The next person to be killed is Shirin Ebadi.' Me." As she recounts, she didn't have time to process the shock, because she needed to keep working. "Only after dinner, after my daughters went to bed, did I tell my husband. So, something interesting happened to me at work today, I began."

Neither death threats nor incessant harassment were ever able to stop Ebadi, 59, from challenging the Iranian regime on behalf of its most beleaguered citizens, and in 2003, her advocacy for Iranian women and human rights activists earned her the Nobel Peace Prize. In her often fascinating memoir, she tells of fighting for justice in a country where the rule of law has disappeared, replaced by a brutal, arbitrary absurdism worthy of a Persian Kafka.

Like many liberal intellectuals, Ebadi hated the shah and supported Iran's Islamic revolution, but it quickly turned on her. While only in her 20s, Ebadi had become one of Iran's first female judges. Once Ayatollah Khomeini took over, the same revolutionaries who had previously sought her support decreed that women jurists were un-Islamic. "In a cruel bureaucratic shuffle, I was appointed secretary of the same court I had once presided over as a judge," she writes.

No matter how many indignities she suffered, Ebadi refused to leave her country, eventually building a pro-bono law practice to represent the regime's victims. One of her most perverse cases involved the family of Leila Fathi, a young girl who was raped and murdered by three men. One of the men committed suicide in prison, and the other two were sentenced to death. Under Iranian law, though, a woman's life is worth only half that of a man's. "In this instance, the judge ruled that the 'blood money' for the two men was worth more than the life of the murdered nine-year-old girl, and he demanded that her family come up with thousands of dollars to finance their executions," Ebadi writes. The family ruined itself trying to raise the money; both Leila's father and brother were reduced to trying to sell their kidneys.

Ebadi waged both a legal and a media campaign on behalf of Leila's family. She didn't win them any measure of justice, but she focused both national and international attention on the regime's misogynistic abuses, taking great risks to do so. "We lived with daily examples of even prominent grand ayatollahs who had been defrocked (unheard of in Shia Islam) or placed under house arrest for speaking out against executions and harsh forms of criminal punishment, such as the chopping off of hands," she writes.

Ebadi would eventually be imprisoned, and her life was repeatedly endangered. But her determination to change Iran from within hasn't wavered. When the reformist President Mohammad Khatami was elected in 1997, many hoped for a loosening in the Iranian regime. "For a few stretches during the years of 1998 and 1999, the country experienced a flowering of open debate and freedom of the press that some optimistic souls called a Tehran spring," she writes.

The optimists have since been disappointed. Last year's election elevated the hard-line Mahmoud Ahmedinajad. Iran is now locked in an escalating confrontation with America over its nuclear program, and the government's rhetoric is militant and apocalyptic. In a despairing New York Times profile, Abbas Abdi, one of the hostage takers at the American embassy who later became a reformist, said the reform movement no longer exists. But Ebadi says she still believes that democracy will come to Iran from within, as long as America doesn't try to bomb it into being.

Salon spoke to Ebadi at her hotel during her recent visit to New York. A small woman who doesn't cover her hair outside of Iran, she spoke through a translator. Throughout, her voice was even and her manner impassive except when she was talking about the plight of Iranian women. Then she would softly, almost unconsciously pound her fist on the table.

In "Iran Awakening," you write that you didn't know how winning the Nobel Prize would affect your ability to work -- whether it would afford you a measure of protection, or give the authorities new motivation to crack down on you. How has your situation in Iran changed since then?

Working in the field of human rights is never easy. I already had difficulties before getting the prize. I had been in prison, and on several occasions they wanted to murder me. I'm used to getting threatening letters.

After I got the prize, my situation did not change inside the country. When I won, the radio and television -- the state radio and television -- did not even want to announce the news. It was only 24 hours later that one of the channels on TV -- at 11 p.m. in the evening, when practically everybody goes to bed -- announced the news. And then that was it.

So I won't say getting the prize has made things easier for me inside the country, but obviously at an international level, things have become much easier for me. Because of this my voice is better heard at the international level.

Next page: "I think if there is an attack against Iran, people will forget about their criticism, and will rally with the government"