Iran, retreats and surprising advances
Stop the presses
Iran’s government has shut down the magazine Zanan after 17 years and 151 issues, ending its advocacy of women’s rights and its fearless exposures of wrongs against women under the current regime.
By Wendy Kristianasen

The closure of the magazine Zanan (Women) on 28 January clearly shows that women’s rights activists in Iran face growing repression. The grounds for closure were that it “endangered the spiritual, mental and intellectual health of its readers” and gave them the idea of “insecurity in society, disturbed public rights, weakened military and revolutionary institutes.” It published articles that “led people to believe that the Islamic Republic is unsafe for women” (1).

This was just a pretext to close the magazine because the women’s rights movement was working, through the Campaign for Equality (mainly but not all female), to get a million Iranians to sign a petition calling for a change to laws that discriminate against women (2). The peaceful gathering of signatures has been under way since 2006, attended by online blogs and YouTube videos.

Shahla Sherkat, 52, a divorcee with two children and a degree in psychology from Tehran University, is a veteran campaigner. She began Zanan in 1991 so that women could find out what mattered to them; given the inclement atmosphere of Iranian journalism, the magazine’s longevity, 151 issues over 17 years, is a tribute to her careful, effective stewardship. She used to say: “I cannot write about everything so I am not going to modify the truth in what I can write.” This is why Zanan was widely respected, and, just as important in Iran, respectful.

Its closure is backward step for the authorities and the loss of an important advocate for women’s rights. Sherkat is fighting for its reopening, as one would expect of her. In the days after the revolution, she struggled to find a post in a newspaper, the state-run Zan-e Rouz (Today’s Woman). In 1990, when it restricted articles to women’s rights within an Islamic framework, she opened Zanan.

In 2001 she was sentenced to four months’ imprisonment on vaguely worded security provisions for taking part in a conference in Berlin, a forum for discussion of the February 2000 parliamentary election at which the reformist Muhammad Khatami swept to victory: the event was disrupted by opponents of Khatami and the new Tehran government. Sherkat has been recognised: in 2005 she received the Louis Lyons Award from the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University, and the Courage in Journalism Award from the International Women’s Media Foundation.

Rights that others take for granted
Zanan’s writers have sought to expose honour killings, the sex trade, marital abuse, etc. Back issues (3) have such stories as “Ending the stoning of women” and “I defended my self-respect” (about a woman who relinquished her right to seek the execution of a murderer). It covered activist Shirin Ebadi’s Nobel peace prize award and wrote of the meaning of this for Iranian women. There have been reports about women parliamentarians; violence against women; the plight of women in south Lebanon. Its last issue featured Benazir Bhutto and ran an interview with Asma Jahangir, a member of the UN human rights team.

Zanan addressed rights that people outside Iran take for granted (4). In Iran, women still face widespread discrimination under the law and are excluded from areas of public life; they cannot be full judges in a criminal or revolutionary court or stand for the presidency. They do not have equal rights in marriage, divorce, child custody or inheritance. The legal age for marriage is 13 but fathers can apply for permission to marry their daughters younger, and to much older men. Criminal harm suffered by a woman is less severely punished. Evidence given by women in court is worth half that of men. There are random attacks too: last year intelligence minister Gholam Hossein Ejei accused the women’s rights movement of being part of an “enemy conspiracy to bring about a soft subversion of the Islamic Republic”.

Zanan was both stimulus and encouragement for a generation of current events and investigative journalists. Its reports on women’s concerns and practical solutions usually managed to stay just on the right side of what press bodies considered acceptable and to avoid grounds for closure and prosecution.

A new generation
Sherkat’s and Zanan’s legacy is apparent in a new generation of women activists; they include 33 arrested in March 2007 outside a courthouse where they were protesting at the unfair trial of five women charged with organising a peaceful demonstration in June 2006 for an end to legal discrimination.

Mahboubeh Abbasgholizadeh, 50, a writer and activist with a BA in Islamic sciences and MSc in communications, was among the 33. An active member of the Stop Stoning Forever campaign, which tries to win reprieves for those sentenced to death, and of the Campaign for Equality initiatives, she has been imprisoned for a month; she went to jail as an NGO activist and came out a feminist. Last year she was charged with “illegal assembly, collusion against national security, disruption of public order”; her case remains without closure, which is used to intimidate her.

Parvin Ardalan, 36, another activist, took part in the June 2006 demonstration and was sentenced on vaguely worded national security provisions to six months’ imprisonment (she is now awaiting an appeal). She won the 2007 Olof Palme award for outstanding achievement but was taken off the aircraft about to fly to Sweden. Her sister went instead and Parvin gave her acceptance speech by video (5). In an interview with the Madrid newspaper La Razon, Ardalan said: “The government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has stepped up the pressure on women”. She admitted she was sometimes afraid but “we have nothing to hide. We know we’re leaving ourselves open to imprisonment again but we carry on meeting because fear is already a part of our lives.”

Shadi Sadr, 34, has a BA in law and MA in international law from Tehran University; she founded Iran’s first women’s legal counselling clinic in 2004. She takes on cases pro bono, from teenage runaways to women sentenced to death by stoning for prostitution or for murdering abusive husbands. She is a key activist in the Stop Stoning Forever campaign.

That Iranian women have an active a role in public life is tribute to generations of campaigners who ensured that their rights were not forgotten during and after the 1980-88 war with Iraq. Shahla Sherkat was part of that tradition.

There have been gains. Women MPs introduced 33 new bills in the 2000-04 parliament, 16 of which became law: the minimum age for marriage for girls increased from 9 to 13; divorced mothers won custody over their sons to age seven (previously it was until two). There was even a proposal that Iran sign the UN Convention on the elimination of all forms of discrimination against women (Cedaw).

Women can now be judicial advisers, seek divorce, or refuse to let their husband take a second wife. They can stand for public office (and are beginning to do so in the city councils, notably in Tehran) and hold managerial positions in the white-collar sector. And they are 64% of Iran’s university students. In spite of the latest blow signalled by Zanan’s closure, Parvin Ardalan affirms that “the women’s movement in Iran is powerful and unstoppable.”

April 30, 2008
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Dumb as We Wanna Be

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
It is great to see that we finally have some national unity on energy policy. Unfortunately, the unifying idea is so ridiculous, so unworthy of the people aspiring to lead our nation, it takes your breath away. Hillary Clinton has decided to line up with John McCain in pushing to suspend the federal excise tax on gasoline, 18.4 cents a gallon, for this summer’s travel season. This is not an energy policy. This is money laundering: we borrow money from China and ship it to Saudi Arabia and take a little cut for ourselves as it goes through our gas tanks. What a way to build our country.

When the summer is over, we will have increased our debt to China, increased our transfer of wealth to Saudi Arabia and increased our contribution to global warming for our kids to inherit.

No, no, no, we’ll just get the money by taxing Big Oil, says Mrs. Clinton. Even if you could do that, what a terrible way to spend precious tax dollars — burning it up on the way to the beach rather than on innovation?

The McCain-Clinton gas holiday proposal is a perfect example of what energy expert Peter Schwartz of Global Business Network describes as the true American energy policy today: “Maximize demand, minimize supply and buy the rest from the people who hate us the most.”

Good for Barack Obama for resisting this shameful pandering.

But here’s what’s scary: our problem is so much worse than you think. We have no energy strategy. If you are going to use tax policy to shape energy strategy then you want to raise taxes on the things you want to discourage — gasoline consumption and gas-guzzling cars — and you want to lower taxes on the things you want to encourage — new, renewable energy technologies. We are doing just the opposite.

Are you sitting down?

Few Americans know it, but for almost a year now, Congress has been bickering over whether and how to renew the investment tax credit to stimulate investment in solar energy and the production tax credit to encourage investment in wind energy. The bickering has been so poisonous that when Congress passed the 2007 energy bill last December, it failed to extend any stimulus for wind and solar energy production. Oil and gas kept all their credits, but those for wind and solar have been left to expire this December. I am not making this up. At a time when we should be throwing everything into clean power innovation, we are squabbling over pennies.

These credits are critical because they ensure that if oil prices slip back down again — which often happens — investments in wind and solar would still be profitable. That’s how you launch a new energy technology and help it achieve scale, so it can compete without subsidies.

The Democrats wanted the wind and solar credits to be paid for by taking away tax credits from the oil industry. President Bush said he would veto that. Neither side would back down, and Mr. Bush — showing not one iota of leadership — refused to get all the adults together in a room and work out a compromise. Stalemate. Meanwhile, Germany has a 20-year solar incentive program; Japan 12 years. Ours, at best, run two years.

“It’s a disaster,” says Michael Polsky, founder of Invenergy, one of the biggest wind-power developers in America. “Wind is a very capital-intensive industry, and financial institutions are not ready to take ‘Congressional risk.’ They say if you don’t get the [production tax credit] we will not lend you the money to buy more turbines and build projects.”

It is also alarming, says Rhone Resch, the president of the Solar Energy Industries Association, that the U.S. has reached a point “where the priorities of Congress could become so distorted by politics” that it would turn its back on the next great global industry — clean power — “but that’s exactly what is happening.” If the wind and solar credits expire, said Resch, the impact in just 2009 would be more than 100,000 jobs either lost or not created in these industries, and $20 billion worth of investments that won’t be made.

While all the presidential candidates were railing about lost manufacturing jobs in Ohio, no one noticed that America’s premier solar company, First Solar, from Toledo, Ohio, was opening its newest factory in the former East Germany — 540 high-paying engineering jobs — because Germany has created a booming solar market and America has not.

In 1997, said Resch, America was the leader in solar energy technology, with 40 percent of global solar production. “Last year, we were less than 8 percent, and even most of that was manufacturing for overseas markets.”

The McCain-Clinton proposal is a reminder to me that the biggest energy crisis we have in our country today is the energy to be serious — the energy to do big things in a sustained, focused and intelligent way. We are in the midst of a national political brownout.

Australia to China: Let's Not Be Friends
Does the West have a new secret weapon in dealing with China in the person of Kevin Rudd, the new prime minister of Australia?

Rudd is the only Western leader who speaks Chinese, and his Chinese is pretty good at that. But deeper still is Rudd's understanding of China.

Australian China scholar Geremie Barme unpacks Rudd's marvelous speech, given at Beijing University last week, in which he bluntly called on China to recognize its human rights problems in Tibet.

Most Western leaders probably would have either punted or come on too strong. Rudd's tone, however, was pitch perfect.

Rudd's brilliance in the speech involves turning the Chinese term "friend" on its head. Friend (pengyou in Chinese) and frienship (youyi) are two of the most distorted concepts in modern China culture. In modern China, a friend is someone who will do you favors and who expects favors in return. A "foreign friend" is someone the Chinese party-state expects will carry water for them and NEVER criticize them.

Whenever a Chinese official called me "foreign friend" (waiguo pengyou), I knew some type of horrible deal would soon be asked or expected of me.

"To be a friend of China, the Chinese people, the party-state or, in the reform period, even a mainland business partner," Barme writes, "the foreigner is often expected to stomach unpalatable situations, and keep silent in the face of egregious behaviour. A friend of China might enjoy the privilege of offering the occasional word of caution in private; in the public arena he or she is expected to have the good sense and courtesy to be 'objective.' that is to toe the line, whatever that happens to be. The concept of 'friendship' thus degenerates into little more than an effective tool for emotional blackmail and enforced complicity."

So what did Rudd do? He went back -- way back -- into Chinese history, to the 7th century AD, and used another word for friendship (zhengyou).

"A true friend," Rudd said, "is one who can be a zhengyou, that is a partner who sees beyond immediate benefit to the broader and firm basis for continuing, profound and sincere friendship."

"Rudd's tactic," Barme wrote, "was to deftly sidestep the vice-like embrace of [the current] model of friendship by substituting another.

"A strong relationship, and a true friendship," he told the students, "are built on the ability to engage in a direct, frank and ongoing dialogue about our fundamental interests and future vision."

This type of engagement could be a model for how the West interacts with China. Enough with the back door, private stuff that Western powers have relied on to engage with China -- private conversations that Chinese officials can then ignore. But at the same time, stop the screaming, with its hint of "Yellow Peril," racism and fear. Rudd got it right. It remains to be seen whether others can follow his lead.

April 27, 2008

Chaos over Paul cuts short gathering

BY ANJEANETTE DAMON
adamon@rgj.com

After a super-majority of Ron Paul supporters captured control of the Republican state convention Saturday, state party officials abruptly canceled the event without electing delegates to the national convention.

Early in the day, state delegates supporting Paul's continued pursuit of the Republican nomination voted through a rules change that forced the state party to abandon its preset ballot of potential national convention delegates and open up the race to the rest of the state delegates.

The vote followed a rousing speech by Paul of Texas, who said his presidential campaign will continue as long as he has support.

But as the convention continued into the evening, chairman Bob Beers said the party's contract for the hall at the Peppermill Resort Casino had expired and the event would be rescheduled.

"Due to a rules change that left us on an overtime basis, we will recess the convention until a date that we are going to announce next week," Beers told a shocked crowd, which stood silent for a few seconds before erupting in boos.

As Beers was escorted out of the building, a short-lived effort to rescue the convention was launched by party activist Mike Weber. Although several hundred Paul supporters stayed, they weren't strong enough to make a quorum to continue the convention.

Throughout the confusion, hecklers battled for the attention of delegates who supported U.S. Sen. John McCain of Arizona.

"McCain supporters leave!" one man shouted.

"McCain supporters stay!" a woman answered.

"We're supposed to be on the same team!" another woman shouted.

In a written statement, party chairwoman Sue Lowden said the vote to allow self-nominations doubled the number of people competing for 31 spots to the national convention. That overwhelmed the party's capacity to process the votes.

"Unfortunately, with the rule changes implemented this morning, we did not have time to complete the process," she said. "Our contract for the meeting space had expired, as had our budget, and ballots were unable to be physically produced by the nominations committee. We had to temporarily recess the convention."

Heading to Vegas?

She is exploring whether to move the convention to Las Vegas to take advantage of reduced costs for the Cox Pavilion, which Clark County Democrats used for their convention do-over.

Beers denied the decision was meant to undermine Paul's efforts to win national convention delegates from Nevada.

"I don't see how it does," Beers said as he raced out of the building. "We've given Ron Paul's guy a list of the credentialed delegates and a list of the nominees for national delegates."

Votes that had been cast to elect nine of the 31 delegates were sealed in envelopes and locked in a safety deposit box, a party official said.

But Paul supporter Chloie Leavitt, of Overton, left angry.

"I do blame Bob Beers," she said. "But not only Bob Beers. This was an organized effort to promote the agenda of a few people, the party leaders, over we the people."

Although he is the presumptive nominee, McCain came in third in the Nevada caucuses, the first step in nominating delegates to the county, state and national conventions. That left him with few natural supporters at the state event.

Despite a Paul majority in delegates, McCain will win Nevada support at the national convention, said Ryan Erwin, a Republican consultant from Las Vegas who supports McCain.

"This is still a McCain convention," Erwin said, adding that enthusiasm for Paul's speech was for his message, not necessarily his candidacy. "There are parts of his message that the entire Republican base likes.

"But at the end of the day, part of the job of being a national delegate is to do what is best for the party in November. And that means supporting the party's nominee."

Paul, who came in second in the Nevada caucuses, actively worked to ensure his supporters attended both the county and state conventions.

His contingent came to the state convention prepared for battle. They had a row of printers to print ballots for their supporters to the national convention. They set up a communications network using text messages to cell phones to make sure everyone voted correctly on motions that would benefit their effort. And they scoured the rules for opportunities to level the playing field.

"On the one side you have a candidate with principles, on the other side you have Tammany Hall," said Kelly Edinger, a Reno Paul supporter. "I'm in it for Ron Paul. I still believe he can win."

Earlier in the day, former Gov. Mitt Romney, who won the Nevada Caucuses, delivered a speech calling for a unified backing of McCain.

"I know Americans are going to choose a great patriot, a man who has been tested and proven," he said to loud cheers.

But Paul's 10-minute speech drove the crowd of 1,200 delegates into frenzied applause. They interrupted him repeatedly with standing ovations.

Acknowledging that he likely won't win the nomination, Paul said his presidential campaign will continue as long as he has supporters.

"Our campaign has continued, is doing well and improving, even though we know exactly what the numbers are," Paul said. "But the message is worthwhile. Your vote can really count if you vote for limitation of government power and spending."

Reactions

Some longtime party activists complained about what they called a disruptive influence on the proceedings. Others thought it pointless since McCain has enough delegates nationally to secure the nomination.

"McCain won fair and square," Boulder City delegate Daniel Hancock said to thunderous boos and cat calls. "So, at this point we are electing delegates not to fight out the nomination in Minneapolis, but probably rewarding people loyal to the party.

"We need to strike a compromise between perfect democracy and getting things done."

After Paul supporters displayed their strength by forcing a rules change with two-thirds of the vote, Bill Brainard, of Sparks, said he had no doubt they would elect most of the delegates to the national convention.

"We will be marginalized (at the national convention)," Brainard said. "We will be marginalized because we're a bunch of kooks. Am I concerned? Yeah."

Paul spokesman Jeff Greenspan said the walkout was a first in his 21-year career in politics.

"I've seen factions walk out, I've never seen a party walk out," he said. "I've never even heard of that."

Apr 13, 8:06 AM (ET)

By CHARLES BABINGTON

INDIANAPOLIS (AP) - Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton outlined a plan Saturday to keep more military-related manufacturing in the United States, calling it an economic and security priority.
Speaking at a plant here that builds transmissions for military vehicles, Clinton said she would limit the Defense Department's ability to buy foreign-made products, in part by making the agency consider the impact on U.S. jobs when it awards contracts.
The New York senator, seeking support in Indiana's May 6 Democratic presidential primary, said she would launch a "comprehensive review of our defense industrial base" to determine "where U.S. capabilities are lacking." It would involve doubling the Defense Department's basic and applied research operations.
Clinton said she also would:
_Beef up policies that ensure "that technologies and industries critical to U.S. national security are not sold off and outsourced to foreign governments."
_Strengthen policies requiring that certain "vital metals" used in military manufacturing are produced domestically.
_Spend $75 million to create an "Interagency Task Force on Industrial Espionage" to combat existing and potential security threats.
"Because of the Bush administration's failed policies, we're not just outsourcing jobs, we're outsourcing our security," Clinton told workers at the Allison Transmission plant. "We cannot remain a strong, free and prosperous nation if we continue to outsource industries essential to our national defense."