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BY PHILIP WALZER
Source: The Virginian-Pilot; Date:Feb 22, 2006; Section:Hampton Roads; Page Number:13
NORFOLK — Women may vote, but they cannot hold high office.
They need their husbands’ approval to leave the country. Their testimony often counts half as much as a man’s.
And when they remarry, they automatically lose custody of their children.
“This legal system is not for Iran,” women’s rights activist Mehrangiz Kar said of her homeland Tuesday night at Old Dominion University. “It is for some other society from 200 years ago or 300 years ago.”
Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has drawn worldwide alarm for his suspected nuclear ambitions and his comments advocating the destruction of Israel. His ascendancy last year also has imperiled his own citizens, including female activists, Kar said.
Anyone challenging the government could be accused of working against Islam.
“That’s why it’s very dangerous in that political system,” Kar said. “That’s why I am here. I am not inside the country that I love.”
She received her law degree from the University of Tehran and has served as a public defender in Iran.
In 2000 , Kar was imprisoned after attending a conference in Germany to discuss political and social reform in Iran. She was released the next year and allowed to go to the United States to seek treatment for breast cancer.
Meanwhile, her husband, a cultural writer, remains under house arrest in Iran – retribution, many activists believe, for Kar’s outspokenness. She has not returned for fear of her safety.
Her speech at Webb Center was sponsored by the university’s Friends of Women’s Studies group. Kar focused not on her own story, but on the plight of Iranians.
“Not only women’s rights are violated by this government,” she said. “Human rights are violated by this political system, and this is terrible.”
Ahmadinejad does not speak for most Iranians, who tend to be fond of Americans, Kar said.
“It doesn’t mean that the majority of the Iranian people think like that,” Kar said. “They are staying in their homes. They are not on the streets.”
She said she did not know how the United States should respond, but sanctions might be counterproductive. “Hopefully, we don’t go toward some situation that the American people lose this love from Iranian people,” she said.
Kar’s bleak outlook was brightened by a few developments: The number of educated people in Iran is growing, she said, and a majority of university students are women.
“They can’t throw them away from the country like me, because they are many,” Kar said. “They will change the political future of Iran.”
--Mehrangiz Kar, who shared her story Tuesday night, left Iran in 2001 and fears returning.
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