Report on 8th of March in Brussels

10 March 2008. A World to Win News Service.

More than 1,000 people, the vast majority of them women, took part in a march in the streets of Brussels on Saturday 8 March to celebrate International Women’s Day. Women and men from Belgium, Iran, Turkey, Kurdistan and Afghanistan, as well as Nepal, Iraq, North Africa and other European countries, joined together to protest the oppression of women in all its forms, from the denial of basic rights under Islamic regimes and in other countries where women are punished for behaviour not permitted by religion, to the Western countries where women have gained legal equality, to one degree or another, but are still oppressed by the system and culture of capitalism.

This march was organised by the Iranian group Karzar (Women’s Campaign for the Abolition of all Misogynist and Gender-Based Legislation and Islamic Punitive Laws against Women in Iran), in cooperation with the Belgian Left Socialist Party. It was also supported by a Kurdish group from Turkey, which joined the demonstration.

The march began with a rally in front of the U.S. embassy, passed by the European Parliament and ended in front of the embassy of the Islamic Republic of Iran. At the start, women of different nationalities condemned U.S. war mongering and its anti-women nature. Among other speakers, a woman from Iraq and another from Afghanistan talked about the deteriorating situation for women under the U.S.-led occupations. These speeches exposed the hypocrisy of American claims to have grabbed these countries to liberate women and bestow democracy upon the people.

The path of the demonstration had a political message: a protest against imperialism (U.S. and European) and also the Islamic regime in Iran. While standing up against a regime whose religious fundamentalist ideology justifies the undisguised oppression of women, the marchers also announced that they have no intention of relying on any of the imperialists who are waiting to seize the opportunity and take advantage of the cause of women and the people’s struggle in the third world and the Middle East in particular. The message was also that women in the imperialist countries, including Belgium, despite legal equality, are an oppressed sex there as well. They face discrimination and inequality in terms of jobs, wages and in other fields. They are oppressed by the patriarchal family, with the burden of childcare and housework largely on their shoulders and threatened by violence throughout society. They are treated as sex objects, not people, as commodities, whether in forms considered perfectly acceptable by society or the traffic in women and prostitution.

The demonstration ended as youthful protestors of different nationalities tied their hands together and together raised them high, shouting “Down with the Islamic Republic of Iran” and “Down with the anti-woman regime” and sang the Karzar theme song. This last part of the march was particularly satisfying to the protestors because during the previous weeks, the police had said they would not permit them to head toward the Iranian embassy. This provoked objections and protests on the part of the organizers and many other people. Faxes, e-mails and letters of protest from all over Europe and many other parts of the world, including the U.S., flooded the office of the local mayor, whom the police said was responsible for the ban. The march preparation committee was on the verge of organising a demonstration in front of the mayor’s office and the press was taking up the controversy when the police and the mayor both conceded permission for this last leg.

After the march, demonstrators gathered in an auditorium at the Brussels Free University (UBL) located opposite the Iranian embassy. Solidarity messages were read from Afghanistan (8 March women’s group, the Revolutionary Youth Movement and the Democratic Organisation of Afghani refugees in Europe), the women’s committee of a group of Turks and Kurds in Belgium, and an Iranian anti-war group in the UK (HOPI). Also featured was a message of solidarity from the U.S. titled “International Women’s Day 2008: We Stand With Iranian Women” signed by more than a hundred of women activists, intellectuals, artists and personalities. A solidarity march was scheduled to take place in the streets of Los Angeles, along with events in San Francisco and New York.

This message said, in part, “We women in the U.S. are proud to stand with Iranian women who are fighting on two fronts: against the anti-woman oppression of the Islamic Republic of Iran and the war threats of the U.S. government. When a woman is lashed, our bodies, too, feel pain. When a woman is stoned, our own blood is spilled. What happens to any of our sisters, whatever patriarchal horror is inflicted in Iran or anywhere, affects all of us. When one woman is degraded, silenced, abused, or murdered, all women are harmed.”

The last part of the programme for 8 March was a celebratory cultural evening. Poems written by women reflected the rebellion of women against their imprisonment in the family and society. There was also a short play called Rose (Flower) by a progressive director Syrous Kafaii. Gisso Shakeri, the progressive composer-performer and campaign activist, sang her songs in Kurdish, Lori (the language of a people in Iran), Afghani and Farsi.

The day before the march a seminar was held to discuss the liberation of women and Karzar’s work over the three years since it was launched. More than a hundred people, mostly women, took part. While the achievements of Karzar and its influence on the Iranian women’s movement were addressed by most of the speakers, the main discussion concentrated on the obstacles to Karzar’s advance. Much of the debate centred on the relationship between the struggle for the liberation of women and the overall revolutionary struggle. There has been a very strong belief among the left movement in Iran that the struggle for socialism in itself is enough and that there is no need today for a specific struggle for women’s liberation or a women’s movement. As some people pointed out, this idea loses sight of the fact that the oppression of women is a central feature of class society and that the emancipation of mankind is inconceivable without the emancipation of the oppressed sex. In fact,
as Lenin said, a measure of the thoroughness of any revolution is the degree to which it mobilises and emancipates women. Another target of criticism was the tendency to overemphasize the importance of women’s economic demands or subordinate the women’s movement to the “workers movement”, conceived as the movement for the economic demands of the workers, as if the most important goal of the proletariat were not the emancipation of all of humanity.

The tendency to liquidate the emancipation of women in the name of “the class struggle”, in both rightist and “leftist” forms, has had a devastating effect on the revolutionary movement in Iran. For example, after the revolution that toppled the Shah, when Ayatollah Khomeini and his regime attacked women’s rights, many so-called left organisations did not take this seriously. Instead of mobilising women and men to defend women’s basic rights, they argued that women should have more tolerance for this kind of oppression “because the class struggle is more important than wearing the hijab”. We have seen the result of such an attitude: the revolution was betrayed and today’s regime represents only a new form of reactionary rule and oppression. These discussions were clearly seen as very relevant to Karzar’s future. They stimulated much thinking and a desire among the participants to continue grappling with these issues in the future.

The seminar ended with a presentation on Simone de Beauvoir on the centenary of the birth of the French thinker whose work had a strong influence on the modern women’s movement.