Listen to the Women and Girls of Iran
It was gigantic and staring at me. Everyone around seemed as mesmerized by it as I was: an eye, wide open. It was staring at the sky, too, and it covered most of the steps of Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park at the far end of the oblong Roosevelt Island on the East River, an unlikely urban cable car stop away from Manhattan. In the background, lurking in the shadows, stood the 39-story United Nations building, proud and self-confident.
In that park, at the bottom of the steps that morning of November 28, 2022, every spoken word and every single stare were targeted at the United Nations, at the United Nations and Iran.
The eye, — also known as The Offered Eyes — is actually a famous artwork by Iranian visual artist Shirin Neshat. Along with other artists—Iranians, of course, and among them the musician Mehrnam Rastegari and the actress Sepdieh Moafi, but also the American singer Jon Batiste and the French photographer JR—Shirin Neshat had taken possession of this place, a symbol of freedom and peace. In this urban garden, she focused her voice with the ones of activists around a single message and a series of art installations, Eyes on Iran. Hillary Clinton sat among them, and so did a survivor of Saddam Hussein’s regime, Zainab Salbi, now a board member of one of the most influential networks of women in the world, Vital Voices, and its president, Alyse Nelson.
United by the same fight, they shout, paint, photograph, act, sing, speak, demand, protest, and insist.
Look at the women and girls of Iran, they all say.
Do you hear their popular revolt?
And look at the bloody repression against them.
How can you, Ambassadors to the United Nations, continue polite conversations with Iranian representatives about the condition of women in the world when women are, within your own country, daily victims of your theocratic regime?
We must remove Iran from the U.N.’s Commission on the Status of Women (CSW). The fact that Iran is a member is a bitter irony.
Hillary R. Clinton
This Monday, November 28, was a relatively sunny, calm, and ordinary New York day. Yet, it carried with it a memory that many have undoubtedly forgotten. On this same day in 1943, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin met in Tehran to discuss the Allied military strategy and the post-war reorganization. At this historic conference, Stalin accepted the American idea of creating a new international body, the United Nations.
Fast forward six decades. A series of disruptions and conflicts are challenging every aspect of the world and mankind: the war in Ukraine, of course, has yielded significant human suffering, energy and economic crises; the climate change and environmental have been accepted as a global threat—the U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres recently worried about humanity becoming “a weapon of mass extinction.” Forgotten wars are burning in so many places, and repressive, rights-denying authoritarian regimes keep casting shadows over Burma or Afghanistan. Health and public health systems, finally, remain weakened by the consequences of the Covid 19 pandemic.
Echoing these multiple plights, a background noise of hope has resounded from the streets of Iranian cities. Its murmur are cries for genuine reform. The outrage of a new generation of Iranian women and girls—and men, too—is reverberating worldwide, and Roosevelt Island is no exception. The Iranian youth want to remove their authoritarian and theocratic regime. They no longer hide their revulsion for a brutal clique who rule with impunity.
The revolt started on September 13, 2022, when the so-called Morality Police arrested a young Kurdish-Iranian woman of 22, Jîna Mahsa Amini, outside a Tehran subway station. Her crime was to wear her hijab improperly. She died three days later in a hospital, allegedly of a heart attack, the authorities said, but actually because of wounds that the police had inflicted on her, according to other women detained along with her. Mahsa Amini’s death triggered a wave of protests. In homage to Mahsa Amini, now a martyr, young Iranian women across the country cut their hair, disposed of their veils, and tirelessly chanted, ‘Woman, life, freedom.’
“So, I stand here honoring her memory, as well as the more than 400 other Iranians who have since been killed, protesting her death and protesting for their freedom, and the tens of thousands who have been arrested,” said the 2016 U.S. presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton.
It’s not over until the Iranian people say it’s over.
JR, Photographer
All eyes are on Iran, say these artists and activists in unison. All eyes are watching these women. They ask for a new world without fear of prison or torture. Their cries, their struggles, and their hopes have resonated across the country’s borders. Suddenly, at least for now, the world remembers to bear witness to the Iranian regime, its morality police, and the actions of the Mullahs.
“The campaign Eyes on Iran is intended to make sure that the public does not forget or ignore the brutal crackdown occurring on Iranian women and girls,” Hillary Clinton explained. “It is a plea to the press of the world to continue covering this horrible series of events. We beg you because this story is a story that has so much depth and importance to all of us.”
Shirin Nes
