The winner of the 2023 Sydney Peace Prize says women have a crucial role to play in ending the conflict in the Middle East, by removing the “head of the octopus”.
Actor and activist Nazanin Boniadi became instrumental in the Woman, Life, Freedom movement, following the death of 22-year-old Jina Mahsa Amini in September last year.
Amini died while in the custody of Iran’s so-called morality police after being arrested for wearing “improper clothing”. Iran recently sentenced two female journalists to up to seven years in prison following their coverage of her death.
The hashtag #WomanLifeFreedom has become a battle cry for women within and outside of Iran. Boniadi brought the issue to the world stage, advocating at the highest levels of the UN Security Council, the US Senate Human Rights Caucus, the British Parliament, and Australian Senate Inquiries.
“To recognise that women are the spark and the engine of this, and how scared this male, Shia, geriatric, intolerant, ruling elite, how petrified they are of women, makes you realise that the women are really the antidote to this regime,” Boniadi tells me, in an interview via Zoom.
Oppressive laws in Iran have been expanded, since the beginning of this revolution more than a year ago. But Boniadi maintains there’s still a yearning for secularism, after almost half a century of fundamentalist rule under its two Supreme Leaders.
“Women and girls have been killed,” she says. “They’ve been blinded, gassed, tortured, raped, beaten, forcibly disappeared. The list goes on. Even as recently as a few weeks ago, yet another girls school in Iran was gassed. The world seems to move on, but that doesn’t mean these atrocities are not continuing to happen.”
Boniadi is urging the Australian government to list the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps — the military arm of Iran’s government — as a terrorist organisation. She’s also calling on technology companies, like Germany’s Bosch, to stop providing cameras to the Islamic Republic, which is using them to surveil women who are defying hijab laws.
In Australia, we speak of ‘male allies’ and ‘active bystanders’ in the workplace and society. Men are taking it a step further in Iran by standing alongside their friends, sisters, mothers and daughters against this “gender apartheid regime”. The vast majority of protesters killed in the past year have been young men.
As for risks to her own life, US-based Boniadi remains pragmatic: “What grounds me is that it pales in comparison to the risks taken by the people inside Iran. Brave dissidents and protesters who are quite literally risking their lives. I get awarded for my activism. They get thrown in jail.”
Speaking about the conflict in the Middle East, Boniadi says 70 percent of the funding for Hamas comes from Iran. Hezbollah is also an Iranian proxy, fully funded by the regime. As long as the “misogynistic, murderous and repressive Islamic Republic” remains, the region will not be stable and peace will not be possible, according to Boniadi.
“We can do everything we can do to fight the tentacles, but as long as we don’t address the head of the octopus then they will continue their nefarious actions,” she says. “As long as they enablers are enabled, then peace will be elusive.”
The Sydney Peace Prize Laureate will deliver a lecture at Sydney Town Hall on the evening of the 2nd of November.
This will be followed by a panel interview featuring Australian-born Middle Eastern political scientist Dr Kylie Moore-Gilbert, who was recently released from 804 days of Iranian imprisonment. They will be joined by Iranian-Australian journalist and author, Shokoofeh Azar, whose novel The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree was nominated for the International Booker Prize.
Click here to find out more or purchase tickets to the 2023 Sydney Peace Prize Award Ceremony and Lecture.