Using Women

Nobody doubts that the trespass of a foreign country’s forces into one’s country is a national security issue that those responsible for guarding the borders cannot ignore. But what provides credibility and legitimacy to a country’s response to such possible violation is the way the apparent violated country responds. Among them, transparent reporting to the public and the world constitute an important and appropriate deterrent response.

This piece is not about a comprehensive evaluation of the illegal entry into a country’s territorial waters. It is about the importance that the propaganda and security of the regime attaches to the gender of one of the arrested sailors. Such an analysis is important from two perspectives: One is the use of women to attract world attention, while the other the damage that is caused to national security by using this method of political propaganda.

Following reports by Iranian new agencies that 15 British sailors who had trespassed into Iran’s territorial waters were detained by Iranian agents, Faye Turney who is the only woman member of the British force has been shown on the state television more often than the others, who while giving an apology confessed that she and her colleagues were in Iranian waters. She also expressed gratitude for the warm and humane treatment that she received from her captors. She appeared on television wearing a black headscarf and was presented as if she was a ranking military officer who had confessed about her deeds. Hearing and viewing what is being said and done only baffles the mind. Those that support the use of rational criteria and reason in foreign affairs and perplexed as they watch those who are responsible for protecting the national security are in fact acting against it.

If national security was really at stake, what was the need for repeatedly displaying images of the television confessions? Secondly, why was it necessary to begin these shows with the woman from amongst 14 other men, and make her sit in front of the cameras with the headscarf? Don’t those responsible for the national security realize that forcing a British military woman to wear a headscarf in front of a television camera demonstrates that the whole event has been orchestrated through coercion? Even if Iran were right on the key issue, doesn’t this manner of presenting it reduce its international impact?

Don’t those official responsible for the national security of Iran know that presenting a military woman with an imposed headscarf is interpreted as a humiliating and insulting act by her expatriates and those across the world sharing her culture, and don’t they realize that under such humiliation, even the words the woman sailor uttered was truthful, nobody would believe her, and that Iran’s national security would not be enhanced?

I raise a question from a woman’s perspective with Iranian authorities: In which specific are of life have women’s rights been recognized in Iran? We know that publishing women’s photographs and images in Iranian publications is a crime in Iran and laws severely punish any one who violates this provision. With such laws, how can they justify making such use of women on the world’s political stage? In a country according to whose laws the testimony of a Muslim woman is in most cases worthless, how come the authorities of the Islamic Republic suddenly give such credibility and authority to the words of a non-Muslim woman that is even greater than those given by men?

If the authorities of the Islamic Republic honestly wanted to defend the national security of Iran through the use of women, rather than displaying her on national television with an imposed scarf, they should have immediately released the captured woman sailor, with the commentary that in Islam a mother is truly respected.

It is unfortunate that this was not done and they chose to do something that world public opinion was witness to the violent and coercive methods in Iran. The bottom line for this episode is that the majority of world public opinion will not believe anything it hears from Iranian political actors regarding the detained British sailors, if they are supported with hundreds of pages of documents and evidence.

Mehrangiz Kar is an Iranian lawyer and human rights activist currently living in the United States of America.