Women and Suicide in Iran

Law, Marriage and Honour-Killing

S. Behnaz Hosseini

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000457605
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Drawing on feminist theory, as well as theory surrounding the correlation between poverty and suicide, this study explores the increased rate of suicide among women in western Iran. Based on empirical research, including interviews with women from the Kurdish region of the country, the author considers the marginalisation of Kurdish populations in Iran, the suppression of their rights, and violence against women in its various forms. With attention to family violence, such as direct physical or sexual assault, psychological bullying or through practices such as forced marriage or honour killings, the author also considers the political nature of such violence, as certain violent practices are enshrined in the Iranian constitution and legitimised in jurisprudential practice. A study of gendered violence and its effects, Women and Suicide in Iran will be of interest to scholars working in the fields of Sociology, Criminology and Middle Eastern Studies with interests in violence, gender and suicide.

1 Traditional society and violence against women

DOI: 10.4324/9781003208501-1

This publication aims to break new ground in discussing the painful and difficult subject of gender violence—in its many different manifestations—in Iranian Kurdistan. The topic has lain dormant, at least until quite recently, and in fact has never been fully addressed. The fieldwork for the present study was conducted by the author in Iranian Kurdistan in 2018. Although my analysis of concepts such as honour, shame, patriarchy, and gender-based violence relate to women throughout the country, some aspects of honour-based violence (HBV) affect Iranian Kurds more severely than other communities in Iran.

Iran is the second-largest country in the Middle East, the 17th largest in the world, and with 87 million inhabitants, the 17th most populous. Its ethnic makeup is complex, and there are large socio-economic differences among the country’s regions. Iranian Kurdistan includes the provinces of West Azerbaijan, Kurdistan, Kermanshah, Ilam, and Hamadan, and borders Iraq and Turkey. There is also a significant Kurdish population in the North Khorasan Province in north-eastern Iran.

The Kurds themselves generally consider Iranian Kurdistan (eastern Kurdistan) to be one of the four parts of Greater Kurdistan, a roughly defined geo-cultural historical region where the Kurdish people make up the majority of the population. Greater Kurdistan is also comprised of parts of south-eastern Turkey (northern Kurdistan), northern Syria (western Kurdistan), and northern Iraq (southern Kurdistan). The majority of the 4.5 million Iranian Kurds are Sunni Muslims and are settled across the borders of Iran, Iraq, Turkey, and Syria (Koohi-Kamali, 2003). An additional four million Kurds are estimated to live in Iraq, 10–12 million in Turkey, and 600,000 in Syria (Eickelman, 1998: 203).

The capital of Kurdistan Province in Iran is Sanandaj. With a population of 414,069, it is the 23rd-largest city in Iran and the second-largest Kurdish city. Sanandaj was founded about 200 years ago, yet, in its short existence, it has grown to become the centre of Kurdish culture. Today, the population of Sanandaj is mainly Kurdish; it used to have an Armenian minority which gradually emigrated from the city. According to the latest census by the Iranian Statistical Centre in 2011, Kurdistan Province had almost 1.5 million inhabitants. Urban residents made up 66% of the total, while the rest lived in rural areas.

According to a labour force survey published by the Statistics Centre of Iran in 2018, the unemployment rate in Iran for 2017 was 12.1% in total: 10.2% for men and 19.8% for women. The percentage of unemployment in urban centres and in the countryside was 13.4% and 8.2%, respectively, while the unemployment rate for the regions of Kermanshah and North Khorasan was 21.6% and 9.7% (Statistical Centre of Iran, 2017–2018). In the Kurdish region of Iran, unemployment triggers a sense of vulnerability and causes individuals to fear for their future. Unemployment also creates a sense of loneliness and alienation due to meagre social support and non-existent government support such as social benefits, cash transfers, or loans. There is a large inequality gap between the Kurdish region and other regions, especially in the big cities.

Runciman (1966) points out that individuals perceive basic inequalities by comparing their position with the same “reference group” in the same category to understand their relative deprivation gap. For the whole community, however, other indicators of inequality are effective. A good overall measure of one’s standard of living in a society is the cost of food (Runciman, 1966). As incomes rise, the total percentage of income spent on food decreases, and the share of non-food items, such as education, health, housing, etc., grows. The lower the food costs in a society, the higher the society’s standard of living. In accordance with the Iranian Household Budget Survey from 1985 to 2017, the amount of income spent on food in urban Kurdistan was about 50% that of urban Iran, generally, while the share of food in the villages was very similar to villages in other areas. This was probably due to the general gap in living standards between rural and urban areas. According to the Statistical Centre of Iran, by 2017, the percentage allocated by households to food, in both rural and urban areas, was 37.2%, up by 13.9% compared to 2016.¹

After centuries of monarchic rule by bilingual Turkic- and Persian-speaking dynasties, and despite the multilingual, multi-ethnic diversity of the population, Persian nationalists under Reza Shah, who was in power from 1925 to 1941, declared that Iran could only have one national language and one national culture. Intensifying the nexus between language, culture, and race, they spread Persian Aryanism as a scientific fact, creating a nationalist discourse or, more precisely, a set of identitarian narratives on culture that would shape not only Iranian politics but also social science research, the writing of history, and public debate for the century to come. It is convenient here to use two (admittedly simplistic) labels to describe the mindsets: “nationalists” and “ethnicists”. The nationalists claimed to represent a reified Iranian nation, which the ethnicists argued is based on one ethnic group; the ethnicists sometimes referred to ethnic groups as nations without citizenship, in other words, those of Kurdish ethnicity were not citizens of Iran (Saleh, 2013: 204). Under Reza Shah, Kurds were no longer allowed to wear their traditional attire, a source of national pride. Kurds did not discard their attire, but rather kept it hidden, and the tribespeople in the mountains never really abandoned it at all (Roosevelt, 1947: 251).

The Kurdish regions in Iran enjoyed semi-autonomy until the late 1800s, but Kurdish claims for self-determination were suppressed by Reza Shah in the 1930s (Ghanea-Hercock, 2003: 12–16). In the aftermath of World War I, a major blow to the Kurdish quest for emancipation came when the 1920 Treaty of Sevres and later the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne quashed their dreams of being an independent state. The idea of Kurdish freedom returned during the occupation of Iran by Allied forces in 1941. As the Iranian army retreated and crumbled, much of its weaponry fell into Kurdish hands, while at the same time, many of the exiled Kurdish leaders were freed and were ready to return to their communities. The Soviet occupation of the area also emboldened the local Kurdish population. The indirect reliance of the Soviets on Kurdish tribes for the preservation of security in the region meant that the occupying power hesitated to subdue hopes for an independent statehood. In the end, the Soviets, who were not particularly trusted by the Kurds due to their history of brutality against them at the end of World War I, extended an official invitation to 31 local significant Kurdish chiefs to visit the Soviet Union (Eagleton, 1963: 14–16).

Soon afterwards, in the town of Mahabad in western Iran, a committee called the Society for the Revival of Kurdistan was formed, chaired by Qazi Muhammad. With Soviet support, on 22 January 1946, the short-lived Republic of Mahabad was established (Ansari, 2003: 88) and the Kurdish nationalists gained a foothold in Iran. Nevertheless, on 15 December of the same year, the Republic collapsed. This was mainly due to lack of tangible Soviet support and the opposition displayed by the tribes. Their opposition was heavily influenced by economic motives; for example, the tribesmen were severely affected by the loss of tobacco trade between them and the rest of the country, which was suspended following the Soviet presence (Roosevelt, 1947: 265). There was a heavy presence of government security forces in the Kurdish areas, and the activities of Kurdish separatist groups, such as the Iranian Kurdish Democratic Party, were closely monitored (Koohi-Kamali, 2003). Put somewhere else, the Kurds realised, following the withdrawal of the occupying army, how great their dependence had been on the Soviets economically and militarily. Finally, under pressure from the Western powers, including the United States, Iranian forces entered Mahabad, burnt Kurdish books, closed the printing presses, banned the language, and executed insurgents including Qazi Muhammad himself (McDowall, 2004: 245).

Introduction

The 1978–1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, which led to the overthrow of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, ended with the approval in December 1979 of a new theocratic constitution and the declaration of Sayyid Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini, known in the West as Ayatollah Khomeini, as supreme leader of Iran.

The Kurds participated in the revolution of 1979 and presented demands for a federal democratic state, the recognition of the Kurdish language, and the use of said language in education and publications. Several anti-regime demonstrations took place in the main Kurdish cities of Mahabad, Paveh, Kermanshah, Marivan, and Sanadaj (Maghsodi, 2001: 297). After the Kurds were denied a seat in the Assembly of Experts, which convened in 1979 to draw up the new constitution, Ayatollah Khomeini warned the Kurdish leaders that any attempts to undermine Iran’s territorial integrity would be crushed, and he sent the Revolutionary Guards to north-east Iran to tackle the Kurdish insurgency (Zabih, 1982: 85). Despite Khomeini’s warnings, in 1979, the Kurdish Democratic Party of Iran (founded in 1945) rebelled and demanded full self-determination, which the regime in Tehran perceived as an attempt at anti-Persian separatism (Hiro, 2013: 152). In response, Khomeini issued a Jihad and a Fatwa against the Iranian Kurds in the same year, declared its leaders enemies of the state, and initiated a military campaign against them. The hostilities continued well into 1980. Despite heavy casualties, the Kurdish leaders evaded capture and retreated to the mountains. The military campaign against the Kurds ended with hundreds of deaths and the banning of the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan. Oppression persisted through the 1980s. Widespread poverty and starvation, killings, and executions were common while Khomeini’s Jihad was still in effect. The 1979 rebellion eventually ended in 1982 with 10,000 Kurds killed and 200,000 displaced. The repression continued with killings, executions, and imprisonments, which, together with a lack of economic rejuvenation, further impoverished the region (Vali, 1998, 2003, 2014, 2015).

Unsurprisingly, the situation of the Kurds in Iran resurfaced during the Iran–Iraq War. Suffering and death were widespread, and Kurdistan underwent further social and economic destruction. In fact, by appealing to the patriotism of Iranians, the Islamic government consolidated its power over liberal voices in the country. The outbreak of the war occurred only shortly after the revolution, which in a way precipitated the “concentration and centralisation of power and the evolution of the instrument of oppression” (Saleh, 2013: 34). A wholesale oppression of the Kurdish people then began. According to Human Rights Watch, in addition to the destruction of many Kurdish villages, a large segment of the Kurdish population was displaced, and vast areas were contaminated with landmines (Human Rights Watch, 2019). It is estimated that 16 million landmines were laid during the Iran–Iraq War and are still located along the western border of Iran.²

On 28–29 June 1987, during the Iran–Iraq War, and although the city of Sardasht in West Azerbaijan Province on Iran’s border with Iraq was not considered a military target, Saddam Hussein attacked it with what is believed to be mustard gas. This city, where Kurds were the dominant ethnicity, ranked first in deaths from suicide in 1991. After the war, although there was some minimal reconstruction work done by the local business sector, the region continued to suffer from stark underdevelopment (Vali, 2020). Even now, after all these years, many of the survivors suffer from respiratory problems, while a large number of people suffer from long-term psychological and mental health problems as the result of the attack (Shaddox, 2007).

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Kurds supported the reformist Mohammad Khatami for president and enjoyed a short-lived, although not far-reaching, freedom to express themselves. A Kurdish party was established, which entered the Iranian Parliament in 1997. Newspapers and magazines started to be published in the Kurdish language; cultural and literary organisations were set up; and the first Shiite Kurd, Abdollah Ramazanzadeh, was appointed as governor of Iranian Kurdistan. However, these reforms did not last, as Khatami was unable to stand firm against the hardliners in his party. Their main concern was that Khatami’s “realpolitik”, which sought to both reinforce and reconcile patriotism and national pride in the country’s rich heritage with a recognition of Iran’s ethnic and cultural diversity, would undermine the regime’s “political legitimacy” and the values of the Islamic Revolution (Saleh, 2013: 49–50).

The Kurds boycotted the 2005 elections, when the hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was elected president. One of the main issues for the Iranian Kurds was the establishment of the Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq, which was legally declared an autonomous governing body within the state of Iraq in 2005, following the Iraq War in 2003. The protests that broke out were, once again, violently suppressed by the Iranian security forces. Kurdish disillusionment with Iranian politics continued even when the moderate Hassan Rouhani was elected in 2013 and again in 2017 (Gunter, 2020: 62–63). Discrimination in the areas of housing, employment, and political rights alongside arbitrary arrests, persecutions, and torture persisted, while Kurdish parents were even prohibited from giving Kurdish names to their children. As unemployment dramatically increased, many local youths left for other cities seeking jobs.

The desperate financial situation and the l...