Commentary:

We talked to Shervin Haravi about the current political and social state of Iran today, focusing mainly on the violation of human rights and on how Middle-Eastern countries differ from European countries on a deeper level. We delved into the importance of the feminine figure in our society and how women in Iran are launching a new cultural revolution.

1. Why did you become an activist?

I was born into an Iranian family. My father came to Italy in 1979 right after the revolution. The universities had been closed for a year and my father was studying mathematics. During the revolution he was also an activist. My grandmother said: “You have to leave, things will change more and more”. And so my father came to Italy. Then in 1984, my mother came too. So I was born into a family that basically had already lived through the first revolution of 1979. Inevitably you always find yourself in contact with stories of people who had lived through injustice and violation of human rights.
I have a little dialogue between me and my mother from when it was Children’s Rights Day in ’97. I was six years old and you could already see that I was attentive to social issues without even knowing it. A child so young with ideas of what rights were. My mother didn’t speak Italian well but she studied pedagogy and she really focused on transcribing our conversations. My mother asked me: “What are the rights of children?” I answered: “To go to school, to have a pencil case, to have the right to eat, to play with other children and to have friends.” My mother asked me: “Who gives you these rights?” And I said: “When we are home our parents give us the rights, at school the rights are given by teachers and those who take care of me. It is important to think about my rights. For example, when I go to my best friend’s house, her father allows me to play the piano and play with her”.

When I was 12 or 13 years old I took part in peace demonstrations. When I finished high school I chose freedom and censorship as the theme of my thesis. I started with article 21 of the Italian constitution: “Everyone has the right to freely express their thoughts. The press cannot be subjected to authorization or censorship.” I also wrote about the history of totalitarianism, of totalitarian regimes and the story of the demonstrations of the Iranian green movement in 2009. In 2009 there were electoral frauds so Ahmadinejad was reconfirmed. As a consequence, a series of demonstrations began and 1,500 people were killed in three days. This news did not reach us, just as the news related to the protests of the “Women, Life, Freedom” movement did not reach us because at that time the censorship of the regime was very strong.
Social media today, thanks to the tools available to Generation Z, is able to bring us video content of what is happening in Iran and to bypass censorship through VPN and other applications. This allows us to have direct information on what is happening in Iran today. My activism is growing over time. After school, I chose to study law, partly because of my passion for human rights. I completed the course and then when I finished, whilst I was studying for the bar, I started an internship and joined the human rights commission established at the court where I worked. We started to organise meetings to target cyberbullying, human rights of lawyers in danger and we had a meeting about Shirin Ebadi, the Iranian Nobel Peace Prize winner. Shirin was a magistrate until 1979 and then in 1979, since women could no longer be magistrates, she was demoted to a mere official. We also talked about Nasrin Sotoudeh, a lawyer and activist who obtained honorary citizenship from various cities, as for example the city of Sorrento.

My activism became more intense with the death of Mahsa Amini. When protests in Iran boomed and my whole family decided to make a choice not to remain impotent, standing still whilst watching people being killed and Iranians losing their lives for protesting for their fundamental rights. We decided to expose ourselves politically, by divulging the contents, the videos and everything that the regime was not showing on national TV.
This choice was also one of renunciation. We renounced returning to Iran until Iran is free. In 2022 I started to do more presentations in middle school and, high schools. I also write articles, do consultancy for national networks, contribute with specific programs. I started presenting on TG3 Mondo, which is a current affairs program that airs on Saturdays and Sundays. with Tg3 I had the chance to interview the Iranian human rights activist and Noble Prize winner Narges Mohammadi. I recently presented to an audience of 20,000 boy scouts in Verona. Young people are full of enthusiasm and desire to learn. We can talk about human rights and there has been progress. I live in Italy, a democratic country. Iran does not know what democracy is, but nowadays Iranians see what exists beyond their country and therefore also want a democratic country.

2. What are the main values you defend?

If we wanted to summarize these would be the values of justice, freedom and human dignity. I defend the right to freely express one’s thoughts. The moment you find yourself faced with stories of people who suffer injustices on a daily basis, the first thing you feel like doing of your own free will is to echo their voices. So these are the main values. Where does all this come from? I believe it comes from a desire for solidarity. These are the principles that make me continue despite the risks I run. These values give me the strength to continue. I hope to transmit these principles in my own small way, especially to young people. Youth in every country and also in Iran are the present and the future and it is thanks to them that this movement has taken a different turn and has distinguished itself compared to other demonstrations and attempts to protest against a regime that has existed for more than 45 years.

3. How does the concept of freedom differ in Europe and Iran?

The premise is that, as we said before, in Europe most of the countries are countries that have undergone a process of democratization. The European Union has the charter of fundamental rights and these are respected and applied. This is already the premise to understand that in Iran it is not like this, so in Iran there is the Constitution of the Islamic Republic, but it is all paper. that In reality, what is written also speaks of the difference between men and women, but it has never been applied and therefore the problem is also the interpretation of the law which then conditions the application or not of a right, and in this sense there are objective discriminations. For example, the latest bill on chastity and hijab, which has been subject to various changes in these two years after Mahsa Amini , is a clear example of continuous violations of human rights, so when we talk about freedom it is obvious that we cannot speak in an abstract sense of something, but in a concrete sense we see how much Iranians are deprived of freedom. This is the reason why they are fighting daily. The sanctions for those who do not wear the veil for example include the seizure of the vehicle, you are also deprived of your license, you are not able to use public transport, a whole series of sanctions. We cannot practically talk about freedom because especially in Iran, both for men and women, there are continuous violations and the fact that Iran is also one of the countries where there is the death penalty and if we also think about the number of executions in 2024: 975 executions or 2-3 executions a day in some months of the year. This is the state of things and precisely for this reason we must then talk about it.

4. Can you describe the life of women in Iran today?

Let’s start with the obligation of the Hijab. The obligation of the Hijab is already women’s life, often the first thing that comes to mind is the fact that in Iran there is this obligation. In reality, when we talk about this obligation we must also underline that this law came into force on March 7, 1979, the very first day before international women’s day. It has always been a symbol through which the regime had the possibility of imposing control over the woman’s body, on how the woman thinks and therefore since 1979 there has been a progressive loss of women’s rights in their daily lives. In order to go abroad women must have consent of her husband. A woman’s testimony is worth half that of a mans and a whole series of issues related to inheritance, adoptions, divorce, all these things are impacted. In any case, the woman is always placed in an inferior position compared to the man. So when we talk about the description of women’s lives in Iran these are the aspects. Despite this, however, women are so tenacious that they will no longer take any steps back. After Mahsa Amini, a real cultural revolution started. Women have changed their daily way of doing things from the fact that they go out without wearing the veil and in front of the moral police that also attacks them, they remain so still, composed and react, they react with the same body that the regime wants to have control over.
For example the case of Ahoo Daryaei the girl, in her underwear and bra in the courtyard of Azad University in Tehran. She had gone to university like everyone else to attend classes and she didn’t wear the veil by choice. We’re talking about 4 November 2024, imagine how many women no longer wear the hijab. She arrives at university and the morality police stopped her. She was first physically attacked because she refused to wear the veil, they ripped off her sweatshirt and in response she took off her trousers and went to the entrance of the university and started walking with her arms outstretched in an upright position in a truly deathly silence. Her body spoke and launched a series of messages that spread like wildfire on social media and through Telegram channels. My Body My Choice, a slogan from the 70s of feminist women, came back. The rights to freedom, to truly express oneself and wear what one wants. So there is also solidarity in this sense from all women in the world and also Italy, because the Italian state continues to also crush women and their rights.
In Iran about 50% are women, more than 60% are graduates out of a population of 80 million. The territory is 7 times that of Italy and 70% of Iranians are under 30. These numbers condition the whole process because young people have great energy, great desire for change and will change things. As in Lucio Dalla’s song Disperato Erotico Stomp “the exceptional feat is being normal”. Iranians’ exceptional feat is to be able to live normally and women are the driving force of this movement. This movement is made up of women and men, this is also the difference compared to all the other demonstrations in the past. There is strong support from men, who also react as a group in moments when a woman is stopped or attacked by agents of the Moral Police.

5. Do you see any changes in the regime in the next decade, considering that more than 50% of the population is young and 50% are women?

At the level of international politics, therefore geopolitics, Iran is increasingly weaker, the Islamic Republic is increasingly weaker. Have you seen that over the course of these decades the objective of Iranian foreign policy was to create a ring of allies like Hamas , Houthis, Hashd al-Sha’bi in Iraq and Syria? its allies, therefore all these pieces that were bubbling in Lebanon are falling and therefore Iran or rather the Islamic Republic is losing ground and is increasingly weaker. On the other hand we see that now Israel with the support of the United States has given signals contrary to the regime. The percentage of people who support the regime is, according to the latest polls, between 8 and 9%. When there were elections both for the President of the Republic and for the Iranian Parliament and there was a very high abstentionism, that is, the data that is communicated by the regime is not the real. Less than 20% went to vote, so this shows the compactness of the Iranian people against the regime. The three things considered worse by the people in Iran are: the repeated repression and violation of rights, the economic crisis and all the problems that derive from it and the continuous isolation of Iran due to the practices of the regime. If things were to change, a process of rebirth and flowering of this people could truly begin, who have so much to give, imagine the difference in some way even compared to other countries in the Middle East. Iran has at its basis the Persian culture, a millenary culture.

6. What advice would you give to young people who want to change the world?

In order to change the world, in my opinion, you have to know yourself deeply. This is something I said during this monologue that I performed on happiness. Being happy is becoming what you are meant to become and in order to change the world first you need to know yourself and then realise that you can help others. How can you help others? Through the acquisition of knowledge and also the assimilation of concepts through the various languages that inform you. Through reading, through theater, cinema, art in all its forms, music, song lyrics. It is enough to think that by reading about the realities of various societies you can develop an understanding and your own critical thinking. If you limit yourself to school, you study, take exams, obtain good results but you cannot broaden your view, you cannot help anyone. Changing the world is one of the most beautiful concepts. As long as you can change your little world into a world that makes you feel good then everything else will happen. The road opens slowly but if you have a thousand issues with yourself and you can’t find peace then you can hardly help others so this is the greatest advice I feel like giving: know yourself.

Resources:

https://www.instagram.com/shervin_haravi/
https://www.radioradicale.it/soggetti/265326/shervin-haravi

Disperato erotico stomp, Lucio Dalla.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXilibsBRh8