 Hey, Susan, I think we're on Facebook Live now. And it's almost 10 o'clock. So maybe we could just get started. And you would probably do a better introduction of yourself than I would. But Susan, Thomas Ebi, it's wonderful to be with you. Thank you so much for joining Code Pink in this half-hour webinar on what is happening inside Iran, as well as US-Iranian relations. And yes, if you could tell us a little bit about yourself. Sure. My name is Susan Thomas Ebi. I'm an Iranian women's rights activist. I lived and worked in Iran from 1999 until 2010, supporting civil society, working to build the civil society, and working as part of the women's movement. In 2010, I came back to the US. Actually, I had migrated into the US at the time of the revolution. And I went back to Iran in 1999. But in 2010, I came back to the US. And since then, I've been working regionally in the Middle East and North Africa to support women's groups, women's movements across the region on their demands for rights and peace. Right now, I direct an organization called FEMENO, which works in the Middle East and North Africa region. And a lot of our work is with civil society groups and women's groups in closed and repressive contexts. So places like Iran, Egypt, Turkey, et cetera, where women are working hard to make their voices hard through civil society organizations. And I'm very happy to be here today to talk about what's going on in Iran and how it impacts women. So we'll spend most of our time talking about what's happening in Iran. But of course, as Donald Trump sucks up so much energy, I thought maybe we should at least talk about his first, the aggressive tweet in all caps and followed up by a response he gave to a journalist saying that he was ready to speak to the leaders of Iran and how this kind of back and forth craziness is felt inside Iran and among the Iranian-American community as well. Sure. Of course, we were very nervous last week when tensions rose to possibly their highest level at least in the last few years when there were a number of very aggressive and threatening tweets going back and forth, starting with the all caps tweets of President Trump telling Iranians that they can't threaten the US. And he was reacting to statements made by Rouhani who had said, war with Iran would be the mother of all wars. Peace with Iran would be the mother of all peace. And so I'm not sure how threatening that was intended to be, perhaps it was intended by Rouhani to draw some lines against increasing US threats that were a result of the US pulling out of the JCPOA and deciding to implement sanctions again. JCPOA meaning the nuclear deal. The nuclear deal, exactly. But nevertheless, the tensions were high and there were a war of wards exchanged by both sides. And we were very nervous. We didn't know where this Twitter war of wards would lead. And then all of a sudden, in an interview in Italy, President Trump said that he's willing to speak to Iran with no preconditions if the Iranians are willing to come to the table, which was rather strange because Secretary of State Pompeo had actually listed a 12-point plan after the US pulled out of the nuclear deal talking about the preconditions of the US for engaging in new negotiations with Iran, even though Iran had lived up to its side of the deal in terms of its nuclear inspections and its requirements with respect to the nuclear deal the US had pulled out and they had instituted a 12-point plan which made it extremely difficult for Iran or any other sovereign nation really to come to the table because they were asking Iran to give up quite a bit. So I don't really know how to read Trump's offer to speak with Iranians or engage in negotiations with Iranians with no preconditions because immediately after he sort of made the statement, which was news for two whole days, both in Iran and around the world, Pompeo again stipulated a few more requirements. So I don't know. I don't know. Certainly I think it's better than the tensions that we were seeing before that. I think we were moving towards potential conflict, even if it wasn't necessarily intended. That level of verbal tension and threats could lead to some sort of conflict. So I'm happy that we've maybe moved away from those very difficult times to a time where leaders of both countries could perhaps have a more civilized conversation about the path forward. And I hope that the offer for discussions and negotiations is a real and genuine offer. I would think that President Trump and his administration would have to take some steps to let the Iranians know they actually do want to engage in respectful and equal discussions with the Iranians because it is the US that pulled out of the nuclear deal. It wasn't the Iranians who pulled out of the nuclear deal. Well, yes. And as you well know, sanctions is war by other means. And not only have there been, since the time of the revolution, sanctions against Iran, but the sanctions that were lifted when the nuclear deal was signed have been reimposed. And now coming up very soon on August 6, there will be yet another round of sanctions. So can you tell us a bit about how these sanctions affect people inside Iran and how you feel this new round of sanctions will affect them even further? Well, the last round of sanctions were pretty serious. I mean, the US managed to get the world's community on board in terms of the sanctions the last round. And they impacted Iranians very negatively. But they were intended to bring Iran to the negotiating table. So we could say that perhaps they, even though they were very difficult for Iranians and impacted most ordinary Iranians, they had a very distinct goal. These sanctions that President Trump promises to implement don't have the same sort of clear policy objectives, because we'd already met the policy objectives of the sanctions. So and Iran was obviously complying. But the stated intent of these new sanctions is by many people associated with the administration is to create chaos and to basically destroy the Iranian economy and to in some way indirectly overthrow the regime in Iran. While Pompeo and his speech in California talked that he officially said that they're not after regime change, a lot of the people closely associated with the Trump administration have advocated for regime change for many years. And it seems that these particular economic sanctions are actually intended to destroy Iranian society from within, which is already struggling in terms of its economy. So obviously sanctions, I think people who follow sanctions, I'm not a sanctions expert, but because my country has been sanctioned for 40 years, it becomes an important issue for you. People who follow sanctions, they recognize that they have usually have the most impact on the most vulnerable groups of people, ordinary citizens. And they tend to strengthen the hands of hardliners. The reaction to the offer of Trump in Iran has actually been that at least from a couple of hardliners with a flat-out no response and a very threatening response. It's not the official reaction, but it shows that perhaps there are elements within the Iranian government or Iranian state, hardline elements that don't want normalization of relations, that don't want discussions, don't want the economic sanctions necessarily to be lifted or this threat of war to be lifted because they benefit from it. But what you have or you have ordinary people who don't benefit from it, already the Iranian economy is suffering greatly because of the speculations because of sanctions and increasing isolation of Iran. And so the last time we had sanctions, we talked to a lot of people. And I'll talk about the impact it has on women. One of my colleagues did this great research and hopefully we'll be able to translate it and update it and make it available to people who are interested. But talking to women, and what they did, what she found in this research is that what happens to women when they suffer economically and a lot of the economic setbacks that they suffered, they'd actually attributed to the sanctions last time around is that they cut from their, first they cut from their leisure activities, right? Then they cut from things like beauty supplies and things like that. Then they start actually cutting from their medicine. Then they start cutting from their food. So a lot of the women that she interviewed had actually stopped eating vegetables, eating meat, eating dairy products so that they could feed their children. And they were suffering greatly because of the sanctions on a personal level. Some women had talked about how a few of the women that she talked to actually talked about had they taken on, had they'd been forced to do the kinds of work that they would never do otherwise in order to meet their economic needs. And so given the fact that Iranian economy is suffering so much, I think that this round of sanctions will have great impact, especially on women and other vulnerable groups at a much faster pace than the last round actually had negative impacts. So people have told me that it's hard to find some medicines in Iran and yet medicines are supposed to be exempt from the sanctions. So how does that happen? Well, there are a couple of reasons and I'll go back to what happened last time and then I'll talk about what's happening now because the sanctions haven't been fully implemented yet or they haven't really been implemented yet. So what happened last time, immediately in 2010 when they announced the sanctions, the shipping industry was sanctioned. So Iran couldn't get insurance for its ships. It couldn't cause the insurance has to be bought through. So basically no shipping was actually allowed to the country. So immediately, almost immediately you could feel the absence of medicines in Iran because there was no shipping. There was nothing being shipped. Later on with the central bank was sanctioned and these sanctions sanctioning the central bank is unprecedented, it had been unprecedented. It had never really happened except for perhaps very targeted for weapons productions. But this is a blanket sanctioning of the central bank which meant that Iran couldn't pay for anything. So we couldn't use Swift, you couldn't pay for anything. So therefore, even if medicine is not being sanctioned as sale of medicine is allowable that companies inside of Iran or the government couldn't actually buy and pay for medicine. A lot of pharmaceutical companies inside the country who make medicine couldn't get their material because they import the material from outside. They couldn't get the material to make the medicines that they needed. So this had a great impact in terms of medicine. And towards the end of the sanctions period people weren't getting medicine for illnesses such as cancer. There wasn't even, at one point there was an anesthesia that was being imported from China that was defective and people were dying for simple operations because they were having reactions to this bad medicine. So it was really terrible. Now what's happening is that in anticipation of sanctions people who have hard to find medicines aren't making them available for sale or others who have access and have money are buying them up ahead of time. So what's available on the market is not available to everybody, right? So people are hoarding it basically. And of course, those who are producing medicine are gonna have the same problems. Given the fact that the real has lost its value it's over 50% in the last few months it's become very difficult for those who make medicine inside the country importers to import the goods, the material to make the medicines inside the country. So already we're seeing some level of shortage even before the sanctions kick in. And these protests there were some in December and January of last year and beginning of this year and then there've been sporadic protests. How much do you feel that they are genuine grassroots uprisings versus being fomented from the outside? And how likely are these to grow to be significant threats to the government? I think definitely the protests are genuine protests. I wouldn't say that certainly there are some fomenting there's some encouraging but I do think that it is a general dissatisfaction and in each area I read a really good article that talked about how really this is a failure of governance because in each area the demands were different. So if you go some areas it was for unemployment some area was in terms of the environment or talking about corruption, et cetera. So I think that the protests were genuine in that sense and people are demanding their government to be responsible to them for them to meet its demands. The fact I can't deny that I'm sure that some of the protestors are being egged on, et cetera but they're also being crushed as well. So I think that the Iranian government has a very, very difficult task in terms of meeting its addressing sort of the international crisis addressing regional issues but then addressing the demands of its public. So it has a huge, huge task ahead of itself. So there's somebody who wrote in a question and asked about how strong is the secular movement for democratic reforms inside Iran? I mean, we have a long, long history of sort of a movement for democracy inside the country. We had a constitutional revolution in 1906. So it's over a hundred years that we've been working in and I think we've had, so we had a secular movement and then we had a national movement and then we had an Islamic movement. I think right now people are from within are working to create reform. The problem is that perhaps the reformists have lost the message with which to really to gain the public support that they had. We can't forget that a year ago, a lot of people went to the polls to vote for Rouhani. This last year has been extremely difficult on the Iranian public because Rouhani hasn't been able to deliver economically because those sanctions that we're supposed to snap back, they haven't snapped back. There's a lot of mismanagement. There's also a lot of corruption that through use of social media is sort of people are finding out about it and it creates a lack of hope and a great frustration among the public. But I think that there is still a genuine civil, there's still a genuine effort within the country to create reform and to work for democracy. There's a genuine civil society that has it very, very difficult. We don't hear the voices of civil society very much because they inside the country, they face backlash when they speak up. Many of them face backlash when they speak up. And so people outside speak on their behalf. One of the young men, Zia Nabavi, who was in prison for nine years. And then finally they told him, actually, the imprisonment was wrong but he'd already spent nine years in prison was just arrested again yesterday which was devastating for me to see but today I read a piece of news that he was released but he's one of these young people who even though he was in prison for nine years he does believe in reform and he does believe in making change from inside the country. And he, as a very sort of moderate, as a very moderate vision he thinks that change needs to happen slowly and deeply. So could you talk a little bit about what you would call a women's movement in Iran, what gains have been made over these years? What are women still fighting for? And what kind of, what ways do they use to struggle for more rights? Okay, so I'll give you a very, I'll try to make it very condensed and quick because it's a long history but at the time of the Iranian revolution the revolutionaries adopted a very conservative version of their interpretation of Shadiah law and we lost a few of the rights that we had gained not very many, but we had struggled women had struggled for them and we lost them such as checks on polygamy, increase in age of marriage even abortion rights. So for the time Iran was actually very progressive even though we had still a lot of restrictive laws on the books. So women lost a lot of their rights they've been fighting for it ever since the very conservative interpretation of Shadiah law imposed certain requirements on women such as allowed for polygamy. Of course, polygamy was allowed before as well but it reduced the age of marriage to nine years old it's been increased to 13 since then and now there's discussion for it to be increased to about 15 or 16 years back and forth on that. So women are fighting for their rights within the family they're fighting for reform criminal law that impacts them negatively they haven't made much headway in terms of actually changing the laws they've had some small successes like I said the increase in age of marriage and child custody for example, issues like that but women have actually gained quite a bit in terms of their social status. So if you compare women's legal status with their social status it's hugely different and divergent. So women are, they're present in the workforce they're doctors, they're lawyers they're even truck drivers, taxi drivers, right? While the age of marriage is very low the actual average age of marriage is 25 and 27. The rate of divorce is very high even though it's very difficult for women to get divorced but they're still getting divorced and the rate of education for women is very high women are educated, college graduates the majority of women even though there's been attempts to sort of push women out of the workforce during Ahmadinejad's period there was a pushback on these social gains but women have managed to hold their ground. Women are fighting, the women's movement suffered a great setback after our 2009 protests a lot of people left, the economy was really bad sanctions made the economy worse Iranian women became even more isolated there was a sense of hopelessness and there was repression and crackdown but they're slowly re-builded after the green movement yes, after the green movement, after it was crushed but they're slowly rebuilding their movement and I'm actually very, very hopeful. On March 8th, we saw sort of this very broad example of the different types of work that women are doing and they held many, many events which was very, for me was very hopeful they had a number of conferences and meetings That's International Women's Day Exactly, International Women's Day we celebrate it we've been celebrating for many years it's a big deal inside of Iran and beyond the conferences and the events that they held they also had a number of street actions women going out into the metro women talking about the economy, et cetera the right to choose their veils, how they dress and also there was a protest planned inside of the, in front of the ministry of labor to object or to bring attention to women's economic situation a lot of people were arrested I think 80 people arrested finally 20 people were charged but they were all acquitted last week which was, to me, it was a very positive thing it shows that at least some part of the security apparatus is for civil society being active and is willing to create that space and I hope that the women's movement can use that space to continue building on the successes that it's had the slow successes it's had in the last few years And what we hear about in the United States are perhaps the more superficial or less in-depth kind of struggles of women to not wear a headscarf or to be able to attend sports stadiums how important are those issues? They're obviously they're very important because they're important to women's daily lives women have been struggling against the official state form of veiling and hijab from day one really they have been they've never given into the official sort of government mandated form of hijab so they've been struggling against that and they're struggling for it even more more loudly these days the stadium, of course, this is a movement that's been going on since the early 2000s and there seems to be some finally the government is finally giving into it a little bit more so we do hear a lot about those but there are also a lot of other activities that women's groups are engaged in that we don't necessarily hear about and they include working on prevention of violence against women there's a group that's working they came up with a draft bill a draft law that they the parliament is actually looking at a draft law on prevention of violence against women so hopefully they'll be able to provide feedback and work with parliament to adopt a better a good law, a better version of the law that's being presented there's another group that's working to prevent street harassment they just launched a harass watch website where people can go and report and they're working with a municipality of Tehran to post their informative posters in the metros and in taxis there's another group that's working on prevention of harassment in the workplace so they're working with factories so there's a lot of different kinds of group work that's going on inside the country that we don't really hear about ever sorry, when you say harassment on the street or in the workplace is that verbal harassment or is there actually physical grabbing of women on the street? Well, the harassment on the street yes, it's verbal harassment it could also be physical harassment, et cetera and this was always so yes so they're working to prevent this they have some great posters that they've developed that really talks about how people should sit in the taxis how they should sit in the metro cat calling isn't a way to it's not flattering for women that are especially threatening so it's an educational and preventative and there's actually a law on the book that's a pretty harsh law I don't necessarily advocate for it against harassment so it includes lashings but there was a recent court case that actually requires a harasser to do community service which we think that's good we don't want people to be lashed for harassing you might want it we don't really want it in law you might wish for it if you're going through harassment but we don't really want it in law so that was actually a big it was a big achievement that somebody was sentenced to do community service for harassing a woman this is great the harassment in the workplace that we're talking about so there hasn't been a lot of work on this there's no encompassing law that deals with this so the people who are working on this issue started with blue collar workers and started working in factories they've done a number of trainings and actually the factory workers and all the local officials they've talked to have been very supportive of the effort because harassment in the workplace is a big issue and they want to prevent it they don't know how to prevent it so it can be harassment you know harassment so lack of boundaries and borders between co-workers in terms of you know how do you define appropriate relations and appropriate behavior but it could also be your boss and these women they did something really amazing they said since we don't have a law we're going to work with women to help them come up with strategies for resistance how they can resist and how they can create spaces in their workplace where they can bring this to the attention of management and make management responsive but it's they're doing they're doing great work yes but we don't we don't hear about those those kinds of things yes and wouldn't it be lovely if we could work together on these kinds of things women in the U.S. and women there and focus on how we make all of our lives better instead of the way it looks right now and in the remaining minutes we have maybe we should go back into the big picture how much do you fear that the U.S. policy will be successful in creating chaos inside of Iran what do you feel is the end game and what do you think that we as Americans who want to help create more space for Iranians to change their own society what can we do to be helpful yeah I mean I am fearful about the future of Iran Iran is a big country in the region its instability will not help the region it won't help U.S. interests or European interests in the region it won't help the security of the region I'd like to see an Iran that's engaged both with its neighbors in a positive way but also the international community Iran has been isolated for 40 years it's probably one of the most isolated countries it hasn't you know and I think even despite its isolation it has a strong civil society we've tried not speaking not talking I think it's time to sort of for full engagement and when I talk about engagement I don't just mean engagement of government and business it should be engagement at all levels so at a cultural level academic level civil society level right sports etc that's that's the future I see that's what I would like to see I think these stabilization efforts will not serve anybody's interests I hope that the Iranian government and the U.S. government take the notion of negotiations and discussions seriously and move forward with it no one can stand bear the consequences of a failed state such as Iran in the region not Iranians can't you know withstand that level of you know destruction the region can't either and I don't think it would be good policy for the U.S. or for Europeans so I hope that we can move past the stalemate to have constructive dialogue and discussion wonderful so as we close here just to let our listeners know that you and your colleagues in the Iranian American community have been working with us at Code Pink in lobbying our members of Congress to speak out against the sanctions and certainly push back against any kind of military attacks on Iran and we also are creating some exciting programs that you are helping us with in terms of these people-to-people ties and so anybody who wants to get involved with us please contact us you can write to info at code pink.org or go on the website sign up for our weekly alerts but thank you so much Susan for the wonderful your work you're doing to help try to keep and under these very difficult circumstances expand the space for civil society inside Iran and of course that means that we have to stop the attacks from the U.S. so that that kind of opening can flourish thank you for being on with us and we look forward to continuing to work with you. Thank you for having me it's been a pleasure and thank you for all the great work that Code Pink is doing to support Iranians and to prevent war and sanctions. Great. Okay. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.