I rise today to support the motion urging Iran to respect the human rights of its Bahai community. I acknowledge the members of the Bahai community in the gallery today, who are part of the Australian Bahai community, which has flourished here since 1920. The world watches with increasing apprehension the deterioration of religious freedom in Iran. The religious fanaticism of the Iranian regime has led to the execution of untold numbers of journalists, writers, trade unionists, gays and lesbians and other minority groups. Not least among these are the Bahai, whose progressive traditions, such as the equality of women, do not sit well with authoritarian theocracy.
I rise today to support the motion urging Iran to respect the human rights of its Bahai community. I acknowledge the members of the Bahai community in the gallery today, who are part of the Australian Bahai community, which has flourished here since 1920. The world watches with increasing apprehension the deterioration of religious freedom in Iran. The religious fanaticism of the Iranian regime has led to the execution of untold numbers of journalists, writers, trade unionists, gays and lesbians and other minority groups. Not least among these are the Bahai, whose progressive traditions, such as the equality of women, do not sit well with authoritarian theocracy.
The Bahai emphasise the spiritual unity of all humankind and speak the common language of human rights. In modern Iran, to be a member of the Bahai faith or any other minority is to live with the fear of state sanctioned abuse hanging over your family and your community. The arrest of the seven Bahai leaders in May 2008, which this motion refers to with serious concern, is just one example of this. The lawyer for the seven Bahai leaders, Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi, has been refused access to their case files and has been personally intimidated since taking on their case. These arrests are only one matter in a long catalogue of oppression and mistreatment stretching back many years. In 1980, all nine members of the National Spiritual Assembly of Bahai in Iran were abducted and are presumed dead. In 1983, 10 Bahai women were hanged for the innocuous act of teaching religious classes to Bahai youth. The youngest teacher, Mona Mahmudizhad, was 17 years old.
The ugly character of the current Iranian regime has been greeted with horror by many Iranians overseas. A petition by over 500 actors, writers, journalists and artists and other Iranian expatriates living around the world has apologised to the Bahai community, expressing their dismay that the once great nation of Iran has deteriorated to this.
All the evidence suggests that the repression of the Bahai emanates from the highest Iranian authorities. In 1991, an ominous memorandum on the Bahai question issued by the office of Ayatollah Khomeini detailed a systematic effort to expunge all trace of the Bahai people from the cultural fabric of Iran. Children who identified themselves as Bahai were not allowed to be enrolled in schools; all Bahai were to be expelled from universities. This memorandum on the Bahai, issued by the office of Ayatollah Khomeini, also included the following statement:
A plan must be devised to confront and destroy their cultural roots outside Iran.
In 2005 another letter from the Chairman of the Command Headquarters of the Armed Forces in Iran was sent to a number of governmental agencies, including the Revolutionary Guard, the armed forces and the police, ordering those agencies to identify adherents of the Bahai faith and monitor their activities. This is the sort of behaviour we have seen from totalitarian regimes before, and we must recognise it for what it is. The classification of minorities in this way has been the awful precursor to ethnic and cultural cleansing in the past across the world. Dehumanising any group of people and denying them rights because of their beliefs or race or religion has all too often been the first step towards physical attacks on or the murder of people in that group.
Amid this ongoing oppression, the 350,000-strong Bahai community in Iran survives. In the face of dawn raids on their homes, the desecration of their cemeteries with bulldozers, the vilification of Bahai children in their classrooms, the disbarring of Bahai from designated professions and threats against Muslims who associate with Bahai, the community has shown substantial bravery. There is no doubt that the treatment of the Bahai community is impermissible and unacceptable by all known standards of human rights. I should mention, too, that three of the seven Bahai leaders arrested recently have close relatives in Australia. I extend my support to all the detained Bahai leaders and their families.
