Iran's leading feminist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate said Saturday that a military confrontation between the United States and Iran over nuclear issues would strike a disastrous blow to her nation's struggling human rights movement by strengthening the hard-line Islamic regime.
Shirin Ebadi, in interviews between sessions at a Los Angeles youth peace conference, called on the Iranian government to abandon uranium enrichment, which has fueled fears that the country is developing a nuclear bomb. But she also urged the United States and Israel to forgo any plans for a preemptive military attack, because it would only give the regime an excuse to crack down on human rights activists such as herself.
"If there is a military attack on Iran, people will forget their differences with the government, and they will defend their country," she said in an interview. "It will also damage our human rights movement, because the government will expand its powers and limit freedoms using the excuse of national security."
Instead, the Iranian jurist called for direct and public talks between leaders, legislators and civilians in both countries.
Ebadi carried her message of nonviolent action to 3,000 students from around the world who gathered this weekend at Loyola Marymount University in Westchester for a peace conference sponsored by the PeaceJam Foundation. The high-spirited conference featured music, prayer, testimony and advice from six Nobel laureates, who were cheered on like rock stars.
Besides Ebadi, the other laureates were Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa, anti-land-mine activist Jody Williams, Betty Williams of Northern Ireland, Adolfo Perez Esquivel of Argentina and Rigoberta Menchu Tum of Guatemala.
The Colorado-based PeaceJam was founded in 1996 to develop young leaders to work for nonviolent change through the advice and inspiration of Nobel Peace Prize laureates. In the last decade, PeaceJam says, it has mobilized 600,000 youth around the world to develop more than 1 million service projects addressing disease, human rights, racism, equal access to natural resources, environmental degradation, weapons proliferation and other global issues.
