Iranian Nobel Peace winner Shirin Ebadi threatened in her home
Young men with ties to a hardline political group shout slogans and vandalize the building where the human rights lawyer lives and works.
Reporting from Tehran and Beirut — Scores of young men gathered around the Tehran home-office of Iranian Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi, shouted slogans against her and vandalized her home Thursday in the latest episode by hardline political groups close to the government to intimidate the human rights lawyer.
Ebadi, 61, said in an interview today that the two police officers finally dispatched after her frantic phone calls to the authorities "just watched" as the vandals ripped the sign bearing her name off the front of her house, screamed that she was a supporter of Israel's Gaza offensive and spray-painted slogans on the front of her building.
In Iran, all demonstrations must have government permission.
"If any demonstration must be permitted by the interior ministry, where were the authorities? Why did police not disperse them?" a distraught Ebadi said in a telephone interview from an unspecified location in Tehran. "While the mobs were shouting slogans against me, the police were watching."
She added, "I am scared to go back to my home."
The apparently unarmed young men, chanting "death to the pen-pushing mercenary," did not identify themselves, though one told Iran's Iranian Students News Agency he was a member of the Basiji militia, a hardline militia that answers to the elite Revolutionary Guards, a parallel branch of the military, and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, the country's highest political and religious authority.
Ebadi won the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize for her years of legal work advocating on behalf of Iranian political activists, religious and ethnic minorities, women and children.
Thursday's demonstration marks the third time in 11 days that authorities or forces close to the authorities have moved against Ebadi, whose small Center for the Defense of Human Rights compiled a report cited by United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon that led to a nonbinding Dec. 18 U.N. resolution calling on Iran improve its human rights record.
Three days later authorities shut down the center, accusing it of operating without a permit. On Dec. 29, authorities seized Ebadi's computer and confidential records, accusing her of tax evasion even though she has not accepted payment for her work in 15 years.
France, in its now-lapsed role as rotating president of the European Union, summoned Iran's envoy to Paris on Wednesday to protest against the "unacceptable nature of the threats" against Ebadi and her colleagues.
