Iranian women stand united in protest and hope at Asian Cup
Source: Guardian
It was the unity of the Iranian fans, more than anything else, that shocked Talieh Akbari. Sitting in Stadium Australia in Sydney with her mother for Iran’s second group match against Qatar – their first time together at a football stadium – she was struck by the sheer outpouring of emotion. “In Iran, happiness is forbidden,” she says. “Iranian people inside Iran are not happy people, but watching the people’s happiness, that is unity.”
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As a woman Talieh is banned from attending football matches in Iran, and although she prefers watching the game on television, she was never going to miss such a rare opportunity to watch the national team in her adopted hometown. She says the ban on women in stadiums has made football like “forbidden fruit”, while her mother Parvaneh believes the match in Sydney was “the first and perhaps the last time I will see Iran play.”
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Since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, the clergy has gradually placed harsh restrictions on females attending sporting matches involving men. The cruel and unusual ruling has been the subject of the famous film, Offside, and, as Kian* told me, a major point of contention for the diaspora community in Australia.
Kian and several other activists have been working quietly on protest banners for the past few months, which they smuggled in and unveiled at the quarter-final in Canberra. On the 65th minute mark, a banner carrying the face of Ghoncheh Ghavami was briefly unveiled in the Gregan-Larkham Stand. Ghavami is a young British-Iranian woman who was placed in prison for trying to attend a volleyball match in 2014. A second banner was also planned to be unfurled inside the stadium, but in the excitement Kian simply couldn’t find the time. In English, it read “Thanks for censoring us!” and in Farsi below “Don’t be tired!”
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Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2015/jan/23/asian-cup-iran-fans-protest
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#teammelli: Social media helps Iranian fans defy censorship of images from Asian Cup matches in Australia
By Sarah Sedghi
Updated January 23, 2015 20:54:12
As the Iranian and Iraqi football teams met tonight in the Asian Cup quarter-final in Canberra, viewers in Iran didn't get the full picture.
Iran has been censoring images of Iranian-Australian women in the crowd because their dress is deemed inappropriate.
In Iran women are not allowed to attend football matches, preventing the mixing of men and women in stadium crowds.
Australian-Iranian journalist Talieh never had much interest in going to a football game in her home country, until she found out it was illegal.
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The International Campaign for Human Rights deputy director in Iran, Gissou Nia, said the sports and youth affairs ministry has decided that "mixed attendance at sport events is un-Islamic and that it threatens public order."
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The regime has gone to great lengths to prevent images of Iranian-Australian women at the Asian Cup reaching televisions in Iran.
Australian-Iranian Vahid said that during broadcasts of the World Cup in Brazil, as soon as the camera panned to women in the crowd, Iranian TV replaced the shot with one of a crowd at a Barcelona-Real Madrid game.
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Twitter: #TeamMelli
Audio interviews with the news radio story:
Audio and Transcript: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-01-23/iran-censors-images-of-iranian-australian-women-at/6043666
mp3: http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/news/audio/pm/201501/20150123-pm12-iranfootball.mp3
