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For the International Day of Violence Against Women:

Violence Against Women is Thousands of years old and Reaches across All Borders

When after raping a fifteen-year-old Iraqi girl named Abir, American soldiers burned her alive, it was as if Atefeh’s aunt’s heart had been set on fire in the small village of Neka in Iran; Atefeh had been fifteen years old when Islamic guards raped and then hanged her.

When warlords in Afghanistan stoned Amineh, Hajieh’s heart trembled in Jolfa prison from the fear of the stones that would crush her own body. In another prison in Iran, Kheirieh screamed not to be stoned and to be hanged instead.

When eighteen-year-old Sohane was set on fire in a Parisian suburb, sixteen-year-old Marjan set herself ablaze in Iran, so that she wouldn’t have to marry a man who was old enough to be her grandfather. A little while later in Pakistan, Somara died from third degree burns to eighty percent of her body, and she never confirmed that her husband had done this to her.

When in Somalia seven-year-old Kolsoom became a victim of female circumcision, her screams mixed with the ones of nine-year-old Maryam in her wedding bed. They had taken Maryam’s doll away from her and had turned her into a doll.

Sindiso is twenty-three and she has AIDS. She has been raped many times. When she was three, her grandfather raped her, and that was when, in Sweden, Fadimeh’s father and brother murdered her.

Marie Trintignan’s boyfriend, a famous French singer, beat her to death. A while later, an Afghan poet named Nadia was killed by her husband. Shortly before and then shortly after that, in the United States, Lisa and Joyce were raped and then murdered by unidentified men.

When Natalie was waiting for customers in an Amsterdam window, a ship filled with sex slaves entered Hamburg’s harbour.

During the economic sanctions of the United States against Iraq, ;more than half a million women lost their lives, and, at the same time, more than 4 million women died as a result of war mainly in Africa, and thousands of their sisters were raped by soldiers in Bosnia.

Violence against women connects millions of women around the world; it affects us on a daily basis. It takes over our lives in cities and in villages, at home and at work, and it comes both in domestic and state forms.

Violence against Women is Thousands of years old and Reaches across All Borders!

On one hand women have been fighting against violence everywhere, and on the other, the invasion of capital and the "new world order" has intensified violence as poverty, illiteracy, unemployement and slavery are becoming more and more feminized.

But as the violence intensifies, so does women’s resistance against it. We hear each other’s stories of resistance and our hearts beat with excitement. These stories inspire us and make us proud of our triumphs; they give us courage. We are all connected to one another; we are one.

The more we learn, the more we realize that violence is a means to put us down and to hold us back. Violence has been used to enslave us. We can only defeat it if we stand strong and tall and fight it with perseverance and courage.

Now is the time for us to stand in our millions and break the chains oppression and slavery and fight for a society without discrimination. The future is knocking on our doors, and it demands our response.

8 March Women’s Organization (Iranian – Afghanistani) November 2006

Zan_dem_iran@hotmail.com

www.8mars.com