FIFA Must Pressure Iran to Let Women Attend Soccer Matches

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/10/opinion/iran-women-soccer.html

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I grew up in the Iranian city of Shiraz after the 1979 revolution. Girls like me were barred from going to stadiums to watch sports because, our religious leaders said, it would be an improper mixing of men and women. Still, I grew up loving soccer. I would watch matches on television with my family, cheering on our favorite teams and players.

My brother Masoud is a gifted player and became Iran’s national-team captain. He has played in three FIFA World Cups. But my mother, sister and I have never seen a game in our home country. My mother has never had a chance for her heart to swell with pride as her son scored a goal, nor could I ever have cheered him on while I was living in Iran.

Iran’s exclusion of its 41 million women from sports stadiums for the past 40 years has led women and girls to risk jail and even their lives to challenge the ban. That could all change this month.

After our years of fighting for this fundamental right, we have finally gotten the leaders of FIFA, the governing body that oversees all soccer, to start upholding its own rules prohibiting this discrimination. On Thursday, for the first time, some women will be able to buy tickets and sit in Iran’s largest stadium, Azadi.

For decades, Iran’s hard-liners enforced the ban cruelly — and FIFA looked the other way. I and many other Iranian women activists protested, wrote letters and sent proof of our exclusion to FIFA’s headquarters.

Iran’s ban was a clear violation of FIFA’s constitution, which says discrimination against women “is strictly prohibited and punishable by suspension or expulsion.” This has meant that FIFA could eject Iran from the competition unless it let women in.

Our fight to go to stadiums was always about human rights, about women’s rights and about the right to occupy public spaces and fully participate in the life of our country. We never accepted being shut out.

In June, I was detained trying to go to an international FIFA match at Azadi stadium. In August, a photojournalist and female fans who attended games dressed as men were arrested and jailed (they were eventually released on bail). Their ordeal was intended as a warning to all female fans.

They still face possible long prison sentences. Other activists and fans have had to leave the country out of fear of being detained. In September, a fellow fan who had been arrested at Azadi stadium in March, Sahar Khodayari, died after setting herself on fire outside the courthouse where she had learned she was facing six months in jail. Our country gave her a name she could not own in life, Blue Girl, for the blue colors of her favorite team, Esteghlal. Team members mourned her death. A former national-team captain said a stadium should carry her name.

FIFA finally acted. At an awards event in September, the organization’s president, Gianni Infantino, promised in front of the world that Iranian women would be allowed to attend a FIFA World Cup qualifier match between Iran and Cambodia on Oct. 10 and all future matches. We’ll see what happens on Thursday.

But don’t let FIFA say it’s responsible for overturning the stadium ban. In March 2018, Mr. Infantino attended a match in Iran’s Azadi stadium while 35 women were being arrested for daring to attend. I wrote eight letters to FIFA, and in November 2018, I met in Zurich with a FIFA leader, Fatma Samoura, to deliver 200,000 signatures of a petition against the ban. In April 2019, I filed an ethics complaint to protest this violation of FIFA’s nondiscrimination and human rights policies. FIFA did not act fast enough — and now Sahar is dead.

Still, even now, FIFA has agreed to a low quota of tickets for women — reportedly only 3,500 in a stadium that holds some 100,000. Women will be sent to different gates and to segregated sections. There are still no restrooms for women in other major stadiums, with the Football Federation of the Islamic Republic of Iran claiming that providing the infrastructure to accommodate women would create a “budgetary” problem.

And FIFA has not done the basic work to ensure that women can safely attend future international matches. FIFA should set a deadline for club league matches to admit families so that we can watch the games together. If FIFA can’t get Iran to follow its rules, the country’s soccer federation should be suspended from participating in international tournaments.

Allowing women the basic right to watch soccer matches in a stadium with their families would symbolize meaningful progress for women’s rights in the country. It’s still not safe for me to return to Iran for Thursday’s match, but I hope that some day I can watch my brother in person, seated with all of my family, in Azadi stadium.

Azadi means “freedom” in Farsi — and when all women are allowed to freely attend matches, the stadium will finally be worthy of its name.

Maryam Shojaei is an activist from Iran who founded the #NoBan4Women movement, which promotes a woman’s right to attend sports events in Iran.

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