IN SPEECH, NOBEL WINNER REBUKES THE U.S.
By Craig S. Smith

December 11, 2003 – (NYT) Shirin Ebadi, an Iranian lawyer, received the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize here Wednesday, declaring that the prize would inspire women across the Muslim world to fight for equality in oppressive, patriarchal societies.

But Ms. Ebadi, who has represented political prisoners and the victims of political violence in Iran, avoided sharp criticism of the Islamic government there and delivered her most pointed rebuke instead to the United States for what she called human rights abuses carried out in the name of fighting terrorism.

Many Iranian exiles have complained that by awarding the prize to a woman working within the legal system in Iran, the Nobel Foundation is supporting political Islam over a secular alternative in the country. Indeed, the Iranian government has taken Ms. Ebadi's prize as an opportunity to showcase recent reforms and put the best possible light on the position held by women there.

After Wednesday's award ceremony, Iran's vice president for the environment, Massoumeh Ebtekar, appeared on CNN to congratulate Ms. Ebadi and extol the advances of women in Iran. Ms. Ebtekar is better known to many people in the West as the official interpreter and spokeswoman for the militants who took American hostages in 1979 at the American Embassy in Tehran.

In her acceptance speech, Ms. Ebadi offered only oblique criticism of Iran's conservative Islamic government, saying that "some Muslims, under the pretext that democracy and human rights are not compatible with Islamic teachings and the traditional structure of Islamic societies, have justified despotic governments."

Ms. Ebadi, 56, is the first Iranian and first Muslim woman to win the prize, which has been awarded annually for the past 102 years. The prize comes with $1.4 million. The Norwegian Nobel Committee, which picks the winners, made it clear that this year's award was meant to send the message that Islam is not necessarily incompatible with democracy and human rights.

"We felt it important to relate to human rights in the Muslim world, but wanted to avoid demonizing Islam," the committee's executive director, Geir Lundestad, said in an interview.

But Ms. Ebadi has come under attack by many Iranian opposition figures abroad who see her as an apologist for political Islam despite her difficulties working within the Iranian system. The chant of protesters has followed her around the few Oslo blocks where the Nobel Peace Prize festivities take place.

"If you live under an Islamic regime in a region where political Islam is terrorizing women and you defend Islam, then you are defending political Islam," said Azar Majedi, founder and chairperson of the London-based Organization of Women's Liberation in Iran, which helped organize the protests in Oslo. "You cannot stop this kind of regime with these kind of niceties."

Ms. Ebadi lost her job as a judge after the 1979 Islamic revolution and has faced death threats and jail time while fighting for the rights of her clients. The country's hard-line clerics have called her a "Western mercenary," and just a week ago, an angry group of conservative Islamic women stopped her from giving a speech at a women's university in Tehran.

Ms. Ebadi has recently called for Iran's ruling clerics to allow women to run for president and has said she does not agree with capital punishment, which is practiced in Iran.

But she insists that her differences with Iran's senior clerics on such matters are a question of interpreting Islamic law. Though she goes without a veil while in Western countries — a punishable offense in Iran -— she has avoided calling for a secular state in her own country.

In her acceptance speech, Ms. Ebadi reserved her strongest reproach for the United States, declaring that "some states have violated the universal principles and laws of human rights by using the events of Sept. 11 and the war on international terrorism as a pretext."

"Regulations restricting human rights and basic freedoms, special bodies and extraordinary courts, which make fair adjudication difficult and at times impossible, have been justified and given legitimacy under the cloak of terrorism," she said, making a specific reference to the American military detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

She warned the United States and other Western countries that have "prescribed war and military intervention for this region" that it would be wrong to meddle in Iran's affairs.

From: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/11/international/europe/11NOBE.html