When The Iranian Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Was Betrayed By Both Her Husband And Her Country

A prominent example of how the Iranian intelligence service tries to silence dissidents, and how it succeeds. Shirin Ebadi, an Iranian lawyer, a former judge and human rights activist, founder of Defenders of Human Rights Center in Iran and Nobel Peace Prize laureate (2003), explains her probably not unique experience: intelligence agents caught her husband of 37 years with another woman who presumably cooperated with them, and threatened him with death by stoning. That he gave up his wife and denounced her in front of cameras and that he betrayed her, compounded by the guilt she feels because her husband was arrested and tortured because of her, is painful for Shirin, she writes seven years after the incident. She also describes the guilt she feels because her innocent husband was arrested and tortured for what she has done.

However, she reveals straightaway: “In August 2009 I was betrayed by both my husband and my country.”

Ebadi’s article, which was written in March 2016, seven years after the incidents, delineates in the minutest detail how a regime indulges itself in breaking down a marriage, a family and describes how it pressures an innocent person who is not even involved in the allegedly illegal, anti-regime activities, to sell his soul.

Ebadi implicitly admits that she has forgiven her husband, when she says to her daughter: “Each individual has only a certain threshold for suffering. Your father couldn’t take that kind of torture”, and adds it was not only a lesson which she imparted to her daughter but also a bitter lesson, she says, “I am still learning myself”.