When I was really young, my father arranged for my older sister—who was 19 at the time—to be engaged to a man who was 50 years old. That man already had a wife and kids.

My sister, in a country like Afghanistan where saying no to your father was unthinkable, stood up for herself. She refused to marry him. And that was the beginning of hell for all of us. Violence became part of our everyday life. Every day. Every night. Screaming, beating, crying. It was like we were being eaten alive from the inside. Slowly fading. Slowly dying.

She fought back for 13 years. My father couldn’t force her to go, but at the same time, we lived in a tribal society where breaking traditions was a crime. Relatives kept pressuring us, talking, judging.

In the end, after 13 years of war inside our own home, we finally got her out of that nightmare. We did that by paying the equivalent of $40,000. A fortune. My father had to sell the land he inherited from his father to make it happen.

On babies and divine punishment

But even after all that, my sister’s suffering didn’t end. In Afghanistan, if a woman is over 20 and unmarried, no one wants her. And if she’s divorced? She might as well give up on the idea of marriage altogether. So, in the end, she had no choice. She married another man. A man old enough to be her father. A man who already had ten grown children.

Now, she has many daughters, all under 12. She kept having babies, hoping, praying, that one of them would be a boy.

In Afghanistan, a woman is only “lucky” if she gives birth to a son. That’s when her husband starts treating her like a human being. But she never had a son. And as if that wasn’t enough, her eldest daughter was born with vitiligo.

In a society like this, where women are already treated like nothing, having a skin condition like that, it’s like a curse. It’s a life sentence.

Yesterday, my sister told me her husband told their 11-year-old daughter that her condition was “God’s punishment.” God’s punishment. On a child. What kind of God punishes a little girl like that? My sister lives like a prisoner. Trapped in a room without a bathroom, without a toilet. And that kills me inside.

The post What Happened When One Woman Tried To Escape Forced Marriage in Afghanistan first appeared on Lazo Magazine.

Mahsa Amini, an Iranian citizen of Kurdish descent, was taken into police custody and dealt several blows to the head. She later died in a hospital in Iran’s capital, Tehran. The young woman’s only alleged crime was not correctly wearing her hijab. Iran’s theocratic regime requires all women to wear a head covering in public. 

In the weeks following Amini’s death, a protest movement erupted across the country. The Woman, Life, Freedom movement – named after the popular protest chant “Jin, Jiyan, Azadi” – pitted women, even religious women who often support the Iranian regime, against the state and its repressive morality police. 

The movement showed the world a new side of Iran, one that is young, female, and defiant. 

In Iran, where freedom of expression is often curtailed, and the Internet is monitored and censored, artists emerged as significant representatives of this new movement. They also played a pivotal role in broadcasting it to the world. 

A new report from the Artistic Freedom Initiative, entitled I Create; I Resist: Iranian Artists on the Frontline of Social Change, highlights the role Iranian artists played in resisting the regime.

“Given the critical role that Iranian art played in inspiring and sustaining the movement, artists were among the first groups to be targeted by the Islamic Republic as the government cracked down on the protests,” the report reads. “From September 2022 to the present, Iranian artists have reported being threatened and harmed for their work in support of the movement. Further, the government has launched numerous attacks on Iranian artists, including work bans, arbitrary arrests and prosecution, torture and the solicitation of false confessions, restrictions on mobility, and transnational repression.” 

Remembering the artists

Johanna Bankston, one of the report’s authors, told Lazo Magazine that calling attention to Iranian artists ensures that the world they want to build isn’t forgotten.

“It’s important to highlight the artists’ contributions because their works were not only legitimate forms of dissent and protest, which are protected under international human rights law, but many of them were also poignant reflections of Iranians’ shared desire to create a future written on their own terms,” she said. “By censoring these works and attempting to imprison the artists behind them, the regime’s disregard for Iranians’ rights and freedoms is more clear than ever.”  

Many of these artists have been forced into exile to avoid persecution.

Here’s a look at some of the featured artists:

Nazanin Noroozi

Noroozi is an Iranian multidisciplinary visual artist living in the United States. She creates films, still images, and collages. She often uses her work to call attention to human rights abuses in Iran.

Jalz

Jalz is an Iranian graphic designer who created an image of Iran’s Azadi (Freedom) Tower superimposed behind Henri Matisse’s dancers.

Roshi Rouzbehani

Rouzbehani is a visual artist who uses graphic design to commemorate performative action and protest. She was the artist behind the 2023 work, My Hair is Not Your Battle Ground.

Arghavan Khosravi

Iranian visual artist Arghavan Khosravi creates art that represents the experience of Iranian women and women who face human rights abuses globally. She moved to the U.S. to study art in 2015. She has been forced to remain in the country ever since the Trump administration implemented its controversial Muslim ban.

Read the full report here.

The post Women, Life, Freedom: On the Iranian Artists Resisting the Regime first appeared on Lazo Magazine.

Emmanuel Macron, the slick, youngest-ever president who rose to power in 2017 with over 60 percent of the vote, promised to usher in a new era of politics that would transcend national divisions. He even renamed his newly minted political party Renaissance, in case you didn’t understand what he was aiming to achieve. But seven years later, Macron has learned that he is no exception to the rule.

Even if his approval ratings aren’t quite as bad as those of his predecessors, they have dropped to record lows.

The affairs of the Fifth Republic

The July snap parliamentary election — which Macron called in response to an increase in votes for the far-right during the European parliamentary elections in June — left no party in the 577-seat National Assembly with a clear majority. A left-wing grouping of various political parties, called the New Popular Front (NFP), won around 190 seats. Macron’s centrists came in second with around 160, and the far-right National Rally came in third with 140 seats.

The next French presidential election won’t occur until 2027, meaning Macron’s job is safe for now. But he must appoint a new prime minister to govern a divided legislature for the next several years. The NFP has put forward a candidate, arguing that they should pick the premier because they had the strongest showing. But so far, Macron has stalled and deliberated and refused to appoint the candidate the left wants.

Amidst all this mess, Lazo Magazine spoke to independent journalist Olly Haynes. He splits his time between France and the United Kingdom and can often be found “Franceposting” on Twitter (the platform we will never call X). This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Why won’t Macron pick a prime minister from the NFP, given that they’ve won the most seats?

The short answer is that the NFP’s program is essentially to undo everything that Macron spent the last several years doing. Macron already didn’t have a parliamentary majority starting in 2022. But he had a working majority because he could sign into legislation lots of stuff with the help of the right-wing party Les Républicains. He could also use what’s called article 49.3, which is when the prime minister overrules parliament to pass laws.

He is only able to do this once per legislative session for something that isn’t a budget. But they’ve been very tactically clever in making lots of things that aren’t necessarily part of the budget a budgetary question. A lot of the anger over pension reform in France was about the fact that it was passed using this measure.

Macron has pursued this very ambitious program of what you might call neoliberal reforms. He’s also beefed up the police and implemented a low-key war on terror. He’s moved closer to the right on the question of the border. He doesn’t want any of this undone.

He came into politics to break apart the cozy duopoly of the socialists and Les Républicains. He sees himself as a modernizer. He wants to turn France into a startup nation, high-energy, dynamic, and he sees politics essentially as a dragging force.

A lot of people accuse him of what they call neo-Bonapartism. His philosophy of the presidency is that he was elected, and therefore power ultimately lies in his hands.

What do we know about the NFP’s choice of candidate, Lucie Castet? She has said the left would reverse the pension reforms and restore public services. Is that why Macron won’t appoint her?

The government resigned over 50 days ago. But we’re in this really weird situation where the ministers who quit are still acting as if they’re in power. The finance ministry has prepared an austerity budget. They’ve baked in a lot of cuts to the health system and schools and other public services. That’s partly a political maneuver to tie the hands of a potential NFP government.

Lucie Castets is a civil servant and an economist. She works in the administration of Paris. She headed a commission within the finance ministry looking at money laundering and financial crime. She’s a big “tax the rich” person. She’s got a similar line to the economist Thomas Piketty about taxation at the European level.

She was a member of the center-left Socialist Party. She eventually left the party over disagreements with Hollande, although she remained close with other members, like Anne Hidalgo, the Paris mayor.

The NFP chose her because she’s not the leader of any individual parties inside the alliance. Castets, because of her history in the Socialist Party, but then leaving it on a left-wing line, but never being affiliated with the La France Insoumise of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, was an acceptable middle ground for everyone. She’s fairly radical on improving public services, but she’s within the institutional world that is acceptable to the Socialist Party.

What is Macron holding out for? He called snap elections. Shouldn’t he face the consequences and appoint the compromise figure?

The president can dissolve the parliament once every year. That means it’s pretty much guaranteed that there’s going to be a dissolution next July. One theory about why Macron is dragging this out is to run down the clock as much as he can.

There’s also a fringe within the Socialist Party. They’re going to try to bring a vote at the next Congress to change the line of the party away from the current leader Olivier Faure. That’s important because Olivier Faure is in favor of an alliance that includes La France Insoumise. He believes in left-wing unity, and the other faction in his party does not.

They would be much more open to joining a so-called “technical government” of center-left to center-right. That would be able to conserve, from Macron’s perspective, more of his reforms. It would be much less about breaking with Macron.

The longer he tries to hold out, to wear down the optimism of the voters of the New Popular Front, and the parties of the New Popular Front, the more he can try to exacerbate these divisions and maybe break off this socialist flank in order to build this technical government.

Macron has not put forward a candidate from the centrist block. They’ve proposed candidates such as Bernard Cazeneuve. These are figures in the Socialist Party who are not in agreement with an alliance with La France Insoumise, and this is an attempt to try to prise away the socialists from the New Popular Front into a centrist technical government.

Is it fair to say this is undemocratic?

Yes, I think that’s a fair assessment. The leader of the French Communist Party, Fabien Roussel, summed it up on television quite pithily. He said if this were happening in Latin America we would call this either a coup or a dangerous blow to democracy.

Partly this is a function of the Fifth Republic system itself, which was born of [Former President Charles] De Gaulle’s coup d’état and institutionalized a huge amount of power in the presidency. Lots of people think the system itself is quite undemocratic. Things like article 49.3 of the constitution allow for the overruling of parliament, often on an arbitrary basis.

That is not necessarily a problem until you have a figure like Macron, who is very clever, very creative, and incredibly stubborn. He also has this almost mystical belief about what democracy is supposed to be, which is that he incarnates the will of the people.

What is the mood in the country right now?

What keeps coming up in conversation is this word “bordel,” which kind of means catastrophe, and there’s this sense of irritation that there’s no government.

There’s a deep anger on the left at the frustration of their democratic expression. There’s lots of gilets jaune-style murmurings on Facebook pages about the lack of democracy in France. But in general, among the less political people, there’s a sense that they don’t like Macron, but this is a catastrophe, we don’t have a government, what is going to happen?

What does this say about the state of French politics and how the system works?

The line that people keep throwing around is that this is the emergence of the Fourth Republic within the Fifth Republic. This kind of chaos and disorder and parliamentary wrangling is exactly what the Fifth Republic was designed to prevent.

Alleviating the system and making it more democratic probably would help with things. However, fundamentally, what I think this is a product of is that there are three blocks within French society, and these blocks have fundamentally quite different interests and ideas.

France has become divided in a tripartite structure, where urban young people, educated but downwardly mobile people, vote overwhelmingly for the New Popular Front, as do the immigrant populations around the cities, in the banlieues.

The rich parts of the cities vote for Macron, and older people vote for Macron, so people whose pensions are not affected by his reforms because they are already taking them.

Then, in deep France, the France profonde, as it’s called, in small towns and villages, people tend to vote for the far-right.

Society is very divided, and I don’t think that will go away even with fixes to the system.

The post What Macron’s Latest Moves Say About Politics in France first appeared on Lazo Magazine.