| Masoumeh Ebtekar | |
|---|---|
| Vice President of Iran Head of Environmental Protection Organization |
|
| In office 2 August 1997 – 3 August 2005 |
|
| President | Mohammad Khatami |
| Preceded by | New Title |
| Succeeded by | Fatemeh Javadi |
| Member of City Council of Tehran | |
| Incumbent | |
| Assumed office 21 January 2007 |
|
| Preceded by | Nasrin Soltankhah |
| Personal details | |
| Born | 8 July 1960 Tehran, Iran |
| Political party | Islamic Iran Participation Front |
| Spouse(s) | Mohammad Hashemi (m. 1978) |
| Alma mater | University of Pennsylvania |
| Occupation | politician and journalist |
| Religion | Twelver Shi'a Islam |
Masoumeh Ebtekar (Persian: معصومه ابتکار; born 8 July 1960) is an Iranian scientist, journalist and politician. She is currently the director of Peace and Environment Center in Tehran.
Ebtekar first achieved fame as the spokeswoman of the students who had occupied the US Embassy in 1979. Later she became the first female Vice President of Iran, the head of the Environment Protection Organization of Iran during the administration of President Mohammad Khatami, and is currently a city councilwoman of Tehran.[1] She is a founding member of the Iranian reformist political party, the Islamic Iran Participation Front.
Originally known as Niloufar Ebtekar, she changed her public name sometime after the hostage crisis to Massoumeh.[2] Ebtekar is married to Seyyed Mohammad Hashemi who has been only active in the private sector for more than two decades, and they have two children.
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Ebtekar's father studied at the University of Pennsylvania, and she is reported to have lived with her parents in Upper Darby of Philadelphia for 3 years.[3] Another source lists her as having lived in Philadelphia for six years as a child, from whence she developed "near-perfect, American-accented English." [4] As a student in Iran she became a supporter of the political Islam of Ali Shariati and began wearing a traditional black chador covering everything except her face.[5]
She holds a BSc degree in laboratory science from Shahid Beheshti University, a MSc and PhD in immunology from Tarbiat Modares University in 1995, where she still teaches. Like many Iranian people, she has two names, she was named Massoumeh at birth, but known as Niloufar among friends and relatives.
Ebtekar served as spokeswoman for the students in the Iran hostage crisis of 1979, where Muslim Student Followers of the Imam's Line occupied the US Embassy and held 52 Americans hostage of 444 days. Selected because of her good command of English, she made regular appearances on American television where she listed the 'crimes' of America and denounced the hostages as spies who should be put on trial.
Asked by an ABC News correspondent one day whether she could see herself picking up a gun and killing the hostages, she replied: 'yes. When I've seen an American gun being lifted up and killing my brothers and sisters in the streets, of course.'[6]
She wrote an account of the embassy takeover with Fred A. Reed entitled Takeover in Tehran: The Inside Story of the 1979 U.S. Embassy Capture [7] She is said to be remembered by many Americans (hostages such as David Roeder, Barbara Timm, the mother of hostage Kevin Hermening and those who watched her on television) with a great lack of fondness, in part because "her familiarity with America added profound emphasis to her rejection of it." [8]
When asked by an American interviewer (Elaine Sciolino) in the late 1990s about her past as spokeswoman for the hostage-takers, why it did not appear on her resume, and why she had changed her name from Nilofar to Masoumeh, Ebtekar "had no apology and made no excuses" about her role[9] describing the hostage taking as "the best direction that could have been taken" by Iran at the time, but surprised the interviewer with her "chutzpah", insisting that the interviewer "not write much about these things."[10]
In 1981, Ebtekar became the editor-in-chief of the English daily newspaper Kayhan International, selected by Khatami who was then the representative of Ayatollah Khomeini in Kayhan Institute. She served in the newspaper until 1983. In 1991 she co-founded the Institute for Women's Studies and Research. Since 1992, she has been the license holder and managing director of the journal Farzaneh for Women's Studies and Research. Ebtekar was appointed as the Head of Women's NGO Coordinating Office and Vice Head of the National Committee to the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995. Laterو she was elected as the President of the Network of Women's NGOs in Iran.
Ebtekar is a founding member of the Islamic Iran Participation Front, a reformist party, and became the was the first woman to serve as Vice-President of Iran when the reformists came to power. Along with Zahra Shojaei, she participated in the first cabinet since the Islamic Revolution to include women. She has been described as a leftist in Mohammad Khatami's alliance.[11]
On International Women's Day in 1998, as vice-president of environmental affairs, she made an impassioned speech condemning the horrific oppression of women by the Taliban Movement in Afghanistan. Her performance caused comment by members of the Western news media in attendance as she herself was wearing a chador, a reminder of cumpulsory hijab in Iran which many in the West view as a violation of women's rights.
In the United States her appointment and uncovering of her past led to a question of whether President Khatami was aware of "how deeply" the hostage taking and holding, and anger towards its foremost public defender "affected both the American government and the American people."[12] Many academics and literary critiques have written and expressed their views on these memoirs.[13] Following this, "some ambassadors" in Tehran reportedly stated they would no "longer meet with her" and would "discourage official contract with her office."[14] In her recently published memoirs,she has however repeatedly referred to her cordial and official contacts with not only Western Ambassadors but European Ministers and Presidents as well.[15]
Ebtekar was named one of the seven 2006 Champions of the Earth by the United Nations Environment Program as a prominent and "inspirational" environmental leader who has made an impact at policy level in a region of the world.[16][17] She was also named as one of 50 environmental leaders by The Guardian newspaper on January 5, 2008 - the only Iranian or Muslim woman in the list.Vidal, John; Adam, David; Watts, Jonathan; Hickman, Leo; Sample, Ian (Saturday 5 January 2008 12.55 GMT). "50 people who could save the planet". The Guardian (London). http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/jan/05/activists.ethicalliving.
She co-founded the Center for Peace and Environment in 2005, a non-governmental organization devoted to the promotion of just and sustainable peace and the protection of the environment. Over 120 experts and academicians are currently members of the Center.
Ebtekar ran for and was elected to the city council of Tehran for the term beginning in 2007, coming in 9th out of 21 candidates, just after Parvin Ahmadinejad, the sister of the current President of Iran.[18] She established and heads the Tehran City Council Environment Committee and currently runs 20 working groups on environmental issues.
Ebtekar considered for a time running in the Tenth Iranian presidency (election on June 12, 2009) after the Islamic Republic's Guardian Council indicated that there is no “legal restraint” against women doing so.[19]
Ebtekar published her memoir as the first woman Vice President of Iran, entitled the Grapes of Shahrivar on May 3, 2009.[20] She has also published a collection of he essays and speeches on the environment and sustainable development, called Natural Peace, [21] She teaches immunology at the MSc and PhD levels, and is a member of several research board committees and a reviewer for two international and four national immunology journals.[22] After leaving her government position in 2005 Ebtekar has spoken as inaugural or keynote speaker at many international events.
After election to the City Council of Tehran in early 2007, Ebtekar began a weblog in Persian entitled "EbtekareSabz" under the free blog service Persianblog. In her blog she wrote 430 posts in environmental, political, social and women's issues, posted over 10,000 comments, the blog had one million viewers in 3.5 years. EbtekareSabz, which criticized the policies of the government and supported the reformist movement in Iran, was filtered by the Government once in early 2010 and again in June 2010 [23] and finally obstructed with a judicial verdict in August [24]/ . Citing the "right to freedom of expression in our constitution" as her incentive, she continued blogging by setting up a new blog. www.greenebtekar2.blogspot.com.
In 2009 the New York Times described her as "informally represent[ing] the views of many of the former hostage-takers", supporting "engagement with the West" and a renewal of the "original ideals of the revolution, including justice and freedom," which many of her peers believe have been abandoned by the current Islamic regime.[25]
On October 7, 2008 eTBLAST, a text similarity search engine on MEDLINE database, noted that 85% of a paper published by Masoumeh Ebtekar came from several previously published articles. The paper, on cytokines and air pollution, was published in 2006 in the Iran Journal of Allergy Asthma Immunology (IJAAI) 5 47-56:2006.[26] A couple weeks after the eTBLAST report, Nature magazine covered the story, quoting one of the authors of original papers, (Ian Mudway, a toxicologist at the King's College London) as saying, "the article is a veritable patchwork of other people's work, word for word, grammatical error for grammatical error." Nature also stated that Ebtekar had not replied to its emails.[27] In response, the editor-in-chief of the IJAAI issued a statement saying: "We regret for this duplication that appeared in the journal. We are working with the editors of the JACI journal [J Allergy Clin Immunol, a journal that published three of the papers from which Ebtekar had copied] to find the best solution in this regard." In December 2008 Ebtekar's article was retracted.[26]
The issue received some political and public attention in Iran[28] where Ebtekar issued a statement admitting she had made a mistake and apologizing for it, but including a list of complaints such as eTBLAST's failure to inform her of their finding in advance, the fact that the article was a review article she was invited to write for the Journal, and that more than 76 references were given in the text.[29]
