Christiane Amanpour sitting in front of an empty chair.
With this image, published this Thursday on her Twitter account, the CNN journalist explained how her interview with the president of Iran, Ebrahim Raisi, had been cancelled.
The reason, she assures her, is that she refused to cover her head with a
hijab.
or Islamic veil during their agreed meeting in New York.
An aide to the president told him, 40 minutes after the start of the interview, that the president asked him to wear a headscarf because it was "the sacred months of Muharram and Safar."
She refused.
“We are in New York, where there is no law or tradition about the scarf.
I pointed out that no previous Iranian president had demanded it when he had interviewed them outside of Iran,” she narrates.
“The aide said it was 'a matter of respect,' and referred to 'the situation in Iran,' referring to the protests sweeping the country.
Once again, I told him that I could not accept this unprecedented and unexpected condition.
And so we left.
The interview did not take place.
Iran celebrates a week of protests this Friday after the death in police custody of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old girl who had been arrested for not wearing the veil correctly, mandatory in the Islamic Republic.
Iranian NGOs raise the number of deaths in the demonstrations to 31, while official television reduces the number to 17.
On Twitter, there was no shortage of people who critically compared the symbolic photo of Christiane Amanpour in front of Raisi's empty seat with another, that of the journalist Lesley Stahl, of the American channel CBS.
She was interviewing the Iranian leader tightly covered and wearing a
hijab
.
But very important nuances were lost in the debate on social media: first, the CBS interview was conducted in Tehran, where foreigners are also required to cover their heads – let's remember the interview of the Spanish Ana Pastor with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2011, in which her headscarf slips.
Second, Stahl's interview took place, according to US television, on Monday, September 12, before the protests broke out.
At the end of what seemed to be a cordial interview with Iranian President Raisi Tuesday, a member of his staff reached up and blocked one of the cameramen from filming Lesley Stahl's goodbyes and took a cameraman's phone for 2.5 hours.
https://t.co/CChTRxk3NR pic.twitter.com/VGWwSAm5y7
– 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) September 21, 2022
The demand of the Raisi team to the CNN journalist, says Ángeles Espinosa, EL PAÍS specialist in the Arab and Islamic world, is “unacceptable”.
"There is no precedent for the president of the Islamic Republic to make such a demand outside his country," she stresses in a telephone conversation.
An example that she lived in the first person was her interview in 2002 with President Mohamed Jatamí at the Palacio del Pardo, in Madrid, the first that the Iranian president granted to an international media, and in which Espinosa did not cover his hair .
Years later, when she interviewed President Ahmadinejad in Iran, she wore a
hijab
.
The correspondent, who was expelled from the Islamic Republic in 2011 after interviewing dissident Ahmad Montazerí, says that she would respect another colleague's giving in to the demand of the
hijab
in order to get this interview, but he thinks she would have acted just like Christiane Amanpour.
"Precisely in the current context of protests, the gesture [of putting on the veil] has another reading."
Something similar says Aidan White, founder of the Ethical Journalism Network, who believes that sources should never impose their standards when it comes to dressing or behaving.
Over the phone, he stresses the importance of the CNN interview being televised.
“By submitting to this demand, and in an interview focused precisely on the
hijab
issue , you would give the viewer the impression that their objectivity is compromised.
If she decided to agree to wear a headscarf, she would of course be forced to explain why.”
Ricardo Gutiérrez, secretary general of the European Federation of Journalists (FEP), disagrees.
The vital thing, he thinks, by phone and in a personal capacity, would have been to get the meeting with Raisi to pose difficult questions at a historic moment.
“The really important question seems to me: am I going to have the freedom to ask what I want?
As a journalist, my responsibility is to ask on behalf of civil society.”
And he connects President Raisi's request with other "protocol" issues in Europe, such as the tie in work environments or the dress code for papal meetings in the Vatican (women must wear a black suit with a skirt below the knee and head covering).
Of course, Gutiérrez admits that the fact that this is a television interview, and not the written press, is a relevant nuance:
Laura Mijares is the coordinator of the Area of Arab and Islamic Studies at the Complutense University of Madrid.
Together with Ángeles Ramírez, an anthropologist from the Autonomous University of Madrid, she published in 2021
Feminisms before Islam
.
The veil and women's bodies
.
The academics do not agree with any type of clothing imposition on any woman in the world, they point out.
"Having said this, the president's attitude is very similar to what is observed in the opposite direction: when in Europe Muslim girls who wear headscarves are excluded from education, as is happening in Spain at the beginning of the course," they point out. via email.
The Iranian president, they point out, leads an authoritarian country that forces women to cover up and, for image reasons, does not want to be seen next to a woman without a headscarf.
“But what happens when one dress is imposed, or another is prohibited, in the name of democracy and freedoms?” they ask.
Journalist Amanda Figueras, author of
Why Islam
, sums up her thoughts in one sentence via text message: “In the end it all comes down to wanting to control women's bodies and, unfortunately, that doesn't just happen in Iran.
Added to this are political interests and trying to impose a worldview as the only valid one.
All this while the voice of the women themselves, of course, is ignored.
What they think is always taken for granted.”
The BBC's chief international correspondent, Lyse Doucet, commented on Amanpour's interview on the British news agency's website.
For her, the image of a woman –of Iranian origins– without a veil interviewing an ultra-conservative president about, precisely, the protests against the headscarf, has tremendous symbolic force.
“Many of us are guided by what we need to get the best interview.
There is a balance between not being disrespectful and not taking orders.
But when the interview is precisely about handkerchiefs, it's a different story."
The vice president of Reporters Without Borders (RSF) in Spain, Edith Rodríguez Cachera, appeals to Western journalists.
“In solidarity with women journalists persecuted inside and outside Iran's borders, and in solidarity with journalists like Narges Mohammadi, who has been imprisoned since 2015, it is more important than ever that we are aware of the wearing of the veil in interviews and public appearances, and that we do so. Let's limit it to places where it's strictly necessary."
Iran is among the 10 worst countries in the world for journalism, according to RSF, which estimates that a thousand journalists have been arrested, jailed or executed since the 1979 Islamic revolution
.
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