The Goldfish Liberation Front

The Attached One had a nasty shock on Sunday morning when he went to feed the goldfish. Vanessa, the pretty one with the gauzy tail, had died during the night. No obvious reason, she had seemed perfectly healthy and was buried in the garden with some ceremony. It left us feeling very sad that she did not get the chance to live in the bigger tank that we were planning to buy for her and her friend Dennis.

The care that we have taken over the two years that Vanessa and Dennis have been with us, to make sure that they have been happy, is in complete contrast to the treatment of the goldfish that are sold every year by an Iranian grocer in west London. In March those passing his shop are treated to a display of all the items needed for the celebration of Nowruz, the Zarathustrian or Persian New Year. These include pots of fragrant hyacinth and sprouted wheat, but it is the glitter and flash amongst them of many small goldfish in tiny bowls of water that draws customers to the shop.

These are very popular with the Iranian expats, who can be seen peering at the pairs of young goldfish in their ornate bowls as they carry them home. What they do not realise is that these fish are being kept in a volume of water that is a tenth of the amount they actually require and that the traditional bowl denies the fish the surface area necessary to give them the oxygen they need to survive. It’s a bit like shutting a toddler into a cupboard where it can only turn round on the spot and putting a plastic bag over its head so that it can’t breathe properly.

I have been told by an RSPCA inspector that they have tried to stop this practice as the fish sit in these tiny bowls until they are sold and who knows what happens to them after Nowruz. I suspect the sewers of West Ealing are alive with goldfish by the end of April, unless of course there are Iranian households with substantial fish tanks. In which case why do they have to buy more each year? The saddest thing about this practice is that goldfish can live for as long as forty years but these die when they are only a few months old.

Most of the Iranians who patronise this shop are likely to be exiles who fled their country after the revolution in 1979. Even so, I always think of those delicate goldfish in their tiny suffocating bowls as a metaphor for the young people of Iran, suffocated by a regime that criminalises homosexuality and executes teenage girls who are themselves victims of rape and abuse. The death of Neda Soltani will make her a symbol of the youth of Iran and their desire to live in a modern democratic environment, but long before this the situation of young Iranian women has been a matter of concern to human rights activists worldwide.

Atefeh Sahaaleh was a sixteen year old girl with mental health problems who was the victim of repeated rape by a former member of the Revolutionary Guard. When she was five years old her mother was killed in a car accident and this drove her father to drug addiction. She was obliged to care for her very elderly grandparents who repaid her by ignoring her. She would wander the streets of her town, prey for older men who would take advantage of her. The penalty for having sex with an unmarried man in Iran is one hundred lashes. She was given this punishment on three separate occasions.

Eventually she was arrested after an unsigned petition describing her as a “bad influence” was presented to the local authorities, asking that action be taken against her. Under torture she confessed to having a sexual relationship with a married man, in other words, he raped her a number of times. Atefeh’s reaction to the sentence of death passed on her led the judge, Haji Rezai, to make a supreme effort to make sure that the sentence was carried out. Documents showed her age as twenty two even though her family can prove that she was sixteen at the time. Rezai himself placed the noose around her neck and it was later discovered that he had been responsible for torturing her. Her family cannot even visit her grave to mourn her as her body was stolen from it within hours of her death.

Young men suffer equally in Iran. In 2005 Mahmoud Asgari and Ayaz Marhoni were executed, convicted of the rape of a thirteen year old boy, although it has been alleged that they died because they were homosexual and that the “rape“ was a consensual act. Their case gained notoriety when photographs taken just before their deaths were published on the internet. Mahmoud was sixteen and Ayaz eighteen. In the UK we worry that our young men are too rowdy, too interested in drugs, too lazy, too inclined to wear hooded tops. What must it be like to be young in a country where you risk a public lashing for engaging in the kind of activity that we regard as part of becoming an adult? How much harder must it be if you are gay?

I have never been to Iran but the knowledge I have of it suggests that it is a place of contrasts. A country where there is torture and executions are carried out but with a long history of creativity. The ceramic and textile art of Iran has attracted and inspired collectors and designers for centuries. Women are obliged to cover their hair in public yet there are female reporters and sportswomen. Homosexuality is banned but Iranian surgeons carry out corrective operations on transgender people every year. Iran’s government has a reputation for cruelty and repression yet its people are some of the kindest and most courteous that I have ever met.

Cruelty and beauty. Goldfish and hyacinths. I hope that the ordinary people of Iran get the democracy that they long for and I hope that shopkeeper sticks to selling flowers next New Year.
　
　
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/5217424.stm　
　
　

Sad and shocking images: