Far from quelling resistance by working people and students, the massacre of more than 7,000 protesters in Iran last month and the arrest of more than 50,000 has only deepened opposition to the bourgeois clerical regime.
Meanwhile, Washington has put in place its largest military buildup of ships and warplanes in the Middle East since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, to press Tehran to give in to U.S. demands. (See article on page 9.) U.S. military strikes would be a blow to Iranian working people organizing to defend their rights against the regime.
Ceremonies traditionally held 40 days after the death of a loved one were transformed into large demonstrations of pride in those fighting the regime Feb. 17 and 18. Participants denounced the government’s slanders that protesters were Israeli- or U.S.-paid agents.
Dancing and women singing in public is forbidden in Iran. But at many of the ceremonies, instead of the traditional reading from the Quran, participants danced and sang, celebrating the lives of the fallen protesters.
“You killed my son. You cannot kill his goals,” the mother of slain 17-year-old Mehrad Sadeghi said to applause at a ceremony in Isfahan. She wore his clothes to the event. “You may have taken his body. But now I wear his clothes and you cannot do anything to stop this from continuing.”
‘We come to take back our country’
Schoolteacher Khadija Alipour’s handwritten will was found in her pocket after she was gunned down in Karaj Jan. 8. “We are not terrorists. We are not rioters. We are not pawns of foreign powers,” she wrote. “We are proud, honorable children of workers, protesting. We have come to take back our country from the privileged elites. We will stay in the streets.”
The father of Sadra Soltani told the crowd at his son’s graveside in Tehran that during the 12-day war between Israel and Tehran his son just missed being struck by an Israeli bomb.
“Israel did not kill my son,” he said. “The Islamic Republic did.”
Students at over a dozen campuses in Tehran, Mashhad, Isfahan and Shiraz have also been protesting every day since schools reopened Feb. 21, to honor fellow students who were killed and to call for the end of the regime.
The bourgeois press around the world and the Tehran regime falsely paint the student protesters as supporters of the son of the Shah of Iran, the U.S.-backed monarch overthrown in the mass popular revolution that swept Iran in 1979.
While small groups of students have chanted for the return of a shah, at a Feb. 24 student sit-in at the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Tehran, protesters chanted, “Neither the Shah, nor Supreme Leader nor the reactionary Rajavi!” “Supreme Leader” refers to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Maryam Rajavi is the leader of the Mujahedeen, a guerrilla group that seeks U.S.-imperialist backing.
Thugs from the Basij, a paramilitary force organized by the regime’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, attacked several student actions. To the thugs’ surprise the students successfully defended themselves.
When the Basij attacked a protest of hundreds at Ferdowsi University in Mashhad, students chanted “Death to the dictator!” and “Basij, you are the same as ISIS.”
The Islamic Association of Students of the University of Tehran condemned the Basij. It reported that on Feb. 22 the student-based Basij confronting protesters were outnumbered at first. But then Basij from off campus joined them, pushing, shoving and beating protesters. Clashes went on for hours before the action was finally dispersed.
Worker-student solidarity
The Tehran and Suburbs Bus Company Workers Union declared its support to the “students’ struggle against repression and for freedom and equality.” The union stressed the importance of “worker-student solidarity” and “defense of the independence of student and labor organizations from the state, government institutions, and advocates of any form of despotism, authoritarianism, or totalitarianism.”
The breadth and determination of the protesters are widening divisions within Iran’s ruling class. The rulers try to use the U.S. government’s war threats to press for an end to the demonstrations.
Supporters of Mir Hussein Mousavi, a former prime minister who has been under house arrest for over a decade, announced they are forming a “Provisional Executive Committee for the Establishment of the Iran Salvation Front,” which they say would guarantee everyone’s rights in a “unified homeland.”
Under the Islamic Republic — like during the rule of the pro-U.S. shah — working people are denied political rights and face severe repression. Oppressed nationalities are discriminated against in jobs and housing, are often denied the right to use their native language and disproportionately face the death penalty.
While Mousavi and his so-called reformist wing of the regime claim they are against “despotism” they have never supported the rights of Iran’s oppressed nationalities — Kurds, Baluchis, Arabs and Azerbaijanis — to self-determination. Nor have they denounced the regime’s promotion of Jew-hatred and threats to destroy Israel.
“Any major social and political transformation in Iran,” the Tehran and Suburbs Bus Company Workers Union said Feb. 23, must include the rights of “all ethnicities and nationalities.” The union said it will soon publish a program to defend “working-class families and the oppressed people of the country” and to “protest against internal repression and killings, and against war and militarism.”
The U.S. rulers don’t want the “social and political transformation” the bus workers seek. They want a stable regime that cooperates with Washington. Some news reports say oil refineries and other factories are among the targets the Donald Trump administration is considering for attack. That is a threat to thousands of oil workers, truck drivers and others who are fighting for higher wages and better conditions.