Shahrokh Zamani Action Campaign

February 11th: Video (in farsi) from the lunchtime picket at the London embassy and evening Trade Union rally protesting the British government’s anti-Trade Union Bill (see also Right To Strike campaign)

On February 11th  activists in London gathered at the Iranian regime’s embassy to protest against the usurpation of the glorious revolution of 1979 by the most blood-soaked section of Iran’s bourgeoisie. February 11th is the official celebration of ‘Revolution Day’ in Iran, where the Iranian capitalist state celebrates a totally distorted history of the Iranian Revolution, one where the reactionary Shia hierarchy led the revolution against the Shah!

However, the truth is that the Iranian Revolution was made by Iranian workers, fighting not only against the corrupt monarchy but also against the failure of the capitalist system to provide them and their families with the basics necessities of human life. They were robbed of their gains in the revolution and then savagely repressed for over 35 years.

We chose this day to protest at the Iranian state’s treatment of the labour movement that fought for freedom in 1979 and continues to fight for freedom today.

To protest Hassan Rohani’s official two-day visit to France a group of activists picketed the London embassy of the French Republic.

Rohani’s European tour has already taken him to Italy and the Vatican. While in France he will be received by François Hollande at the Élysée Palace and will sign trade deals and memoranda that will help boost profits for French and Iranian capitalists.

As in Italy, the general repression in Iran and the severe measures taken against labour activists and the left will not be discussed. It is clear that the improvement in diplomatic and trade relations between the capitalists of Iran and Europe comes at the expense of Iranian workers’ rights.

The demonstrators unfurled the banner of ‘Iranian Workers Are Not Alone’ outside the embassy and chanted slogans in support of all imprisoned workers in Iran. They also demanded that the suspicious death of Shahrokh Zamani be investigated independently. Their placards called for freeing all jailed workers and political prisoners, for workers to have the right to organise and to go on strike.

The protesters included comrades from Alliance for Workers’ Liberty and Iranian Workers’ Solidarity Network. We thank all picketers for helping us to publicise the struggles of Iranian workers and showing their solidarity with the recent upsurge in protests and strikes.

Free all political prisoners now!
Long live independent workers’ organisations and the right to strike!
Investigate Shahrokh Zamani’s death!
Iranian workers are not alone!

Iranian Workers’ Solidarity Network
27 January 2016

A photo from tonight’s picket, more to follow:

Much fuss has been made about Hassan Rohani’s Italian hosts covering up nude statues in Rome’s Capitoline Museum to save him from blushing!

Critics of Matteo Renzi’s government, mostly right-wing politicians in Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia and the Fratelli d’Italia party, have condemned the boxing up of Venus and other classical nude statues as “negating our own [culture]” and “a kind of surrender.”

This hoo-ha has missed two very important points:
1- For over 36 years Iranian women – i.e., real, living and breathing human beings – have been forced to cover themselves from head to toe so that the country’s male population are not ‘shamed’ or ‘sexually provoked’!

This nonsense is, of course, an excuse for the religious and political authorities of the regime to intrude in the smallest personal details of every woman’s life at home and the way she dresses outside the home. And the male relatives, whether they agree with the policy or not, have to ‘watch over’ the girls and women so that the family is not ‘shamed’ or hauled in front of a court for ‘offending’ the authorities.

But did Rohani’s Italian hosts consider the sensibilities of nearly 40 million girls and women when glad-handing him? We don’t think so.

2- Hassan Rohani is the so-called ‘president’ of a regime that for decades has persecuted workers, women, youth, national and religious minorities, writers, artists and any other kind of dissident for the slightest expression of opinions that are not approved by the authorities.

And if anyone dares to take independent action based on such opinions and ideals then they are locked up in jail, tortured and even executed. This regime is particularly vicious in smashing the struggles of workers to form independent trade unions and establishing the right to strike.

Again, we don’t think that anyone in Matteo Renzi’s government mentioned anything about the systematic abuse of workers’ rights. There just wasn’t any time when there were €17 billion ($18.4 billion) of business deals to sign with Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, Danieli (the steel company) and their like!

Now that Rohani is in France we expect workers’ and women’s rights to get the same treatment.

Free all political prisoners now!
Long live independent workers’ organisations and the right to strike!
Investigate Shahrokh Zamani’s death!
Iranian workers are not alone!

Iranian Workers’ Solidarity Network
27 January 2016

Norman Lamont, the Conservative politician and pro-Pinochet campaigner, has been appointed by the Britain’s Tory government as its envoy in charge of developing trade with Iran’s dictatorship.*

Norman Lamont first found infamy as Chancellor of the Exchequer when he presided over Britain’s forced exit from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM). Although most people called September 16th 1992 Black Wednesday, an event that cost Britain’s Treasury around £3.3 billion, the next day Lamont was found to be very cheerful and claimed that he had been “singing in the bath this morning”!

Lamont’s second claim to infamy came when on October 17th 1998 the British government was forced to detain General Augusto Pinochet in compliance with an international arrest warrant issued by a Spanish judge, Baltasar Garzón. Norman Lamont became the Chilean dictator’s most vociferous supporter after Margaret Thatcher.

Even though the Pinochet regime had “killed at least 3,197 people and tortured about 29,000” (Obituary, Washington Post, December 11, 2006), that did not stop Norman Lamont from being very active at different levels, and using many channels, to help the dictator escape from Britain and not face any judicial process. He constantly tried to portray the twice-elected Salvador Allende, the prime minister toppled and killed by Pinochet, as a bigger evil than the head of the military junta who became an international symbol of state brutality against the left, workers, women and the poor! Lamont also peddled the notion that a trial could destabilise Chile’s new-found democracy!

Given the political history of Norman Lamont, who has now been ‘elevated’ to the House of Lords, we know that his dealings with the Iranian regime will at no point bring up the issues of political executions, political prisoners, detention without trial, torture and the many other forms of abuse that sustains the dictatorship.

More specifically we do not expect Norman Lamont to let the rights of workers to form independent trade unions and the right to strike, or women’s equal treatment by the state and society, or the rights of national and religious minorities and all other oppressed layers in Iranian society to come in the way of the multi-billion pound trade and investment deals that the capitalists of Britain and Iran are planning.

The capitalist classes of both Britain and Iran have their clear agenda and they have selected the experienced personnel who can deliver that agenda. It is now time for the workers of Britain and Iran to co-operate against this common enemy to make sure that their rights are not trampled on in the drive to make big profits for capitalists in both countries.

Free all political prisoners now!
Long live independent workers’ organisations and the right to strike!
Investigate Shahrokh Zamani’s death!
Iranian workers are not alone!

Iranian Workers’ Solidarity Network
25 January 2016

* “Norman Lamont has been appointed UK trade envoy to Iran as part of a wider government attempt to improve Britain’s disappointing export record.” (Financial Times, January 20, 2016)

Dear comrade,

The nuclear deal between the 5+1 imperialist powers and the Iranian regime, signed in July 2015, was approved by the United States Congress in September and President Obama has now begun the process of lifting sanctions. During the past week we have also seen the Iranian regime’s ‘parliament’ and the Guardian Council – which sits above it – endorse this agreement.

Since the ‘cold war’ between imperialism and the regime is ending – with trade delegations from many European countries heading to Iran since July – the authorities in Iran have been taking steps to prepare for a relative reduction in the general level of repression. Opening up Iranian society is a necessary condition for improving the economic situation, including a positive effect on growth.

Continue reading →

Shahrokh Zamani’s statement from jail

To the labour organisations of Iran and the world

For us workers the solution is internationalist unity.

There is intensification of exploitation, discrimination and arrogance, injustice and violation of legal rights against the Iranian working class.
Accept my warm greetings from Rejai Shahr prison. I, Shahrokh Zamani, am a member of the re-launch committee of the Tehran Painters’ Union, and a member of the Committee to Pursue the Establishment of Workers’ Organisations.

Along with other imprisoned labour activists like Behnam Ebrahimzadeh and Mohammad Jarrahi, I have been condemned merely for legitimate and legal defence of the right to found independent organisations and the right to strike, that are officially recognised throughout the world, and in defence of wages that match inflation, job security, unemployment and health insurance, pensions, and a labour law that guarantees the basic rights of the 50 million members of Iran’s workers’ households.

For these, I was arrested by the anti-worker Islamic Republic, and without any trial in the medieval kangaroo courts, given the heavy sentence of 11 years in prison.

The intensification of exploitation is on the rise, with wages fixed at a quarter below the poverty line, the prevalence of temporary and unsigned contracts, the absolute enslavement of workers and the destruction of job security; the importing of shoddy goods by the mafia of wealth and power and the complete destruction of employment and production and making millions unemployed, scrapping subsidies of essential supplies and energy and the astronomical price rises, privatisation — or handing over to family — and basing all areas of health, education, sports and public services on money; the elimination and destruction of all social security protective laws, including labour laws. As a result of these anti-people policies, 80% of Tehran’s population live below the poverty line, 75% of industrial production has been destroyed and unemployment stands at 43%, ranking second highest in the world, the highest housing costs in the world, 11 million illiterate people, and the highest rate of divorce, addiction and depression in the world, that put 14 million workers with their 50 million household members in a state of slow death.

In such a miserable situation, with no control from below by workers’ or people’s organisations and the banning of the slightest freedoms of speech, press and parties, the ruling sponger and middleman class, ranked 144th out of 157 countries of the world for bribery, has increased the scale of open looting and stealing of the national wealth to disastrous levels. The theft includes 3 billion tomans ($1,088,730) from the banks, 1860 billion tomans ($675,504,000) in the copper industry, tens of billions in the Shahid (Martyr) Foundation and 70 billion in Iran Insurance, 6 billion Asaluyeh. And in broad daylight, public robbery by 600 members of the ruling wealth and power mafia, who pocketed 150 trillion tomans, which is a quarter of the country’s banks’ liquidity and they have no intention of giving any of it back.

Or Mortazavi, the butcher of Kahrizak, has received 65 million tomans, which is equivalent to the monthly wage of 100 workers, and the very same person has given the four managers of Social Provision 2.7 billion tomans bonus. Meanwhile, just this year, 300,000 of workers’ children were not able to go to school because of penury. But most of these people, without the slightest questioning and serious prosecution, are free to roam or even in power. And the smallest organisation, strikes, protests and workers’ complaint aimed at the government leads to prison sentences and the rulers’ recklessness. For example, the workers’ complaints about wages that are even lower than that which is stipulated in law, which was rejected by the Labour Supreme Court; cancellation of workers’ unemployment insurance by the Guardian Council; or abolishing the construction workers’ insurance by the Islamic Councils’ Assembly. These are just a few examples.

The repressive government of the Islamic Republic, to continue and preserve the paradise of the ruling billionaire government leeches and to prevent workers’ strikes, has established armed security and basij (mobilisation) forces in the big workers’ centres like vehicle manufacturing and oil and petrochemicals, has turned these workers’ areas into barracks. The slightest resistance and struggle for the most natural human rights lead to suppression, dismissal, arrest and imprisonment as a response.

Even yellow government organisations are not allowed to be active in major productioncentres. There isn’t one independent organisation, or labour leader and activist,who has not endured hunger, torture and imprisonmentby the Islamic Republic. Workers’ committees that have been subject to theseverestoppression, persecution,arrestsandimprisonments, include the Co-ordination Committee, the Committee to Pursue, the Free Union, the trade unions of Vahed, painters, Haft Tapeh and bakers.

Despite all these repressive policies, the working class of Iran continues to struggle with 5 to 8 strikes a day. But in the absence of stable, class and national organisations, i.e., general trade unions and political parties, workers’ spontaneous movements are without any programme, remaining isolated and scattered, and in the face of the general repressive policies of Iran’s capitalist government cannot be unified into united class resistance and struggle. Therefore the founding of stable and general workers’ organisations in Iran is necessary in order to get rid of this misery, and more essential that supper.

Friends and comrades, workers of the world and the region, especially Turkey, the Arab countries, Pakistan and Afghanistan; the dependent, parasitic and middleman capitalism of Iran, as an overseer and partner of the transnational capitalist countries in the engineering, electronics, and other sectors, in order to supply cheap labour and raw materials, implements the neoliberal policies of global capitalism, including the IMF, to the letter. As part of global capitalism it exploits workers. The Iranian working class, with 50 million household members, as a battalion of the world’s 2.5 billion workers, must in unity and accord with its brothers and sisters throughout the world, have a common and united programme, policy and strategy against the intensification of exploitation during the structural crisis of capitalism and the attempt to make toilers shoulder the burden of the crisis in the region and the world. Just as capitalism makes plans on a world scale and acts nationally and regionally, we must also, with internationalist unity and posing cases of co-ordination and planning, confront and resist nationally, regionally and globally and force them to retreat.

I also thank you for the support, compassion and selfless assistance in support of the Iranian labour movement, especially condemnation of the brutal repression of activists who have been arrested and sentenced by the Islamic Republic, and ask that you continue your internationalist and fraternal support and effort. I suggest that with joint effort centres of common organisation of global and regional, especially in Turkey, the Arabic countries, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran, are formed to co-operate and conduct a programme of sustained, leading and conscious of class struggle. Especially to assist us in creating national trade unions and workers’ organisations to establish links with international organisations. A major struggle could be fought on this. With the activity and solidarity of the working class, help the workers to get rid of oppression and exploitation.

Long live the internationalist unity of the workers of the world
Theworking class will be victorious

Rejai Shahr prison

1 December 2014