The protest movement is still going daily after almost two months. It is now into its 10th week. The regime is desperately trying to find a way to put an end to it but has up to now failed. The protest demonstrations both inside and outside have been unprecedented.
After four decades of bloody dictatorship and trampling upon the most basic women’s rights, it is interesting that the women have taken a lead in this dynamic uprising. Women have started to openly flout the rigid Islamic rules governing what women can wear or how to appear in public and more. They are demanding their full rights, their autonomy back. The regime is now cornered and is desperate to find a way to regain control.
Some quarters in the western countries have fallen for the regime carefully planned propaganda that the protesters are influenced by the external enemies of the Islamic Republic. This is false. This movement is a popular one led by women and youth and supported by all the left forces in Iran including the Tudeh Party of Iran.
Below is an interview with Comrade Mohammad Omidvar, Spokesperson of the Tudeh Party of Iran.
In Iran, the protests quickly changed from being about the murder of Mahsa Amini to being about the general situation of women in the country. Can you briefly describe what that situation is? What are the restrictions on women’s rights apart from the obvious dress code?
Firstly, let me use this opportunity to thank the DKP and our German comrades for their solidarity with the Iranian people and our party going back over 80 years. We very much appreciate this proletarian international solidarity.
To understand the root and cause of the current uprising against the reactionary regime in Iran, it is essential to note that over the past two years, we have been witnessing ever-increasing social unrest and protests. From a growing number of workers’ strikes across various industries (the most prominent being the long strike at the “Haft-Tapeh” Sugar Cane Agro-Industrial complex in Susheh, the strike at “Hepco”, the Heavy Equipment Production Company in Arak, and that of thousands of contract workers in the oil and petro-chemical industries), strikes and protests by teachers across almost all cities in Iran and protests by tens of thousands of pensioners. The leading cause of these growing protests was the worsening economic situation due to the regime’s neo-liberal policies backed and praised by the World Bank and IMF, together with the criminal US sanctions. According to government statistics, over 40% of the population lives under the poverty line, and unemployment, especially amongst the youth in some provinces, is as high as 70%. This, combined with widespread, unprecedented corruption and growing and widespread suppression of people’s democratic rights and freedoms, especially after the sham elections of 2021 and the instalment of Ibrahim Raiesi, one of the “death judges” in the 1988 massacre of thousands of political prisoners in Iran, as president. Amongst the executed were hundreds of our Party’s leaders, cadres and some of Iran’s prominent writers, trade union and student activists.
Over the past four decades, women in Iran have been subjected to the most inhumane treatment possible. Similar to what is practised by the reactionary rulers of Saudi Arabia and under the Taliban in Afghanistan, women in Iran have been denied their most basic human rights, including the right to control their bodies and choose their clothes. These include:
- Marriage: The Islamic Republic initially lowered the age of marriage to 9 for girls. In 2002, the parliament raised it to 13.
- Divorce: A woman can only get a divorce in court with a judge’s order, while a man can get a divorce by declaring it verbally.
- Child Custody: Child custody is automatically given to the husband or his family. A divorced woman forfeits child custody if she remarries, even if her husband has died.
- Travel: A married woman cannot obtain a passport or travel abroad without her husband’s written consent.
- Inheritance: A widow only inherits 12.5% of her husband’s estate, but a widower inherits his wife’s entire estate. A son inherits twice as much as a daughter.
- Jobs: Women are bannedfrom entering the judiciary or standing for the presidency
- Segregation: From schools to universities as well as in healthcare, women are segregated from men. As far as health (access to women doctors) is concerned, this has created significant health challenges for women, especially in rural areas.
Needless to say, many of Iran’s religious leaders in recent years have described women as “half of a man” as they do not have the same “brain power” as men.
What are women demanding apart from the abolition of the compulsory headscarf?
Women in Iran are demanding freedom from medieval and reactionary laws imposed by the Islamist regime that discriminate against them in a wide range of areas as described in my previous answers.
How do you judge the declarations of solidarity, especially by female politicians from the EU? Are they helpful in the struggle for women’s rights in Iran?
As far as our Party is concerned, we strongly believe in the international solidarity of workers and communist parties and progressive forces everywhere with the struggle of the Iranian people and, in recent weeks, with the heroic struggle of women, youth and students against the despotic regime in Iran. We also believe that US imperialism and EU leaders do not have the interest of the Iranian people at heart. Their policies are aimed at fulfilling their strategic goals in the region. History, including the 1953 coup in Iran by the CIA and the British MI6 (signalled by the BBC), which overthrew the elected government of Dr Mosaddeq and reinstated the Shah’s puppet regime, and the execution and imprisonment of Tudeh members, has shown that, as far as US-led world imperialism is concerned, they want puppet regimes in order to plunder the country and build military bases in the region to advance their hegemonic goals.
Iran is seen by many people – regardless of the regime ruling there – as a bastion in the international, anti-imperialist struggle against NATO, the EU, and the USA. At the same time, progressive forces, not least members of your Party, are suppressed and persecuted there. How do you see this complicated situation?
We believe that the current regime in Iran, from a class point of view, represents the interests of big mercantile and bureaucratic bourgeois serving a capitalist system. The political structure of this capitalist system in Iran is based on “political Islam”, where the regime’s “Valie-Fagieh” (Supreme Leader) is the “representative of god on earth” and therefore, above all laws and legal or governing structures in the country. The regime over the past forty years has been using “anti-imperialist” rhetoric to advance its regional and international goals. It is worth mentioning that prior to the wide-spread sanctions most of Iran’s trade was with the west. During the 2003 imperialist war against Iraq, Iran backed the invasion and allowed USA and NATO fighters use Iran’s air space. Even at the height of the revolution, Iran’s rulers secretly met with Colonel Oliver North in Tehran and agreed to help the US fight against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua (the Iran-Contra scandal). It is also worth mentioning that the regime’s leaders do not deny their desire to re-establish the “Islamic Empire” in the region and beyond. The regime’s policies include supporting the most reactionary forces in the region, ranging from their interference in Iraq and supporting the Taliban in Afghanistan to interference in some of the former Soviet Republics.
In short, the regime in Iran is a reactionary capitalist one whose only interest is staying in power. Iranian leaders neither believe in nor accept the concept of “Imperialism” and have shown themselves to be strong anti-communist allies of the west when required. The attack on our Party in 1983 was executed with the help of the CIA, MI6, and Turkey’s MIT. In mid-1982 two high-ranking officials of the regime were invited to Islamabad in Pakistan where they met British MI6 representatives who passed them suitcases of fabricated intelligence against the Tudeh Party of Iran’s organisation and activities in Iran. This intelligence was used to prepare the case for attacking our Party on 6 February 1983. The Times of London, in an editorial the following day, welcomed the suppression of the TPI by the regime.
This is a translation of the interview with Comrade Mohammad Omidvar, Spokesperson of the Tudeh Party of Iran by Unsere Zeit, a publication of the Germany Communist Party (DKP).: https://www.unsere-zeit.de/das-regime-ist-nicht-antiimperialistisch-1845247/ Unsere Zeit,
Photo: Solidarity in Australia. Matt Hrkac from Geelong / Melbourne, Australia, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Check out a clip of a video interview with Comrade Habib of the Tudeh Party on our youtube site
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