Iran: Green road to nowhere

international | rights and freedoms | other press Friday October 23, 2009 15:34 by Yassamine Mather - Hands Off the People of Iran

Yassamine Mather analyses the development of the struggle in Iran following the rigged presidential elections. She critiques the Green Movement and points to the for support of the Iranian Left and the struggles of the Iranian Working class. Yassamine also illustrates how ordinary Iranians suffer most from Sanctions. Full text at link.

Every day for the last few weeks Iranian workers have been protesting, at times in their thousands - at their workplaces, outside government offices and provincial offices complaining about job losses, non-payment of wages, privatisation ... Universities have been the scene of daily protests and ordinary people have used every opportunity, even football matches, to express their opposition to the regime. At the same time a new wave of exiles, including reporters, writers, professors of literature, are leaving the country, despairing of continued repression and the ineffective ‘reformist’ leaders.

For the overwhelming majority of Iranians, however, such an option does not exist. Tens of millions of wage-earners have no choice but to continue their struggles against the regime in their daily confrontation with factory-owners and the religious state that backs them. In the words of those at Wagon Pars, who went on hunger strike last week, workers have “nothing to lose but their unpaid wages”...

Sanctions have compounded an already dire economic situation. In the South Pars oilfields 6,000 contract workers are threatened with sacking, as whole fields are abandoned asTotal, Repsol and Shell are pulling out. The current protests should be seen in the light of the world economic crisis as well as the impact of sanctions. Iranian workers are adamant that the dire economic situation is one of the main reasons why protests continue and evolve, despite the failures of the green movement. Some of their supporters talk of the “suffocating silence” of the green movement’s leadership.

In the US, the Iran Sanctions Enabling Act (IRSA), approved by an overwhelming 414 to six margin in Congress, will allow local and state governments and their pension funds to divest from foreign companies or US subsidiaries with investments of more than $20 million in Iran’s energy sector. And the house foreign affairs committee has scheduled a vote for October 28 on the Iran Petroleum Sanctions Act (IRPSA) bill.