Iranian Students and Others Defy Regime Once Again

[redwinter]

Yo comrades, saw this in Revolution newspaper and figured it was very important coverage of this uprising in Iran and the rapid developments of a potentially revolutionary situation. We have to find ways to support this uprising and spread the revolutionary consciousness necessary to help the struggle for revolution worldwide...

http://www.revcom.us/a/186/iran-en.html



Monday, December 7, thousands of students and other Iranians defied government threats and repression to demonstrate against their current rulers—the widely hated regime of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei. The occasion was 16 of Azar—National Student Day, a commemoration of the 1953 murder of three Iranian students by the U.S.-installed monarch, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. On campuses and in nearby streets, alleyways, and squares in over a dozen Iranian cities—including Tehran, Mashad, Tabriz, and Isfahan—Iranian students and their supporters fought the regime’s massively deployed police and militia, responding to their truncheons, chains, teargas and stun guns with rocks, barricades and fires in the streets. Many protesters were beaten and over 200 were arrested, yet the protests continued the next day as well.
(continue reading: http://www.revcom.us/a/186/iran-en.html)

[Patchd]

Khodro Car Workers had issued a statement (http://www.revleft.com/vb/iran-statement-khodro-t124348/index.html) a while back on the matter. In addition, Yassamine Mather (one of the two Fedayeen minority members, and former guerillas left alive after fighting the regime in '79-'82) reported on (http://hopoi.org/?p=801) the Worker organisation against the regime.

" ... More than 300 workers in the Abadan oil refinery gathered on Thursday November 12 to protest against non-payment of wages and bonuses, saying they had not been paid for more than three months. Hopi chair Yassamine Mather reports:

The refinery authorities associated with what remains of the state-owned Iran National Oil Company say the workers are employed by a contractor and they cannot do anything about their demands. The protest followed a strike by the whole workforce of 450 involved in the development of Bandar Abbas Oil refinery. This was their third walkout in less than three months and the strike is continuing. The Iranian government’s privatisation plans are notoriously corrupt and generally help empower and enrich the Islamic Pasdaran (Revolutionary Guards). But in the oil industry it is different from elsewhere. Privatisation has been undertaken with the aim of dividing workers and hampering national negotiations over wages and conditions, in the knowledge that for oil workers deployed in various sectors of the industry, working for so many different contractors, it would be impossible to negotiate common terms and conditions ... "