Iran on the Brink: Rising Workers and Threats of War
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Iran on the Brink: Rising Workers and Threats of War
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780745326030 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Pluto Press |
| Publication date: | 03/27/2007 |
| Pages: | 288 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.70(d) |
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CHAPTER 1
May Day in the Children's Park
On May Day 2004, while thousands of workers unfolded their banners along the busy, noisy highway that passes through western Tehran's seemingly endless zone of warehouses, round-the-clock assembly lines and factory construction sites, the streets of Saqqez, in western Iran, lay eerily silent. The town had been cordoned off; the leafy alleys near the Children's Park were empty. Somewhere in Saqqez, contingents of police and soldiers were hiding. Uneasy at their invisible presence, people stayed inside longer than planned, although they were not exactly surprised that a massive force had been deployed into this remote corner of the Kurdish province.
Months earlier, groups of workers in Saqqez – seamstresses, bakers, brick-makers – set up a shora, or council. They linked up with labour activists in Tehran and five other cities, primarily in northern Iran, and began exchanging ideas and penning demands. After secret meetings and coordination, a resolution had been agreed upon and the decision taken: on May Day, workers would demonstrate simultaneously in all seven cities. Ignoring police instructions, the workers would break through decades-old barriers of fear, and manifest their discontent with the hardships imposed upon them by the Islamic Republic. Nothing of the sort had happened before during the Republic's regime.
To the Western mind, Iran appears to be clad in black. A morose mullah in a dark robe has evil plans in mind, a rancorous president maniacally spits conspiracy theories, woeful women covered in monotonous chadors amble through gloomy streets: these are some of the images conjured up by the word "Iran". Lately, to these impressions have been added the images of a smiling young couple holding hands, an excited blogger expressing his admiration for Western pop stars, a female student pulling back her hijab to uncover a seductive curl of hair, only to throw it all off as she enters the villa where the next party will take place, hidden from the views of Islamic virtue.
These images do not necessarily make the whole picture more accurate. Iran is first and foremost, by all quantitative standards, inhabited by ordinary people trying to make a living. They worry about how to cover their rising rent, how to get some time with their children, how to persuade the manager to change a temporary contract into a permanent one. They expect accidents at work, suspect that the company is in the process of being downsized and sold, and resent the glaring riches amassed by the ruling elite; in recent years, more of them have started to do what so many others in their situation have done before. They organise. On 1 May 2004, some of them went public.
The shora of Saqqez had applied to the local authorities for a May Day celebration. Their application had been rejected. The activists had proceeded anyway, putting up posters and distributing redcoloured leaflets. As the appointed hour approached, people gathered in small groups on the fringes of the Children's Park, speaking quietly, waiting. When Saqqez's well-known labour leader finally arrived, everyone started to move into the park, while more people from the streets joined in.
Then the silence was shattered. From a half-finished building near the mosque, police charged the crowd. They waved batons, hurled insults, chased men and women through the park, pulling them down to the ground. When the crowd had vanished from the park, forty demonstrators lay pressed to the ground, hands tied on their backs. Within an hour they would all be behind bars.
No May Day was celebrated in Saqqez. But the event, related through underground networks for many months, gradually assumed the character of a symbolic inauguration of the most sustained period of labour unrest since Iran's clerical regime secured power in the early 1980s. This unrest came to afflict the regime as its major internal menace.
But the menace didn't emerge from a vacuum. Iran's history is steeped in the actions of working people taking society's matters in their own hands.
CHAPTER 2
After Spring Comes Winter
A SPIRIT OF RESISTANCE TO ALL AUTHORITY
Modern Iranian history appears to follow the form of a strange weather cycle: spring arrives, popular aspirations to self-rule stir, intensely democratic structures emerge from the ground; workers' organisations begin to flourish, things warm up along social frontiers – at which point winter sets in. A new regime establishes a chilling stranglehold over all of Iranian society and everything freezes. The freeze permeates the grass roots, for what seems like an everlasting ice age. Then the cycle starts anew.
An early spring asserted itself in 1906. At that time, Iran was autocratically ruled by the long-standing Qajjar dynasty, which had agreed to auction off the country piece by piece to imperialist powers, mainly Britain and Russia. Strikes and animated protests from the merchant community of Tehran in early 1906 forced the king, or Shah, to take a step back. He acceded to the formation of a parliament, or Majles, that was to write a constitution for the country and specify the powers of the throne within strict parameters. To supervise the elections to the Majles – an affair for merchant guilds and other proprietary classes – local councils, or anjumans, were set up in the cities. But they would accept no straitjacket. Beginning in the northern Azeri city of Tabriz, the anjumans remained in session after the elections, opened up their proceedings to the populace, and widened their activities to such areas as tax collection, establishment of pension funds, and the construction of schools, roads and health clinics.
The Tabriz anjuman was like the sun thawing a frozen Iran. The people of Tabriz participated in daily meetings, tending to their interests through a radicalisation of the council, which enforced reductions in the prices of basic commodities, such as meat and bread. Landowners and merchants who didn't comply found their stock expropriated; gradually, the anjuman took control over the distribution of grain and other necessities in the province. As other anjumans throughout the country emulated these practices, what is known as the "Constitutional Revolution" of Iran entered its social phase. In her monumental study of the period, The Iranian Constitutional Revolution, 1906-1911, Janet Afary shows how the classes initially in support of the reshuffle of power – merchants, clergy, wealthy landowners – now realised that the ideas of a parliament and a constitution had released the genie of a very different concept of democracy, one implemented through daily participation by the lay masses of peasants, artisans, workers and petty traders, including women.
Iran's embittered leaders turned against the revolution. Commanding the front was Tehran's highest-ranking cleric, Sheikh Fazlullah Nuri, who in 1907 proposed an amendment to the constitution. It was an ominous portent of what was to come many decades later: an appointed assembly of learned clerics would receive the bills presented to the Majles and check their concordance with (its own interpretations of) sharia law, equipped with the authority to veto any law deemed un-Islamic. This would pave the way for what Nuri envisioned as a "theocratic government". Since it constituted the antithesis of the anjumans' existing power, the passing of the amendment triggered a renewal of the revolution. In Tabriz, the anjuman announced a general strike against the constitutional revisions and expelled leading clerics, delineating an absolute separation between religious and political affairs. From the city, news of the anjuman's general empowerment beamed out across the country. Local rulers were pilloried, suspicious clerics censured, and arms deposits seized.
Britain's consul in Tehran, Sir Cecil A. Spring-Rice, wrote in consternation:
In every town there is an independent Assembly [anjuman], which acts without consulting the Governor or the Central Assembly [Majles] at Tehran. One after another, unpopular Governors have been expelled, and the Central Government and the Tehran Assembly have found themselves powerless to resist. The danger of universal disorganisation seems a real one. A spirit of resistance to oppression and even to all authority is spreading throughout the country. The leaders are unknown.
Naturally, the Shah abhorred this steady dissolution of power and wanted all anjumans disbanded. This was wishful thinking on the royal court's part, whose authority remained severely curtailed; more remarkably, the Majles did what it could to rein in the councils. It promulgated laws limiting the number of officially approved anjumans, brusquely refused the requests of many towns and villages to form councils of their own, and prohibited all anjumans from dealing with political matters. The latter decree was equally futile and ludicrous, in a country where not only political but economic matters were increasingly in the hands of the anjumans. And the councils continued to proliferate, in towns as well as in villages. The Tabriz anjuman was, correctly, singled out by the central government as the instigator of village councils – used by peasants to undermine feudal relations – but the principle was firmly defended by the anjuman's preacher, Sayyid Javad Natiq:
In every civilised nation, according to our Muslim traditions, people are allowed to form organisations. In every city, region, community, and village, people exchange ideas about their affairs, whether they relate to their interests, better cultivation of their land, raising their children, opening schools, or even harassment by government and overseers, in order to stop such action. Why is it then that the people of Dikhvaragan [a village in the area] are to be deprived of such a public right and that whatever the cruel landowners and governors wish to do to the poor peasants, it is to be endured and not stopped?
Such was the spirit among the grass roots when the Constitutional Revolution restrained the monarchy. They grew even more impassioned as the Shah attempted to regain what he had lost through a coup d'état in July 1908. The Shah's forces bombarded the Majles, which was defended by thousands of mojahedin revolutionaries and anjuman activists. However, Russian Cossack brigades engaged by the Shah eventually cleared the streets of Tehran. There ensued a civil war between reactionaries entrenched in the capital, and progressives – all the more socially defined – centred in Tabriz, ending with the liberation of Tehran one year after the coup.
During what is known as the "second constitutional period", a new grouping appeared in the expanding variety of popular associations. In June 1910, the printers of all the major newspapers in Tehran went on a general strike, and announced the formation of the first trade union in Iran. They confronted their employers with a list of 14 demands, among them a working day of nine hours, one free day a week, and increased compensation for night work. Other demands read as premonitions of the working conditions that would plague the Iranian working class into the twenty-first century: "in the case of illness a workman must receive his full wage", "above all, the wages must be paid regularly", and, most tellingly, "managers must treat their employers with politeness".
All of this organising came to an abrupt end in 1911, when Russian forces occupied northern Iran. The monarchy was restored, free of restrictions. However, at the end of the First World War – which brought more occupations, battlefield destruction and extreme famine to Iran – the heat from intense social struggles rose again. From the mountain forests of the northern province of Gilan, a peasant-based partisan army called the jangalists or "forest-dwellers" descended on the country. In June 1920, backed up by Red Army troops and led by the legendary bearded horseman Khuzek Khan, the jangalists proclaimed a Soviet Socialist Republic in the province. Parts of this movement formed a communist party along Bolshevik lines – the first of its kind in Asia – and an ambitious programme of land reform and democratic institutions was embarked upon, with the aim of spreading the party's message to all of Iran. At about the same time, socialists and communists united various workers' collectives into the Central Council of Federated Trade Unions; popular associations and political debates once again flourished.
It required the iron fist of a resolute new Shah to quell the movement. In 1921, self-made Cossack commander Reza Khan imposed himself upon the throne. His top priorities were to crush the jangalist movement, which threatened to march on Tehran, wipe out the tribal forces that roamed freely in the peripheries of the country, and put an end to the contagion of trade unions. By constructing a strong, centralised army – his main achievement – Reza Shah managed to undo all the post-war upheavals within a few years. In 1925, he felt confident enough to invoke the ancient Persian dynasty of "Pahlavi", adding the title to his name. Reza Shah Pahlavi now monopolised power in his own hands, with the Majles' role reduced to a façade, dissidents jailed, and the ever expanding army tightening its grip on the country; strikes, unions and political debate were banned. All opposition activities were frozen, and all might was reinstated at the top. A first cycle of thaw and freeze had been completed.
THE STRIKE THAT SPREAD LIKE WILDFIRE
Spring arrived again with the next war. In 1941, the avidly pro-Nazi Reza Shah, who conspired with the Germans to open his territory for their troops en route to the Soviet Union, was deposed by incoming Allied forces. When the jails were opened, labour organisers, immured for up to two decades, walked straight out to the coalfields, textile workshops and metal factories and picked up the threads of unionisation. Other ex-prisoners, mainly intellectuals, formed a new communist party called Tudeh, "the masses". In reality, however, the party was fostered by the Soviet military authorities occupying the northern parts of the country, to be used as Moscow's pawn in the country. None the less, the Tudeh established a genuine base among the masses, by fusing its party apparatus with the trade unions.
During the later war years, union activists successfully penetrated Iran's new economic centre: the oil fields of Khuzestan. Tens of thousands of highly combative oil workers, operating what were at the time the world's biggest oil refineries, were recruited as the muscle of the labour movement; in a show of their strength in 1946 they held what has been labelled "the largest industrial strike in Middle Eastern history". The Central Council of Iranian Trade Unions likewise became the largest union federation in Middle Eastern history, and Tudeh the strongest communist party.
This critical period of Iranian history reached its zenith in 1951. Buoyed on a wave of popular support, as expressed in democratic elections, mass demonstrations, strikes and fatwas, Prime Minister Muhammad Mossadeq ejected Britain from the oil fields and nationalised them. Instead of fettering the Iranians in foreign domination and poverty, this source of immeasurable wealth would henceforth belong to the people. In the eyes of the imperialist powers, Mossadeq's action was regarded as a mortal sin. The British, having lost their black gold mine, hatched plans to retake what they considered rightfully theirs, but they could succeed only after the CIA had invested its logistic resources in the enterprise. In 1953, US agents, armed with briefcases stuffed with millions of dollars, entered Iran and connected with the network of stooges left idle by the departing British. They bought news presses to spread lies about Mossadeq, bribed ayatollahs to turn against him, suborned generals and key people in government positions. On 19 April 1953, Mossadeq's opponents mobilised military units on the CIA's payroll and a mob hired for a good day's wage. Led by the national team of weightlifters, they encircled the prime minister's home (after the street battle, some were found with fresh 500-rial notes in their pockets). For the CIA, the day of the coup was "a day that should never have ended, for it carried with it such a sense of excitement, of satisfaction, and of jubilation that it is doubtful any other can come up to it".
The Tudeh didn't lift a finger. Although its reach had extended deep into the military, the party made no attempt to resist the coup; none of its hundreds of thousands of members and sympathisers were mobilised. During the nationalisation process, the Tudeh had been wavering in its support for Mossadeq; the party preferred a solution where not Britain but rather the USSR would be accorded access to Iran's oil. Consequently, when the coup was set off, the leadership of the Tudeh simply departed for Moscow, leaving the rank and file in the lurch. Some leaders, though, preferred to stay and cooperate with the new military authorities by handing over information about the party and the unions, which were subsequently annihilated.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Iran on the Brink"
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Copyright © 2007 Andreas Malm and Shora Esmailian.
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