[Cont'd from back page vote, with 98% of…]
Socialist Press1979 1979-04-11Read it in the scan (PDF), scan page 2 →
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Cont'd from back page vote, with 98% of those voting in favour of the "Islamic Republic" and only 1% of the abstainers being political abstentions.
After the demagogic and fraudulent poll the Ayatoliah Khomeini declared the "Islamic Republic", one of the first effects of which was the reactivation of the revolutionary courts over which Bazargan's government has no control but which it managed to persuade Khomeini to suspend a few weeks ago.
In the last few days at least 30 former officials of the Shah's regime, including his Prime Minister for 13 years Amir Hoveyda, have been executed following summary trials.
There are some signs that this revolutionary justice might once again be turned by the reactionary religious leadership against "moral deviants" and "communists" who have become the standard scapegoat of the Islamic authorities.
The pro-Moscow "Communists" of the Tudeh Party, however, may be protected from this by their increasingly abject grovelling before Khomeini and Islamic reaction.
The Tudeh called for a yes vote in the referendum and immediately after Khomeini's declaration of the "Islamic Republic" the Tudeh's mighty patron Leonid Brezhnev (who had armed and defended the Shah) sent a telegram congratulating the Ayatollah on the occasion and assuring him of the Soviet Union's friendship.
The counter-revolutionary role of Stalinism in Iran thus persists beyond the fall of the Shah whose dictatorship the Stalinists helped to prolong.
The left-wing Marxist-Leninist and Islamic guerrillas, the liberal bourgeois National Democratic Front led by Mossadeq's grandson and virtually all the nationalist organisations in Kurdistan, the Turkoman. region and elsewhere called for a boycott of the elections (which makes Bazargan's claim of 1% political abstentions totally unbelievable).
But despite that correct position none of these organisations can offer the revolutionary leadership needed even more urgently by Iranian workers and their allies:
Such leadership can only come from building a Trotskyist party which can link today's fight for democracy and bettet material conditions to the struggle for the working class to take power.