Defend Democratic Rights Against Islamic Reaction!

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The fraud of violence of Khomeini's Islamic Republic is now being hurled against every force of open opposition in Iran.

The armed forces, the 'revolutionary guards' and organised mobs of Islamic fanatics are all engaged in a national offensive to secure the reactionary Their aim is to crush the widespread and growing movement that seeks to develop the revoluționary struggles which overthrew the Shah's dictatorship.

Working class

But this campaign of repression is being directed with gathering intensity against the organisations of the left which claim to stand for socialism and to represent the working class and other oppressed masses of iran.

Last week's mass demonstration against press censorship rallied tens of thousands in defence of democratic rights against the drive to renewed dictatorship.

But against , the demonstration were ranged the most fanatical supporters of Khomeini's 'Revolutionary Council'; the extreme rightwingers of the Towhid and the Hezbullahis ('Party of God'); and armed thugs drawn from the enormous lumpen-proletariat which fills Tehran's vast shanty towns.

Full violence

The violent fighting of that Sunday continued throughout the week, with the Pasderan ('revolutionary guards') increasingly throwing their weight against the opposition forces and in support of the fuli violence of Islamic reaction.

The National Democratic Front (liberal party of the bourgeois intellectuals, which originally called the demonstration) has been driven underground.

The self-styled MarxistsLeninists of the Fedayeen have had their offices ransacked and destroyed. They were subjected to further attacks as they marched in protest to bourgeois Prime Minister Bazargan.

The HKS (Socialist Workers Party, affiliated to the USFI) and the Stalinists of the Tudeh Party have suffered similar treatment.

Even the Mujaheddin have had to repel attacks from gangs and the Pasderan themselves although these Marxist-Leninists' claim to be Islamic and for all their criticisms have remained firm supporters of Khomeini.

The mob's cries of 'God is great' and 'Death to atheist communists' have found a shrill echo in Khomeini's speeches.

The vehement. anti-communism of this fanatical bigot reached a new pitch of hysteria over the week, with talk of gallows at every street corner and extermination of enemies to 'the revolution' But Khomeini has been trying (successfully) to whip up reactionary violence precisely because of his fear that power and control of the Iranian revolution were already slipping from his hands.

Far from securely legitimising his rule, the elections to the Constituent Assembly actually provoked new criticism, protest and opposition. Arab militants have continued their campaign of sabotage in the oil-fields of the south-west.

Defying the betrayals of their leaders, the Kurdish people have once again risen up against the repression of the Pasderan, and come into battle with the army.

Their siege of Paveh has now been broken by heavy reinforcements, but fighting continues in Kurdistan.

Economic crisis Behind all these developments looms the growth of the economic crisis. While Bazargan's cabinet makes : its trade deals and contracts with imperialism, no section of the regime has any plan, however useless, for tackling the economy.

Food supplies are disrupted, industrial production stagnant in many areas and as inflation nears a rate of 30%, 'unemployment dominates probably one quarter of the whole labour force.

And. still the working class maintains its occupations and has shown no signs of ending strikes just to please 'God' and the Ayatollah Khomeini.

This •situation posed Khomeíni l with the task ot creating a diversion from these material problems, while he proceeded to destroy the leadership of the proletariat before workers • moved into open struggle against his regime.

The anti-communist hysteria and violence of the last week has fitted both parts, and laid the basis for future pogroms if necessary.

Khomeini did not confidently select these tactics-desperation forced them onto him.

The limited democratic gains of the Iranian revolution will be destroyed utterly by Khomeini USFI crisis. unless ..they are defended resolutely by the working class, the only consistently revolutionary class in Iran..

But the fight against Islamic reaction and : for democratic rights in Iran cannot be won within the perspective of bourgeois democracy held out by the Stalinists and petty bourgeois radicals.

Nor can it be won by any kind of accommodation with Khomeini, as the Fedayeen and Mujaheddin are finding. • The democratic rights of the Iranian masses can be secured only through the fight for a revolutionary programme to establish a workers and peasants government in Iran.

*An end to censorship! For full freedom of the press!

*Lift the ban on demonstrations! For full freedom of political organisation and demonstratior *For the right to strike and form free trade unions.

*For free elections with universal suffrage and social equality for all women and homosexual men.

*For the right of self-determination and separation for the Kurdish people and all other rational minorities.

*Defend the workers.comnittees! For the building of elected soviets.

*Build workers militias against Islamic reaction and threats of imperialist restoration.

*Releasé all those political orisoners not linked with the Shah's dictatorship!

For the building of a revolutionary party, Iranian section of reconstructed Fourth

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Page Tomas Borge, the new Minister of the Interior and leader of the 'Proletario' faction of the Sandinistas Now, when the US ships in a measly 150 tonnes, (having flown in 30 planes a day during the 1972 earthquake in the full knowledge that these supplies would go directly to the

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