Butcher Shah

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Nothing could have more glaringly exposed the fraudulence of visit to Washington by the Shah of Iran.

While Carter feted and flattered this criminal dictator, the United States police were engaged in beatng up Iranian students wnc had come to Washington to demonstrate against the Shah.

The repression of the demonstrators in Washington followed police action in other parts of the United States to prevent the Iranian students organising their protest.

In Chicago on October 28 police invaded a meeting of 40 Iranian students and supporters. Twenty of them were arrested and the same number injured in the police attack and later when detention.

Hostility

The organisers of the Washington protest also had to contend with the activities of the Savak (the Shah's gestapo) who are allowed by Carter to operate freely in the US just as they are allowed by the government to operate in Britain).

In view of all this, the large attendance at the antiShah demonstrations (well over 10,000) testifies to the hostility of the mass of Iranians outside as well as inside the country to the dictatorship.

The Iranian authorities could only manage to get 5,000 along to the Welcome the Shah demonstration even though the Savak threatened students who did not come along and offered the air fare, $100 in cash and several days of free food and lodging to those who came.

Ferocity

In Iran itself the last few weeks have seen a series of militant anti-Shah demonstrations by students in Teheran, Qum, Shiraz and Rey, all of them put down with the usual ferocity by the police who fired at and injured many students.

The leaders of these demonstrations have been arrested and now join the huge number of political prisoners in Iran's jails.

Amnesty International estimates the current total at abour 10,000.

The Shah's government has recently claimed that the number of political prisoners is only 2,500.

'Liberalisation"

But even this blatant lie is a new departure since it is the first time the Shah has admitted to holding any political prisoners.

very tadmis on beralisation* yc-y which has been introduced in the last few weeks.

Intellectuals have been permitted to circulate a number of protest petitions and letters asking for liberalisation have been sent to the Shah by former leaders of Mossadeq's National Front All this reflects to some extent a weakening of the regime. But in essence it is the kind of cosmetic liberalisation which the Carter regime demands of its more embarassing friends.

The repressive apparatus, which forces the masses into obedience or imprisonment, torture or death, remains unchanged and as active as ever as the treatment of student demonstrators have shown.

Shah needed

For the workers, peasants and students not a shred of political right exists.

And Carter is making no protest about that because American and British imperialism need the Shah's regime for two major tasks.

First, to help them police the region of the Gulf where the Iranian army has played an important role in fighting the rebellion in Oman. By 1980 there are due to be 60,000 American military and security personnel in Iran.

Second, Iran is important to the imperialiststates for its oil wealth.

Major assistance

The Shah has already given major assistance to the British government by loaning it money and oil at crucial moments and buying British goods, especially armaments, the Concorde and Chrysler Carter cars.

The American capitalists now need his help to join Saudi Arabia at the next round of OPEC price talks in keeping down the international oil price. And this the Shah has already promised to do.

Santiago Carrillo is the These are some of the reasons why the workers' movement cannot look to imperialist frauds like Carter to • ameliorate the dictatorship; their interests lie in preserving it.

The letter to Carter from Labour MPs Stan Newens and William Wilson, requesting him to ask the Shah to respect human rights, is therefore a dangerous diversion.

This kind of 'opposition' to the Shah's dictatorship means nothing.

The Labour lefts' who oppose the Shah have consistently refused to fight in the Labour Party for the breaking of all economic links with Iran and for the enforcement of these boycotts by action by the labour movement.

That is the most concrete assistance which the British labour movement can give to the struggle of the Iranian masses for democratic rights and for the overthrow of the dictatorship and its replacement by a government of the workers and peasants.

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Carter's 'human rights crusade' than last week's