26.07.2006
No to war, no to repression
In the name of humanity, justice and truth. People of Iran, humans have a right to freedom of expression and belief, to criticise their society and to directly intervene in any process that relates to their fate. This is a right derived from the historic movement of humanity and the relations resulting from their entry into a structure called society.
Rulers have always tried to dilute, and where possible remove, the historic and social rights of the ruled, unaware that their inhibiting force is frail and destructible when confronted by the huge material force of history and society.
People of Iran, a serious and deadly danger is step by step casting its shadow on our land, forever under despotic rule. The danger of war, the danger of sanctions, the danger of the death of a large number of the people of our country, the danger of hunger, shortage of medicines, newborn and children dying, the danger of thousands and thousands of people who under the false propaganda of two belligerents facing one another do not really know for what reason they are being sacrificed to a new war. The land of Iran is about to be trampled under the boots of soldiers who are defending the rights of warmongers inside and outside the country. Its earth is about to be turned upside down under thousands and thousands of bombs and rockets.
Witnessing deadlines and countdowns in the new international condition, the domestic press is either, as in the past (voluntarily or under duress), eulogising the regime or impatiently awaiting the external attack in silence. Political parties within the country, inside and outside of government, have chosen silence and in their entirety have swallowed their tongue, fearful of a brazen power. Today conditions in Iran are such that we find ourselves forced to speak out on issues beyond our remit, which many others for a long time have wished to express.
Thirty-three years ago, with the payment of the first instalment, the process of building the Bushehr nuclear reactor began. Now 21 years have elapsed since the start of the secret, non-transparent and covert activities of the rulers of the Islamic Republic of Iran on the road to acquiring nuclear technology, which they claim is peaceful and which the global society fears might lead to nuclear bombs.
In the entire eight years of the ruinous Iran-Iraq war, while day-to-day living was the serious preoccupation of the people of Iran, the government budget was directed at procuring weapons of war and other military expenditure, while the people had to endure a variety of limitations and shortages. And later, at a time when the pressures resulting from putting into effect the IMF programmes1 had destroyed all the comfort, welfare, financial and economic security of the people of Iran, at a time when the rentiers and capitalists nurtured by the regime were getting fatter and the poor more and more destitute, tens of billions of dollars taken from the people of this country were diverted into the nuclear ambitions of a decision-making minority without appearing in any official budget and without any supervision from the people.
This enormous expenditure of capital, which undoubtedly was at the expense of the living standard of hundreds of thousands of people in our country, was used on huge political and international bribes, to purchase industrial machinery, getting hold of various mysterious items through the illegal nuclear smuggling networks, paying the living costs and monthly wages of thousands of foreign specialists and workers, and underwriting the huge cost of protecting the nuclear installations and the military issues rising from it.
Then, all of a sudden, in a political and propaganda ruse, while the people of Iran were in no way privy to the decision-making process or even aware of its existence, which had been organised in secret and at the costs of tens of billions of dollars from the development, welfare and education budget of the country, the issue is being transformed into a "national question" concerning an "indisputable right"!
The government-run press monopolies try with all their might to present nuclear energy as such a unique development that without it the future of the country is bleak, while at the same time the entire world is united in preventing Iran from acquiring it. Their brazenness is such that we are asked to forget that the people of Iran - that is, the very people who financed these installations - were the last to be told. The rulers of the Islamic Republic present themselves as the servants and representatives of the Iranian people, but in practice treat the people as strangers.
Issues such as this, and the consequent notoriety, always emerge from abroad. The Iranian people hear what developments have taken place in their land, and with their money, either through the espionage services of foreign powers, the international press or international organisations and institutions. In this particular case, only when outsiders and non-Iranians learnt of the secret nuclear activities of Iran did our rulers reluctantly decide to reveal a corner of these activities. And that only and solely because they needed to make it into a "national question".
At present, as before, in the absence of a free, independent and non-governmental press, the people of Iran are being bombarded by propaganda through governmental television, radio, newspapers, mosques and pulpits without knowing why and for whom they are being driven as victims down a hugely hazardous path. Political activists have abdicated their social and collective responsibilities, faced with the intimidatory setting created by the commanders of the guard2 and security forces. They had been warned in advance that those who intend to criticise the nuclear policies of the government risk 'having their the tongues cut off'. People are left without information and are confused.
The Iranian regime has adjusted its budget, based on an oil price of $38 a barrel,3 and in order to get its hands on an immediate source of income has accepted inflation of more than 34%. Such decisions can take the country into a prolonged and severe economic crisis. The government, by exchanging foreign reserves into the currencies of the few so-called friendly countries, and by preparing a totally military budget, has welcomed war and sanctions. Those officials making decisions on security and nuclear issues openly talk of the North Korean regime and its nuclear tactics as a model.
Things have come to such a pass that representatives of that enemy which for over 28 years the rulers of the Islamic Republic of Iran blamed for all their problems - shouting, 'Death to America' from every official tribune, while anyone who thought differently or dissented politically was accused of being in the pay of that enemy - are now sitting opposite representatives of the Islamic Republic in negotiation and exchanging diplomatic smiles. As if self-made taboos and forbidden limits are being broken by their own priests.
Those in power and their negotiating partners are conducting secret and murky negotiations over the interests, lives and future of 70 million Iranians. In our view such negotiations are illegal in the absence of real representatives of the people and a negotiating partner with authority and acceptable international credentials in human and global issues.
'Nuclear energy is our undeniable right'
This is a slogan the regime is desperate to instil into society. The rulers have forgotten, or pretend to forget, that even before nuclear energy becomes our undeniable right, the people have more basic and more important undeniable rights, all of which are being denied them. The right to freedom of belief and expression; the right to directly and fundamentally intervene in determining their own fate; unequivocally equal legal and human rights for men and women in the family and in society; the right to education and free and available healthcare provided by the state; equal social rights for all, whatever their ethnicity, gender or belief; the right to form non-government associations and trade unions and many others. Also the right to be kept informed and to supervise government projects such as nuclear energy that are being carried out with their money.
Who will determine the priorities for realising these rights? The people or the rulers? Indeed does such a government that allows itself to coercively decide the priorities actually believe in, or is it committed to, implementing the rights outlined above?
We pose another question here. Of the various technological needs of the country today, which is more important: nuclear energy or, to take an example, self-sufficiency in petrol production, the improvement and renovation of worn out industries such as oil and textiles; new methods of town planning and building in an earthquake-prone country such as ours; new methods for manufacturing machinery and methods for drilling in our mountainous country rich in minerals; methodology for making and repairing aircraft in a country whose aircraft industry too often records tragic accidents; and tens and hundreds of other issues?
Does a country which is importing its needles and cloth from abroad have no other activity worth investing in of greater priority than nuclear industries? What was the logic of those who chose nuclear technology at such exorbitant and unconventional costs?
Advanced industrial countries, despite not having any technical, economic or political obstacles in expanding nuclear reactors, steer clear of it and, while seriously looking for new, cleaner energy sources, use fossil fuels in most of their electricity plants. The insoluble environmental and economic problems associated with disposal and safeguarding of nuclear waste, with a potentially lethal half-life of thousands of years; the real dangers facing nature and mankind from the spread of these products; and the widespread opposition by the people, green parties and environmentalists to the proliferation of these harmful technologies have meant that nuclear energy has been removed from the long-term development programmes of those countries that possess these technologies and, unlike America, North Korea and Israel, are not dominated by military objectives.
What excuse is there for the insistence on the spread of this industry in Iran? If the issue is really to do with medical and other research, as scientific experts claim, then a small reactor with limited investment would be enough. The rulers of the Islamic Republic must speak openly and unambiguously with the people of Iran and the world for the issues to become clear.
The current nuclear dispute, however, has roots in other, more fundamental and hidden reasons. Global capitalism, which in the 70s planned to oppose the Soviet bloc by constructing a green belt, encouraged 'political islam' in the fertile terrain of the Middle East and contrived to divert and change the course of such popular movements as the 1979 revolution in Iran. But the broad and extensive support for political islam coincided with the collapse of the Soviet bloc and suddenly it lost its previous raison d'être and became an obstacle to the system of global rule.
From the vantage point of global capitalism today, political islam has lost its rationale. Now that the brief period of the success of the capitalist system is past and a major economic recession has started in the countries of the metropol, and under the shadow of the remilitarisation of global capitalism in the shape of the coming to power of George Bush in the United States, and the necessity of opening up new consumer markets and extensive energy resources, the American government, representing the largest collection of finance capital, is bent on changing the political map of the Middle East.
In the case of Iran a formidable battle is looming. On the one side is the Islamic Republic, aiming to preserve itself inside the country and oppose itself to the global order. On the other side stands America, aspiring to impose an ordinary capitalist state on Iran, acceptable to capital. The part of the people is to pay the costs of this battle of conflicting interests. The different claims of either side of this conflict over the nuclear issue in Iran are merely tools to begin this physical and final conflict. The battle is over the material interests of two groups owning capital - one to maintain its advantages and the other to extend them.
This capitalist military campaign, however, needs some aspects of demagoguery. Therefore America, which possesses the blackest human rights record among the world's nations, has for some time been sending troops to the four corners of the world under the flag of 'democracy' and 'human rights'. In each country, after tens of thousands of innocent humans have died in the war it has started, having established a satellite state and plundered the national wealth of the country, it goes on to declare that it will not remove its troops for years in order to protect the sapling of freedom, human rights and democracy it has planted.
Two violators of human rights go to mutual war for survival and economic interest and to divert public opinion at home. One gives its efforts the colour and smell of nationalism and the divine; and the second freedom, human rights and global security.
A government which by intervention and support for the massacre of thousands and thousands of freedom-loving human beings in Latin America, Asia and Africa in the hands of such lackeys as Ngo Dinh Diem, Batista, Adoula, Pinochet, Somoza, Ferdinand Marcos, Suharto, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Saddam and tens of other large and small lackeys and stooges of imperialism has been busy massacring freedom and snuffing out human rights on earth. America accounts for the greatest mountains of corpses of innocent people in history, a country which was the first and only user of nuclear weapons against defenceless people. The atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki is a crime that will forever pose a question mark over America's claims to support freedom and human rights. America attacks Yugoslavia, Iraq and Afghanistan to spread democracy and to press for human rights with the brand of shame of Vietnam still fresh on its face.
Murder, plunder, rape, food and medicine shortage, infanticide, the trampling of the most elementary human rights using the excuse of emergency conditions of war, a war the Americans brought on the country, is the gauge by which to judge US claims.
Kidnapping and assassination of opponents in various countries; the building and multiplying of secret prisons where torture is rife; interference and overthrow of independent popular governments that opposed American plans, such as the lawful, democratic and popular governments of Lumumba in Congo, Allende in Chile, etc; support for the genocide of the Israeli army in Palestine; support for regimes that trample human rights but have close commercial and political ties with America, such as Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Turkey, Jordan, Israel; and in Iran, according to Madeleine Albright, Clinton's secretary of state, the US planned and bankrolled the black coup d'etat of 19534 and helped create the post-coup atmosphere of tyranny and repression - all these are mere glimpses of the activities of America in 'establishing human rights and spreading democracy' across the world.
We warn the people of Iran, social and political activists, student, labour, women and other activists, that our country is now entering a whirlpool of war and violence. The following, depending on the responses and policies of the various social forces, will be among future possibilities:
1. Attack from outside
The experience of Yugoslavia, Iraq and Afghanistan has shown that an outside attack on a country, in the first place, causes huge loss of life and the massacre of defenceless people, and in later stages the destruction of the entire developmental and economic infrastructure; and also an atmosphere of insecurity, violence, terror, kidnapping, murder, plunder and rape and in deeper stages the radical collapse of social activity. For a long time arid military law will supersede democratic law, and force and coercion will replace logic. Politics and the economy will undisputedly be dependent on the rulers of America for a long period.
2. Economic sanctions
History shows that the victims of political and economic sanctions are not governments, but the people. Under sanctions government determination to totally repress and prevent any protest reaches its maximum. Instead of freedom, people receive hunger, illness and pain. The more the external pressure, the greater the pressure of the rulers on its people. All the veils of shame will be torn asunder. Bayonets rather than tongues speak to the people.
3. Forced agreement
It is obvious to us that the interests of neither of these systems will allow for total agreement. The issues at stake are the consumer market, natural resources, cheap human resources, and the political existence of two conflicting concepts. There will be secret and murky negotiations. Because the real representatives of the people are absent, it can result in nothing but the squandering of the entire wealth of the Iranian people at the expense of the survival of a way of thought. Such negotiations are therefore basically and fundamentally illegal and unacceptable.
The political space of Iranian society is currently closed and in darkness. This atmosphere is the result of ignorance, secrecy and the clampdown on the mass media, and more importantly the inactivity and irresponsibility of the so-called intellectuals, activists and political parties.
The majority of Iranian intellectuals, because their thinking does not reflect the lower layers of society, instead of understanding the concerns of their society, inject the ideas of intellectuals from other cultures from the top downwards. They are incapable of speaking in the language of their people. They are therefore unable to move the mass of the people with lucid ideas and to give shape to positive developments in society. They, in their own way, are responsible for the ignorance and inactivity of society.
The internal political parties and groups, in the absence of political and social freedoms and truly popular parties in Iran, and because of government intimidation or the trifling interests which arise from opportunism, have misused their platforms and enormous resources to impose inactivity on themselves and on society. They must understand that the result of inactivity and silence is the acceptance of one of the possibilities outlined above.
Finally, we feel the need to make the following observations:
1. This is not the quarrel of the Iranian people, but a clash to decide who rules Iran. Therefore the people must not become sacrificial soldiers for either side. People should only enter the arena when the war is over their interests.
2. Nuclear energy is only an excuse in this battle of interests. Therefore, we not only call for a halt to nuclear activities in Iran, but demand the non-nuclearisation of the world and the removal of all weapons of mass destruction in all countries, including America, Russia, China, Israel "¦ We defend research to find forms of safe energy and the use of clean fuels with the least ecological pollution as a substitute to nuclear technologies.
3. Any attack or sanctions would be in open conflict with the short and long-term interests of the people of Iran and our people oppose anyone who is planning such aggression. In this we specifically declare our hatred and opposition to the interference by, and the unilateral and self-centred role of, America.
4. A solution to the crises facing Iranian society is only possible under the umbrella of democratic and popular rule. A government in which the ruled, in a significant and real way, have the ability to impose their collective will on the rulers. The source of such a development can under no circumstances be from outside. An authentic transformation is not something that can be imposed from above or outside into society. A healthy and authentic transformation can be on the basis of the movement of the society itself and hence is realisable from inside and from below upwards. If there is to be a model, then this model is not from foreign governments or intellectuals, but from the spontaneous and conscious struggle of the peoples of other countries - movements such as the revolt of the students, youth and workers of France.
The people of all countries deserve a better and more beautiful world than the crisis-ridden world of today. We must struggle for this better world because a people who do not act for their own welfare will find that others will decide for them.
Said Habibi member of Central Council of Office of Consolidation
Yashar Ghajar chair, Islamic Society, University of Amir Kabir
Majid Ashraf Nejad chair, Islamic Society, University of Rejai'
Morteza Eslahchi chair, Islamic Society, University of Allameh Tabatabai
Behruz Karimi-Zadeh student activist and editor Khak magazine
Abed Tavancheh member of Central Council of Islamic Society, University of Amir Kabir