“Our struggle is twofold”
Founding Statement of the Chicago Committee in Solidarity with the People of Iran
August 9, 2007
The Chicago Committee in Solidarity with the People of Iran has chosen August 9th, 2007 — an International Action Day in Solidarity with the jailed Iranian trade unionists Mansour Osanloo and Mahmoud Salehi — as its date of inception. We join the trade unions and labor activists around the world who have answered the call of the International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF) and the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) to demonstrate solidarity with Osanloo and Salehi on this day. As we meet at the offices of the progressive magazine In These Times, there are shows of solidarity taking place in Algeria, Austria, Canada, France, Germany, Britain, Egypt, Finland, Hungary, Iran, Indonesia, Japan, Jordan, Malaysia, Nepal, the Netherlands, Norway, Pakistan, Palestine, Panama, Romania, Spain, Switzerland, Thailand, Trinidad, Tunisia, and Yemen. The date of August 9th was chosen to mark the one-year anniversary of Osanloo’s release from a previous stint behind bars in 2006, following mass global trade union protests.
Our solidarity with Mansour Osanloo and Mahmoud Salehi, and with the struggles of Iranian workers, flows from our solidarity with other struggles in Iran today — with the women’s movement, the student movement, the human rights movement, and with Iran’s democratic dissidents. We see these struggles as intertwined in important ways. The Iranian workers’ struggleis as much a struggle for human rights as it is a struggle for social justice: Iranian laborers are demanding their right to organize, their right to freely associate, and their right not to be abducted and jailed without charges being brought against them. All of these things have happened to Mansour Osanloo and Mahmoud Salehi — as they have to so many trade unionists in Iran, where it is forbidden by law to form independent unions. The last two years have seen a sharp rise inthis repression not only against Iranian workers, but also women’s rights activists, student activists, human rights activists, and writers and intellectuals.
It is no accident that this upsurge in repression has been targeted at this array of groups: what unites these disparate movements and individualsis their common struggle for democracy and justice. We have formed this committee in order to say that we stand with that struggle. When Iranian workers go on strike to demand better conditions and democratic rights, we stand with them; when Iranian women mobilize for their rights, as they are currently doing in the momentous, grassroots Million Signatures Campaign, we stand with them; when Iranian student activists take to the streets to protest the shutting down of newspapers, we stand with them; when human rights organizations in Iran decry the widespread torture to which political prisoners are subjected, we stand with them. And they stand alongside each other: among the slogans shouted amidst the student demonstrations in early December were “students, workers, unity, unity” and “free political prisoners.”
During those same demonstrations one student commented: “Our struggle is twofold: against internal oppression and external foreign threats.” We concur strongly with this sentiment and stand in solidarity with that twofold struggle: we oppose both the repression and authoritarianism of the Islamic Republic and stand steadfastly against any US attack on Iran or foreign military intervention of any kind. Indeed the mere threat of an attack is an abomination: not only does it violate the UN Charter, but it strengthens the most reactionary and repressive forces inside Iran, providing them with an ideal pretext to crack down on democratic dissent. Washington and Tehran feed off one another’s rhetoric, each finding in the other a useful external enemy. Underneath the bluster and the posturing lies a deep symmetry between the two governments. We stand with Iran’s dissidents, trade unionists, and human rights activists in firmly opposing Washington’s bellicose saber-rattling and warmongering maneuvers.
We also disagree strongly with those who argue that supporting Iran’s dissident voices and progressive forces somehow contributes to the Bush administration’s imperial designs or pours fuel on the fires of US warmongering. Quite the contrary: in standing in solidarity with Iran’s human rights activists, trade unionists, and democratic dissidents, we are in fact supporting people who themselves are unequivocally opposed to any US attack on their country and have said so loudly. Moreover, those very progressive forces in Iran have made it abundantly clear that they want international solidarity — not from the Pentagon or the CIA or the neocons, but from global civil society. That is to say, labor unions, human rights groups, women’s rights activists, intellectuals and writers. Those who contend that to show our moral and political solidarity with the democratic struggle in Iran is to further the cause of imperialism are dead wrong and utterly out of touch with the views of Iranian progressives.
We reject the disfigured concept of solidarity — sadly found in certain quarters of the Left and the antiwar movement — that maintains the need to defend any regime that finds itself in the crosshairs of US imperialism. This perspective involves solidarity not with Iranian feminists or trade unionists, but with the Iranian government that crushes their demonstrations and jails their activists. We believe in rejecting what the philosopher Slavoj Žižek aptly calls the “double blackmail”: are we merely against imperialism or also in favor of emancipation? Rather than side with one or the other, we should oppose both US imperialism and the human rights violations of the Islamic Republic, both the militarism of Bush and Cheney and the tyranny of Ahmadinejad and Khamenei. Our sympathy belongs to the liberatory movements in Iran today, not with the regime that represses them.
This is a vitally critical moment — in precisely the twofold sense to which the Iranian student protestor referred. It’s avitally critical moment in terms of the ominous specter of a US attack on Iran, which would produce an unimaginable human catastrophe and derail Iran’s democratic struggle for the foreseeable future. It’s also a vitally critical moment domestically in Iran, which is in the midst of a ferocious crackdown on dissent. Newspapers are being closed; student activists and trade unionists are being jailed; intellectuals are being paraded on state television making coerced “confessions”: Iran’s hard right is unleashing a sweeping new wave of repression in an attempt to redraw the lines of Iranian political life. In these dark times, we feel compelled to take a stand: against Washington’s military maneuvers and with the struggles for democracy, human rights, and social justice in Iran.