CONCRETE AND FROM BELOW

US Solidarity with Iran

by Raha Iranian Feminist Collective, WIN Magazine

As members of a feminist collective founded in part to support the massive post-election protests in Iran in 2009 while opposing all forms of US intervention, we take this opportunity to reflect on the meaning and practice of transnational solidarity between US-based activists and sections of Iranian society. Both protests against and expressions of support for Ahmadinejad are articulated under the banner of support for the “Iranian people.”

In particular, critics of the Iranian regime have advocated the use of “targeted sanctions” against human rights violators in the Iranian government as a method of solidarity. Despite their name, these sanctions trickle down to punish broader sections of the population. They also stand as a stunning example of US power and hypocrisy, since no country dares sanction the United States for its illegal wars, torture practices, and program of extrajudicial assassinations. Some “anti-imperialist” activists not only oppose war and sanctions on Iran but also defend Ahmadinejad as a populist president expressing the will of the majority of the Iranian people.

In fact, Ahmadinejad’s aggressive neo-liberal economic policies represent a right-wing attack on living standards and on various social welfare provisions established after the revolution. We offer an alternative notion of and method for building international solidarity “from below,” one that offers a way out of “lesser evil” politics and turns the focus away from the state and onto those movement activists in the streets.

“Targeted” Sanctions
From 1990 until 2003, a US-led UN coalition placed crippling financial and trade sanctions on Iraq in an ostensible effort to weaken Saddam Hussein’s authoritarian regime. Sanctions, we were told, amounted to a humane way of combating intransigent authoritarianism around the world while avoiding mass bloodshed. The complete collapse of the Iraqi economy during 13 years of sanctions coupled with the inability of ordinary Iraqi people to access banned items necessary for their day-to-day survival—such as ambulances and generators—led to over half a million Iraqi civilian deaths. Furthermore, the sanctions were an utter failure in their purported primary goal—thwarting the Hussein regime while avoiding full-scale war. Finally, in March 2003, the United States and a small “coalition of the willing” began a full-scale military intervention in Iraq, which has shredded the fabric of Iraqi society and left a network of permanent US military bases—and Western oil companies—behind.

Some form of sanctions against the Islamic Republic of Iran has been in place with little effect for more than 30 years. But since President Barack Obama took office, the sanctions have been amped up. In June 2010, a US-led UN coalition passed the fourth round of economic and trade sanctions against the Islamic Republic since 2006. The stated goal: limiting Iran’s nuclear program. Soon after, the European Union imposed its own set of economic sanctions. A month later, with the Comprehensive Iran Sanctions Accountability and Divestment Act of 2010 (CISADA), President Obama signed into law the most extensive sanctions regime Iran has ever seen.

It should not be surprising, given the United States’ historic attempts to control Iranian oil, that CISADA’s primary target is the management of the Iranian petroleum industry. These sanctions would penalize any foreign company that sells Iran refined petroleum products, which are a necessity for the country’s primary industry, as well as for the everyday functioning of modern life. This winter, shortages of imported refined gasoline forced the Iranian government to convert petro-chemical plants into makeshift refineries that produce fuel loaded with dangerous particles. As a result, the capital city of Tehran has been plagued by unprecedented levels of pollution, shutting down schools and businesses for days at a time and leading to skyrocketing rates of respiratory illnesses and at least 3,641 pollution-related deaths.

Parts and supplies for a great deal of machinery—and not only those potentially associated with nuclear industry—are denied entry into Iran; indeed, one of the deadly examples of the effects of these sanctions in recent years has been the spate of crashes by commercial Iranian aircraft due to faulty or out-of-date parts.

No member of any Iran-based opposition group—from leaders of the “green” movement, to activists in the women’s and student movement, to labor organizers—has called for or supported the US/UN/EU sanctions against the Islamic Republic. On the contrary, leaders from virtually all of these groups have vocally opposed the implementation of sanctions precisely because they have witnessed the Iranian state grow stronger, and the wellbeing of ordinary Iranians suffer, as a result. The US government’s long record of either complicity with or silence regarding the treatment of dissidents in Iran—from the 1950s when it helped train the brutal SAVAK torture squads right through to the post-election crackdown in 2009—makes it nothing if not hypocritical on the issue of human rights in Iran.

The Spectrum of Support
In stark contrast to the range of groups protesting the Iranian president and the Islamic Republic’s policies, some 130 activists from antiwar, labor and anti-racist organizations took an altogether different approach in September 2010, attending a dinner with Ahmadinejad hosted by the Iranian Mission to the United Nations. According to one attendee, the goal of the dinner was to “share our hopes for peace and justice with the Iranian people through their president and his wife.” During two and half hours of speeches, activists embraced Ahmadinejad as an ally and partner in the global struggle for peace and, with few exceptions, ignored the fact that his administration is responsible for a brutal crackdown on dissent.

Rather than listening to the millions of Iranians who protested unfair elections and political repression, these activists heard only the siren song of Ahmadinejad’s “anti-imperialist” stance, his vehement criticism of Israel, and his statements about US government complicity with the September 11 attacks. Many of these groups are numerically small organizations with histories of denying atrocities carried out by heads of state that oppose US domination.

One of the most bewildering misrepresentations of Ahmadinejad outside Iran has been around his economic policies, which are often represented by the US left as populist or even pro-working class. In reality, the extent and speed of privatization in Iran under Ahmadinejad has been unprecedented and disastrous for the majority of the Iranian people. Recently, despite vast opposition even from the parliament, the government annulled gasoline and food subsidies that have been in place for decades. The massive unregulated import of foreign products, especially from China, has made it impossible for agricultural and industrial domestic producers to survive. These hasty and haphazard developments have severely destabilized Iran’s economy in the past few years, leading to rocketing inflation (25–30 percent) and growing poverty. Unemployment is very high; no official statistics are available, but rough estimates are around 30 percent, creating fertile ground for recruitment into the state’s military and police apparatus (similar to the “poverty draft” in the United States).

Anti-Imperialist?
The 1978–79 revolution was one of the most inspiring popular uprisings against imperialism and homegrown despotism the world has seen, successfully wresting Iran away from US control over Iranian oilfields and ending its role as a watchdog for US interests in the region. Denunciations of US imperialism were a unifying rallying cry and formed a key pillar of revolutionary ideology. However, in the more than 30 years since, the Iranian government has, like all nations, ruthlessly pursued its interests on the world stage. Despite its anti-American/anti-imperialist rhetoric, Iran cannot survive without capital investment from and trade with other “imperial” nations, without integration into a world market that is ordered according to the relative military and economic strength of various states.

The Iranian government’s support for Palestinians scores it major points with many leftists in the United States and around the world. While the Iranian government does send material aid to Palestinians suffering under Israeli blockades and in refugee camps in Lebanon, it has also manipulated the situation for purposes that have nothing to do with Palestinian liberation. Using money to buy support from Palestinians and financing and arming the Hezbollah army in Lebanon are crucial ways the Islamic Republic exerts its influence in the region.

Currently no form of independent organizing, political or economic, is tolerated in Iran. Attempts at organizing workers and labor unions have been particularly subject to violent repression. No opposition parties are allowed to function. No independent media—no newspapers, magazines, or radio or television stations—can survive, other than websites that must constantly battle government censorship. The prisons are full of journalists and activists from across Iranian society. Prisoners are deprived of any rights or a fair trial, a violation of Iranian law. Iran has the second-highest number of executions among all countries and the highest number per capita. In January 2011, executions soared to a rate of one every eight hours.

The women’s movement has been another major target of repression in the past few years. Dozens of activists have been arrested and imprisoned for conducting peaceful campaigns for legal equality; many have been forced to flee the country, and many more are continually harassed and threatened. Women collecting signatures on a petition demanding the right to divorce and to child custody are often unfairly accused of disturbing public order, threatening national security, and insulting religious values.

Ahmadinejad’s anti-immigrant positions and policies are the harshest of any administration in the past few decades. The largest forced return of Afghan immigrants happened under his government, ripping families apart and forcing thousands across the border (with many deaths reported in winter due to severe cold). Marriage between Iranians and Afghan immigrants is not allowed, and Afghan children do not have any rights, not even to attend school. Moreover, government has been repressive toward different ethnic groups in Iran, particularly Kurds. It is promoting a militarist Shia-Islamist-nationalist agenda and escalating Shia-Sunni divisions.

Despite the many differences between the individuals and groups represented at that dinner with Ahmadinejad, what the overwhelming majority of them have in common is a mistaken idea of what it means to be anti-imperialist or antiwar. Part of the confusion may stem from a distorted notion of what it means to speak from inside “the belly of the beast.” In other words, the argument goes, those of us in the United States have a foremost responsibility to oppose the actual and threatened atrocities of our own government, not to sit in hypocritical judgment over other, lesser state powers. But in the case of the vicious crackdown on all forms of dissent inside Iran, not judging is, in practice, silent complicity. If anti-imperialism means the right to criticize only the US government, we end up with a politics that is, ironically, so US-centric as to undermine the possibility of international solidarity with people who have to simultaneously stand up to their own dictatorial governments and to the behemoth of US power.

Solidarity: Concrete and from Below
There is no contradiction between opposing every instance of U.S. meddling in Iran—and every other country—and supporting the popular, democratic struggles of ordinary Iranians against dictatorship. Effective international solidarity requires that the two go hand in hand, for example, by linking the struggles of political prisoners in Iran with those of political prisoners in the United States, not by counterposing them.

Internationalism has to start from below, from the differently articulated aspirations of mass movements against state militarism, dictatorship, economic crisis, and gender, sexual, religious, class, and ethnic oppression, in Iran, in the United States, and all over the world. For activists in the United States, this means being against sanctions on Iran, whether they are in the name of “human rights” or the nuclear issue. It means refusing to cast the United States as the land of progress and freedom while Iran is demonized as backward and oppressive. Solidarity is not charity or pity; it flows from an understanding of mutual—though far from identical—struggle.

For solidarity to be effective, it must be concrete. US-based activists need to educate ourselves about Iran’s historic and contemporary social movements and, as much as possible, build relationships with those involved in various opposition groups and activities in Iran so that our support is thoughtful, appropriate to the context, and, ideally, in response to specific requests initiated from within Iran. It is our hope that these struggles may be increasingly linked as social justice activists in the United States and Iran find productive ways of working together, as well as in our different contexts and locations, toward the similar goals of greater democracy and human liberation.

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Raha Iranian Feminist Collective is a New York City-based group of Iranian and Iranian-American women working toword gender and sexual justice and opposed to militarism and imperialism. They believe that all genuine liberation comes from below. Contact them at rahanyc[at]gmail.com.

A longer version of this article appeared Feb. 19 in Jadaliyya, the online magazine of the Arab Studies Institute. This version ran in the Spring edition of WIN, the magazine of the War Resisters League.

From our Daily Report:

Iran: contract workers demand rights
World War 4 Report, June 9, 2011

Idiot leftists schmooze Ahmadinejad
World War 4 Report, Sept. 25, 2010

See also:

SELLING IRAN
Ahmadinejad, Privatization and a Bus Diver Who Said No
by Billy Wharton, Dissident Voice
World War 4 Report, July 2009

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Reprinted by World War 4 Report, July 1, 2011
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingCONCRETE AND FROM BELOW 

ROOTS OF EGYPT’S REVOLUTION

Labor Unions and the Uprising in Tahrir Square

by Dan Read, Toward Freedom

Kamal Abbas
Kamal Abbas comes across as a modest man. As coordinator of the Center for Trade Union and Workers’ Services (CTUWS) in Egypt, nearly twenty years of activism under repressive conditions seem to him little reason to boast. Others beg to differ.

Kamal recently arrived in the UK as part of a speaking tour to visit with British activists and trade unionists. His talks focused on the victory won four months ago when Abbas and his fellow activists overthrew long-hated President Hosni Mubarak.

“What we witnessed in Egypt and Tunisia, and now in Libya, Syria and Yemen, is that the struggle for freedom is not limited to one nation,” said Kamal, his quietly spoken Arabic relayed via a translator to an enthralled London audience.

Abbas’ story, however, begins way before the tumultuous events witnessed in Tahrir square; it is part of a legacy of resistance that goes back decades. Under the regime of former President Mubarak, grass-roots workers’ organizations in Egypt had to operate in conditions that could at best be described as “semi-legal.” This had been the rule since 1957, when President Nassar had ordained it necessary for all Egyptian unions to join a single organization, known as the Egyptian Trade Union Federation (ETUF).

This became the norm in much of the Arab world, where mainstream union leaders held to a tradition that saw the state as being integral to the functioning of the labor movement. In the case of Egypt, the ETUF tried to hold onto its government-approved monopoly, even at the expense of other, independent and democratic initiatives such as the CTUWS.

“The Egyptian trade unions were a lot like those in the Stalinist countries,” said Eric Lee, international trade union activist and founder of the LaborStart campaign website. “They were a state-controlled federation. It was a complete monopoly; you could not form an independent trade union. And the federation just supported the state—if the state supported privatizations they the federation supported privatizations.”

It was not unheard of for disillusioned workers to seek their own solutions to wider problems of poverty, unemployment and draconian government measures. Kamal Abbas himself began his time as a worker activist when he participated in a strike at the steel works in Helwan, just south of Cairo. The strike was put down with several deaths, yet despite brutal repression, the ETUF did little to help the workers’ cause. Abbas and others then decide to start a new, grass-roots workers organization.

“The situation for trade unions in Egypt was difficult,” Abbas explained. “The official federation was dominated by the government since its establishment. However, in 1990 we managed to form the CTUWS and for the next twenty years were advocating and defending workers’ rights such as the right to strike and form independent trade unions.”

Unsurprisingly, then President Mubarak did not look kindly on such endeavors. Kamal and those like him were frequently harassed and arrested by security forces. In 2007, the organization came under particularly heavy pressure due to their involvement in on-going strikes in the textile sector. Although less than a year later over twenty thousand workers were again on strike, the CTUWS headquarters in Helwan was shut down, alongside several other branch offices.

In this instance the ETUF directly turned on the CTUWS, attacking them in the media and blaming them for the onset of industrial unrest. The CTUWS in turn claimed they had a responsibility to defend the workers, yet coupled with increased government scrutiny over CTUWS moves to annul state interference in internal trade union elections, the union was largely forced underground.

“They had endless difficulties,” Eric Lee said. “Kamal was in and out of jail often. What the union was clever about was that they looked for international support from early on. They knew that international support would help them survive the onslaughts. But they faced constant repression. When I attended a meeting with them last year, only nine months before the regime was overthrown, they said to all of us ‘you are aware that at any moment the police could burst in and arrest everyone.’ That was the atmosphere, even as recently as a year ago.”

Uprising
The Arab Spring appeared to catch Western commentators off guard. Given that the mainstream media appeared to want to avoid reporting on events such as the 2006-2007 textile strikes, this is perhaps unsurprising.

Revolutions, however, do not appear out of thin air. “People who think that revolutions come out of nowhere have never studied revolutions,” said Lee. “Many international activists knew that Egypt was absolutely bubbling in turmoil. When I was there last year I knew very little about Egypt—the Solidarity Centre which is the AFL-CIO’s foreign policy arm—was there in strength, they had been backing the CTUWS for some time. And they were distributing a book which had some academic material about the Egyptian working class which covered right up to about a year ago.”

The book described the past decade’s union struggle which led to a wave of strikes which continued for the last five years. The strike, explained Lee, “involved millions and millions of workers, and enormous street demonstrations—they had ten thousand workers camped outside the Prime Minister’s office. This proved that society was losing its grip—the police couldn’’ control the streets, ten thousand workers camped out is a very significant protest and this wasn’t picked up on most of the global media; they just weren’t looking for it. Trade unionists who were involved did know about it.”

When mass street protests erupted last January, however, the CTUWS began to play a decisive role. As demonstrators took to the streets in their thousands and huge swathes of the urban working class came out on strike, Tahrir square became world famous as the focal point for revolution. It was in this square that Kamal Abbas made his first appeal for a new federation of trade unions.

“On January 30th we met with representative of other independent trade union organizations and we discussed forming a new federation,” said Abbas. “We then made an announcement in Tahrir square, calling for a new federation. But at the time we had no idea what would happen. Since then this call has been responded to by the workers. The challenge now that the revolution has succeeded is to be able to build a society of social justice.”

During this time, the old ETUF largely ignored the protest movement and instead committed itself to “monitoring” the labor force for signs of discontent. In the process, they effectively signed their death warrant as an alleged workers’ organization by showing clearly which side they were on.

Additionally, the International Confederation of Arab Trade Unions (ICATU)—a conservative body influenced by Muamour Gadaffi—appears to have taken a back seat in the face of independent unionism. Having long pursued a policy of Arab nationalism that saw non-Arabs in the Middle East excluded from membership, some have called for the ICATU’s disbandment and the formation of a more ethnically inclusive body.

“ICATU does not accept unions that are not Arab,” said Lee. “So people like the Kurds are not welcome, Iranians are not welcome and of course the Israelis are not welcome. Not only that, but the Palestinians are not welcome. The Palestine General Federation of trade unions, which is generally accepted to be the Palestinian labor movement, has never been a member of ICATU because ICATU deemed they were tainted by collaboration with Zionism.”

ICATU, arguably now something of a relic which fails to represent the true ethnic diversity of the Middle East, now stands to be swept away by a new tide of popular trade unionism standing in a different tradition than that of Arab nationalism and state control.

Hope for the future now takes precedence in the minds of a population long accustomed to living under a repressive government. With the military government having made moves to ban strikes and curtail workers’ organizations, Egyptians are generally feeling optimistic about future possibilities.

“This revolution in Egypt started with the uprising of young people, which shows that this revolution has a great future,” said Abbas.

It remains to be seen how far the Arab Spring may continue, considering the convoluted situation in Libya and the savage repression in Yemen and Syria. Given that the Egyptian and Tunisian former presidents in particular were long-supported by western powers, another question is what relationship the new Egypt may pursue with their former imperial partners in the west.

Abbas believes that the political situation may have changed fundamentally with the entry of popular protest and upheaval. “The policy-makers of Europe and America have been shown that the people in the Middle East are not satisfied with dictatorships. This revolution has really forced them to acknowledge that the people themselves can act in their own interests.”

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Dan Read is a freelance writer in Britain. Photo of Abbas by Hossam el-Hamalawy.

This story first ran June 22 on Toward Freedom.

From our Daily Report:

Egypt: protesters clash with security forces in Tahrir Square —again
World War 4 Report, June 29, 2011

Egypt: Suez Canal zone workers go on strike again
World War 4 Report, Feb. 20, 2011

See also:

INTERNATIONALISM, LIBYA AND THE ARAB REVOLTS
by Pierre Beaudet, Viento Sur
World War 4 Report, March 2011

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Reprinted by World War 4 Report, July 1, 2011
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingROOTS OF EGYPT’S REVOLUTION