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News & Letters, July 2001
Election and resistance in Iran
Given an undemocratic but decisive choice, Iranian voters turned
out en masse on June 8 and handed Mohammad Khatami a landslide
presidential victory with 77.8% of the vote. Less than 1% voted
for Ali Fallahian, the candidate with known ties to
assassination squads. But a considerable number, nearly 15%,
voted for a former labor minister who campaigned under the
slogan of "less political freedoms, more economic
justice!"
Despite solid backing, the number of those who believe Khatami
will truly oppose the hard-line and conservative clerics has
plummeted drastically. There are those who say that Khatami's
presence only serves as a shield for the clerical establishment
against challenges to its religious and ideological legitimacy.
They point out that Khatami was also the candidate of the
conservatives. But relatively few Iranians were willing to hand
over more power to the other factions. There is good reason to
believe that a considerable number of people, however, heeded
the call to boycott the elections or turn in their ballots
blank. According to one eyewitness in the city of Qum, nearly
65,000 blank ballots were turned in.
Meanwhile, less than a week after the elections, workers at a
recently privatized textile factory stormed the office of the
new owner-manager to protest the non-payment of their salaries.
According to a report in the Financial Times (June 18), workers
at the Chit-e-Rey factory near Tehran smashed furniture and
hurled computers out of windows when their new boss arrived for
the first time in two weeks, empty-handed.
The workers' protest at Chit-e-Rey follows a wave of other
protests due to economic restructuring which spells out
wholesale shutdown of factories and massive layoffs of workers
with no social security or unemployment benefits.
Most Iranian industries have been run by bonyads or religious
conglomerates that need not keep their books open to the public.
According to various estimates these foundations run from
one-fifth to two-thirds of Iran's economic output. During the
last two years the bonyads have been selling off industries that
lose money.
As the FINANCIAL TIMES reports, the Foundation for the Oppressed
and War-Wounded (which took over the former Shah's wealth and
then expanded during the war as a major war industry) recently
revealed that it employs 63,000 people and supported 120,000 war
disabled, but only 85 of its 400 companies were profit-making.
Chit-e-Rey was one of the losing industries sold off to private
investors. The new owners, for the most part, have shut down the
plants and stopped paying wages to workers. Several hundred
workers shocked the establishment when they took their protests
to the Majlis chanting "Death to the bonyad."
After the latest elections, workers' protests are sure to spread
in an organized way in the period ahead as privatization
proceeds. Iran's economy has been stagnating and coming apart at
the seams. In that sense Iranian workers have nothing to
celebrate with the election of Khatami. The entrance of workers
into the arena of the political struggles carried on by the
youth movement since the late 1990s may finally help lift the
incubus from the mind of Iranians to break the back of this
regime.
--Cyrus Noveen
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