|
Let Us
Celebrate Our Fighting Unity on International Women’s Day
We women from Iran will
march on the streets of Europe on March 8 in order to let the world know we, who are
facing one of the deadliest woman hating regimes on Earth (the Islamic
Republic), will go on rebelling against everything reactionary until we
achieve emancipation of women and the whole of humanity.
We will reaffirm that
never ever in history have slaves been liberated by the slave owners. Therefore
we denounce and reject George Bush’s outrageous declarations about wanting to
liberate us.
We call upon women and men
in the US to act in
solidarity and support us in our difficult fight against our two enemies who
are part of the same matrix: the Islamic Republic of Iran and US
imperialism.
Oppression of women is the
linchpin of Islamic theocracy in Iran. Religious state guarantees
total patriarchy. Here, all
kinds of state sanctioned brutal rituals are performed over
women’s bodies: obligatory head to toe cover Hejab;
arresting and torturing those who rebel against Hejab;
stoning and hanging “infidel” and
adulterous women. In Iran
women have no right to travel, no right to work, no right to education
without consent of father or husband. It is total patriarchy. Medieval penal
codes ensure medieval moral codes.
In Iran, extreme
oppression breaks women and denigrates them but also turns them into
formidable rebels. We rebel against our conditions and we struggle to make
all oppressed and exploited people in Iran rebel against the slavery of
women. Today in Iran, every progressive and revolutionary movement – be it
the workers who fight for the right to strike and have unions or the students
who are fighting against tyranny and US war threats – calls for abolition of
laws demoting women to a slave situation; they call for separation of state
and religion, and at the heart of this separation is an end to the slave
situation of women.
In the midst of our bloody
fight against Islamic Republic of Iran we have to also face another bloody
foe: US
imperialism.
GW regime claims to be
“liberator” of the people in the Middle East:
a 100 percent criminal cynical deception. We know what that “liberation”
looks like! Misery and oppression of our sisters in Afghanistan and Iraq fills us with deep sorrow
and rage. In “liberated” Iraq
with close to one million deaths and total disruption of life for millions of
people, many female children who have been spared by US bombs and bestial
raids of US
army are traded in prostitution free market. After all it has been
“liberation” of free market capitalism which trades in human flesh.
We want to make one thing
clear: we the women of Iran, who have been in a kind of civil war with
Islamic Republic of Iran for the last 29 years, are not fighting to liberate
ourselves from the clutches of one outmoded social, ideological, political
system like the IRI in order to let another outmoded system like US
imperialism replace it. Nothing is more deadly a trap for the oppressed than
to prefer one set of oppressors to another set of oppressors.
We don’t need anybody
“liberating” us. We have been liberating ourselves for 29 years, and the US has been helping and consolidating the IRI
and other “made in USA”
Islamic fundamentalists in the Middle East. The
US rulers (Republican or Democrats) are experts in putting together all kinds
of reactionary mummies, tribal, clerical and warlord patriarchs and “forging
a state” out of them. This is the kind of pluralism and democracy US has been dishing out to the people of the Middle East in addition to bombs.
We don’t need “liberation”
ala GW. But we do need the support of people in the US!
We need the people in the US to fight
against their regime while we are fighting against ours.
GW and Islamic rulers in Iran are
warning us that one must choose between them. No! we
should not let the people in our countries to be squeezed in this political
trap. It is clever on their part to use the fight in between them to also
stamp out any possibility of the people taking the helms of society away from
them in making revolutions in Iran
and US. Instead of playing their sinister destructive path we have our own
way: to squeeze them in between our internationalist revolutionary struggles.
We believe IRI is just a
part and parcel of the world wide system that US and other imperialist powers
are controlling and leading: an extremely oppressive anti people women hating
system which is prevailing in the world. This system has to be buried in
order for us to be liberated. We women
of the world must break our chains and unleash women as mighty force for this
epochal change. We have one fight to fight for the whole of humanity.
March 8 women’s
organization (Iran Afghanistan)
2008
|