TPI calls for campaign to release all political prisoners

Tudeh Party of Iran (TPI) issued an appeal to all progressive and freedom-loving forces of Iran and around the world for the release of all political prisoners.

ICP, 8 January 2018

The Central Committee of the Tudeh Party of Iran on January 7 issued an appeal calling to organise a broad campaign ‘for the release of hundreds of students, working people and freedom fighters in Iran who have been detained by the repressive forces in recent days’. It said that ‘the anti-people and dictatorial theocratic regime of Iran have proceeded to deploy large squads of the Guards Corps, Basij militia and the mercenaries of the security forces to violently repress the protest movement of the youth and working people of our nation’.

According to the statement, the response of the heads of the dictatorial regime to the people has been ‘to accuse them of association with foreign powers’ in order to justify it violance. The latest reports indicate that more than 1500 protesters have been arrested by the security forces of the despotic regime, hundreds have been injured and tens of people have lost their lives during the protests.

The TPI emphasized that the popular protests continue across the nation and ‘tens of militant and freedom-loving students are among the detainees’. It declared that the strategic demands of the popular protests cannot be crushed through intimidation and suppression forever. The demands of ‘rejecting the  despotic theocratic regime; an end to the rule of a bunch of dark-minded, inhumane characters; an end to the oppression and economic injustice resulting from the following and application of neoliberal policies; an end to the unprecedented corruption in the regime and government apparatus; and the establishing of a free, sovereign and democratic Iran’ were underlined in the statement.

While the majority of the people of Iran demand a fundamental change in the political system based on the absolute dictatorship of the Supreme Religious Leader, the statement indicated that ‘neoliberal capitalist socio-economics’ has underpinned this system destroying the productive infrastructure of the country and causing unprecedented levels of poverty. On the other hand, this system is dominated by ‘rentiers and a parasitic capitalist mafia, namely the heads of the Guards Corps, the Basij militia force and other security forces’.  The TPI asserted that ‘This demand of the people of Iran cannot materialise without a change in the current rulers and the establishment of a government based on the people’s will’.

Reminding the Party’s previous call for ‘a united action of all social strata’ with 'a clear and democratic alternative for the current despotic regime', the necessity to challenge the regime by gathering around ‘a minimum program based on the demands of freedom, social justice, bread, jobs and housing’ was emphasized. The statement went as follows:

Fighting for the release of all the political prisoners and prisoners of conscience - whose ranks are once more swelled by the large number of protesters detained by the regime over recent days - is one of the most important and urgent tasks of the protest movement and all the progressive and freedom-loving forces of the nation. We cannot allow the regime to force the detained activists to make baseless and forged confessions in its courts or media through both physical and mental torture with impunity - as has been its conventional and typical recourse in dealing with opposition.

‘According to reliable reports received, the interrogators and torturers of the regime’s security apparatus are conjuring and preparing scenarios to force the prisoners - who have no access to lawyers and legal advice - to recant through coercion and torture. The freeing of the detained activists from the claws of the dictatorship would be a great victory for the popular movement and a heavy defeat for the regime and its supporters.

The TPI demanded the immediate and unconditional release of all prisoners, saluted the detainees in the prisons and called for launching international campaigns, organising protest demonstrations and gathering people in front of the prisons ‘to keep vigil and demand the release of the detainees, in the days when the flames of the mass protests are still burning across the country, is a priority’.