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