Solidarity with the Students’ Struggle in the UK!
The Iranian women’s and Students from 8th March Organisation, are pleased to protest along you against an unfair increase of tuition fees that seriously would harm and damage the education and the future generations especially those of poor strata.
7th December is the student’s day in Iran named after 3 students were shot dead by the Shah’s (then the King of Iran and an ally of the western powers) forces in 1953.
The student’s day is a very important and meaningful day to all Iranian people because it is a day of struggle. The students’ have been in forefront of the people’s struggle in the last 57 years in their fight against both the Shah’s regime and the Islamic regime that replaced it.
With the new regime the Iranian people not only did not achieve freedom but a religious rule was added to an already existed dictatorship, under which the women are oppressed and severely discriminated. The tremendous pressure on women students because of their gender and control on women and men relation are only some aspects of the Islamic regime in the universities. Hejab (veil) is compulsory for women in universities and by this way the women are controlled and are harassed and arrested if not it is not fully observed.
The students have been the most conscious and sensitive section of the society and could not have seen all the oppression and injustice and yet remain silence.
As you are fighting against the injustice and the brutal attack against the education it is clears that you are not only fighting for your own future but more than that you are fighting for the future of a generation, the future of the education as a whole. We understand that this is the reason for your anger and this is the reason for your just struggle. So we express our sincere solidarity with your struggle and are determined to support you and your demand ‘free education for all’.
Today as we are celebrating the students’ day by supporting your struggle, the Iranian students in the very same day are continuing to fight under suppression. The Iranian student’s celebrated the student day in their university with their comrades under the harassment of the security forces, or in their prison cell where thousands of them are imprisoned, tortured and if is a woman students is threatened by rape and other sexual abuse. The Students in Iran fought courageously in the recent uprising against the Islamic regime, and that is why the students and education in Iran as a whole is also under the attack of the Islamic regime. In the course of the last year thousands of students and many lecturers have been imprisoned, terrorised, expelled and harassed.
The universities are militarily invaded by the Islamic regime forces. And the Iranian students are also the victim of the austerity measures and the policy of new-liberalism that is putting all the social resources on sale under the name of privatization, a policy that all the factions of the regime including the opposition factions who are known as ‘green’ faction, approve. This policy would put lots of strain on the working class and other poor sections of the society.
The new -liberalism means the abolition of free education and especially further education. This would not only put severe strain on the students but depriving the lower classes from further education and education as a whole.
British government also wants to make the students and the poor people pay for the crisis that monopolies and capitalist are responsible for. The government by this way is targeting the whole education that the future of the whole population depends on.
This is the reason that the student all over the world should support your struggle as much as the Iranian students need your support and the support of other fellow students in other parts of the world in their struggle against a brutal Islamic republic of Iran.
8 March Women’s Organisation (Iran-Afghanistan)
7th December 2010
www.8mars.com / zan_dem_iran@hotmail.com