Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s call for a review of last Friday’s voting “is only a tactical retreat for a new offensive” against the widening mass movement for reform, Iran’s Tudeh Party warns.
In a June 15 statement, the Tudeh Party (Party of the Masses, Iran’s Communist Party) says the government’s latest move is an effort at “splitting parts of the reformers from the popular movement and eventual suppression of freedom-loving, reform-demanding and protesting people.”
The statement said that with yesterday’s “million-strong march” in Tehran — the biggest in the country since the 1979 revolution against the shah’s dictatorship — “the courageous and conscious people of Iran, in closed ranks and in a grand peaceful display, challenged the despotic and reactionary rulers and showed their massive will and power to the government of deceit and lies tied to the Velayat-e Faqih (rule of Islamic jurists, headed by Supreme Leader Khamenei) and reactionary putschists.”
“The gigantic march, which was called by Mir Hussein Mousavi and staged despite the Ministry of Interior’s refusal to issue permits for it, once again proved that the Iranian people’s voice can not be silenced through bayonets and deceit,” the Tudeh statement said. “The handling of this huge epic by the putschists speaks loudly about the alarm engulfing the ruling reaction. The night before the march, Velayat-e Faqih (Khamenei) mercenaries and armed tugs of the regime, savagely attacking the Tehran and Isfahan universities student dormitories, tried to sow panic so that they could stop the show of will of millions of Iranians through chaos and blind riots.
“Right now, the plan of the putschist reactionaries is to contain and diffuse the popular movement by all means possible. Firing at today’s peaceful marchers in Tehran and other cities and killing and maiming a large number of people clearly proves the sinister aims and goals of the reactionaries. The ruling reaction knows well that the million-strong presence of the masses is the main obstacle in preserving the coup d’etat and the call for annulment of the election results, which was clearly voiced in today’s march, is possible through this powerful voice.
The statement continues, “To turn over the review of the massive fraud committed in elections to the reaction’s ‘Council of Guardians,’ which is one of the organizing institutions of the massive fraud in the first place, and the collaborators with the Ahmadinejad anti-people coup is like delivering the judicial process to one of the main culprits of the crime. The call for a recount is clearly an undisguised plot by the theocratic regime to extinguish the anger of the protesting population and send them home and hence survive this unprecedented crisis that has engulfed it.”
“The ruling clergy should be forced to retreat,” the party says.
It notes that the main demands of the popular movement include “immediate and unconditional annulment of the fraudulent results of the election, together with the unconditional freedom of all those incarcerated in recent days and also the trial of the armed mercenaries who have attacked the protesting popular forces and have caused the horrendous atrocities of the recent days.”
The Tudeh Party urges Iranians to “continue with your peaceful and violence-free protests against the will of the reactionaries, in all forms and using all means. The only way to confront the coup of the mercenaries bound to the orders of the Velayat-e Faqih is your vibrant and massive presence at the scene of struggle. The just call for the annulment of the election results is only achievable through your tireless and vigilant efforts against the regime’s plots.’
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