Tehran Bus Drivers To Stay Home on Friday

SMCCDI (Information Service):

Hundreds of "Tehran's Collective Bus Company" (TCBC) drivers, technicians and workers will stay home, this upcoming Friday, in order to protest against the brutal repression of their peaceful actions and the mistreatment of their colleagues and family members.

Hundreds of TCBC employees were arrested and tens, including wives and children, were wounded following last Saturday's strike, by brutal Islamist militiamen and Islamic regime's plain clothes' agents.

Most of the arrested are kept in section 240 of the infamous Evin political jail and several of them have been put in solitary confinement in order to make false confessions on links with foreign intelligence. READ MORE

The Greater Tehran has approximately around 12 millions of inhabitants and many are supportive of the strikers. Most workers and governmental employees, such as teachers, are openly supporting the bus drivers and tracts are widely distributed in order to condemn the regime.

The repression of the TCBC strikers, who are from the poor layers of the society, has boosted the already advanced process of decomposition of Ahmadinejad's administration's image, just as, the repression of the Students' Uprising of July 1999 did with Khatami's administration. Ahmadinejad was declared to be a defender of the poor against the rich Islamist oligarchs who are affiliated to Rafsanjani and Khatami administrations. He was supposed to re-establish 'justice' and to make all Iranians benefit of the country's revenues.

In reality, more and more Iranians are understanding that the problem is not about men but of the totality of an ideological and theocratic political structure without any ability of reform or accountability.

The movement of the Tehran's Collective Bus Company's drivers, if extended due to a free world's support, might lead to the apparition of a worker movement, such as, the 1980's Solidarnosc (Solidarity) which was able to rally various economic sectors behind it and to create the possibility of radical political changes in Poland. Solidarnosc was the independent Polish Shipyards' Workers' Union formed in Gdansk, lead by Lech Walesa, and which was in opposition to the Militaro-Communist rule of General Jaruzelski backed by the defunct USSR.

Most Iranian National-Secularist groups, such as, the SMCCDI and the INSP (Iran's National-Secular Party) are supportive of the TCBC strikers and in general of any clean and clear move for a genuine democratic and secularist change in Iran. The two movements' members and supporters have been asked to help the families of the TCBC employees. The expression of such support and calls on the population to protect the strikers have been made, at several occasion, on the waves of abroad based Iranian radio and satellite TV networks broadcasting for Iran.

The TCBC strikers' move and legitimate aspirations are not only limited to internal Iranian debate and in this line, several western workers' unions, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, and influent politicians, such as, the U.S. Senator Rick Santorum have already declared their support.

Without doubt, the continuation of such public supports and a real financial support for the TCBC strikers can plunge the Islamic regime into an abyss from which it can not escape. The result would no more lead to just obtaining some controlled 'greater freedoms or liberties' in the frame of the current theorcratic regime, but to a total liberation of Iran due to a secular and democratic revolution without any need to any kind of military intervention.

The trend has become more noticeable, as especially the absolute majority of Iranians have well taken their distances from the regime's "reformists from within" and some of their docile so-called student associations, such as, the "Office of Consolidation Unity" (OCU).

Many Iranians are looking for President's George W. Bush State of Union's speech, of tomorrow evening, in order to hear his comments on Iran and the quest of Iranians for genuine freedom. SMCCDI and INSP believe that George W. Bush can surely play an important role, just as; the late President Ronald Reagan did in supporting openly the Polish people's aspiration for a total change of the society and Solidarnosc's movement.