Osman Şenkul
In Iran, Reza Shah had entered into a secret alliance with Nazi Germany, providing Hitler with bases from which to attack the Soviet Union and rejecting all demands made by the Allies to close them down. On 25 August 1941, Allied forces entered Iran.
Reza Shah was forced to flee, and the British installed his son, Mohammad Reza, in power. In September 1941, taking advantage of the vacuum created by the August events, the Iranian Tudeh Party (Iranian People’s Party) was founded to carry on the activities of the banned Iranian Communist Party in the open.
In the years that followed, the ‘Shah regime’ became the focal point of social movements in Iran. A major uprising against the Shah regime was waged across the country for years. Tudeh was the first political party to recognise the necessity of establishing a united front bringing together progressive forces to fight against reaction and imperialism, and to take practical initiative in this direction.
Whilst many political organisations were taking advantage of the freedom afforded by parliament, the party was not legally recognised because the internal reactionary forces and their imperialist patrons feared the consequences that Tudeh’s open activities would bring.
As the years-long struggle waged by social forces—among whose leaders was the Tudeh Party—gained momentum, Ayatollah Khomeini, who had been in exile in Najaf, Iraq, for many years, was expelled from Iraq—then under Saddam Hussein’s rule—in 1978 at the request of the Shah of Iran, and moved to Paris, France, where he took up residence at Novfel Le Château.
Meanwhile, the struggle against the Shah’s regime in Iran was gaining momentum, led in part by the Tudeh Party. During this period, lorries transporting goods from Iran to Europe were largely passing through Turkey. In Turkey, where the trade union movement was growing in strength, strikes were also on the rise. The industrial areas where these strikes took place were, naturally, situated on or near the E5 of that era—now the D100—which served as the transit route from Iran to Europe. During the peak of the strikes, there was a severe fuel shortage across Turkey; consequently, Iranian export lorries were travelling with extra fuel in their tanks to ensure they could complete the Turkish leg of their journey. The majority of lorry drivers who knew enough English or German to explain their plight in Europe were also members of the Tudeh Party; consequently, they would visit the strike tents they encountered along the route and provide the strikers with the fuel they required.
However, Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Tehran from Paris on 1 February 1979 aboard a private plane, following 15 years in exile. Following his return, on 11 February 1979, the army declared its neutrality and the Shah’s regime officially collapsed. The newly established Khomeini regime also had the Tudeh Party in its sights; for the Tudeh had already prepared its programme for the post-Shah era and was attempting to disseminate it to the masses:
- The protection of Iran’s independence and sovereignty.
- The establishment of a democratic regime that guarantees individual and public rights, particularly freedom of thought, expression and association.
- The struggle against all forms of dictatorship.
- Implementing land reform as an urgent priority, and raising the standard of living for peasants and other working-class masses.
- Restructuring the education system to provide compulsory, free education for all. Laying the foundations for a free national healthcare system.
- Reforming the tax system to benefit lower-income groups.
- Implementing reforms in the general economy and all sectors; expanding industry and mining; and developing transport infrastructure through the construction of road and rail networks and the modernisation of existing ones.
- The nationalisation of the deposed Shah’s assets for the benefit of the people.
The newly established Mullah regime, however, cracked down on the Tudeh Party, which had been the driving force behind the mass movements—including strikes, boycotts and occupations—that had played the greatest role in undermining the Shah’s regime. The Mullah regime had begun to feel uneasy as the details of the Tudeh programme started to reach the masses. The regime realised that as Tudeh’s programme, which encompassed all workers, reached wider sections of society, mass movements would grow increasingly larger, and this would naturally pave the way for the overthrow of the Mullah regime and the establishment of a People’s regime in its place.
Just as the 1980 regime in Turkey did, the Mullah regime also cracked down on the Tudeh in Iran with widespread arrests and executions. Just as happened in Turkey following the 1980 coup, thousands of people—the vast majority of whom were educated—who managed to escape arrest, imprisonment and execution left the country and emigrated to European nations.
Having lived under the heavy oppression of the Mullah regime for many years, the Iranian people, although they occasionally rose up in protest, were unable to organise a mass movement and were consequently suppressed at the cost of hundreds of lives. However, the uprisings in recent years have begun to garner increasingly widespread popular support.
Protesters opposing the regime in Iran have been acting in a more organised manner since the beginning of this year. With the support they have received from broad sections of the population, they have expanded the protest movement to a massive scale despite the killing of hundreds of people, thereby shaking the regime.
On 21 February, thousands of university students also joined the growing anti-regime demonstrations and protest movements. This uprising by university students, which was also supported by many academics, marked the first protests on this scale since the regime’s deadly crackdown. University students marched on the campus of Sharif University of Technology in the capital, Tehran. As the protests spread, government supporters attacked the students. The students’ uprising in Tehran spread to many universities across Iran, and the anti-regime mass movements gained significant momentum.
The students’ uprising, which began with demonstrations attended by hundreds of protesters on the Sharif University of Technology campus, spread to Shahid Beheshti University and Amir Kabir University of Technology. At the same time, the participation of broad sections of the public in the uprising movements, driven by economic hardships, was being attempted to be halted by the clerical regime’s massive massacre.
The US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency (Hrana) announced that at least 7,015 people had been confirmed killed during this wave. Of these, 6,508 were protesters, 226 were children and 214 were individuals linked to the government. The latest figures were updated on 15 February. Hrana also announced that it is investigating a further 11,744 reported deaths.
Despite all this repression by the clerical regime, the popular uprising was growing steadily and broadening its base as much as possible. In particular, the uprising at the universities, which began on 21 February, had started to put the clerical regime under considerable strain; the regime’s security forces had begun to withdraw from many areas and establish strongholds to protect the regime.
In other words, the clerical regime in Iran was in a very difficult position, and seeing this, large masses of people were intensifying the uprising. Despite the regime forces’ increasingly heavy-handed responses, the number of participants in the protest demonstrations was growing day by day; until 28 February, when, on the orders of US President Donald Trump and his ally, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, US and Israeli forces began bombing Iran.
The widespread mass actions in Iran, which were growing towards the overthrow of the regime, swelled further under the impact of the attacks launched on Trump’s orders; but this time, those filling the squares—with the support of the security forces—had transformed into ‘forces protecting the regime’.
In short, through the heavy attacks he launched and orchestrated against the country, Trump saved the regime in Iran at the eleventh hour, whilst simultaneously blocking the Strait of Hormuz, through which a large portion of global oil trade passes. According to Fatih Birol, Executive Director of the International Energy Agency (IEA), the Strait of Hormuz accounts for 25 per cent of global seaborne oil trade, with 15 million barrels of crude oil and 5 million barrels of petroleum products passing through it daily.
With this move, which saved the Iranian regime, Trump also largely cut off the flow of oil to China, his biggest rival in the global economy. Trump had taken his first major step in this regard when he seized control of Venezuela’s oil supply by staging a nighttime raid to abduct the country’s leader, Nicolás Maduro, who presides over the world’s largest oil reserves. According to Visual Capitalist data, China, which imports an average of 11,108,000 barrels of oil per day, sourced the largest portion of this from Central and South America and the Middle East. Of China’s daily oil imports, 6,324,000 barrels came from the Strait of Hormuz and the Middle East region (1,576, 000 from Saudi Arabia, 1,279,000 from Iraq, 712,000 from the UAE, 321,000 from Kuwait, and 2,436,000 from other Middle Eastern countries). According to the same data, China also sourced 1,055,000 barrels of its daily oil imports from Central and South American countries.