Iran

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Iran (Persian: ايران), also called Persia, is a Middle Eastern country located in Southwest Asia. It borders Armenia, Azerbaijan (including its Nakhichevan exclave), and Turkmenistan to the north, Pakistan and Afghanistan to the east, and Turkey and Iraq to the west. In addition, it borders the Persian Gulf across which lie Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. The official name of the country is the Islamic Republic of Iran and Shi'a Islam is the official state religion.

Throughout history Iran has been of great geostrategic importance due to its position between the Middle East, Caucasia, Central Asia and the Persian Gulf and its proximity to Eastern Europe and the Indian subcontinent.

1 History
- 1.1 Iranian Revolution, 1978-1979
2 Current Political Climate
3 Geography
- 3.1 Climate
4 Economy
5 Demographics
6 Culture
7 Related
8 External Links

[edit] History

[edit] Iranian Revolution, 1978-1979

Religious fundamentalism, whether Christian, Muslim, Hindu or other deserves to be closely examined because it has increasingly become a player on the world stage in recent years. On the one hand, many media commentators and pro-war agitators were not slow to characterise the wars in the former Yugoslavia, Sudan, Chechnya, Palestine/Israel and Afghanistan as "crusades" against the Muslim populations or "jihads" against Christian or Jewish people. On the other hand, many religious working class people who have borne the brunt of these wars - especially when driven by US imperialism as in Afghanistan - have succumbed to the false belief that they are being protected by their domestic theocratic (religious state) regimes. The debate around the supposed "revolutionary" nature of some religious fundamentalist regimes is similar in many ways to the debate on the "liberatory" nature of national liberation movements.

Although the relationship between anarchist revolutionary workers and religious (or nationalist) workers fighting for a better life is complex, given the current war on the Afghan people, an examination of a genuine workers' revolution in a majority Muslim country is probably the most effective way to clarify our position. So we will look at what happened during the Iranian Revolution of 1978-1979.

Iran is an important test case firstly because until the revolution, Iran was one of three key pro-Western strongholds in the Middle East necessary for suppressing local worker demands and keeping oil production cheap (the others being Israel and Saudi Arabia). Secondly, because the revolution - or more correctly, the Muslim clerical counter-revolution that destroyed it - was to the Arab, Kurdish and Persian world what the Russian Revolution was to the European world and has provided the "model revolution" debated amongst anti-imperialist and revolutionary Muslim workers ever since. Iran developed great strategic importance for the imperialist powers (especially Britain and Russia, then later the USA) following the discovery of massive reserves of oil there in 1908.

The Iranian oil industry concentrated more workers together than any other industry in the Middle East, with 31,500 working in oil production by 1940 - but most of the profits went to Britain. The following year, Russia and Britain invaded Iran and installed a puppet ruler (shah), but worker militancy was on the rise. The Communist Party of Iran had collapsed in the 1920s, but new leftist and nationalist forces came into being and organised industrially: the communist-inspired Masses organisation and the National Front. A crackdown by the British-backed shah's forces in the late 1940s drove the movement underground.

But despite the intensive activities of the secret police, militant cells of workers - and, operating in parallel, religious fundamentalist scholars allied to the exiled Ayatollah Khomeini - re-emerged to agitate for change, especially during the 1963 revolt, and starting again in the early 1970s.

Black Friday

Increasingly, the extravagance of the shah's Pahlavi dynasty provoked resentment in all parts of Iranian society, even among the middle classes which were traditionally strong supporters of the regime. In August 1977, 50,000 poor slum-dwellers successfully resisted their forced removal by police, then in December, police massacred 40 religious protestors and the resentment boiled over into open anger. Strikes and sabotage were on the rise while wages dropped due to an economic downturn. The shah imposed martial law and on "Black Friday", September 8, 1978, troops gunned down thousands of protesters.

In response, infuriated workers launched a strike-wave that spread across the country like wildfire. Oil workers struck for 33 days straight, bringing the economy to a dead halt, despite fruitless attempts to send troops into the oilfields. On December 11, 2 million protestors marched in the capital, Tehran, demanding the ousting of the shah, an end to American imperialism and the arming of the people. Soldiers began to desert. On January 16, 1979, the shah fled to Egypt. In mid-February, there was an insurrection, with air force cadets joining with guerrilla forces - the leftist Organisation of Iranian Peoples' Fedai Guerrillas, or Fedayeen, and the nationalist Mujahedeen - in over-running the military academy, army bases, the parliament, factories, armouries and the TV station. The Pahlavi regime collapsed and Khomeini, who had returned from exile, cobbled together a multi-party provisional government, but the people wanted more.

Popular Grassroots Movements

Women's organisations flourished, peasants started seizing the land and in some places, established communal cultivation councils, strikes were rampant and workers seized control of their workplaces, arranging raw materials, sourcing and sales themselves, even setting prices in the oil industry. A system of grassroots soviets - called "shoras" in Iranian and based on the old factory council idea - sprang up in fields, factories, neighbourhoods, educational institutions and the armed forces. Armed neighbourhood committees - called "komitehs" - based on the old Muslim scholar networks - patrolled residential areas, arrested collaborators, ran people's courts and prisons, and organised demonstrations. It was a true workers' revolution with secular revolutionaries and Muslim workers overthrowing the capitalist state side by side. A May Day march in Tehran drew 1.5 million demonstrators.

The former headquarters of the secret police-controlled official trade union federation was occupied by the unemployed and renamed the Workers' House. The new workerist federation, that replaced the old state one, the All-Iran Workers' Union, declared that its aim was an Iran "free of class oppression" and called for shoras to be "formed by the workers of each factory for their own political and economic needs".

Provisional Government Emerges

But the religious fundamentalist clerics lead by Khomeini were terrified of the power of the working class and haunted by the spectre of the imminent collapse of Iranian capitalism. If it collapsed, they could not reconstitute themselves as the ruling elite in place of the shah and there would be no profits for them to steal from the workers. Three days after the insurrection, the provisional government ordered workers back to work, but the strike, shora and komiteh movements just spread.

A month later, the government declared the shoras to be "counter-revolutionary", claiming that their minority bourgeois regime was "the genuine Islamic Revolution". Still the shoras spread, so the regime introduced a law aimed at undermining worker self-management by banning shora involvement in management affairs - while at the same time trying to force class collaboration by insisting that management must be allowed to participate in the shoras. The shora movement peaked in July but then the government offensive, combined with the inexperience of the left, began to take its toll. The National Front, Masses, Fedayeen and both the leftist and Muslim wings of the Mujahedeen all backed the provisional government, mistakenly believing that an Iranian clerical-dominated bourgeoisie was better than the imperialist-backed Pahlavi dynasty.

Revolution is Co-opted and Repressed

Khomeini founded the fundamentalist Iranian Republican Party (IRP) to squeeze opposition parties out of the provisional government and at the same time established the Revolutionary Guards (Pasdaran), a political police force to marginalise the secular left within the komitehs, which it wanted to mobilise as a supporter bloc. The Pasdaran were soon forcibly liquidating shoras, purging komitehs and repressing ethnic Kurdish separatists and women's organisations, while the Party of God (Hezbollah) was created as a strike-breaking force of thugs. The IRP also created a public works project to divert the energies of the most militant shoras - replacing them with fundamentalist shoras and Islamic Societies - and to rebuild the exploitative capitalist economy (all the while spouting populist and anti-capitalist slogans in the manner of all fascist dictatorships). The true workers' revolution was destroyed and for the Iranian working class, whether secular or Muslim, a long night of living under a new autocratic regime had begun.

The fundamentalist clerical regime had not set them free: it had only produced new forms of capitalist exploitation and police state repression. The lesson of Iran is a basic anarchist one: workers can never trust groups, religious or not, who chant the right revolutionary slogans but whose real aim is class rule.

Source

Taken from the article Lessons from the Iranian Revolution, 1978-1979 by Michael Schmidt. (Bikisha Media Collective)

[edit] Current Political Climate

The current political climate in Iran is terrible. In general there is apathy all over the political spectrum. The reason is that Khatami's presidency (as we had predicted in Nakhdar) was a sham and did not bring any meaningful change. The false hope was that he could 'stand up' to the so-called 'conservative' faction and could bring liberalization of the political atmosphere on the one hand and create more jobs for the youth (who currently represent 65% of the workforce) on the other. He did not accomplish either. Newspapers have been shut down; workers' claims on months of back pay have been ignored, and their daily demonstrations in front of their respected factories are being attacked. Wage increases for teachers and nurses have been postponed, the number of political prisoners and the torture of students (or any other dissident intellectuals) who dare to raise their voice is on the rise again. Finally, the desperation of the unemployed youth has caused an increase in the drug addiction (currently over two million!) and prostitution in particular. The corruption is skyrocketing, and the decadent lifestyle of a small class (the 'Nuevo Rich') is sickening. And it is becoming increasingly worse, with no progressive alternatives in sight. Consequently the average Iranian is in total despair.

Quoted from an interview with Payman Piedar. You can read the full text here.

[edit] Geography

Iran borders Azerbaijan (length of border: 432 km / 268 mi) and Armenia (35 km / 22 mi) to the northwest, the Caspian Sea to the north, Turkmenistan (992 km / 616 mi) to the northeast, Pakistan (909 km / 565 mi) and Afghanistan (936 km / 582 mi) to the east, Turkey (499 km / 310 mi) and Iraq (1,458 km / 906 mi) to the west, and finally the waters of the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman to the south. Iran's total land mass is 1,648,000 km² / ≈636,300 mi² (Land: 1,636,000 km² / ≈631,663 mi², Water: 12,000 km² / ≈4,633 mi²). That is approximately the land mass of Alaska.

Iran's landscape is dominated by rugged mountain ranges that separate various basins or plateaus from one another. The populous western part is the most mountainous, with ranges such as the Caucasus, Zagros and Alborz Mountains, the latter of which also contains Iran's highest point, the Damavand at 5,604 m (18,386 ft). The eastern half consists mostly of uninhabited desert basins like the saline Dasht-e Kavir, with the occasional salt lake.

The only large plains are found along the coast of the Caspian Sea and at the northern end of the Persian Gulf, where Iran borders on the mouth of the Arvand river (Shatt al-Arab). Smaller, discontinuous plains are found along the remaining coast of the Persian Gulf, the Strait of Hormuz and the Sea of Oman. The Iranian climate is mostly arid or semiarid, though subtropical along the Caspian coast. Iran is considered to be one of the fifteen states that comprise the so-called "Cradle of Humanity".

[edit] Climate

Iran's landscape produces several different climates. On the northern edge of the country (the Caspian coastal plain) the temperatures nearly fall below freezing and remain humid for the rest of the year. Summer temperatures rarely exceed 29°C (84°F). Annual precipitation is 680 mm (26 in) in the eastern part of the plain and more than 1700 mm (75 in) in the western side of the plain. To the west, settlements in the Zagros mountains basin experience lower temperatures. These areas have severe winters, with average daily temperatures below freezing and have heavy snowfall. The eastern and central basins are arid. They get less than 200 mm (8 in) of rain and have occasional desert. The average summer temperatures exceed 38°C (100°F). The coastal plains of the Persian Gulf and Gulf of Oman in southern Iran have mild winters and experience very humid and hot summers. The annual precipitation ranges from 135 mm to 355 mm (6 to 14 in).

[edit] Economy

Iran's economy is a mixture of central planning, state ownership of oil and other large enterprises, village agriculture, and small-scale private trading and service ventures. The current administration has continued to follow the market reform plans of the previous one and has indicated that it will pursue diversification of Iran's oil-reliant economy. The Iranian government is attempting to diversify by investing revenues in other areas, including, car manufacturing, aerospace industries, consumer electronics, petrochemicals and nuclear technology. Iran is also hoping to attract billions of dollars worth of foreign investment by creating a more favorable investment climate, such as reduced restrictions and duties on imports and the creation of free-trade zones like in Chabahar and the island of Kish. Modern Iran has a solid middle class and a growing economy but continues to be plagued with high inflation and unemployment.

Iranian budget deficits have been a chronic problem, in part due to large-scale state subsidies– totaling some $7.25 billion per year–including foodstuffs and especially gasoline. The towering Alborz mountains in Tehran rising above modern high rises of the Elahiyeh district.

Iran is OPEC's second largest oil producer and holds 10% of the world's proven oil reserves. It also has the world's second largest natural gas reserves (after Russia). The strong oil market in 1996 helped ease financial pressures on Iran and allowed for Tehran's timely debt service payments.

State investment has boosted agriculture with the liberalization of production and the improvement of packaging and marketing helping to develop new export markets. Large-scale irrigation schemes, together with the wider production of export-based agricultural items such as dates, flowers and pistachios, produced the fastest economic growth of any sector in Iran over much of the 1990s. Even though a series of droughts has held back output growth substantially, agriculture remains one of the largest employers. Iran has also developed a biotechnology, nanotechnology and pharmaceuticals industry.

Iran's major commercial partners are France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Russia, China, Japan and South Korea. Since the late 1990's, Iran has increased its economic cooperation with other developing countries, including Syria, India, Cuba, Venezuela and South Africa. Iran is also expanding its trade ties with Turkey and Pakistan and shares with its partners the common vision for the creation of a single economic market in West and Central Asia.

[edit] Demographics

[edit] Ethnic groups

The majority of Iran's population speak one of the Iranian languages, though Persian is the official language. While the number, percentage, and definition of the different Iranian peoples is disputed, the major ethnic groups and minorities in Iran include the Persians (51%), Azeris (24%), Gilaki and Mazandarani (8%), Kurds (7%), Arabs (3%), Baluchi (2%), Lurs (2%), Turkmen people (2%), Qashqai, Armenians, Georgians, Assyrians, Circassians, Iranian Jews,and others (1%). These percentages however are only old estimates. There are no official statistics on ethnicity numbers or percentages in Iran.[7]. The literacy rate in Iran is above 89% and closer to 100% for its younger population.

Iran's population size increased dramatically during the latter half of the 20th century to reach 70 million in 2006, although in recent years Iran appears to have taken control of its high population growth rate and many studies show that Iran's population growth rate will continue to decline until it will reach replacement level and stabilize by the year 2050 (100 million). Iran's population density is forty persons per square kilometer. Iran hosts more than one million foreign refugees (mainly from Afghanistan with some from Iraq), one of the largest figures on earth, and official government policy and social factors aim towards repatriation.

Inversely, Iran has a diaspora estimated between two to three million people who emigrated to North America, Western Europe, and South America, for the most part occurring after the Iranian revolution.

[edit] Major Languages

The number of Persian-speakers of Iran is estimated more than 42 millions, (see: Persian people) ( Ethnologue using an obsolete and old information claims that in 1997 there were 22 million native speakers of Persian language spoken in Iran). Other major languages in Iran are Azeri (c. 16.8 million), Kurdish (7.6 million) (Northern, Central, Southern and Laki), Gilaki (3.265 million), Mazandarani (3.265 million), Luri (2.375 million), Turkmen (2 million), Bakhtiari (1 million).

[edit] Religion

Most Iranians are Muslims; 90% belong to the Shi'a branch of Islam, the official state religion, and about 9% belong to the Sunni branch (many of whom are Kurds). The remainder consists of non-Muslim religious minorities, mainly Bahá'ís, Zoroastrians, Jews and Christians.[7]

The latter three minority religions are officially recognized and have reserved seats in the Majles (Parliament), and are officially protected religions. In contrast, the Bahá'í Faith, the largest religious minority in Iran, is not officially recognized, and has been persecuted during its existence in Iran. Since the 1979 revolution the persecution has increased with executions and the denial of access to higher education. See Persecution of Bahá'ís and Religious minorities in Iran for more information.

[edit] Culture

Iran has a long history of art, music, architecture, poetry, philosophy, traditions, and ideology. Many Iranians believe their culture to be the one and only reason why their civilization has continuously survived thousands of years of turmoil. Farhang ("culture") has always been the focal point of Iranian civilization. Most Iranians consider themselves the proud inheritors and guardians of an ancient and sophisticated culture. Enlarge Farhang ("culture") has always been the focal point of Iranian civilization. Most Iranians consider themselves the proud inheritors and guardians of an ancient and sophisticated culture.

که ایران بهشت است یا بوستان همی بوی مشک آید از دوستان

"Whether one thinks of Iran as Eden or Garden, The smell of musk abounds there from friend and companion." --Firdawsi

همه عالم تن است و ایران دل نیست گوینده زین قیاس خجل

"Iran is The Heart and all the universe The Body, Of this claim, the poet feels no regret or humility." --Nizami

Persian literature is also highly regarded by both native Persians and foreign scholars. The Persian language being used for over 2,500 years has left distinct marks in the history of the written word. Because of such poets as Hafez, Molavi(Rumi), Omar Khayyam, and Ferdowsi, Iranian poetry has received world-wide attention for their beautiful poems and songs.

With 300 international awards in the past twenty-five years, films from Iran continue to be celebrated worldwide. Perhaps the best known director is Abbas Kiarostami. All media in Iran are controlled directly or indirectly by the state and must be approved by the Ministry of Islamic Guidance. This includes the Internet, which has become an expanding means to accessing information and self-expression among the younger population. Iran is now the world's fourth largest country of bloggers.

The quest for social justice and equity is an important Iranian cultural trait. Respect for the elderly and hospitality for foreigners are also integral an part of Iranian etiquette.

The Iranian new year (Norouz) is celebrated on March 21, the first day of spring. Norouz was nominated as one of UNESCO's Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity in 2004.

In her book, New Food of Life, Najmieh Batmanglij writes that "Iranian food has much in common with the other cuisines of the Middle East, but is often considered to be the most sophisticated and imaginative of them all, as colorful and complex as a Persian carpet."