December 3rd, 2017

Proposal of Statement for the freedom to the Syrian and Iranian political prisoners,
from the Alliance of Socialists of Middle East

Note: The following would be an email that would serve as a cover letter for the attachment, which starts below:

Attached is a brochure which features a few of the many political prisoners in Iran and Syria. The Labor Campaign to Free Iranian and Syrian Political Prisoners is hoping to raise awareness of the issue of political prisoners in these two countries by featuring these particular individuals.

The aim of this campaign is to bring together labor activists around the world to take joint action
to demand the immediate release of Syrian and Iranian political prisoners. These prisoners
represent working class, feminist and anti-racist and free speech struggles that labor activists need to support to fight against imperialist wars abroad as well as increasing authoritarianism and racism at
home.
            This campaign will begin by singling out 9 political prisoners, some of whom have disappeared
after abduction. Most have been imprisoned by the Syrian regime and the Iranian regime.
Some have been abducted by religious extremist organizations in Syria. There are 100,000
political prisoners in Syria. Most of  them are in Bashar Assad’s prisons and some in the prisons of
religious extremists such as ISIS and Al Qaeda. There are hundreds of political prisoners in
Iran. Many are perseucted national minorities such as Kurds and religious minorities such as Bahais.
            The campaign has the following goals:

• Free all political prisoners in Syria and Iran.
• Oppose all imperialist interventions in Syria and Iran, be it the U.S., Russia, China, or Saudi

Arabia, Israel, Turkey and Iran.

• Expose the lie of the global and regional imperialist “War on Terror” and reach out to those social justice activists and revolutionaries who are truly fighting imperialism, capitalist authoritarianism and religious extremism in Syria and Iran.
• Show that solidarity with political prisoners in Syria and Iran is also a crucial part of fighting

the rise of authoritarianism, the extreme right and the growth of white supremacy.

• Counter the narrative in the US, Britain and elsewhere that socialists and others on the left should in some way support Assad's regime in Syria and the Iranian regime or at least ignore their crimes.
• Build working class unity between Syrian and Iranian workers and between workers the world

over to oppose the economic, social and political terrorism of the capitalist system.

• It is time for labor, feminist, anti-racist and LGBT struggles in our respective

countries to come together. This campaign is one step in that effort.

Workers of all lands, unite. We have nothing to lose but our chains. We have a world to win.

 

Political Prisoners in Iran

Reza Shahabi, who recently ended his 50-day hunger strike at the Rajai Shahr  prison in Tehran,   is a 42 year old worker and member of the executive board of the Tehran Bus Workers’ Syndicate.  Shahabi has been in and out of prison since 2010 when he was convicted of “sedition” for participating in labor strikes and organizing workers.  He has endured 19 months of solitary confinement  and four  hunger strikes.

In addition to his deep dedication to workers’ rights, he is also a strong advocate  of women’s  equality.  He has also strongly criticized the anti-labor  policies  of  both former president  Ahmadinejad and current president  Rouhani.  Shahabi has openly expressed his opposition to Iran’s military interventions in the region.  In a letter  from prison, on the occasion of International Workers’ Day in 2013,  Shahabi stated:  “While we condemn the warmongering and adventurist policies of sections of the Iranian government,  we demand the lifting of the economic sanctions which directly aim at  working-class families and toilers, and we strongly condemn any talk or thought  of a military attack which will be a deadly curse…”  (http://www.peykarandeesh.org/movements/816-shahabi.html)

 

Narges Mohammadi, B.A. in applied physics,  is a 44 year-old journalist, women’s rights and human rights activist,  and  the deputy director  of  the Center for the Defenders of Human Rights (http://www.humanrights-ir.org/?lan=en) which was founded by Nobel Peace Laureate, Shirin Ebadi.

In 2009, after the Green Movement’s mass protests to oppose the fraudulent election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad,  Mohammadi  was arrested on charges of  “assembly and collusion against national security,”  And sentenced to 11 years in prison. By 2013,  after developing severe health problems such as muscular paralysis and lung disease,  she was released after posting bail . In 2015, she was rearrested on charges of sedition and for starting a campaign against the death penalty.   Her opposition to the execution of innocent Sunni political prisoners was used by the courts to accuse her of “supporting ISIS.”
Mohammadi who has two small children, has often been barred from seeing them or even talking to them on the phone.   In order to gain the right to be visited by her children or to speak to them on the phone now that they live in exile, she has gone on hunger strike twice. This is unclear. Are her two small children the ones living in exile, or are those different children?  She also continues to suffer from severe and life-threatening health problems but continues to speak out.   In December  of 2016,   after receiving the Human Rights Award of the City of Weimar,  she wrote a letter of appreciation from Evin prison in Tehran.  In this letter she had stated that “as a woman who is repressed,” she  “would rather be a prisoner and away from  family and friends,  than someone who is granted formal freedom.”  She had also  emphasized that war and sanctions which target ordinary Iranians threaten human rights by weakening civil society.
(نرگس محمدی: جامعه مدنی ایران را یاری کنیدDeutsche Welle, Nov. 12, 2016 and  جایزه حقوق بشر وایمار برای نرگس محمدی Radio Zamaneh, 21 آذر 1395 )

 

Zeynab Jalalian is a 35 year-old Kurdish political activist who was arrested and imprisoned in 2008 for her activities with the political wing of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party.  She received a death sentence which was later commuted to life in prison without the possibility of parole.  Jalalian who comes from an economically disadvantaged family, fled her home at age ten because her family would not allow her to continue her education.   Since her arrest and imprisonment, she has suffered from systematic abuse, torture and solitary confinement for refusing to “confess” to armed actions which have been attributed to her by the state.   During the course of her imprisonment, she has developed an eye disease which could have been easily cured but has led to blindness because of deliberate lack of treatment by prison authorities and the state.

In a recent open letter addressed to Jalalian, another woman political prisoner,  Golrokh Ebrahimi Iraee, wrote:  “There are very few people like you who can tolerate this inverted world  and give of themselves to keep  the idea of free spirit alive on the pages of history. . . One day, life under ignorance and constant surveillance and their thought-police will end.” (  گلرخ ایرایی،  “ما در جای درست تاریخ ایستاده ایم .”  Akhbar-rooz, April 12, 2017)

 

Syrian Political Prisoners

Razan Zaitouneh, Samira al-Khalil, Wa'el Hamada and Nazim Hammadi – the Douma Four – are four human rights activists who were kidnapped on December 9, 2013 from the Violations Documentation Center in Douma in the Damascus countryside. The armed groups exercising de facto control over Douma at that time include the Army of Islam, which is part of the Islamic Front. Zaitouneh, who is head of the Center, had defended political prisoners in Syria since 2001 and played a key role in the promotion and protection of human rights through her work as a lawyer, activist and journalist. She also co-founded the Local Coordination Committees (LCC's). As a result of her work, she had been threatened by both the Syrian government and armed opposition groups in Douma. Al-Khalil had been a long time political activist in Syria and had been detained by the Syrian government from 1987 to 1991 for her activism. Hamada was also an activist before the 2011 uprising and was an active member of the LCC and the VDC.

Their case has been supported by Amnesty International, the Center for Women's Equality, Human Rights Watch, Iraqi Journalists Rights Defense Association, and many other groups. For more information, see: https://www.lrwc.org/syria-ngos-renew-call-for-release-of-douma-4-human-rights-activists-missing-for-three-years-joint-statement/

 

Jihad Asa’ad Muhammad On 10 August, 2013, Syrian security forces arrested Syrian journalist and Marxist dissident Jihad Asa’ad Muhammad near Athawra Street in central Damascus. News of his arrest was confirmed by his sister Lina, a fellow Marxist and anti-regime activist forced into hiding. Jihad had been among the few revolutionary activists who remained in the Syrian capital, a deceptively quiet bubble under the strangling iron fist of the regime, despite the ominous threat of arrest hovering over his head.

Jihad wrote about the thousands of ordinary, working class Syrians who are languishing in Assad's prisons. These are the unsung heroes and heroines of the Syrian revolution – and of all revolutions – and Jihad struggled to bring their cases to light. He tells about Umm Haytham, one of thousands of Syrian women tirelessly searching for her detained husband and sons. He tells about revolutionary women from socially conservative and patriarchal communities who are on the frontline of the Syrian revolution. For more information on Jihad, see: https://budourhassan.wordpress.com/2013/09/27/freedom-for-jihad-and-syrias-wretched-of-the-earth/

Oday Tayem. On 29 August 2013, Syrian security forces arrested Palestinian-Syrian activist Oday Tayem after raiding his house in Jaramana, a regime-controlled suburb southeast of Damascus. In the five months following his incommunicado detention, attempts by Oday’s family members and friends to know the specific security branch where he is being held have failed.
Born on 12 May 1993 south of the Syrian capital in al-Yarmouk Refugee Camp, Oday is the eldest of three brothers. His father is a refugee from the ethnically-cleansed village of al-Shajara, near Tiberias, and his mother’s family was displaced from Kafr Kanna, a town near Nazareth, in the 1948 nakba. At seven years old, Oday participated in protests in Syria in support of the Second Palestinian Intifada in 2000. Like an entire younger generation of Syrian Palestinians, Oday did not give up the struggle and left his studies in Lebanon in order to participate in the “Syrian Intifada” of 2011. The Action Group for Palestinians in Syria, a London-based monitoring organization founded in 2012, has documented the names of 756 Palestinians currently being detained and nearly 300 more missing. For  more information on Oday 's case, see:
http//budourhassan.wordpress.com/2014/01/31/oday-tayem-son-of-the-two-intifadas/

The Labor Campaign for Syrian and Iranian Political Prisoners calls for:

• Freedom for these political prisoners and for all political prisoners in Syria and Iran.
• A labor/workers investigation into the cases of these political prisoners as a start to an investigation into the cases of all political prisoners in Iran and Syria... and around the world.
• Full democratic rights, including union rights and working class rights, in Syria and Iran.
• End oppression of women and of different ethnic groups in Iran and Syria.
• Full rights for all religious groups and for those with no religion; separation of religion and state.
• For working class unity and a united working class movement against the ravages of capitalism, which is destroying the planet.