In order to harass left activists, members of the Worker-Communist Party of Iran-Hekmatist, the Iranian regime’s “courts” have declared 12 members of this party as common criminals. Scandalously, INTERPOL has accepted this verdict as valid and has put these left activists on its “wanted list”.
The “democratic” bourgeois states of the world pretend and claim they have an “impartial” judicial system. However, this has been proven wrong time and time again. Marxists know full well that the judiciary is only a branch of the bourgeois state that is not really impartial, particularly when it comes to the fundamental material interests of the bourgeois class. Normally the judiciary deal with common criminals and the real class nature of this body does not always appear clearly. But when you remove all the secondary trappings of the state, one sees that it is essentially “armed bodies of men” organized to protect the private property and status quo.
This is true not only of the kangaroo courts of open totalitarian dictatorships, but also applies to the judicial branch of so-called “democratic” government in Western Europe and North America. It is thus no wonder that INTERPOL, the international policing body of the United Nations, is no better as it is run by an imperialist club of world leading nations.
It is clear that the imperialists apply double standards when it comes to the alleged “crimes” of world leaders. If a government of any country is in alliance with them, they do not care how heinous these regimes and their crimes are. This is clear in the case of US imperialism, which although it sometimes cries out about “Human Rights” when it comes to certain regimes – those that step on its toes, such as that of Milosevic and Saddam Hussein in the past – it is not so outspoken when it comes to its allies. It has had no scruples in supporting brutal, military police dictatorships and the most rabid tyrannical right-wing governments of the world, such as Suharto’s Indonesia, Pinochet’s Chile and today the rotten regime in Saudi Arabia.
Confirming all this, INTERPOL recently did something that has attracted the rightful outrage of many of us who, like the majority of the Iranian population, oppose the hated regime of the Islamic Republic. It has put 12 Iranian left activists, who are members and supporters of the Worker-Communist Party of Iran-Hekmatist (known as the Hekmatist Party), on a “wanted list” for organized crime. This absurd act is based on a verdict issued by a court of the Islamic Republic of Iran, a regime whose own leaders are among the foremost criminals against humanity! It does not take much to understand that a regime like that of Iran will use any means necessary to harass oppositionists, especially those who declare themselves communist.
If INTERPOL wants to take the word of the Islamic regime to decide who is a criminal, they should know that based on reactionary Islamic law in Iran everyone who actively opposes the government risks execution, as does everyone who declares themselves publicly as atheist. Of course if you are a communist militant, your crime is even more serious in their eyes.
All 12 of the accused, whose pictures and files have appeared on the INTERPOL website, are Iranians Kurds who hold citizenship of European countries. Ten are Swedish, one is German and one British. Many of them are leading members of the Hekmatist Party, a well-known communist party in Iran, including its leading figure, Koroush Modaressi.
It is clear, and very worrying, that the Islamic Republic, who faces an all-out revolutionary movement in Iran that is attempting to overthrow it, is shamelessly collaborating with INTERPOL to pursue the Iranian militants abroad who have been a sharp voice of opposition in recent years. Any collaboration of these international bodies with the Islamic regime to pursue the Iranian opposition movement should be condemned. The Islamic Republic knows that its days are numbered and these are its last desperate attempts to hold on to power!
A widespread campaign has started, mainly in Sweden, to oppose this criminal act of INTERPOL (stopterrorism.org) and it is good to see that most of the Iranian left parties have been vocal in condemning this act.
The International Marxist Tendency adds its voice to this campaign by condemning this act and demands an immediate withdrawal of these verdicts by INTERPOL. If anybody should be tried in Iran, they should be the leading members of the Islamic Republic, from Khamenei, who are responsible for many crimes against the Iranian people. That, of course, should happen not in the sham bourgeois judiciary but in the people’s courts after the overthrow of the hated Islamic Republic.