EDITOR’S NOTE: This is an excerpt from The Persian Night: Iran under the Khomeinist Revolution.
Regime change becomes possible when at least the outline of a political alternative becomes visible. Like nature, society abhors a vacuum.
In the case of Iran, that vacuum cannot be filled by the dozen or so groups in exile, although each could have a role in shaping a broad national alternative. What is still needed is an internal political opposition that can act as the nucleus of a future government. The ingredients of such a nucleus exist already. However, such a nucleus cannot be created so long as the fear persists that the United States and its allies might reach an accommodation with the regime and leave Iranian dissidents in the lurch. And that fear has roots in reality. In the years 1999–2000, President Khatami succeeded in splitting the opposition by boasting of the terms of his forthcoming “grand bargain” with President Clinton. His message was ingeniously twofold: the deal would help solve the nation’s economic problems and open the way for less repressive measures in social life and culture, but it would include a stipulation that America would never help opponents of the Khomeinist regime.
Although, as we have seen, the “grand bargain” came to naught, the message and its implications have not been forgotten. Many in the West believe that because opposition to the Khomeinist regime does not offer a single easily recognizable figurehead it cannot be taken seriously. The American dictum “You cannot beat anybody with nobody” tells it all. Totalitarian regimes, however, do not allow opponents to produce such figures. An opposition leader who begins to look menacing is imprisoned, forced into exile, or murdered. During Khatami’s presidency, the nationalist leader Dariush Foruhar, once a cabinet minister under Khomeini, began to look menacing to the regime. In 2001, the regime decided that it was time to stop him. A hit squad was sent to his home in Tehran to murder him and his wife by chopping off their heads, a message to all that under the mullahs no one would be safe. Scores of other men and women who appeared to be emerging as opposition leaders at the local or national level have been eliminated by Khomeinist hit squads in various parts of the country. The regime has also used murder as a weapon against its opponents abroad. As soon as someone looked like a potential leader, a murder squad was sent to eliminate him. This is why the Iranian opposition, rather than promoting a single “somebody” who would beat the regime, has produced a number of leading figures at different levels and in different fields. Since the mid-1990s, the most active opposition to the regime has come from urban workers, women, students, teachers, and ethnic minorities. Each of these groups has produced leaders of their own — individuals who enjoy audiences beyond their social stratum.
Leading the opposition to Khomeinism since the late 1990s are Iran’s urban workers, who had once supported the revolution. Symbolising this new and growing movement is a man some Western commentators have called “the Iranian Lech Walesa,” after the Polish trade unionist who helped bring down the Communist empire. The mullahs ruling Iran, however, regard him as “a dangerous enemy of Islam.” The man himself — Mansoor Osanloo, a fifty-year-old leader of one of the many illegal trade unions that have sprung up in Iran in the last few years — shies away from both sobriquets. “We do not have a political agenda,” he says. “All we are asking is for Iranian workers to be treated as free human beings, not as slaves.”
Osanloo first made his name in 2004 when, along with fourteen fellow workers, he created the Syndicate of Workers of the Tehran United Bus Company. Within weeks, most employees of the company — which is owned by the Tehran municipality and controlled by the Interior Ministry — had joined the new union. That left the so-called Islamic Workers’ Council, a regime-sponsored organ imposed in many industries as an ersatz union, exposed and isolated. Workers across the country soon emulated the Tehran example. On May Day, more than four hundred free trade unions, boasting a membership of millions, raised their banners in the capital. Osanloo and his colleagues were among the founders of the Workers’ Organizations and Activists Coordinating Council (WOACC), which is emerging as the principal voice of wage earners — especially in the public sector, which accounts for more than 70 percent of Iran’s economy. The emergence of independent unions has meant the demise of “Islamic councils” in many workplaces and the virtual death of the so-called Workers’ House set up by the mullahs to control labor. Free unions have chased away hundreds of mullahs who headed the Islamic councils, often enjoying high salaries and perks.
Osanloo was first jailed in 2005, after his union launched an original form of labor action: Tehran bus workers announced free rides for all comers. When the authorities sent in armed security men, the workers went on strike — bringing Tehran, a city of twelve million inhabitants, to a virtual halt. The regime then tried terror and intimidation. A group of three hundred members of the Iranian branch of Hezbollah, armed with clubs and knives, attacked Osanloo and his colleagues and beat up their families, including small children. Osanloo suffered knife wounds, including a deep cut in his tongue, inflicted by a Hezbollah member who had vowed to “silence the enemy of Islam.” A partial return to work was soon interrupted when bus drivers refused to implement a new rule under which women passengers were confined to back seats — which in practice meant that more than 80 percent of the seats in Tehran’s double-decker buses were reserved for men.
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