Held online due to the coronavirus pandemic, HOPI chair Yassamine Mather speaks about the incident in 1971 which marked the beginning of guerrilla struggles against the Shah’s regime.
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Preparing for revolution
Yassamine Mather says that the Siahkal incident 50 years ago marked a break with the passivity of ‘official communism’, but the guerrillaist left was hopelessly outmanoeuvred when it came to the reality of revolution in Iran Fifty years ago this week, the town of Siahkal in northern Iran was the scene of an armed uprising …
Limits of guerrillaism
Mohamad Reza Shalgouni was a founder-member of the Organisation of Revolutionary Workers of Iran (Rahe Kargar). He spoke to Yassamine Mather about his strategic reassessment as a prisoner of the shah and experience of the revolutionary years of 1978-79 How long were you a prisoner during the shah’s reign? I was in prison from January …
Three waves of protest
Feelings of injustice, a lack of rights and a sense of betrayal have become universal and act as psychological and subjective drivers of protest, writes Ardeshir Mehrdad. But how can protest be forged into a movement than can topple the regime? Since the beginning of the 1990s, Iranian society has witnessed successive waves of protest. …
Statement on the US-Iran crisis
Trump’s reckless drone assassination has actually strengthened the reactionary Islamic Republic in Tehran, states Hands Off the People of Iran. Hands Off the People of Iran unequivocally condemns the United States assassination on January 3 of the commander-in-chief of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, Qassem Soleimani – the culmination of the latest bout of sabre-rattling between the …
Interview on the Iran crisis
HOPI chair Yassamine Mather has been interviewed by Counterpunch Radio in the US, on the international crisis sparked by president Trump’s assassination of Qassam Soleimani and the effects within Iran. | Listen to the interview here Yassamine is also quoted in this news story, written before Iran’s admission that a Ukrainian jet was brought down …
Threat of war is real
With Iran partially withdrawing from the nuclear deal and the US imposing yet more sanctions, tensions are rising fast. This is an edited version of an opening given by Yassamine Mather on the political situation in the Middle East A common question journalists ask these days – if they are not asking about Brexit – …
Raking in fortunes
It is workers who have been hit the most, writes Yassamine Mather, while those close to the regime have benefited enormously We all remember Hillary Clinton’s promise of “targeted sanctions” against Iran’s Islamic republic. They were deployed to ‘moderate’ the Shia government’s regional policies, as well as its internal human rights record. Of course, anyone …
Forty years of inequality
The US administration preferred Islamists to leftists, says Yassamine Mather Commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the February 1979 uprising in Iran has been marked by dozens of scholarly seminars in Europe, numerous documentaries produced by the Persian-language media, as well the usual military parade inside the country. Documentaries produced outside Iran concentrate on memoirs …
Israel and Saudi Arabia in cahoots
Saudi plans for regional domination are not meeting with much success, writes Yassamine Mather More than six weeks after the death of Jamal Khashoggi we know a lot more about his tragic plight after he entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. However, it is still unclear who ordered his execution, what will be done about …