*MESSAGE OF SOLIDARITY TO THE IRANIAN WORKING CLASSAND DEMOCRATIC FORCES*

The Communist Party of Ireland expresses its solidarity with the democratic forces of Iran in their continuing struggle to bring about radical social and economic change.

We express our solidarity with our comrades in the Tudeh Party of Iran and with all working-class and popular forces who valliantly struggle to assert the genuine demands for democracy and to offer an anti-imperialist direction to the struggles of the Iranian people.

The theocratic Islamic regime of the mullahs/ayatollahs has, over the last thirty years, brought great hardship upon the people, sown great division, and inflicted mass repression, using extreme violence and torture to maintain its grip on power. They thwarted the aspirations of the masses for democracy, economic and social justice flowing from the revolutionary uprising of the Iranian people when they overthrew the American puppet regime of the Shah.

Today the ruling class of Iran, which has used religion as a mask to hide its real intentions, is divided about its relationship to imperialism, while imperialist forces from the United States, Britain and the European Union continue to interfere, with the aim of replacing the present regime with one that better serves their interests and preventing the genuine demands of the masses for democratic change from being achieved.

The Irish people have bitter experience of the manipulation of people’s sincere religious beliefs by the ruling class in the South of Ireland, by the unionist clique in the North of Ireland, and by British imperialism, which fostered and nurtured religious divisions to secure its own imperialist interests. This interference by imperialism and the carnival of reaction that it promoted and encouraged has left a deep legacy, which has hampered progressive forces for many decades here in Ireland.

The imperial powers, when it suits them, can also ally themselves with the most obscurantist and backward forces in the Muslim world while at the same time fomenting anti-Islamic religious hatred.

The democratic advance of the Iranian people has been frustrated, once by the imposition of the Shah and secondly by the regime of the ayatollahs.

Eugene Mc Cartan
General Secretary