Solidarity with protest movement in Iran
As protests sweep across Iran, Socialist Alliance expresses its solidarity with the students, workers, shopkeepers, young people, women, and all Iranians resisting a brutal and authoritarian regime.
We stand with Iranians who seek to live free from a 45-year long autocratic and repressive religious regime and who demand safety, dignity and the right to determine their own futures.
We recognise that women and queer people, as well as Kurdish, Afghan, Baluch and other marginalised communities, are among those most violently oppressed by the regime, as they are at the forefront of resistance.
We strongly oppose the opportunistic weaponisation of the Iranian people’s struggle by Israel, the United States and their allies.
Attempts to channel legitimate resistance into renewed US dominance, a Zionist-aligned regional order, or a restoration of the monarchy would simply replace one oppressive regime with another.
Iranians are caught between an autocratic and repressive religious regime, US imperialism, Zionism, and monarchist restoration. Through their uprising Iranians are making more than a choice between rival systems of domination.
We express our unwavering solidarity with them.
We firmly reject the appropriation of women’s rights by the fascist and imperialist rightwing, which seeks to weaponise women’s rights to justify war, imperialism, racism and the demonisation of Muslim people.
Socialist Alliance stands in solidarity with the 92 million Iranians, and the 5 million who live outside of Iran, who all have the right to self-determination, safety, universal dignity and freedom of political, sexual, cultural and artistic expression.
Women’s liberation cannot be achieved through racism, Islamophobia or imperial violence.
The freedom of Iranians is intertwined with the freedom of Palestinians and all other oppressed peoples. True liberation is collective, anti-imperialist and rooted in international solidarity.
[The Socialist Alliance National Executive adopted this statement on January 9]