(The following article is from the July 1-31, 2009, issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading communist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $25/year, or $12 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $25 US per year; other overseas readers - $25 US or $35 CDN per year. Send to: People's Voice, c/o PV Business Manager, 133 Herkimer St., Unit 502, Hamilton, ON, L8P 2H3.)
By Liz Rowley, Ontario leader of the Communist Party

Statement by the Central Executive Committee, Communist Party of Canada, June 22, 2009

Despite waves of state repression, millions of citizens have taken to the streets across Iran to protest the rigged Presidential election which took place on June 12th. The Communist Party of Canada stands in solidarity with Iranian workers and people in their efforts to expose and overturn these fraudulent elections, and with their demand for new, fair and democratic elections, for the release of all those wrongly arrested and detained, and for the prosecution of all those responsible for the crude attempt to falsify the outcome and for the subsequent state violence.

     Not only is the current round of elections at issue; the entire electoral process in Iran is a mockery, designed by the theocratic regime to thwart the people's will and to maintain control by the religious leadership at any cost. All parties and individual candidates must be pre-approved by the ruling clique, and secular and other forces critical of the Ahmadinejad regime and the governing religious order are banned, and subject to repression, imprisonment, and even execution.

     Immediately following the June 12 vote, the "Council of Guardians" and its "Supreme Religious Leader" Khamenei declared the elections "fair and democratic", and announced the victory for the incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. When this sham `seal of approval' failed to dissuade the people for rising up in protest, Khamenei made a tactical retreat, pledging a limited vote re-count. At the same time, the ruling "traditionalist right" mobilized its supporters and launched numerous attacks on opposition forces, such as the bloody June 14 attack on the student residences of Teheran University which left dozens killed and many more injured and detained by the authorities.

     Then the ruling "Council of Guardians" announced that 3 million more votes were "counted" than were actually cast by voters - three million! - and yet despite this admission, continued to uphold the bogus re-election of Ahmadinejad.

     The Tudeh Party (Iran's Communist Party) denounced the fraudulent elections and the vicious repression that followed. In its June 13 statement, Tudeh's Central Committee stated:

     "The obvious poll rigging and fixing of millions of ballots... shows that the spiritual leader and his armed militias are the organizers of the state sponsored violence against the will of millions of Iranians... All social and political forces of the country should declare the poll's results as void and use all means to voice their protests against this deception perpetrated by the Spiritual Leader and his armed cronies. Accepting these election results would be a betrayal of the people's vote and would be tantamount to collusion with a deceitful and backward regime."

     Some in the peace and anti-imperialist movement internationally have wrongly concluded that because the Ahmadinejad regime has been targeted by U.S. imperialism and its regional gendarme, the Zionist state of Israel, and because certain bourgeois and pro-Western forces figure among the opposition, that they should remain silent, or worse, even support the reactionary regime. This simplistic arithmetic, based on the flawed notion that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend", is fundamentally flawed.

     The Ahmadinejad regime is not at all a progressive or "pro-worker" government, even if at times, it has sided with anti-imperialist forces internationally. It is a vicious, reactionary regime which has repeatedly attacked workers' organizations, students and secular forces, including imprisonment, torture and murder against its opponents over the past thirty years of its rule.

     But its days are numbered. All out in support of the popular forces of Iran in their just struggle!