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Protests against Iranian govt  | | Mansour Osanloo |
Trade unionists will protest tomorrow, 9 August, at Iranian embassies in key cities across the world – including London – as part of a day of action to free jailed union leader Mansour Osanloo. Osanloo is being held without charge in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison as the latest move in a brutal two year government campaign against him and his Tehran bus drivers’ union.
The ITF (International Transport Workers’ Federation) has called the action day as the latest tactic in its campaign to defend Osanloo and his fellow bus drivers. It chose August 9th because it is the anniversary of his release from jail in 2006 following a worldwide trade union outcry. Protests will be held tomorrow in Algeria, Australia, Austria, Belarus, Belgium, Canada, Egypt, France, Germany, Great Britain, Iran, Indonesia, Finland, Japan, Jordan, Malaysia, Morocco, Nepal, Netherlands, Norway, Pakistan, Palestine, Panama, Romania, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Thailand, Tunisia, Trinidad, the USA and Yemen.
The London event will take place tomorrow from 12:00 to 14:00 outside the Iranian Embassy at 16 Princes Gate, Knightsbridge, London SW7 1PT, with protesters gathering opposite on the Hyde Park side of Kensington Road. ITF General Secretary David Cockroft will deliver several thousand petitions calling for Osanloo’s release, while protestors hold up placards with the names of all those who have signed. The event is being supported by the ITUC (International Trade Union Confederation), British TUC (Trade Union Congress) and Amnesty International.
ITF General Secretary David Cockroft commented: “Mansour is being held without charge, without legal representation and without medical attention. When his wife tries to deliver his medicine it is turned away. When his lawyer, his family or his doctor try to visit they’re told Mansour is a spy and ejected. This is deliberate, vindictive punishment of someone for doing nothing more than upholding the simple right to belong to a trade union.”
“We and our colleagues in the international trade union movement have tried to give the Iranian Government the benefit of the doubt and see this latest attack as the work of rogue elements in the security services, but it is becoming clear that either they have authorised it at the highest level or they can no longer control their own forces.”
He concluded: “Today we will prove to them that across the world Mansour Osanloo has not been forgotten.”
Just weeks after returning from a visit to the ITF in London and meetings with union leaders in Brussels, Osanloo, 47, was attacked and snatched from a bus by unidentified assailants on 10 July. Despite desperate pleas by his family and friends the authorities denied all knowledge of the attack and his whereabouts for two days, after which Revolutionary Court Judge Saeed Mortazavi finally changed his story and admitted that he was being held without charge in Evin prison. Since then he has been denied legal and medical visits, despite problems with an eye wound he suffered in a previous attack.
Immediately after the abduction the international trade union movement mobilised to support him and firstly to force the Iranian authorities to acknowledge that it was their agents who had taken him, and then to secure his release.
Osanloo has fought back against a prolonged Iranian government campaign of arrests and violence and has been snatched and gravely assaulted before by both police and men from the Iranian security services. The leader of the Syndicate of Workers of Tehran and Suburbs Bus Company (Sherkat-e Vahed), he was brought to Britain in June by the ITF to address trade unionists from around the world about the union’s struggle. He then travelled to Brussels to meet the ITUC and other world trade union leaders.
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