Apparently the members of the group exercised considerable ingenuity in smuggling their publication into Iran. The Kayhan International noted, that “It has also been noticed that publications of this organization have recently been masterly [sic] concealed in cigarette packets and sent to Iran.” It also claimed that the Revolutionary Organization was able to establish contacts with George Habash of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, who agreed to help publish some of the Iranian group’s material and help to smuggle it into Iran.
The Revolutionary Organization of the Tudeh Party made no secret of its adherence to Maois. According to the Kayhan International, “They emphasized their opposition to the Soviet Communists and adopted the slogan: ‘Chairman Mao is our chairman.’”[771]
According to Kayhan International, the Organization of Communist Marxist-Leninists had its origins in a meeting of Tudeh Party dissidents at Tirana, Albania in 1964, at which they announced their separation from the party and endorsed the position of China. There was a second conference of this group sometime later, in Brussels. The group appears to have been torn by the competing attractions of the Cuban and Chines models. As a result of this conflict the pro-Chinese elements in 1967 established the Organization of Communist Marxist-Leninists. Some of the members of that group, according to pro-Shah sources, had “training” in China. Its efforts to establish a base in Iran were reportedly thwarted by the Shah’s secret police.
One thing that tended to undermine the work of the Iranian Maoists in the later years of the Shah’s regime was the diplomatic rapprochement between the Shah’s regime and that of Mao Tsetung. Both of the Iranian Maoist organizations sought to rationalize the overtures of the Chinese to the Shah.
When that rapprochement began in 1971 with an invitation from the Chinese government for the Shah’s sister, Ashraf Pahlevi, to visit China, Red Star, the organ of the Revolutionary Organization of the Tudeh Party, “acknowledged that many Iranians are puzzled by the Chinese government’s invitation to Ashraf. It asserted that the imperialists and their stooges are being forced by the revolutionary masses of the workers to recognize the Chinese government, and predicted that the shah’s regime would try to sabotage this development, which it viewed as a gain for the world revolution.”[772] Storm, the organ of the Organization of Communist Marxist-Leninists, reportedly “took the same position on China’s relations with the shah.”[773]
However, according to East German Communist sources, when the quarrel between the Albanians and the Chinese broke out, the two Iranian groups took opposite sides. The Revolutionary Organization of the Tudeh Party supported the Three Worlds Theory, whereas the Marxist-Leninist Organization denounced that theory as “revisionism and supported the Albanians.[774]
After the Iranian Revolution that brought Ayatollah Khomeini to power, at least two Maoist groups appeared inside Iran. We have no information concerning the connection of these groups with the two Maoist factions that had existed in exile before 1979.
One of these post-revolutionary organizations was the Peykar (Struggle) group. It was formed by people splitting from the leftwing Muslim group, the Mujahideen. According to the New York Trotskyist newspaper Workers Vanguard, the “Peykar had a reputation as ‘super’ Maoists, enemies of the ‘Soviet social-imperialism.’… At the outbreak of the war with Iraq in 1980, the Peykar group took a Leninist position on the conflict. Its newspaper wrote, “The proletariat of Iran and Iraq should aim their guns towards their own governments. They should continue their revolutionary policy in their own revolutionary war—i.e., the overthrow of the reactionary requires an establishment of the rule of workers, peasants and other toilers.”[775]
The other Maoist group in Iran that appeared after the 1979 Revolution was the Union of Iranian Communists (UIC). It was apparently aligned with those Maoists who opposed the successors of Mao after his death.
The Union of Iranian Communists opposed both the clerical forces headed by the Ayatollah Khomeini and those lay elements that at first collaborated with the Ayatollah. Thus, an editorial in the group’s periodical Haghighat (Truth), dealing with the threat of a military coup against the revolutionary regime, accused the government party, the Islamic Republic Party, of being “in the same league with the coup engineers,” and particularly attacked Bani Sadr. Insofar as the Ayatollah Khomeini was concerned, the editorial said, “Ayatollah Khomeini is also claiming supernatural powers and is putting the fate of he country into ‘Allah’s hands.’ But on the earth there is no Allah, and the things that are material and which you can touch and feel are in the hand of the coup plotters and those who have a hand in it.”
This editorial concluded, “As we have said many times, there is only one way to stand up to those dangers which are threatening our revolution-and that is to struggle to continue the revolution and mobilize and organize the roots of this revolution, which is the masses of toilers. The danger of a coup d’etat and the objective base of it won’t be destroyed unless the revolution goes forward and smashes this base under its wheels.”[776]
According to a statement of the Central Committee of the Revolutionary Communist Party of the United States in 1983, the UIC “emerged and developed in the 1960s and 1970s largely outside the borders of Iran among the students and intellectuals.” After June 1981, the UIC “dedicated itself to the complete overthrow of the reactionary Khomeini regime.”[777]
One result of the efforts of the Union of Iranian Communists to overthrow the Khomeini regime was an uprising organized by the party in the northern city of Amol late in 1981. According to the New York Revolutionary Worker, this uprising “liberated Amol for a day and a half and dealt the forces of the Islamic Republic some heavy blows, including killing over 250 Pasadarn (Khomeini’s ‘Revolutionay Guards’) and other assorted reactionaries, injuring hundreds of others, and destroying a number of the regime’s organs of power.” In the wake of the Amol uprising, between 200 and 300 leaders and members of the UIC were arrested. Twenty-two of these were tried and executed on the first annivesary of the Amol revolt.[778]
In 1982, Joseph D. Dwyer reported that two Maoist groups “appear to have small-scale, but organized support in Teheran and other urban centers.”[779] A decade later, the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement, the international organization of orthodox Maoists loyal to the Gang of Four, claimed the Union of Iranian Communists as one of its affiliates.[780]
Iraqi Maoism
The Israeli journalist Amnon Kapeliuk noted in 1959 that “In organization, number of members and influence, the Iraqi Communist Party is the strongest Communist party in the Middle East.”[781] After the overthrow of the monarchy in 1958, the Communists collaborated closely with the successor republican regime headed by General Abdul Karim el-Cassim (or Kassem), and for a while they were represented in the cabinet. Although the Communists were severely persecuted in the early years of the Baath Party regime that seized power in 1963, by 1972 the Communist Party had two members in the cabinet of President Ahmed Hassan el Bakr.[782]
773
Javad Sadeeg, “Iran Stalinists Back Mao’s Betrayal,”
776
779
Joseph D. Dwyer, in
781
Amnon Kapeliuk, “The Iraqi Communists Practice Self-Criticism,”
782
“Iraqi Communist Party Joins Government,”