Happy International Women's Day!!!!

Hamid Taqvaee’s Message on the Occasion of March 8:

Sexual Apartheid Regime should be smashed

March 8, International Women’s Day, the day of struggle for women’s rights is on the way. Commemorating March 8 in Iran has a larger weight and is more important, when compared to other countries in the world. For more than three decades the misogynist Islamic regime has deprived women from participating in many social, artistic, and sport activities; the Islamic regime has denied women’s basic rights, has considered women, at best, half the men, has denied them fundamental human rights such as the right to divorce, the right to custody of children and has set father’s or older male family member’s permission as the condition of women’s participation in social affairs or their right to travel. For more than three decades the Islamic Republic has treated women as men’s sex slaves, has considered them source of perversion of the “Islamic society” and has imposed Islamic veiling and sexual segregation in means of transportation, schools, and work places on society on the basis of such ultra-reactionary ideas.

However, freedom-loving women and men have never surrendered to such ideas. People’s overall conceiving of women’s position in society and within family is the exact opposite of the reactionary understanding that the Islamic Republic represents. That is why people have always rejected the Islamic regime as unacceptable and unwanted. That is why from the very conception of the Islamic regime on, from March 8, 1979, the struggle against the existing situation and for emancipation of women has permanently been continued.

This March 8 is the day that this struggle emerges strongly and in concert against totality of the misogynist Islamic regime. We are approaching March 8 through eight months of people’s revolutionary struggle to topple the Islamic regime. Women are a major force and pioneers of this struggle; Neda Aghasoltan is the symbol of this struggle; emancipation of women is a fundamental demand of this revolutionary fight.

Emancipation of society is not realizable without emancipation of women. Strengthening and progression of women’s emancipation movement is a determining factor in the struggle against the nightmare of the Islamic regime. On anniversary of March 8, let us all women and men march the streets side by side; let us commemorate Neda Aghasoltan’s memory; let us shout out loud “Down with Anti-woman Regime,” let us throw Islamic veils and smash sexual apartheid walls and the whole of anti-human Islamic regime!

On the occasion of March 8, International Women’s Day, I congratulate all freedom-loving women and men all around the world.

Hamid Taqvaee

General Secretary of the Worker-communist Party of Iran

March 3, 2010