Massacre de travailleurs migrants afghans par l’Iran

Massacre of Afghan migrant workers,

The Iranian regime is a murderer and the Taliban are responsible

On October 14, 2024, the military forces of the fascist regime of the Islamic Republic of Iran massacred about 260 Afghan migrant workers in the Saravan Kalgan border area of ​​Sistan province of Iran with direct fire and wounded more than 70 others.

The victims of this great tragedy, the majority of whom are young people, were planning to enter Iran in order to escape from the hell of the Taliban in Afghanistan and find work and a piece of bread. The occurrence of this crime was revealed and reported for the first time by the « Hal Vash » human rights organization.

This is not the first time that the bloodthirsty and fascist regime of Iran commits crimes against Afghan workers and immigrants. In the past years, we have witnessed the execution, imprisonment, forced deportation, beatings, insults and humiliation of the Islamic Republic regime with Afghan immigrants.In order to divert the minds of the Iranian people from their corruption and failure, the regime of Iranian mullahs has always tried to blame the economic and social crises in Iran on Afghan immigrant workers. By launching a hate campaign against Afghan immigrants, this barbaric regime has caused harassment and racial discrimination of Afghan immigrants in Iran.

Despite the fact that Afghan migrant workers in Iran are engaged in hard physical work in the fields of construction, agricultural and livestock farms and mines with low wages without the minimum health and safety facilities, they are always subjected to violence, exploitation and discrimination by Iranian government departments and private employers. There are reports that even some Iranian employers do not pay Afghan workers’ wages at the end of the month, and Afghan migrant workers do not have the courage to complain to the government office because they do not have legal work documents.

Today, with the hellish situation that the workers and people are experiencing inside Afghanistan, the Taliban and its foreign supporters, including the United States and NATO, are responsible for it. It was the US and its NATO allies that facilitated the Taliban’s rise to power after a 20-year defeat in Afghanistan during the treacherous agreement in Doha in 2020. As an anti-science, anti-freedom, misogynistic and an extremist  Islamic group, the Taliban made the implementation of Islamic Sharia their main task and priority, not improving the living conditions of the people.

According to the OCHA report, in 2024, more than half of Afghanistan’s population is facing severe hunger and « 23.7 million people in Afghanistan have been identified as needing humanitarian aid, but international aid organizations have announced that the devastating floods this spring have increased the number of people in need. » On the other hand, the World Food Program recently announced that more than three million children in Afghanistan are malnourished.

When the Taliban came to power in August 2021, all women were fired and banned from working in government offices and private institutions, domestic and foreign non-governmental organizations, and in addition, 90 percent of the former government employees’ jobs were occupied by the Taliban.

According to the reports of the employees of foreign and domestic organizations, the « humanitarian aid » that is provided by the « international community » to Afghanistan, a large percentage of it is usurped by the Taliban government and a small part of it reaches the people. On the other hand, the corruption in the Taliban government, the collection of heavy taxes from the people and the lack of provision of social and welfare services, the lack of job opportunities and the escape of financial capital and skilled labor, all these factors have caused the country to sink into the swamp of human catastrophe. In some provinces, poor families had to sell their male children for 2 to 3 thousand dollars, or marry their underage daughters as the third and fourth wives of Taliban employees or 50-year-old men for money. After the Taliban came to power, the number of domestic violence has increased, and the figures of despair among young people and suicide among women have increased to an unprecedented level.

Considering the above factors, people and young people in Afghanistan, although they know the dangers of death and the difficulty of fleeing the country, they still prefer to gamble with their fate in order to escape from the oppression of the Taliban and to save themselves from the gradual death caused by poverty and hunger. The massacre of 260 people in the Kalgan Saravan region by the Iranian security forces is not an incident limited to Iran, but the  way Afghan immigrants are treated in Pakistan, Turkey, Greece and other European countries has been always  discriminatory, inhumane and in contradiction with UN human rights and refugees’ conventions.

While strongly condemning the massacre of hundreds of Afghan workers by the fascist regime of Iran, the Left Radical of Afghanistan (LRA) believes that imperialism and the great capitalist powers, for the sake of accumulating capital and maintaining their hegemony, they have faced not only Afghans but all the inhabitants of the planet with all kinds of disasters, from the destruction of the environment, the production of modern weapons of mass destruction, the corona virus pandemi, to the launching of terrible wars and genocide, poverty and unemployment and unwanted immigration crisis.

Afghan migrant workers and Iranian workers and people are never enemies, but their common enemy is the Islamic Emirate of the Taliban in Kabul and the Islamic Republic in Tehran and the entire capitalist system based on private ownership and exploitation. We must focus on the solidarity between the progressive, socialist, anti-war and anti-imperialist forces, not only between Afghanistan and Iran, but also at the regional and global level, so that through the overthrow of warmonger, fascist and authoritarian governments build a world free of war and unwanted immigration, a world free of exploitation and free of all kinds of atrocities and discrimination.

Left Radical of Afghanistan (LRA)

October 19, 2024