In memory of Torab Haghshenas
Comrade Torab Haghshenas, a great friend and supporter of his native Iranian working class and the Palestinian struggle, died in a hospital on the outskirts of Paris on 1 February.
He was surrounded by the kind and warm-hearted nurses for whom he was like family. For the last two years he had many conversations with them about the war against the capitalist system. In his last hour, before departing to the Père Lachaise Cemetery to be buried alongside his life partner, comrade Puran Bazargan, 10 nurses came to say goodbye to this great companion of working class.
More than 400 comrades – Iranian, Palestinian, French, German, Afghan, Turkish and some others from all around Europe, Canada, the US and Australia – also paid tribute to him and his 50-year legacy of radical Marxism.
Torab was born in August 1942, to a poor farmer family in Jahrom, southern Iran. After he finished year nine, he was sent to an Islamic clerical school in Qom (a Shia Islamic city, equivalent to the Vatican for Catholics), where the grand ayatollahs were residing and teaching Shia Islamic principle to the new mullahs.
He spent three years studying Islamic ideology and learning the internal affairs of the clerical system, which later – during and after the Iranian revolution – would have a great impact on Iranian people.
He left Qom and entered a teachers’ college in Tehran. At this time he was still a devout Muslim and joined the university Islamic association. He was involved with nationalist and religious activists.
During the June 1963 uprising (sparked by the regime’s arrest of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini), Torab became radicalised. In September 1965, he and about 10 of his students formed a “reading cell”. This cluster grew to more than 50 and became an underground propaganda group. Eventually it grew to 500 members. In 1969, the group adopted a guerrilla warfare policy, which it called “armed propaganda”.
Torab, because of his fluency in Arabic and English, was sent to contact Palestinian groups for assistance. He successfully negotiated with Palestinian comrades, and he and many of his comrades trained in the Palestinian camps and even fought in the Jordanian civil war of 1970-1. Many of these comrades later fought heroically in Iran and were killed in gun battles with the SAVAK (the regime’s secret police).
Torab worked tirelessly to connect the organisation, which by now was called the People’s Mujahidin of Iran, with other revolutionary groups in the region and elsewhere.
In September 1975, after two years of internal political and ideological debates about Islam and Marxism, a majority of the organisation’s cadre agreed to end the group’s ideological dualism and accept Marxism.
Torab was one of the last cadres to be won away from Islam, but since then he has devoted his life to spreading socialism. A year before the Iranian revolution, the organisation, after some deliberation, decided to abandoned guerrilla warfare.
“We have to get out and join the working class struggle”, the members concluded. Torab was one of the utmost advocates of this new approach. By the time of the Iranian revolution, the Mujahidin Organisation (ML) had active secret and non-secret centres in Lebanon, Syria, South Yemen, Libya, Turkey, Iraq, Paris and London, all because of Torab’s huge organisational efforts to connect with revolutionaries in those places.
Two months before the victory of the revolution, a majority of the organisation agreed to change its name to “Organisation of struggle for emancipation of working class” (“Peykar” in Persian).
Torab, alongside almost 100 other cadres, came back from exile and worked as editor of the organisation’s weekly magazine (Peykar). The group became one of the most radical in the history of the Iranian communist movement. After two years, it flourished to almost 10,000 organised members and 1,000 trained cadres. Torab and his partner Puran were active educators for new and inexperienced members.
With the defeat of summer of 1981, and the mass killing of leftist activists by the Islamic regime, the organisation lost nearly 600 of its members; a few thousand more became political prisoners. In the last meeting of the leadership, Torab was ordered to go into exile and revive the Peykar.
He left Iran for Europe in 1982 and tried hard to bring together the thousands of student sympathisers of Peykar. But the organisation was in crisis. Torab and Puran never stopped the fight. With a small circle of comrades they established the publication Andishe va Peykar (“Deliberate and Struggle”), which still exists.
Torab was farewelled by hundreds of revolutionaries. His ashes rest alongside Puran in Père Lachaise. Long live their memories. Salute!
