Maryam Rajavi hails protesting Iranian teachers and urges expansion of support for them

NCRI - Mrs. Maryam Rajavi, President-elect of the Iranian Resistance, hailed the teachers, workers and toilers who have risen in various parts of the country for their rights and to protest against discrimination, corruption and oppressive measures by the mullahs’ regime. She called on the people, especially the youth and students, to expand the protests and express solidarity with the teachers.

Teachers’ protest movement, ongoing since last year, swelled on Thursday, April 16, in Tehran and most provinces, including Fars, Mazandaran, Esfahan, Eastern and Western Azerbaijan, Ardebil, Central, Kurdistan, Zanjan, Yazd, Alborz, Khorasan Razavi, Southern Khorasan, Sistan and Baluchestan, Lorestan, Ilam, Kerman, Kermanshah, Qazvin, Khuzestan and Hamedan. Teachers demanded the annulment of judicial sentences and the release of the imprisoned teachers, increase in wages, ending discrimination, and improvement of the educational environment.

Protestors were carrying placards that some of them read: “Imprisoned teacher must be freed”, “improvement of livelihood is our absolute right”, “equality is our absolute right”, “our silence is louder than outcry”, and “criticizing forbidden – embezzlement permitted”.

In Kerman the protestors put on shrouds to portray the condition of teachers while in some cities the teachers chanted slogans against the Education Minister of Rouhani.
Mrs. Rajavi said: While teachers are struggling with severe poverty, the riches of the Iranian people is either spent on unpatriotic projects of export of fundamentalism and terrorism, production of the nuclear bomb, beefing up the suppression machine, the revolutionary guards, and the terrorist Qods Force, or is plundered by the leaders of this regime and their families.

The official budget of the military, suppressive and export-of-terrorism organs is three fold that of the education with around one million teachers and 13 million students. Beside the official budget, billions of dollars is placed at the disposal of the revolutionary guards and the mullahs’ intelligence by Khamenei or through the vast economic resources that these organs control with no supervision over them.

Mrs. Rajavi added: As long as the clerical regime is in power in Iran, poverty, unemployment, inflation and high prices that hurt the people in general and teachers and workers in particular, shall only get worse. Only the overthrow of this anti-human regime by the people and the Iranian Resistance and the establishment of democracy will bring this great catastrophe to an end.

Secretariat of the National Council of Resistance of Iran
April 16, 2015