Trade unions rally to free Iran's imprisoned 'Lech Walesa'

Tehran: Iran has sparked a storm of protest from trade unionists around the world after imprisoning a bus driver known as the Lech Walesa of the Islamic Republic.

Mansour Osanloo, who leads a 17,000-strong bus workers' union, was abducted on the streets of Tehran on July 10 by an unidentified gang, thought to have been secret policemen. He had just returned from a trip to Europe, including Britain, where he met officials from the London-based International Transport Workers' Federation (ITWF) to discuss the government harassment his members were suffering.

Now he is languishing on unspecified charges in Tehran's notorious Evin Prison - described as the 'Islamic Alcatraz' - on the orders of Saeed Mortazavi, a hardline judge accused of presiding over numerous human rights abuses and illegal detentions.

Osanloo's imprisonment comes as part of a clampdown on dissidents by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's government, in which scores of pro-democracy activists and academics have been arrested over the past five months.

But unlike some of his fellow political prisoners, Osanloo, 48, has largely restricted his activities to campaigning for better working conditions for his union members, demanding increases in their wages and better protection against Tehran's appalling smog.

He has insisted: "All we are asking is for Iranian workers to be treated as free human beings, not as slaves."

Intimidation

Even that, however, has invited the ire of Iran's mullahs, for whom any independent organisation with a large membership poses a potential threat similar to Solidarity, the Polish shipyard workers' union led by Walesa, which opened the first major cracks in communism in the early Eighties.

In Brussels, Osanloo described the intimidation which union members had faced, with some members having been arrested 10 or more times, and family members, including children, being beaten, detained and subjected to inhumane treatment.

The international union, which represents nearly 5 million transport workers in 148 countries, has now written a letter to Ahmadinejad's office, urging him to free Osanloo immediately.

A spokesman for the ITWF, Sam Dawson, said: "Osanloo has pushed to create an independent and democratic trade union in Iran, and that appears to be something that the regime is not happy with."

Osanloo was on his way home from work when the bus in which he was a passenger was pulled over by a carload of men, some allegedly armed with clubs and knuckle-dusters. They dragged him into their vehicle, telling passers-by who tried to intervene that he was a 'hoodlum and a thug' who was wanted by the police. Witnesses said he was beaten up during the abduction.

His abductors carried no identification, but drove a Peugeot car of a kind commonly used by the security services.