Re-posted from Shahrokh Zamani Action Campaign
On September 3rd, at 19:00, a gas explosion in Damghan’s Tazareh coalmine buried many workers 700 metres underground.
Six miners died and emergency services had to treat scores more for methane poisoning and shortness of breath after rescuing and taking them to the surface.
The dead workers were later identified as Behrooz Afrooz, Ghorban-Ali Kamal, Hossein Ghazaian, Hamid Izadi, Abolfazl Ghanaii Mohammad Nematsefat.
Workers at Damghan’s Tazareh coalmine – in the Eastern Alborz mountains, Semnan province in northern Iran – have been vocal in drawing the attention of the mine’s owners and the authorities about their health and safety concerns for many years. These concerns were routinely dismissed and ignored.
Instead, the Iranian regime’s immediate response to this utterly preventable tragedy was to close all roads out of the mine and leave all workers trapped and entombed 700 metres below ground. The authorities were determined that the corpses were taken out quickly, buried quickly and that the mine resumed its routine work quickly – so that nothing delayed their profit-making and wealth-accumulation.
Given the many hundreds of workplace deaths in Iran, workers’ control is now a basic and life-saving demand for Iran’s workers. Only workers’ control over production and distribution in Iran’s mines, factories and workplaces can guarantee that workers will go home after their shift is over. And when workers’ families need to be sure that each morning will not be last time, they will see their loved-ones alive, and that they will join them for dinner after a hard day making the capitalists richer.
Shahrokh Zamani Action Campaign
8 September 2023
Sources: Khuzestan Vanguard Socialist Workers’ Cell
