Homeless Stage Protest, Iran Zamin News Agency, March 29

According to reports from Iran, homeless people in Tehran's Shariar district staged an antigovernment. The reports said that on March 20, residents in Shariar neighborhood protested the demolishing of their homes. The regime reacted by dispatching suppressive guards to the scene at Tehran's Laleh street and clashed with the demonstrators. In early March, the area's municipality had used 18 bulldozers to demolish houses. The razing was repeated on March 18, when the revolver-touting mayor led an attack by a group of club-wielders against local residents. In the ensuing clashes, angry residents beat up the mayor. A group of them were injured and several others including a number of truck drivers carrying bricks for the locals were arrested.

 Gore Warns Against Weapons Sale to Tehran, Pejvak (Swedish National Radio – Farsi Service), March 26

During his trip to China, Vice President Al Gore called on Chinese officials not to sell missiles and other weapons of mass destruction to Iran. He said that curtailing the sale of weapons of mass destruction was one of America's main foreign policy objectives.

 Illegal Weapons' Parts Seized, Profile, March 25

Austrian customs officials discovered and seized a shipment of illegal weapons bound for Iran. The shipment included Hydraulic parts for long-range artillery. The parts were built by the Nordikom factory, which had secretly sent parts to Iran and Iraq during the eight-year Iran-Iraq war.

A brief report about the plight of Iranian women throughout the country is the subject of this feature. The date of the report is March 2, 1997. It was compiled by one of the Resistance's activists in Iran.

In the southeastern Baluchistan province, very few factories and workshops hire women. There is a Macaroni factory that hires 20 women who, despite working there for two years, are still day-to-day workers.

They are not insured, despite promises by the factory owner to do so. The women only earn between 38 to 53 dollars a month. Other women who know how to weave or are good at handicraft, work at home and sell their work to middle men or the organization for the handicraft at minimal prices.

Generally speaking, there are no laws or regulations that would protect women at the work place. They are at the mercy of the their employers who can fire them arbitrarily. Often times, they are fired on bogus charges of mal-veiling.

Men always earn much more than women for equal work. For example, in a sweets factory 20 kilometers east of Tehran, women earn $41.00. The factory does not provide transportation facilities and they are forced to handle the problem themselves.

The factory owner prefers to hire women because in his words, "they complain less, do better work and receive lower wages. And if we wanted to get rid of them, we could easily do so by accusing them of improper veiling."

Another manager in the factory said that they had placed an ad in the newspapers to hire seven women. "Some 890 contacted us in a matter of three days," he said. "Although we paid very low wages and offered no transportation, 500 agreed to our terms. Many were single women with high school diplomas. Even some university students had applied. There were some widows which begged us to hire them for only $31.00, but we did not do so because of concerns that they may file grievances."

He added: "We imposed our conditions on seven young and energetic high school graduates. We told them we can fire them any time we want and hire some of the other applicants."

With respect to social rights, if a woman is witness to the murder of her brother, her testimony alone is not accepted. Four women witnesses must testify. But one man's testimony is sufficient to prove a murder.

Female high school students have been denied recreational facilities and have to attend mandatory collective prayer sessions. Most are depressed and demoralized which is very uncharacteristic of their age.

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