IRANIAN communists have warned against the theocratic regime’s attempts to undermine international solidarity with victims of oppression as United Nations human rights chief Michelle Bachelet expressed alarm at the numbers killed and detained in recent protests.

Her office said that, to its knowledge, there has been at least 7,000 arrests in 28 of Iran’s 31 provinces since mass protests broke out on November 15.

Ms Bachelet said she was “extremely concerned about [the arrested persons’] physical treatment, violations of their right to due process and the possibility that a significant number of them may be charged with offences that carry the death penalty.”

As many as 200,000 people are believed to have taken part in anti-government protests sweeping the country, as anger rising over the cost of living. Economic stagnation has caused wages to fall and there are severe electricity and water shortages.

About 400 people are believed to have been killed by government forces in a violent crackdown on demonstrations.

The communist Tudeh Party has warned against attempts to portray the uprising as part of a US-backed plot, dismissing the notion that those facing down the brutal theocracy are tools of imperialism.

It warned of “deliberate attempts to undermine international solidarity” by aligning with an Islamist regime that has peddled these smears against trade unionists, communists, poets and writers for decades.

In 1983, more than 1,000 Tudeh Party members were detained on the collective charge of spying for the Soviet Union. Many leading members were jailed, tortured and executed and many more were forced into exile.

A rally was held in Tehran on Saturday to mark Student Day, the anniversary of the gunning-down by the Shah’s soldiers of three students protesting against a visit by then US vice-president Richard Nixon in 1953.

The party was clear that those protesting were ordinary people: workers, youth and women who have been marginlised by the capitalist system in a country operating “a ruthless neoliberal economy.”

Tudeh international secretary Navid Shomali told the Star that the uprising stemmed from the state’s inability to resolve accumulated contradictions.

“The extent of recent protests in more than 100 cities across the country and the direct struggle of people against the regime’s repressive forces has gravely scared the regime’s leaders, who have placed the country in the current disastrous situation of economic bankruptcy, poverty, widespread deprivation, chronic unemployment, untethered inflation and widespread social anomalies.

“Unlike the propaganda claims of the regime about the demonstrators being the agents of foreign forces, the fact is that thousands of young people who stood up to the repressive forces of the regime are suffering from deprivation, unemployment and the suppression meted out by a ruthless regime which has ruined the present living conditions of the enormous mass of the youth and rendered their future prospects even worse.”