Mansoor Osanloo in Evin Prison again

A couple weeks ago, Amir Taheri wrote about Mansoor Osanloo, head of the Syndicate of Workers of United Bus Company of Tehran and Suburbs. He said:

Western commentators have called him "the Iranian Lech Walesa," after the Polish trade unionist who helped bring down the communist empire. The mullahs ruling Iran, however, regard him as "a dangerous enemy of Islam."
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Osanloo was first jailed in 2005, after his union launched an original form of labor action: Tehran bus workers announced free rides for all comers. When the authorities sent in armed security men, the workers went on strike - bringing Tehran, a city of 12 million inhabitants, to a virtual halt.

The authorities then tried terror and intimidation. A group of 300 members of the Iranian branch of Hezbollah, armed with clubs and knives, attacked Osanloo and his colleagues and beat up their families, including small children. Osanloo suffered knife wounds, including a deep cut in his tongue, inflicted by a Hezbollah member who had vowed to "silence the enemy of Islam."

In January 2006, a bus strike was brutally crushed by the Iranian regime. Ossanloo was arrested and held in Evin Prison for nearly eight months. He was arrested yet again in December 2006. He was released in January of this year. He was allowed to leave the country, and instead of being cowed into silence, he atended international labor meetings in London, Brussels and Geneva where he spoke out for better working conditions in Iran.

Then, on Thursday, Rooz Online had this:

With mounting pressures on Iran’s social movements and activists, recent heavy judicial sentences for women activists, and the new wave of student arrests, the bus carrying Mansur Ossanloo, the head of Iran’s large Vahed company bus syndicate workers (Sandikaye Kargaran Sherkate Vahed Tehran) was stopped in eastern part of the capital by a Peugeot car and Ossanloo was forcefully transferred into the vehicle.

Yesterday, there was this news:

According to a report from Mansour Ossanloo´s family and friends, the Iranian authorities have finally admitted that Mansour Ossanloo being held in section 209 of Evin Prison.

The order to arrest Osanloo, who was kidnapped from a bus on Tueday the 10th of July by Plain clothes men, came from Islamic” Revolutionary” Court Judge Saeed Mortazavi, who had up to this time denied any knowledge of Ossanloo’s whereabouts.

This section is for political prisoners, and is run by the intelligence apparatus. RFE/RL said last year:

Section 209 is Iran's most notorious detention center for detained critics and activists.

Located inside Tehran's Evin prison, the names of the individuals held there are not recorded on the official list of Evin's prisoners and families of the detainees are sometimes left clueless about where their loved ones are being held.

Political- and security-related prisoners are sometimes held in section 209 in solitary confinement for months without being charged or put on trial.

Detainees are reportedly subjected to long and multiple daily interrogations. Some former detainees have said they were deprived of sleep and medical care. Others have said they were threatened by authorities with indefinite imprisonment. Some said they were beaten up.

The thugs that are in power in Iran will hang on to their power through intimidation, through violence, through brutality. We salute the courage it takes for Osanloo to persist in his defiance of this regime.

Finally, this is Taheri again, from Thursday:

Osanloo also convinced the leaders of the International Labor Organization (of which Iran is full member) to oppose Ahmadinejad's new draft Labor Code. This would abolish virtually every right won by Iranian workers over decades of struggle, and impose rules that WOACC calls "conditions for slave labor, not employment in a free society."

Is Osanloo's abduction related to the meeting he had just chaired? The meeting certainly did two things that the authorities do not like: It condemned the government's announcement that it had "dismissed" and taken into custody six SKSV leaders. And it refused a government demand that bus drivers assume responsibility for imposing stricter "hijab" rules by keeping women passengers limited to the two back seats and forcing women "not dressed according Islamic codes" off any bus.

Osanloo told the meeting that it was not up to the government to decide who should lead the union, and called for the immediate release of his colleagues. He also recalled that a bus driver's task was to drive his passengers to their destinations safely, not to select them according to what they wear.

Mansour Osanloo is a voice for wisdom, moderation and peaceful change in a society ridden by potentially explosive contradictions. To silence that voice would be a tragic loss for Iran's future.