Correspondents' Correspondence Iran's Leftists

...In recent weeks, for example, the People's Fedayeen, the main secular Marxist organization, has been giving young recruits weapons training, and has pressed various demands on Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan...

...While a head-on collision between Khomeini and the Left has thus been avoided so far, the odds are that the Left will be a constant source of friction and instability in the months to come: Not strong enough to take over the country, it is nevertheless too strong to be eliminated...

...One teacher declared, "Now we must have a voice in what happens next...

...The largest Leftist rallies in Teheran have drawn only a few score thousand demonstrators—peanuts compared to the number that regularly turned out for Khomeini...

...Both groups were prime savak targets, and Iranian officials used to say complacently that they had been mostly stamped out...

...In handling the Leftists, the government has been steering an uneasy middle course between the two extreme alternatives of a) caving in to their demands, and b) trying to wipe them out...

...It is surprising, however, that the Leftists should be making their moves just now, when Khomeini commands overwhelming mass support, when traditional Islam is in the ascendant, and when the Left comprises a relatively tiny pool of largely urban students, intellectuals and workers...

...And the Tudeh supporters and other Leftists among the oil field workers could probably further disrupt the country's oil production any time they warned.—Err' Pact...

...Should the government try a crackdown they could always revert to the kind of terrorism they carried out under the Shah—only on a bigger scale...

...Besides the usual bunch of excited students, the participants included industrial workers from automotive assembly plants and women without the chador, the shawl-like veil pious Iranian Moslem women wear...

...Like so many events in Iran over the last two years, the Leftist activity has been at once predictable and surprising...

...it has asked for what amounts to a guarantee that the government will not try to crush the Left by force...

...It consisted of around 5,000 marchers carrying the standard pictures of Khomeini, but also chanting slogans about workers and unity—not about Islam...

...Verbal condemnation goes on, with Bazargan saying he would never cooperate with the Communists or other Iranian Marxists?They only betray...

...The Fedayeen have acquired thousands of weapons from looted Army arsenals...

...The marchers were secular Leftists coming out of the closet, as it were: After months of being mostly submerged in the Khomeini-led revolutionary movement, they were making the first of what has proved to be a series of increasingly bolder moves toward getting, keeping and enlarging their power in post-Pahlavi Iran...

...It has been predictable because the Tudeh has displayed considerable durability in operating for years from Eastern European headquarters with what non-Tudeh Iranian Leftists say is a lot of Soviet manipulation and support...

...Iran's Leftists New York—Not long before Aya-tollah Khomeini returned to Iran—as Teheran was being swept by disorders and demonstrations against the Shah and the Bakhtiar regime—I watched an unusual procession...

...Specifically, it has called for the inclusion of the Tudeh Party—Iran's long banned Communists—and other Leftists in the running of the country...

...A few English-speaking demonstrators, recognizing that I was an American correspondent, came up to me and talked about their "martyrs," the Leftists who had been killed by the Iranian Army in the preceding months...

...Moreover, during the Shah's reign the Fedayeen and the Mujahedeen showed discipline and daring in their terrorist attacks...

...and with public backing from the Mujahedeen—Islamic-oriented radicals—the Fedayeen have been urging that workers councils be given a substantial role in the nation's economic life...

...Some regime utterances have even suggested the Tudeh may be permitted to operate legally...

...In addition, late last month reports circulated that a Tudeh leader has returned from exile in East Germany, and that the party's supporters among oil workers in the south were resisting Khomeini's appeals to raise petroleum production...

...Yet Leftists have been allowed to continue arms-training sessions and hold a mass rally...