Re: [A-List] Re: Re Iraqi CPs positions

["Henry C.K. Liu" <hliu@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Reuters. 13 April 2003. Iraqi Communists in North Dream of Brighter
Future.

KALAR -- In this small, dusty town in northern Iraq, diehard Communists
study the works of Marx and Engels and dream of the day their party
rises from the ashes.

Once the most powerful communist movement in the Middle East, the party
was brutally repressed by Iraq's government for 40 years, leaving just a
few thousands members to follow the creed in the Kurd-controlled North
of the country.

The collapse of the Soviet Union and the communist system in eastern
Europe was a further blow.

"The collapse of the Soviet Union was a catastrophe for us," said Abdul
Hamid Mohammad, a 48-year-old party member, standing outside the
crumbling headquarters in Kalar, a town 100 miles northeast of Baghdad
and a communist bastion.

"It was especially hard for the older members. Of course we saw this
coming when (former Soviet President) Mikhail Gorbachev came to power."

But with the U.S. military's noose tightening around Baghdad, there is a
glimmer of hope for the party faithful.

"As a party we have faced complete extinction at least three times,"
said Subhi Mehdi Ahmed, a member of the Kurdistan Communist Party's
(KCP) politburo in northern Iraq, the only presence the party still has
in the country.

"What party has ever faced what we have faced? We are working to return
to what we had in the 1950s, but we know it won't be easy," he told
Reuters in Sulaimaniya, the second largest city in Kurd-controlled
northern Iraq.

With Lenin, Engels and Marx staring down from a picture on the wall,
Ahmed estimates the KCP's membership at less than 5,000, although
support in local elections a few years ago was in the tens of thousands.

Najad Mohammadamin Hiwarash, a 41-year-old taxi driver in Sulaimaniya,
proudly brandished his Communist Party membership card, and recounted
his narrow escapes from President Saddam
Hussein's government.

Shot six times during various battles, he also survived a chemical
weapons attack in 1987 and was released from death row in an Iraqi
prison, where he had been tortured, in a prisoner swap after the Kurdish
uprising of 1991.

"Marxism will triumph in the end," he smiled.

In Kalar there is little to distinguish the party headquarters from
other buildings.

A small hammer and sickle is painted over the entrance and a handful of
Soviet-style posters inside depict communist heroes martyred under
Saddam's rule.

Outside stand communist "peshmerga" fighters, wearing traditional baggy
green trousers, belts slung with ammunition and grenades, scarves around
their necks and Kalashnikov assault rifles slung over their shoulders.

In an unlikely alliance, these and other Kurdish fighters fought
alongside [!!] U.S. special forces in a recent attack on the Ansar
al-Islam group of radical Islamists which Washington accuses of having
ties with the al Qaeda network.

Communist Party leaders welcome the U.S.-led assault on Saddam and his
army, but oppose any role for Washington in Iraq if he is toppled.

This kind of ideological flexibility runs through Kurdish communists'
thinking.

"We have all studied Marxism and Leninism, and take inspiration from
them," said Abdul Rahman Faris, another politburo member in Kalar.

"But we are not trying to create a proletarian labor state, as this was
one of the weaknesses of the old Soviet Union. I personally do not
believe in the atheist ideology and members are free to choose to be a
Muslim or not."

The rhetoric is not of revolution, power to the proletariat and the
evils of capitalism but of "social justice and democracy."

"What happened to communist ideology is not the fault of the ideology
itself but in the way it was practiced," Faris added.

A small group of members nod enthusiastically when asked if they are
familiar with the works of Lenin, Marx and Engels.

"We go to seminars and there is a committee which deals with matters of
theory and ideology," said Peshraw Rashid, a 36-year-old baker and party
member, wearing a gray suit.

"We are hopeful that the Kurdistan Communist Party can regain a position
of real power in Iraq," added Mohammad. "Not through a coup or a
revolution but through democracy."

Politburo members say they have good relations with the Patriotic Union
of Kurdistan and the Kurdistan Democratic Party, the two main political
forces in northern Iraq.

The PUK and KDP, along with the Iraqi National Congress and Shi'ite
Muslims who represent the largest group in Iraq, will play a key role in
shaping politics in post-Saddam Iraq.

The communists, however, will struggle to make their voices heard above
the clamor for power and control of Iraq's huge oil resources.



michael pearn wrote:
> Henry you are missing the point that Iraq is not the
> adopted country of the Kurds but is rather the
> artificial creation of imperialism after WW1. Prior to
> that date what is now Iraq was three separate areas of
> the Ottoman Empire based on Basra, Bagdad and Mosul.
> In that arrangement the various peoples had a great
> deal of autonomy. The Kurds were not subjected to the
> Turks or the Arabs as such but their own ruling elite
> were particiapants within the Ottoman polity.
>
> That changed after WW1 and the Kurds were divided
> among a number of ethnically based nation states newly
> created and in large part artificial. The Kurds within
> Iraq at no point had the option of voluntarily
> choosing to be a part of that state but were alloted
> Iraqi citizenship by the victorious imperialist
> powers. They did not then adopt Iraq as their homeland
> but found themselves a national minority in a nation
> state newly created by imperialism.
>
> As a national minority the Kurds have been
> systematically discriminated against. Mosul was always
> mixed ethnically but Kirkuk was once a mostly Kurdish
> city but that changed with the development of the oil
> industry in the region. Iraqi Kurdistan has then been
> systematically underdeveloped iun elation to Iraq as a
> whole and it#'s peoples often confined to the hill
> country of the north. This has condemned them to a
> backwardness that is marked in their political
> development.
>
> Politically Iraqi Kurdish parties have not been modern
> bourgeois nationalistparties but rather based on clan
> loyalties and similar networks. thus the two major
> parties, the KDP and PUK, are based on the barzani and
> talabnai families respectively. but their programs
> differ not at all. Today their main source of income
> is through taxation on the border posts and as such
> they remain trapped in a tributary system which in a
> distorted manner echoes the pre-existing mode of
> production in the region.
>
> Being based upon clan loyalties rather than bourgeois
> nationalism their political horizons have never
> reached the level of calling for an independent and
> unified Kurdish state. Instead they have called for an
> enlarged autonomous zone in the north of the state of
> Iraq. That is the limits of their demands. But note
> well those are not the demands of the Kurds but of
> their political leaderships in the KDP and PUK.
>
> It is likely that as with Kurds in Turkey that the
> main body of the Kurdish people in Iraq desire such a
> unified independent state. But in the absence of any
> bourgeois nationalist party that demand is not
> articulated in Iraq. The result is that the Kurds have
> indeed become the auxileries of Imperialism in this
> current episode. that is terrible but is not the fault
> of the Kurds but of their current leaders.
>
> yes the Kurdish peshmergas were the auxileries of the
> Imperialist Coalition and therefore fought against the
> right of Iraq to remain an independent nation state.
> calling for the right of the Kurds to form a state of
> their own at this moment would therefore be foolish.
> not only foolish but no one would listen most
> certainly not the Kurds themselves who are most
> concerned at the moment with the potential threat from
> Turkey. Which threat has pushed them into the arms of
> the imperialists of course.
>
> but saying that the Kurds should not raise the call
> for an independent state right now, when no is in
> fact, is very different to denying them that right
> when this episode is over. Then socialists have a duty
> to point out that the Kurds are in fact an oppressed
> group in those countires in which they are corralled.
> Socialists have a duty to raise the demand for a
> unified and Independent Kurdish state.
>
> Such a state i would suggest can only be achieved
> should the Turkish workers move aganst the capitalists
> in that country. The struggle for an independent
> Kurdistan must also be a struggle for a socialist
> Kurdistan and a socialist Turkey. Not only does the
> division of Turks and Kurds make the work of the boss
> class easier in that region but much of the Kurdish
> working class is not to be found in Kurdistan but in
> Ankara and Izmir, and I would suggest in Frankfort and
> London.
>
> --- "Henry C.K. Liu" <hliu@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >
> The Kurds had never been independent. There were an
>
> > enthnic group under
> > the Ottoman Empire.  They were "liberated" by
> > British imperialism, the
> > same way US imperialism "liberated" them in 1991 and
> > 2003.  When the
> > British redew the map of the defeated Ottoman
> > empire, the Kurds did not
> > fight for independent. The Kurds accepted Iraqi,
> > Turkish Iranian and
> > Syrian citizenship as jews in various countries
> > accpeted adopted
> > citizenship.  In Iraq, they were granted aountonomy.
> > For them to then
> > turn on their adopted country by siding with
> > invaders is treason.
> >
> > To support Kurdish independence now in the context
> > of imperialist
> > invasion is to distort the meaning of independence.
> > Notice how they did
> > not continue to fight US troops when told what to
> > do.  They obey
> > dutifully. Some independence fighters!
> >
> > Henry C.K. Liu
>
>
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