Iraqi Communists 'welcome US assault on Saddam'

["David Quarter" <davidquarter@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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.