'athist Oppressors

Scan page 7

leader The same article p argue:

"The treachery of the a'athists is only equalled y the cynicism of the talinists. Backing the gime in line with the plicies of Moscow, the lalinists have entered a ampletely unprincipled ational pact with the itchers their amrades."

Yet it is the same Iraqi gime which Newsline now gales with regular paeons !. praise, and describes as trying through the ocialist transformation" I the country!

In fact the murders of ommunist Party members Iraq are still going on. bough the WRP aintained a long silence on ese executions, on nuary 4 they printed an iqi denial of reports iblished in Kuwait which scribed them as: "completely baseless and ned at distorting Iraqi titudes and undermining gi policy."

Forced to admit

The statement argued it since Iraq's vice-presiat had just completed a i the CP pussished severai pers in Iraq the reports uld not be true.

But only a month later on February 2 the WRP was forced to admit that:

"It is true that 21 CP members were executed early last year [!] for illegally forming cells in the armed forces.

The purpose of these cells was to fight against the government.' There are no prizes for the answer to what , would happen to Ba'athists who set up cells in the Soviet army. They would be ruthlessly purged."

This bizarre line of argument grew even worse:

"As for the executions in the army, we could give a roll-call of honour of dedicated Communists and revolutionaries who were massacred by Stalin."

So in the WRP's eyes it is alright for Iraq's anticommunist rulers to slaughter Stalinists be ause Stalin was a murderer! Vhat has this to do with Marxism?

"Hue and cry'

Nothing daunted, the WRP leaders plough on with their tortuous argument. They claim that the Stalinists are raising a hue and cry over the executions only because they wish to sabotage the Pan-arab unity between Iraq and Syria and worse still:

"Last summer the Stalinists had a hand in the attempts to get the PLO and the Iraqis to exterminate each other in a series of fratricidal killings."

Exactly how this alleged plot operated, we are not told. Nor are we told its relevance to the indefensible butchering of 21 CP members by the Iraqi Ba'athists.

Kather, the WRP leaders try to hide behind yet another "conspiracy" theory.

But they go further. The Ba'athists, they claim:

• have played a hundred fold more progressive a role in the Middle East than Stalinism. This is a straight case of Moscow trying to set up cells in the Iraqi armed forces for the purposes of undermining the regime. It must the consequences.

It ill behoves the British Stalinists to ingenuously try to turn this into a case of 'human rights' or one of principle.

The principle of defending workers from the attacks of capitalist states has nothing to do with Iraq".

If Iraq is not a capitalist state, then • perhaps the "theorists" in the WRP leadership would explain to us what kind of state it is, and through what process capitalism was overthrown without any form of revolutionary leadership.

Workers state?

We note that WRP leaders have yet to admit that Castro's Cuba is a deformed workers' state, clinging still „to their wooden notion that it remains capitalist.

So how do they analyse Iraq?

If the WRP has discovered a workers' state newly emerged in the Middle East during the last five years shouldn't they be enthusiastically explaining to the world's working class how this occurred, what lessons can be drawn from it, and where else (Libya?) such events can be expected?

Indeed it is only a workers' state which any Marxist would concede has the right to repress its political opponents.

Carte blanche

But the WRP give the atheists and other opponents, carte blanche to execute presumably not only Stalinists but anyone organising in Iraq "to fight against the government"

Of course the struggles of Trotskyist party-a genuinely proletarian internationalist opposition to the Ba'athists-would - be repressed in exactly the same way.

Presumably Newsline would support such repression. Certainly it attacks the Stalinists because they raised:

"some questions and put demands which could not be met under the prevailing circumstances, with the object of embarassing the (March 22)

Setting aside what demands these were, surely it is the task of Marxists to point an independent road forward for the Iraqi masses against their reactionary nationalist leaders?

Would not Trotskyists seek to organise in the armed forces as well as the working class and peasant movement?

Not the WRP! They condemn any attack at all on the Ba'athist dictatorship:

"All this was finally crowned by violating the agreement concluded between the two parties in regard to the prohibition of political work among the armed forces and by organising cells within the army.

The CP was fully aware that the penalty for organising party cells in the army carried a death sentence.

Gaddafi There are many repressive regimes in the world where to organise a trade union is tantamount to inviting imprisonment and death: does the WRP oppose CP members or other militants undertaking such work? Does it defend the regimes that. jail and murder such militants?

No! But all the normal laws of the class struggle are apparently suspended in Iraq, The March 22 Newsline actually includes in its two-page eulogy of the Ba'ath Party the following:

"It [the Ba'ath Party] is the first Pan Arab party which embodied the hopes of the entire nation and considered itself the instrument of the Arab nation, disregarding the regional tendencies which still show their potency in some Arab communist parties."

What happened to the Comintern's struggle against Panislamism, and its warnings against wrapping a "communist cloak" around revolutionary movements that are not really communist"?

What is the class character of this regime which, bonapartist style, "considers itself" the instrument of the "Arab nation"?

But, perhaps more pertinent still, what is supposed to happen to the historic liberation struggle of the Kurdish people-at present an oppressed minority in Iran, Iraq, Turkey and part of the Soviet Union?

Ruthless opponent

The Ba'athists' opposition to "regional tendencies" has made them a ruthless opponent of the Kurds, whom at one point the WRP used correctly to support in their struggle:

"One thing that stands out very clearly in the current struggle is the brutality of the Iraqi ruer and their callous disregar for the Kurds living in th areas outside their hands They show all the con tempt of men who consider themselves part of superior race in the way they wage the war and treat the Kurds under their control."

(Workers Press June 12 1974).

Now this correct position has also been jettisoned in the WRP's courtship of the Ba'athists.

In the process Kurdish leader Barzani and the Kurdish Pesh Merga guerrilla fighters have been variously branded in cynical Newsline articles as tools of the CIA, the Shah, the Zionists, and even Joseph Hansen!

Ghost

In 1974 Workers Press journalist John Spencer had correctly assessed the role of assistance given to the Kurds by the Shah-and separated the issue of Barzani leadership from the Kurdish struggle itself.

And at first it seemed as if the ghost of John Spencer haunted: the, Newsline offices to report on Barzani's recent death:

"Barzani who throughout his life was involved in. the struggle for Kurdish independence died of lung cancer. The body was flown to Oshnrouien. It was here that Barzani led many battles for Kurdish independence. Hundreds of Kurdish women broke into cries of the Kurdish people are not dead.

... Pesh Merga querrillas wearing red turbans raised the cry: The Shah is the enemy of our leader".

The obituary concludes: "In March 1975 the Kurdish rebellion against Iraq came to an end. They were settled in conditions of extreme poverty. Barzani fled into exile in the US"

But, blushing at this glimpse of objectivity; the WRP leaders sprang into action, and next day published the extraordinary disclaimer that:

"This report was inadvertently used direct from Reuter [!]. It does not reflect the views of the WRP. Today we publish an obituary of Barzani which traces the highlights of his counter-revolutionary career."

The article then churns out a sustained cover-up for political life as a dedicated Stalinist and ended it as a hireling of the CIA"

In stark contrast to the previous day's deta iled report, it claimed Barza ni's funeral was shunned by the Kurds.

The WRP went on to declare, on the very eve of armed revolt by the Kurdish minority in Iran, that they were entirely in support of the Ayatollah Khomeini!

..The WST. on the other hand continues to defend the right of the Kurdish people to genuine self-determination-up to and including secession should they choose it-in place of national oppression in Turkey, Iran and Iraq.

We call for a struggle against such elements as Barzani who, in a sense parallelling Yasser Arafat, seek to pursue the Kurdish struggle through wheeling and dealing with bourgeois heads of state.

We call for the struggle for an independent soviet Kurdistan as part of Socialist United States of the Middle East.

Such a revolutionary transformation means -the mobilisation of the Arab masses for the overthrow of reactionary regimes including that in Iraq and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat based on workers, peasants and soldiers soviets.

We therefore publicly accuse the WRP, leadership of flagrant abandonment of the founding principles of Communist movement in their slavish fawning on Gaddafi, Arafat and the Ba'athist butchers.

Never replied The WRP leadership do not hesitate to put pen to paper i to defend the Ba'athists in the capitalist press. But they have never once replied to the points we have made, based as they are on the traditional political positions of Marxism. • We challenge the WRP leadership to reply to our accusations.

And we invite WRP members and ex-members to discuss with us the historical origins of such a political degeneration.

----- pull-quotes -----

Ba'athists, with their history of murdering communists,

the Ba'athists, pointing out that Barzani. "began his