crack. down n Iraq isp The The Ba'ath "Social
Socialist Press1979 1979-04-21Read it in the scan (PDF), scan page 2 →
Read from the scan by machine and not corrected: expect misread words, and now and then a caption or a line from a neighbouring story. For anything you quote, read the scan.
Scan page 2
munist repression.
On April 5 it imposed a 30-day ban on the newspaper (Voice of the People) of the Iraqi Communist Party after the paper carried a reply to a recent attack on the CP by the "Progressive National Front".
This Front, which nominally rules Iraq, comprises the Ba'ath Party, the Kurdish Democratic Party and-the Iraqi Communist Party itself The CP says that the Front "still officially exists but is dead in practice"
The Stalinists say they have not been to its meetings for two years.
Despite the fact that the CP claims it has had 15,000 of its members arrested and 31 put to death in the current wave of repression, the party obligingly keeps two ministers (of Transport and one without portfolio) in' the coalition government with the Ba'athists.
It has called for no mass struggle against the reactionary, repressive regime (which is scandalously supported by Gerry Healy's British "Trotskyist" Workers Revolutionary In fact last week an Iraqi Communist Party spokesman, pointing to the increasingly warm relations between' the Iraqi Ba'athists and the feudal kingdom of Saudi Arabia, said it was "hardly conceivable" for the CP to leave the coalition "just when their opposition to the Israel-Egypt treaty is allowing the Iraqi leaders to emerge from their isolation".
The Iragi Stalinists? treacherous attitude to the bloody repression of their own members, therefore, flows from an abject hope that the • oppressors will reform themselves.
----- pull-quotes -----
ist" regime in Iraq has stepped up its anti-Com-