on the occasion of the Rome demo for the Iraqi resistance, 13 Dec, 2003
Americans! You are going to be leaving Iraq either carrying coffins or in them! Then hurry out and save your soldiers from certain death!
Iraqi Resistance Fighters! Kill the occupiers wherever you find them!
A free homeland and a happy people!
Workers of the world and oppressed people, unite!
Communists of the world! Rise up! The time has come!
Before everything else, we wish to congratulate ourselves and congratulate you over the heroic Iraqi national resistance activity against the treacherous Anglo-American occupation. With that we bring you the certain promise of the national resistance that it will crush the occupation and liberate Iraq!
The Americans have been blinded by their power. Furiously enraged, they attack and threaten. They work meticulously against international law. They trample all legality, both divine and human, making out as if their soldiers were above all laws and norms, entitled to ravage, ruin, and destroy without hindrance, and with no one to bring them to account before either local or international legality.
But the pure Land of the Two Rivers, the cradle of civilizations, of law, and of values, has arisen today anew to fulfill the tasks set for it by the Exalted Creator. This land is giving the occupiers a taste of disaster. It is making them weep like widows in the streets of Baghdad. The Land of the Two Rivers will without fail send them back to their homes in coffins or in headlong flight with their tails between their legs in humiliation and defeat. This will herald the beginning of the end of American arrogance. It will be a humiliating reversal on a world scale, as America falls defeated, beaten, bloodied, and despised, never again to resume its haughty strut.
If our noble Iraqi people continue to harbor hatred in their souls for America, it is not a hatred of the great American people, but against American militarism, and the band of tyrants who are manipulated by the right-wing Anglo-Zionist lobby which has begun to curtail even the freedom of the American people themselves, as it sends them today to die in defense of their monopoly interests and those of their rabid gendarme – Israel.
Comrades!
As the human struggle against oppression escalates, as world monopoly tramples the peoples with increasing severity, humanity`s dream of attaining justice and equality among people forms the basis on which our Communist movement has arisen as one of the qualitative leaps with which history is replete at times when means of oppression and enslavement mount up and there is no longer any hope save in a comprehensive radical transformation.
Although Communism was preceded by Islam, Christianity, Zoroastrianism, Mandaeanism, and the Sinaite faith in the struggle for justice, peace, and freedom, the communist movement has its own specificity. At the very least, it arose on the basis of a great legacy of human progress, most prominently the heritage of the tremendous scientific renaissance, the acceleration of communications and the emergence of nations and national borders between states, the excessive concentration of capital as it strove viciously to accumulate profit. Religious circles aligned themselves solidly with the monopolies against the oppressed. Our philosophy was conscious of the dangers and causes of exploitation and so aligned itself solidly with the oppressed, taking into account the fact that if those oppressed people were to take power it would mean the end of the age of exploitation. Brotherhood, peace, and justice between peoples would prevail instead. Based on this understanding, our movement was one of the harshest and most vehement opponents of the occupation of others` territory, of colonialism, whether it spread peacefully or by war. Our movement realized that occupation is the harshest form of national and ethnic as well as class oppression.
What the Communist movement has contributed to the world in the way of liberation struggle of the peoples is entirely worthy of mention. The experience of Laos, Cambodia, Cuba, and Viet Nam bears witness to this. The experience of the Lebanese Communist Party during the Zionist rape of their country also bears witness to this. They raised the slogan “To Arms!” and died as martyrs and martyrdom fighters, as did their comrades in Hizb Allah and the rest of the Lebanese Patriotic Movement. If our movement has suffered reverses for a time, let this be a lesson for us, that we might treat our mistakes and review our experience.
Also entirely worthy of mention is the legacy of the Iraqi patriotic movement, including our Iraqi Communist Party, which has given martyrs for the cause of liberation.
Our slogan, as Iraqi Communists, is “A Free Homeland and a Happy People.” Based on this, our stand on the freedom, sovereignty, and independence of the homeland is of the highest importance and is felt most keenly. So much so, that even our philosophical beliefs themselves pale before it. This was formulated by the founder of our party, our comrade forever, Fahd, when he said: “I am a patriot before I am a Communist, and when I became a Communist, I came to feel even more greatly my responsibility to my homeland.” On this basis we are compelled and destined to fight the occupier wherever he comes from, by any means, and in alliance with our Iraqi patriotic forces, and with international forces whatever their ideological character. On this basis too, and in the situation where our country has fallen under occupation or when it is attacked by an enemy, there is no such thing as “tactics” or “acceptance of the status quo” or “assessing the balance of strengths and weaknesses” except insofar as this serves the basic aim, and that aim is defense of the homeland. During the Zionist aggression of 1967, Iraqi Communists set aside their aversion to `Abd ar-Rahman `Aref. From the dungeons in which they were languishing, some of them under sentence of death, others under long and even life sentences, they overlooked those personal matters and appealed instead to be set free to take part in the fighting against the Zionist enemy, whether as regular soldiers at the fronts or as Resistance guerrillas. They pledged to return voluntarily to their cells after the defeat of the enemy, and they offered to allow the Iraqi government whatever it chose as a guarantee of their pledge, including using their relatives as hostages.
But today, oblivious to the times and to the consciousness of free people, the Communist movement in Iraq has been deluded. It has been afflicted by a reversal more intensely painful and more violent in its effects than was the party`s acceptance of the partition of Palestine at the end of the 1940s.
The reversal today is the product of two full decades of retreats led by the two renegades `Aziz Muhammad (former Party Secretary) and his deputy Fakhri Karim. The two renegades collected all the keys to Party political power in their hands – finance, propaganda, the security apparatus, the secretariat of the Central Committee, and the Political Bureau. They abrogated the internal system of the party and expelled the best of the militant comrades, and things reached a point where the party became totally paralyzed and unable to move. Its only concern became how to find allies to fight for it. Then the party suffered an ideological reversal and began to speak in the name of the chauvinist current within the Kurdish movement. Organizationally, it became an army of informers for the benefit of the two renegades Fakhri and `Aziz. The party came to be dominated by a school that stood outside the norms of organizations, a school of how to bring people down. The two renegades used this method, naturally, to divert attention from their own personal degeneration. Finally Fakhri Karim took possession of the Party`s resources, bank accounts, and propaganda institutions all of which he registered as his own personal property, thereby entering the world of the broker and business agent. The inevitable outcome of all of this was that he would ally himself with America, finding it to be the best guardian of his personal business interests. He visited Washington in 1991 and presented them with a down payment in the form of a statement that he made on Voice of America radio in which he asked George Bush (the father) to intensify his embargo on the Iraqi people. As a result of enticement and intimidation, a group of writers and literary figures belonging to the Iraqi Communist Party gathered around him and cooperated with the American Central Intelligence Agency in publishing a newspaper under the title “Sawt al-Kuwayt ad-Dawli” [“The International Voice of Kuwait”] which distorted the facts and was one of the most important clarions heralding the 30-nation aggression against Iraq in 1991. It was precisely this newspaper that published the theatrical story of the young Kuwaiti girl Nuwayrah under the headline “The Iraqis steal incubators from the children of Kuwait.” As the battles raged, this newspaper, which was edited by Iraqi Communists, printed stories under giant masochistic headlines like “Coalition forces demolish Baghdad” and “Allied aircraft exterminate Iraqi military formation near Basra.” Even the Kuwaiti government with all its systematic hostility to Iraq could not bear the extreme vulgarity of such a paper. It came to regard the money allocated to it as a waste of public funds and finally shut it down. Thus in 1993 its editors began directly to work for the Central Intelligence Agency, becoming experts at bringing down people within the Party and the Iraqi and Arab patriotic movements. They set about publicizing the plan to occupy the country under the slogan “liberation of Iraq.” America announced some of their names, and an Iraqi lawyer living in exile lauded them.
When the scandals surrounding Fakhri Karim multiplied, he stepped aside to allow the renegade Hamid Majid to take his place in the secretariat of the Party. Since that time, the Party has openly taken up work with America and against the Iraqi people. The Party newspaper “Tariq ash-Sha`b” published an article in July 2002 that reported that the Deputy Consul in the American Embassy in Damascus visited the offices of the Iraqi Communist Party in Syria and discussed recent developments with Party representatives. The Party`s internal publication, “Munadil al-Hizb” (in June 2002) reported on a special meeting of the Party Central Committee to study how the Party would take part in the coming events, which they termed “the liberation of Iraq.” During the invasion battles, the Party openly acknowledged that it had fighters on the front lines together with the invasion forces. In the last decade, the Party took upon itself the task of preparatory propaganda for what the Anglo-Zionists termed preventive air strikes on military targets during the period of the embargo. Hamid Majid himself entered Iraq via Kuwait together with the American Army. Last but not least, he has joined the Council of No-Accounts (the so-called “Governing Council”) which was declared and whose members were appointed by the American Military Governor of Iraq. The first decree of this Council was to declare the date of Baghdad`s occupation to be a national holiday. In addition, in order to secure his admission to this Council of No-Accounts, Hamid Majid agreed to the conditions imposed on him by the Military Governor, among the most important of which are:
– That Hamid Majid must not represent the Communist Party but the Shi`ite confessional community.
– That the Communist Party should reformulate its program and internal rules so as to take out from them and from the Party`s publications, all references to “colonialism”, “imperialism”, “national independence”, “defense of the homeland”, and any concept that is related to these terms. In addition, Bremer must be referred to as “Mr. Bremer” and the occupation authorities must be referred to as the “Government of the Coalition”.
– The Iraqi Communist Party must cooperate with the American Army against Islamist and other “saboteurs” who are now bearing arms against the occupation. The Party must immediately inform on any suspects, and it must actively participate in maintaining security.
– No members of the Communist Party must carry any weapons unless licensed to do so by the occupation and that they must undertake patrols together with the occupation troops against the Iraqi people.
– The Party must work determinedly to reduce extremism among Shi`ite Muslims – the Sadr and al-Khalisi Groups
– while on the other hand working to strengthen the currents of Baqir al-Hakim and Bahr al-`Ulum.
Obviously, the implementation of these conditions means in practice the total elimination of the role of the Iraqi Communist Party in the political arena, on the one hand; and, on the other hand it will lead to transforming the mass membership of the Iraqi Communist Party into informers, collaborators with the enemy of Iraq, the enemy of the peoples, and of humanity – the Anglo-Zionist right-wing. The hands of this right wing are stained with the blood of patriots from every part of the world. It is they who brought about the defeat of the glorious 14 July 1958 Revolution, and the defeat of the glorious 3 July Revolution. Indeed it is this right-wing itself that pushed and organized and is ultimately responsible for the bloodshed and loss of life associated with Baath Party coups of 8 February 1963 and 17 July 1968. In February 1963 the American Central Intelligence Agency took over direction of the putschists, making use of a radio transmitter in Jordan. This radio station broadcast the names and both the official addresses of Communists and their secret hideouts, enabling the putschists to execute them on the spot or to arrest them and torture them to death.
The February 1963 coup was not its only bloody act. The American Central Intelligence Agency planned the murder of a million martyrs in Indonesia and of more than a million in Viet Nam in open genocide or in the course of what even enemies of the Left have called a “dirty war.” This is to say nothing about the massacres in Chile, Nicaragua, Afghanistan, and the 30-nation aggression against Iraq in 1991 and the depleted uranium. And now America is occupying our country in contravention of international law.
Fraternal Communists and Friends!
Our heroic Iraqi people and their courageous resistance fighters are up to the task of expelling the occupation. But we appeal to you for your solidarity with and support for the Iraqi people, not simply because our cause is just, nor merely as a matter of principle, but so that you may take part in this great event – the fall of America, enemy of the peoples – which has begun today in Iraq.
The crime that the renegades in the leadership of the party have committed is unpardonable. It inflicts damage on the entire Communist movement in Iraq, in the Arab Homeland, and in the world. Neither self-criticism nor apology at some later time will do any good in this case. The Party Rules have rejected this behavior in legitimate organizational ways, yet the gang of renegades has persisted in its treasonous behavior tossing aside the history of the Party, its potential, and the Party`s struggle for which thousands of martyrs have fallen.
Therefore we, the mass members of the Iraqi Communist Party and its base, declare as follows:
– The Iraqi Communist Party does not abandon its well-known national and worldwide goals in its struggle for peace, democracy, and equality among peoples and nations. It does not abandon the goal that it previously proclaimed among its unshakable national principles on the level of domestic, national politics, and that goal is the building of a socialist, democratic, and free society. But the current situation is a situation of occupation, and armed national resistance is the only means capable of crushing the occupier and driving him out of Iraq. It is the highest form of struggle against the occupier. Every goal that lies outside of the framework of the resistance must be postponed until after liberation. We stand with the sons and daughters of our people against the occupation and are committed to the armed patriotic resistance. We support it whatever its religious or political currents. For the first and basic aim now is to expel the occupiers from Iraq.
– Any Communist who cooperates with the occupation under whatever circumstances is charged with the greatest act of national treason!
– The behavior and actions of the current leadership of the Iraqi Communist Party do not represent the Iraqi Communist Party or Iraqi Patriots.
– We will not be frightened by idiotic accusations that we are “advocating terrorism” or “anti-Semitic” or “supporting al-Qa`idah.” It is America that has declared war on the entire peace-loving world without regard for international or divine law. Therefore we call upon all opponents of America, and upon all opponents of invasion and the colonization of peoples, to come to Iraq and to fight alongside their brothers in the heroic Iraqi Resistance, or to give whatever they can from wherever they are in their own countries in service to that goal!
– The Americans know which way the border is. So for their departure let there be: No negotiations! No discussions! No agreements!
– We do not and will not accept any government under occupation, nor any trusteeship under the United Nations! We do not and will not accept any international forces on Iraqi territory for any reasons! We are the ones who can guard our homeland`s security, and we are the ones who can construct its institutions!
– All energy must go to resisting the occupation, militarily in the first place!
Disgrace and shame upon anyone who draws invaders against his homeland!
Glory to the courageous Iraqi people!
Glory to the peoples who love peace and liberation!
Glory to the world patriotic and Communist movement!
Iraqi Communist Party (Cadre) 031205
