The New Worker
The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain
Week commencing 27th April 2007

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Lead
IRAQ -
PATRIOTS LAUNCH COUNTER SURGE
by our Arab Affairs Correspondent
RESISTANCE fighters have launched a “surge” offensive of their
own, pushing the imperialists back on the defensive in Iraq in fierce
fighting throughout the country. While tens of thousands of American
and puppet troops have been deployed in Baghdad since February under
Bush’s new “security” plan, it has done little to thwart partisan
attacks in heart of the city and on the heavily fortified “Green Zone”
military compound.
In one of the most lethal attacks on American troops since the war
began, a suicide car bomber struck a patrol base north-east of Baghdad
in Diyala province on Monday. After the initial blast the guerrillas
opened fire on fuel trucks inside the depot, which exploded leaving
nine American soldiers dead and 20 more wounded.
It was the second bold attack against a US base north of Baghdad in
just over two months and was notable for its use of a suicide car
bomber as insurgents have mostly used hit-and-run ambushes, roadside
bombs or mortars on US troops and stayed away from direct assaults on
fortified military compounds to avoid US firepower.
The deaths raised to 98 the number of British and American troops who
have died in Iraq in April, the deadliest month for American troops
since December, when 112 died. It was the single deadliest attack on
ground forces since December 2005, when a roadside bomb killed 10
Marines and wounded 11 on a foot patrol near Fallujah.
With the death toll mounting, Democratic leaders in Washington agreed
on Monday on legislation that requires the first American combat troops
to be withdrawn from Iraq by 1st October with a goal of a complete
pullout six months later. Bush has promised to veto any such measure as
the legislative confrontation intensifies.
In Baghdad the construction of a five km long concrete wall to seal off
a Sunni Muslim nationalist quarter has enraged Baghdadis and Arab
opinion far beyond Iraq. The Americans claim the wall around the
Azamiyah neighbourhood will reduce sectarian attacks between Sunni and
Shia extremists but the real objective is to partition the capital into
sectarian enclaves to make it easier for the occupation army to raid
them and control the major roads in and out of the city.
to
the streets
The people of Azamiyah have taken to the streets to denounce the
“sectarian wall” that would make them prisoners in their own city. And
they’ve won the backing of maverick Shia cleric Muqtada al Sadr
who said the protests showed that Iraqis reject “the sectarian, racist
and unjust wall that seeks to divide” Sunnis and Shias.
Al Sadr said the wall showed the “evil will” of the “American
occupiers”. He urged his Mahdi Army followers to join the Sunnis
in new demonstrations against the wall, while the underground Baath
Party called on the United Nations to immediately intervene to halt its
construction.
Puppet “premier” Nouri al-Maliki appeared to bow to the anger on the
street on Sunday when he ordered work on the wall to stop. But he soon
backed down saying the subject would be “discussed” and stating that he
would not rule out all barriers such as barbed wire.
Meanwhile in the British controlled southern zone of Iraq, Sunni and
Shia resistance groups formed a united front last weekend. Fifteen
southern partisan groups, including some Shia militias but not Mahdi
Army, announced the formation of the Popular Front of the Iraqi
Resistance on 21st April.
Abu Abdullah al Dawsari, a field commander in the “Brigades of the
Freemen of the South” resistance organisation, said that the Popular
Front had several objectives.
“The first of our aims is to make the southern front the equal of the
western, north-western, and central fronts in Iraq in the fight against
the foreign alliance. Our efforts are also dedicated to trying to
stop the Iranian penetration into Iraq that is coming in under the
cover of the occupation forces,” he declared.
“We are also trying to arouse the zeal of the Arab tribes in southern
Iraq, who are no less patriotic and Iraqi than the tribes in the rest
of the country, even though the nature of the repression practiced by
the religious parties on them obscures the extent to which they reject
the occupation.”
And many Arab tribesmen are now leading the resistance in the south,
enraged at the occupation authorities and the puppet politicians of the
cities who serve imperialism and treat the Arab tribes as aliens in
their own land.
*************
Editorial
Traitor Yeltsin
BORIS YELTSIN is dead and not
mourned by communists and progressives around the world, nor by the
millions of Russians who found themselves robbed of their pensions,
their savings, their jobs and their state welfare as Yeltsin presided
over the sell-off of everything of value in the Russian economy to
greedy, self-seeking capitalist fortune seekers. He put the final nails
into the coffin of the Soviet Union. He accepted huge loans from the
imperialist countries and so allowed control over Russia’s huge mineral
wealth to fall into the hands of Russia’s enemies.
Yet the western press has been lauding him as though he was some
sort of great hero. We saw a drunken buffoon, flattered and manipulated
by the western powers, who reduced a once great nation almost to the
status of a Third World country. His successor Putin has retrieved the
situation a little; he has reasserted Russia’s control over her own
mineral resources and jailed some of the greedy oil tycoons for failing
to pay their taxes.
But Russia still remains now a capitalist country with a huge
wealth gap between the few ultra-rich and the many very poor; life
expectancy is short, especially for men and alcoholism and drug abuse
are high as the people are demoralised and betrayed.
Yeltsin of course was not the sole author of this disaster;
Gorbachov paved the way and it says something about the state of the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union that it allowed both these traitors
to rise through its ranks and that the first “oligarchs” ready to seize
the valuable assets of the Soviet people had been leading party members.
That situation will be examined and analysed for possibly
hundreds of years to come as a grim warning to other socialist states
aspiring to communism.
Nevertheless the first socialist state in the world lasted longer
than the first bourgeois republic in Britain – the Commonwealth that
lasted from 1649 until 1660 – and it achieved far more politically,
economically and socially. It proved that workers were capable of
creating their own state power to rule over a fairer and more just
society; that they were capable of transforming a backward economy into
a leading super-state and that they were capable of defeating the might
of Hitler’s Third Reich.
The end of Britain’s bourgeois republic and the restoration of
the monarchy in 1660 was not the end of Parliamentary bourgeois power
and influence in Britain or the world – it was hardly the beginning. In
1688 the “Glorious Revolution” saw the power of Parliament restored and
the creation of a constitutional monarchy.
Similarly, the failure of the Soviet Union is not the end of
working class socialist power in the world or in Russia – it is hardly
the beginning.
Right now the most greedy and reactionary sections of the World’s
imperialist ruling classes are stuck in Iraq like Brer Rabbit was stuck
to the tar-baby. Their greed for oil and their arrogance have trapped
them.
Meanwhile in China, Korea, Laos, Vietnam and Cuba workers
continue to build and to defend their workers’ states. At the same time
in Venezuela, in Bolivia, in Ecuador, in Nepal and in dozens of other
places, workers are asserting their power as a class to bring rising
living standards, education, healthcare and social justice to their
countries while the imperialists can only curse and swear.
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