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IRAQ: THE GUN AND THE PEOPLE

by our Arab Affairs Correspondent

FOUR RUSSIAN diplomats have been slain in Iraq. The Baathist underground and the major partisan movements in Iraq have rejected a sham “amnesty” offered by the US puppet regime last week and partisans battled in the streets of Baghdad and once again rocketed the US “Green Zone” military compound while the puppet parliament was sitting.

The Russian government has blamed the Americans for the death of four of their diplomats seized by a guerrilla group linked to Al Qaeda that was demanding the withdrawal of all Russian troops from Chechnya in exchange for their lives.

In Moscow Russian officials stated that the coalition forces were responsible for security in Iraq, including the safety of foreign diplomats in Baghdad. “The responsibility for the execution of the Russian diplomats is the burden on the shoulders of all those who occupied Iraq. This crime is on their conscience,” deputy speaker of the Russian parliament Lubov Sliska declared.

The head of the Iraqi Cultural Forum, an organisation that represents Iraqi immigrants in Russia, told the Vremya Novosti newspaper that he believed western secret services were behind the murders. “This is a US-led game,” Salyam Musafir said.

responsible

“This is how they decided to punish the Russian diplomacy for its anti-war stance. The US is definitely responsible for the fact that they have occupied Iraq but failed to establish law and order there”.

The streets of the occupied capital rang to the sound of gunfire when partisans seized parts of southern Baghdad last Friday and held them for nearly three hours. On Monday the resistance fired mortar rounds into the maximum-security zone that the Americans have set up around the Republican palace in Baghdad – the district they have called the “Green Zone” as the US-sponsored “Iraqi parliament” was in session there. A headquarters of the US Army and puppet troops in the north-west of the city was rocketed and street battles erupted in the heart of Baghdad when the resistance overran a puppet check-point the same afternoon.

Meanwhile the sectarian “Badr Brigade” that works for the puppet regime raided a dormitory in Baghdad University, dragging 10 Sunni students out suspected of nationalist sentiment because they came from the partisan stronghold of Ramadi.

Other Badr Brigade units attacked the homes of Palestinian refugees in eastern Baghdad, killing four as part of an ongoing pogrom against the Palestinian community which the sectarians accuse of being pro-Baathist. But the attackers did not get away entirely unscathed. Local Iraqis who rushed to the aid of the Palestinians killed five of the pro-American sectarian gunmen and wounded several more.

The US-installed puppet regime of Nuri al-Maliki claims to have held secret talks with high-ranking US military commanders and former generals and officers the Iraqi Army from before the American invasion in their drive to get the resistance to give up the fight.

But the Baathist underground and the major partisan movements have rejected the sham “amnesty” offered by the puppet regime as a ruse designed to split the resistance and get some of them to lay down their arms.

The General Command of the Iraqi Armed Forces, a major part of the Iraqi resistance, dismissed claims that they had held talks with puppet leaders saying “no intelligent person could believe such a lie” while the Iraqi Arab Socialist Renaissance Party (Baath) issued a similar statement analysing and rejecting the Al Maliki “initiative”.

“What are the contents and conditions of this `reconciliation’ and with whom are we to reconcile?” the Baath Party statement asked rhetorically, and went on:

“The idea of this reconciliation is based on the renunciation of `violence’ as the occupation administration calls it, and agreeing to become a part of the political process, even as the Americans continue to refuse even to set out a timetable for their withdrawal! Instead of that, American officials talk about remaining in Iraq for a long time to come, and about building bases and airports! Therefore the ‘reconciliation’ can only mean one thing, and that is the acceptance of the occupation and its results”.

The statement went on to say: “Putting a halt now to the armed resistance at a time when it is at the gates of decisive victory would be the greatest possible betrayal of Iraq, an ignominious retreat from the promise of its liberation, an unacceptable abandonment of the rights of Iraq and the Iraqis who have been killed, raped, imprisoned, and tortured.”

Addressing the “heroic fighters in the holy struggle” the Baath stressed: “The path to decisive victory lies not through the United Nations or the Arab League or negotiations with the occupation under its conditions, or collaborating with stooges. Victory only comes out of the barrel of the gun of the militant.

“So keep hold of your weapons! Make them your sure path to victory, your only guarantee that the occupation will be prevented from playing its cards and the cards of its lackeys to try to circumvent the resistance or some of the resistance organisations.

“The fundamental way to complete the march to decisive victory is the militant gun, combined and integrated with a broad national front embracing all those who reject the occupation!”

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Editorial

Stop Zionist aggression

ISRAELI WARPLANES are hitting targets in Gaza. Israeli tanks are pouring into the Gaza Strip. The Palestinian leadership has been told that they will face massive retribution unless a captured Israeli soldier is handed over. It seems that another deadly round in the battle for Palestine is about to begin.

Whenever Israel attacks it poses as the injured party. It tells the world it has to act to save the life of a soldier taken by Palestinian commandos in a raid last week. But Israel says nothing about the 37 Palestinian civilians killed and another 192 injured in the occupied Palestinian territories in the last two weeks as the result of attacks by the Israeli forces.

Tel Aviv blames the Palestinian militias for armed resistance which it calls “terrorism” but says nothing about the root cause of the crisis in Palestine – the millions of Palestinian Arab refugees and their descendants driven out of their homes by the Zionists in the first Arab-Israeli war which ended in 1949 and the continued denial of Palestinian rights even in the territories seized by Israel after the Third Arab-Israeli war of 1967.

Ehud Olmert’s Kadima bloc won the Israeli elections in April by promising to resolve the Palestinian crisis. He had a plan. He was backed by former Israeli Labour premier and Nobel Prize winner, Shimon Peres. He had the blessing of the Bush administration which is all that counts in Tel Aviv these days.

But there was nothing new in his plan nor had he bothered to consult the Palestinians because Olmert knew it was totally unacceptable.

Olmert’s big idea is often called “unilateral disengagement”. All that means is that Israel withdraws from the parts of occupied Palestine it doesn’t want or cannot hold while retaining all the good bits, including the vast tract of Palestinian territory the Zionists call “Greater Jerusalem”, behind a concrete wall that has also been erected on stolen Arab land.

If the Palestinians agree to negotiate their own capitulation Israel might give them a few more crumbs. If not the “plan” will be implemented regardless of past UN resolutions, Oslo agreements or the “road map” that Bush and Blair were telling us was the only way forward not long ago.

Olmert bleats that he has no Palestinian “partner” to negotiate with. But he has. Olmert claims that his plan will safeguard Israel’s “security”. But it won’t.

Israeli leaders down the years have repeatedly spurned the concept of a comprehensive and lasting peace with the Palestinians and the rest of the Arab world in exchange for the elusive dream of total victory. Armed to the teeth by imperialism their armies have dealt savage blows against the Arabs. Tens of thousands of Arabs have died in the wars and confrontations that have wracked the Middle East since the State of Israel was established in 1948. But so have many Israelis.

The terror of the oppressor has spawned the terror of the oppressed. The Palestinian determination to fight tooth and nail for their rights by whatever means possible continues to frustrate the Zionist dream of a land without Arabs and a Middle East that revolves around Tel Aviv.

The basis for a just peace has long been accepted by the international community. Past UN resolutions have called on Israel to withdraw from all the occupied territories seized in 1967. The UN has upheld the right of the Palestinians to establish their own independent state on the West Bank and Gaza Strip and recognised the right of the Palestinian refugees to return to their homes or receive appropriate compensation, if they so wish, from the Israeli authorities.

The Palestinian problem is not insoluble but it can only be resolved when the legitimate rights of the Palestinians are resolved. That’s the bitter equation that Olmert must accept if he wants peace.

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