[lbo-talk] Iraqi Communist party

Michael Pugliese michael098762001 at earthlink.net
Tue Feb 1 10:42:17 PST 2005


http://news.ft.com/cms/s/a4cb8110-73aa-11d9-b705-00000e2511c8,dwp_uuid=c1a5b968-e1ed-11d7-81c6-0820abe49a01.html via http://www.labourfriendsofiraq.org.uk/ Communists back from the wilderness By William Wallis in Basra Published: January 31 2005 17:18 | Last updated: January 31 2005 17:18

A quarter of a century after Saddam Hussein executed its leaders and drove their comrades underground or into exile the Iraqi Communist party has resurfaced and looks set to make a respectable showing once votes are counted in Sunday's elections.

The party has attempted to mount a secular challenge to the Islamists who dominate the main coalition appealing to the Shia vote in the south. In doing so they have rekindled a struggle for the minds of Iraq's historically marginalised Shia majority that stretches back to the middle of the last century.

There are few communist outposts left in the world after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the ICP appears no exception when it comes to the lack of a powerful sponsor or consistent ideology tailored for 21st century challenges.

Their new headquarters in Basra have been fashioned from a dilapidated building with shattered windows, bare floors and a precarious staircase.

The only adornments are along the corridor where party officials have hung hundreds of photographs of earnest-looking, former comrades. These were the Shia communists martyred in the late 1970s when Saddam Hussein was asserting absolute control over the Iraqi state.

ICP leaders who have emerged today are mostly of a generation that survived in exile or in the obscurity of a secret, fearful fraternity.

Opinion varies on how successful they might be in staging a comeback in parts of Iraq where the ICP was once the dominant political force among young Shia opposed to the Hashemite monarchy in the 1940s and 1950s.

Their campaigning in the run-up to Sunday's elections was among the most open and vigorous. However, with no accurate exit polls, it is still anybody's guess.

"They were blown away with yesterday's winds," said Ahmed Qasim, an engineering student from Basra university.

Yet 29 per cent of callers to a radio show in Baghdad on the eve of the election said they would vote Communist.

A senior British diplomat returning from the province of Dhi Qar, north of Basra last week, said it would not surprise him if the ICP picked up 20 per cent of the vote there. "Everywhere I went there seemed to be someone quoting Marx or George Bernard Shaw."

In Basra, Abbas al-Fayed, an ICP candidate, outlined the party's priorities. These include equal rights for women, a strong civil society and a decentralised state, (the latter designed to appeal to the strong leftist following in Kurdish areas of Iraq).

There were brief mutterings from one member about being "pro-business", before the campaign manager, Ahmed Khodeiya said firmly that in Communist Iraq income would be redistributed with a "tax on the rich".

Beyond that the ICP is appealing to secular Iraqis' very real fears of an emerging theocratic state where personal liberties would be restricted.

But the ICP's strongest selling point is probably its history. The party was on the receiving end of Saddam's bloodbaths, and had little association with Iran, where many of Saddam's Islamist opponents sought shelter, but communists were ruthlessly persecuted in the early years of Ayatollah Khomeini.

-- Michael Pugliese



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