Tag: Middle East

Turkey faces the unintended consequences of its regional meddling
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Turkey faces the unintended consequences of its regional meddling

[From A World To Win News Service.]

24 September 2012. A World to Win News Service. Turkey is playing a central role in the U.S.-led campaign to bring down Bashar al-Assad. Now it is being confronted with the possibility that instead of strengthening Turkey’s influence in the region, the weakening of the Syrian regime may create the most serious challenge the Turkish government headed by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has faced so far.

 Until only recently the two regimes were close allies. One of the points of unity between Assad’s Baathist Party and Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) was their opposition to the Kurdish movement in both countries. Not only do Kurds in the two countries have strong historical ties, a significant number of Kurds in Syria are from families that fled repression in Turkey, and the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party), though based in Turkey, includes many Kurds born in Syria. Now  Assad is “playing the Kurdish card”,  trying to use the Kurds to threaten Turkey.

 Following are excerpts from a lengthy article in issue 60 of Haghighat, the publication of the Communist Party of Iran (Marxist-Leninist-Maoist) entitled “The development of Syria’s civil war and the possibility of its spread to neighbouring countries, and the perspective of the formation of a state of Kurdistan”.

Women fighters from a Kurdish militia at a roadblock in North-East Syria.

The civil war between the two reactionary sides in Syria has gone through another turning point. The Bashar al-Assad regime has pulled back its troops from five Kurdish cities in northern Syria and largely left control of this region to Kurdish forces, especially the Democratic Union Party (PYD), a Syrian Kurdish organization linked to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) based in Turkey. 

 Turkey has threatened to attack Syria militarily in response to PKK attacks launched from Kurdish areas in Syria. In mid-August U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton went to Turkey to review possible scenarios for regime change in Syria. U.S. officials reaffirmed Turkey’s importance as a “strategic partner in the region”. One of the most important agreements is to leave the key institutions and military apparatus of the Syrian state intact. Continue reading “Turkey faces the unintended consequences of its regional meddling”

The Imperialist Intrigues Against Libya
RI Articles & Statements

The Imperialist Intrigues Against Libya

Expose and oppose all designs against the Libyan People

Revolutionary Initiative (Canada)
Statement from the General Secretary
March 13, 2011

Gaddafi’s relationship to imperialism

In stark contrast to the manner in which the Western imperialists have responded to developments across North Africa and the Middle East over the last two months, for the armed opposition in Libya they have been only too ready to support the anti-Gaddafi movement. For all their clamoring about the necessity for “peaceful transitions” where the masses threatened their clients in Tunisia, Egypt, and elsewhere, the imperialists have abandoned their pacifist demagogy when it has come to Libya. NATO is pushing for a military assault against Libya that could range in devastation anywhere from NATO’s operation against Kosovo in 1999 to the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Continue reading “The Imperialist Intrigues Against Libya”

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Alain Badiou – Tunisia, Egypt: The universal reach of popular uprisings

The wind of the east carries away the wind of the west

Until when the idle and crepuscular West, the “international community” of those who still believe themselves to be the rulers of the world, will continue to give lesson in good management and good behavior to the rest of the world? Is it not laughable to see some well-paid and well-fed intellectuals, retreating soldiers of the capital-parliamentarism that serves us as a moth-eaten Paradise, offering their services to the awe-inspiring Tunisian and Egyptian people, in order teach these savages the ABC of “democracy?”

What pathetic persistence of colonial arrogance! In the situation of political misery that we’ve been living for the last three decades, is not evident to surmise that it is us who have everything to learn from the popular uprisings of the moment?

Don’t we have the urgency to give a close look to everything, that, over there, made possible, by collective action, the overthrow of oligarchic and corrupt governments, who — or maybe especially — stood in a humiliating position of servitude to the Western world?

Yes, we should be the students of these movements, and not their stupid professors. For they give life, with the genius of their own inventions, to those same political principles that for some time now the dominant powers try to convince us of their obsoleteness. And in particular the principle that Marat never stopped recalling: when it is a matter of liberty, equality, emancipation, we all have to join the popular upheavals.

Continue reading “Alain Badiou – Tunisia, Egypt: The universal reach of popular uprisings”

RI Articles & Statements

North Africa and the Middle East: Support the revolts and prepare for revolution

A statement from the General Secretary of Revolutionary Initiative (Canada)
February 14, 2011.

When the young Tunisian produce merchat Mohamed Bouazizi set himself ablaze after having his livelihood taken from him by Tunisian authorities, he sparked a rebellion amongst a stratum of youth, students, the urban unemployed, and petty-bourgeois, first in Tunisia and then all across the Arab world. But Bouazizi was himself merely a rallying point, the final trickle of indignation sufficient to allow the fears of Tunisians to be overcome by their yearning for liberation. The Tunisian revolt, followed by the flight of Ben Ali on January 14, 2011, emboldened the Arab masses to emulate Tunisia’s example, igniting all of North Africa and the Middle East in rebellion.

The domestic and international situations that have conditioned these revolts are the depressed economic conditions in most of the Arab world, subordinated as it is to the geopolitical interests and economic dictates of imperialist globalization, which includes the defense of Zionist aggression and expansionism. The protests and rebellions throughout the Middle East – from Tunisia, to Algeria, to Egypt, to Jordan, to Yemen, to Gaza, and beyond – have been triggered by decades of pro-imperialist, feudal, dictatorial, pro-Israel, and bankrupt antipeople policies. As the Arab revolts unfolded, the news outlet al-Jazeera began to release the leaked “Palestine Papers”, thousands of diplomatic documents from the past decade of the Israel-Palestine conflict. A brief glance at only a few of the thousands of documents reveal unequivocally how treachourous and pro-Israeli is the Palestinian leadership of Mahmoud Abbas and the entire Palestinian Authority. These documents have offered the Arab masses and the whole world yet another opportunity to observe how U.S. imperialism, Israel, and comprador ruling classes like Mahmoud Abbas and Co., conspire against the interests of the masses in the geopolitical and economic interests of imperialism. Continue reading “North Africa and the Middle East: Support the revolts and prepare for revolution”

Reposted Content, RI Articles & Statements

International communist movement led by Marxism-Leninism-Maoism greets with joy and favor the uprisings of the popular masses in Tunisia and Egypt

Party of the Committees to Support Resistance – for Communism (CARC) – Italy
Via Tanaro, 7 – 20128 Milano – Tel/Fax 02.26306454
e-mail: resistenza@carc.it – website: www.carc.it

National Direction – International Relations Department
Tel. +39 0226306454 – e-mail: carc.ri@libero.it
02/02/2011

We release this stance by Communist parties, groups and organizations led by Marxism-Leninism-Maoism about the popular masses who rebel in Tunisia, Egypt and in the other countries where they soon will begin the same great and heroic enterprise, inviting to subscribe it.

CARC Party – Int. Dept.

The international communist movement led by Marxism-Leninism-Maoism greets with joy and favor the uprisings of the popular masses in Tunisia and Egypt that are overthrowing the regimes that oppress their country. They are anti-popular and tyrannical regimes, heirs of the old colonial system that has now worn neocolonial clothes. They are regimes slaves of U.S. imperialism, of the International Community that the U.S. government presides over, of  the Zionist groups in Israel who are the colonial armed wing of the American imperialist bourgeoisie in Palestine and in the Middle East, of the world imperialist system.

Let their revolt be the dawn that heralds a new world!

Continue reading “International communist movement led by Marxism-Leninism-Maoism greets with joy and favor the uprisings of the popular masses in Tunisia and Egypt”