The AWTWNS packet for the week of 26 April 2010 contains two articles. They may be reproduced or used in any way, in whole or in part, as long as they are credited. To subscribe or for back issues, go to www.aworldtowin. Write to us – send us information, comments, criticisms, suggestions and articles: news@aworldtowin. - India: Heightened repression against opponents of Operation Green Hunt - Iran: "Another look at the present situation and our tasks" India: Heightened repression against opponents of Operation Green Hunt 26 April 2010. A World to Win News Service. As part of Operation Green Hunt, the Indian government is trying to instil fear among Indians inside and outside the areas where they intend to clear out the Maoists. Progressive forces of a variety of political opinions who have expressed opposition to this operation face threats, intimidation and arrests. Among them is the well-known author and activist Arundhati Roy, who created a major stir with her article "Walking with the Comrades" published online at Dawn.com. Launched late last year, Operation Green Hunt is an unprecedented military offensive against the Communist Party of India (Maoist) and the masses hungry for radical change who make up the army they lead. This war is being waged in the jungles and forests that are home to the tribal peoples known as Adivasis in central and eastern India (Chhattisgarh, Jharkand, Orissa, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra and West Bengal). For generations the Adivasis have had to fight to maintain use of this land, even though the Indian Constitution supposedly guarantees their rights to it. Laden with mineral resources, the land is coveted by national and international corporate exploiters. In Dangs, Gujarat, several people have been arrested recently based on information from police in the state of Orissa. Among them was Avinash Kulkarni, a prominent follower of Mahatma Gandhi's philosophy and forest rights activist taken into custody 26 March. He was preparing for a People's Tribunal, a long-standing method for the basic masses who have no recourse to the legal system to expose government crimes against them. Kulkarni has been charged with "waging war against the state", and organising and participating in "unlawful" assemblies of people in Dangs and Surat. Associates say Kulkarni has been arrested to "create a possibility of dividing" the Adivasi Maha Sabha (AMS) that he leads, an alliance of 40 tribal rights organisations comprising some 30,000 tribal people, part of a robust movement in Gujarat's tribal areas seeking the implementation of the Forest Rights Act. The police say that Kulkarni was involved in organising a Maoist rebellion in the south of Gujarat. On the morning of 7 April, a contingent of 25 police arrested activist Kirity Roy for "impersonating the judiciary". His "crimes" include trudging the interiors and borders of West Bengal, fact-finding and documenting extra-judicial killings, custodial death, rape, mysterious disappearances and police torture. Roy was elected a board member of Amnesty International and an NGO representative at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva. In June 2008 he helped organize People's Tribunals in nine states across India, as part of a National Project on Preventing Torture in India. In Kolkata, 82 brave women and men told their stories to a local Tribunal. There was the family of Santosh Mondal. The police chased him for being a smuggler. To escape he dived into a lake. The family says the police went after him in a speedboat and the propeller blades killed him. There was Radha Rani Ari – gang-raped by parliamentary party goons in Nandigram village in 2007. She insists on justice, but no police station will register her complaint. The Jawaharlal Nehru University administration in Delhi released a circular on 23 March stating unequivocally that seminars, public meetings, film or documentary screenings, and exhibitions would be allowed only if they do not "compromise national integration, harmony and security". On 9 April, a cultural programme was organised by the JNU Forum Against War on People, a broad platform of students and organisations opposed to Operation Green Hunt. A right-wing student group attacked the programme and called for Operation Green Hunt to be implemented at the University. These reactionaries destroyed equipment and threw stones. Several injured progressive students had to be hospitalised. Although the scheduled screening of the Costa-Gavras film Missing (about the U.S.-backed 1973 coup in Chile) could not take place, the rest of the programme did. During this attack, security guards stood by silently and observed. The administration excused this inaction, saying that the students against Operation Green Hunt had not obtained prior permission for their programme. Controversy rages throughout India around Arundhati Roy's stand with the Maoist and Advisais. Chattisgarh police are considering bringing charges against her in connection with some passages in her "Walking with the Comrades" that allegedly violate the Chhattisgarh Special Public Security Act of 2005. An individual legal complaint against her has already been lodged. It states that Arundhati's essay "sought to not only 'glorify' the Maoists but also denigrate the country's established system, including the judiciary." In a hostile interview with Roy 16 April on CNN-IBN, Sagarika Ghose baits her, demanding to know if Roy still upholds "the tone of sympathy" with the Maoist cause she expressed in her essay after a guerrilla ambush of an Operation Green Hunt military unit in Dantewada which led to the death of 76 government troops. Ghose asks why she is "the writer India loves to hate." She replies that it is the people who have a stake in the things she opposes in her writing who hate her, not the people who are the victims. While Roy carefully upholds her advocacy of non-violence, she also points out, "Hundreds of people who are not known have been picked up and jailed. There is a whole bandwidth of people's movement from the non-violent ones outside the forests to the armed struggle inside the forests which have actually held off this corporate assault, which I have to say has not happened in anywhere else in the world." -end item- Iran: "Another look at the present situation and our tasks" 26 April 2010. A World to Win News Service. Following are excerpts from the article "Another look at the present situation and our tasks" from issue no. 48 of Haghighat, organ of the Communist Party of Iran (Marxist-Leninist- Some partial displacements in driving forces and contradictions From the beginning of the recent uprising, two contradictions have been at work, driving developments and intertangling with one another, giving rise to the unprecedented legitimacy crisis of the Islamic Republic of Iran: the contradiction between the majority of people and the whole system, and the contradiction among the ruling factions. On the one hand the cracks and divisions among the top officials provided the opportunity for the volcano of the people's rage to overflow, and on the other the reactionary character of the contradiction among the ruling factions has had a limiting effect on the people's uprising. An important section of masses sought to deal with the Islamic Republic as a whole political system, but the leaders of the "Green wave" (the Islamic colour green is the symbol of the ousted faction) wanted to score some points for themselves through negotiations and control and restrict the masses. Of course the outcome of this political/class confrontation has not been decided yet. But the genie is out of the bottle and no one can easily stuff it back in. In fact, as the people's struggle developed, it thwarted most of the rival reactionaries' political calculations and considerations. The uprising of the masses went beyond what many people thought possible and advanced quickly. It reached a peak during the Ashura (26 December) protests, when people all over the world recognized the offensive character of those events. Since then the Iranian political landscape and the relationships between the people and the rulers and regime factions have undergone dramatic changes. These developments were brought about by the people's struggle and sacrifice. Clearly the situation in the country cannot go back to what it was in the period before the uprising. Iran's rulers are more aware of this than anyone else. These changes have become major challenges to the Islamic political system's survival, further intensifying the contradictions among different factions of the regime regarding the issue of how to rule. If at the beginning the interweaving of the contradictions prevented many observers from seeing the real dynamics of the people's struggle, in the process of the last few months not only has the main basis of the people's revolutionary uprising come more to the surface, but also there has been some shifting of the objective contradictions. To a large degree the "Green" leaders have lost control of the people, and the contradiction between the people and the whole ruling system has come to overshadow the contradiction between regime factions. These leaders now fear the people more than they fear the ruling faction. This can be seen in the reaction of the Green leaders after the Ashura struggle. Their fear of the people led them to the negotiation table and to retreat from their initial demands. The tactics they resorted to in the 9 February protests [when they tried to claim their "share" of the celebration of the anniversary of the founding of the Islamic Revolution] were a concentrated expression of this fear. The situation is such that the two factions cannot cool down the steam boiler of the contradictions within the system factions and the whole society. But in order to reduce the people's rage, they have eased their own differences temporarily. Mir-Hussein Moussavi and Mehdi Karoubi [the leaders of the ousted faction] have to try to dial down the people's movement and at the same time show that they are with the people. They are aware of the danger that they might lose their support from the people, and they know that without the people's presence the ruling faction will not give a damn about them. This is the contradiction that the Green leaders have confronted from the beginning. Now it has increased their political volatility and created divisions among them. This in turn has influenced the situation and will prevent any quick resolution of their contradiction with the ruling faction. The momentum and power of the people's struggle and its impact Whether or not the people's uprising can withstand the compromises of the present leadership and go beyond these reactionary- At the heart of all these plans is the rescue of the state machinery and the creation of a transitional government. All the bourgeois forces are looking for a form that would enable them to save the state machine from the masses' struggles and at the same time offer some sort of "change" to keep the masses quiet. Certainly there is no easy plan that can resolve the ruling power's present crisis. The international scene has become more complicated because of the contention among the imperialist powers (in particular between the U.S. and China and Russia), and the differences within the U.S. ruling class on how to deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran and its project of achieving nuclear technology. In the internal theatre, factors such as the limits to the ruling faction's ability to hold out in the face of the people's struggle, the fear of other bourgeois forces (including the reformists inside the regime and the religious nationalists) and their tendency to compromise and seek advantage, and some weaknesses within the people's ranks, all make it difficult to predict where the situation is heading. However we can expect to witness other surprising and explosive events. The main problem faced by the uprising is the lack of revolutionary leadership and revolutionary organisation. The frustration that many people felt regarding the lack of success [in disrupting the regime's celebrations as well as waging their own struggle] on 9 February is an expression of those shortcomings. Today how quickly and how powerfully the people's movement develops depends on the resolution of this problem. Despite the strength of the spontaneous uprising of the people, it will not be able to advance decisively if it remains spontaneous – if is not armed with revolutionary leadership and organisation. As long as this problem is not resolved by creating and strengthening a communist leadership, it will play a negative role and prolong the present situation through ebbs and flows. The contradictory role of the international factors in the situation From the beginning international factors have played an important role in shaping the Islamic Republic's political crisis. The regime's structural crisis has been worsened by the international economic crisis. The mutual contention among the world powers in their approach to Iran and the tendency of the rival regime factions to support different imperialist powers has greatly increased the volatility of the situation. The people's uprising took place at a time when U.S. policies towards Iran had undergone important changes. Barack Obama, with his emphasis on negotiations with the Islamic regime, had put forward a different strategy and tactics than George Bush. This policy intensified the contention between the two regime factions and pushed the Ahmadinejad- U.S. imperialism was forced to take the people's struggle into account in its policies toward the Islamic Republic. The U.S. seems happy that the Islamic Republic, as a fundamentalist regime, has lost its strength and unity, but they are not for its complete collapse. In the present situation in the world and the region they don't need a weak, incapable and unreliable regime. The U.S. government under no circumstances encourages an uncontrollable explosion of the masses. This is even more true in Iran where communists have enjoyed a certain mass support historically and have been able to influence the mass movements. The U.S. imperialists want to resolve the problem of Iran's future regime in light of their strategic and long-term regional goals. Today the U.S. is trying to advance these goals mainly through influencing Iran's internal affairs (rather than the military option). Thus it has supported the prospect of a more moderate Islamic regime with the Greens, while at the same time seeking to influence the ruling faction through the use of various levers such as negotiations and sanctions, and, on some occasions, military threats through Israel. However the U.S.'s ability to act faces obstacles beyond Iran. The general situation is decided by the broader context of contention among the big powers, in particular between the U.S., Russia, and China and to some degree Europe. In determining its policies toward the Islamic Republic, the U.S. ruling class has to continuously wrestle with the problems that exist in that context. That is why there are different views within the U.S. ruling class on how to deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran, instead of a united policy... The most important political task: building a new pole Despite the blows that the people's uprising inflicted on the Islamic Republic and despite the fact that the reactionary goals of the Green leaders have been exposed for many of the masses, this spontaneous uprising suffers from great limitations. It is still trapped within the bounds of the regime's internal contradictions. As long as the people's uprising is mainly polarised on the basis of the contradiction between the two factions, the result will be a waste of the people's energy. The task of the revolutionary communists is not just to support the uprising or even to seek to radicalise it within its present framework. Rather, the revolutionary communists must mainly go against the tide and try to transform that overall framework. To the degree that people have a clear and deeper understanding of demands such as "Separation of the state and religion," the "Liberation and equality of women" and the "Elimination of the special oppressive institutions" Today the main obstacle in the way of the development of the struggle, including the forms of struggle, is the class limitations of the policies that lead the uprising – i.e the consciously reactionary Green leaders. Without challenging these policies, and without talking to the people about the fundamental orientation that the uprising should take and the real potential that it has, the revolutionary communists cannot correctly carry out their tasks in this situation... It is only by putting forward proletarian revolution as the only real scientific and correct solution that we can offer a bright future. It is impossible to repolarise the political scene without bravely and continuously putting forward communism Without broad communist propaganda and the propagation of communist views, it is not possible to really polarise the current movement. The situation is such that introducing a revolutionary alternative and shedding light on the specific features and overall character of the future society have become the most burning questions of the day. What kind of state power can we rely on to solve the problems of this society? How can we destroy the old state and replace it with a new state? Under what kind of leadership can this be possible? These are the questions that have been raised during the recent people's uprising, more than at any time before, and they deserve answers. From this point of view, raising discussions such as on "our state and their state" is an important condition for politically intervening in the situation, winning over the advanced in society and creating public opinion in a broad scale. To do this it is essential that the communists bring forward the achievements of the 20th century proletarian revolutions and a critical summation of the positive and negative experiences, arming themselves with a new scientific communist synthesis, developing it and calling for a revolution in the present round of struggle. The danger that threatens the present movement does not come only from the reactionary Green leadership. Bourgeois-democrati It is true that Iranian society cannot develop without carrying out democratic and anti-imperialist tasks, and this is the point of view from which the overthrow of the Islamic Republic should be seen. But the communists do this in their own way, not on the basis of the old bourgeois-democrati The present balance of power is often presented as a reason to give in to today's bourgeois-democrati This way of acting and thinking is an expression of retreat in the face of being small. Being small is a contradiction that the communists today are grappling with. However this contradiction cannot be resolved by compromising our goals and adjusting to minimalist programmes. It can be resolved only by persisting in these goals and our revolutionary orientation and having strategic confidence in them… What is meant by communist leadership and a communist party is not the introduction of another political group alongside the existing ones. It is a deep understanding of the role and leadership of the communist party that must be introduced. And it is necessary to have a serious political centre. The people's understanding of the party and the necessity for the party's activity must be heightened so that the people require such a party to be built up. For this, what is required is a profoundly materialist understanding of the necessity and the role of the political party for the seizure of political power and throughout the period after that, all through the period of transition from socialism to communism… In the present situation, only by vigorously putting forward communism and aiming for the repolarisation of the uprising can we organise and strengthen the party's forces, organise and broaden the fighting fronts and reach a position where we can talk about the start of an armed revolutionary struggle for the seizure of power. - end item- |
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