Newsgroup: it.politica.pds
Titolo: "Rifondazione" in Iraq

Ecco alcune notizie dal NYT, che forse possono interessare (e persino
divertire) qualcuno.
Bye bye, Albert
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Communist Party re-emerges in Iraq 
Dexter Filkins 
The New York Times 
Saturday, April 26, 2003 
Leaders set up headquarters in Baghdad 
BAGHDAD   Among the myriad political parties blooming across this
revivified capital, perhaps the most unlikely one is the bearer of the
hammer and sickle.
The Iraqi Communist Party has set up its headquarters in an old army
building here, emerging from decades of repression that sent many of its
members to the gulag or the gallows.
With a reworked set of principles and a renewed sense of hope, the party
leaders are taking their case to the Iraqi people once more, in a
political environment more open than any they have ever known.
But after years of outrunning the secret police, the men and women of
Marx are now confronting a more prosaic concern: whether anyone is
willing to listen to them.
"I think our time has come," said Zakiya Halifa Zaidi, the
oft-imprisoned grand dame of the party, a 70-year-old communist since
she first started passing out party literature as a child.
"The Iraqi people know we always fought for our principles and that we
always fought for the good of the common man, despite the ferocious
repression we faced," she said.
Zaidi is not alone in believing that her party may finally have its
moment in power. The rebirth of the Communist Party is part of a
extraordinary flowering of political activity that has taken place in
the two weeks since Saddam Hussein fled, in a country where until only
weeks ago the mere discussion of political alternatives could earn one a
sentence in jail.
Most of the groups that have recently opened offices in Baghdad claim an
ethnic, tribal or religious base: the Assyrian Democratic Movement, for
example, or the Kurdish Democratic Party, or Al Dawa, a fundamentalist
organization of Shiites. The communists are one of the few who claim to
speak for all Iraqis.
Like the Communist Party, many of the groups announcing their presence
have an intimate knowledge of the apparatus of state repression. The
communists were harassed often during the years between the country's
independence in 1932 and the ascension of Saddam to the presidency in
1979. In one especially brutal interlude, members of the Ba'ath Party
murdered dozens, and possibly hundreds, of party members following the
Ba'ath takeover in 1963. After Saddam assumed the top post in Iraq,
Communist Party members say his attempts to crush them were unrelenting.
A handful of dedicated members like Zaidi continued to nurture the
party's ideals through the worst years of Saddam's rule. They met in
cells, used code names and wore disguises to hide from the secret
police. Zaidi, a modern woman whose face was known across Baghdad's
cultural scene, used to wear an abaya, the head-to-toe black gown worn
by traditional Iraqi woman, and a veil, before spiriting off to one of
her secret meetings.
"I was under very strict surveillance, the police watched me very
closely," Zaidi said. "But once I got away, I had 40 different houses
that I could go and hide in."
Zaidi's story is sufficient to stand in for the history of her party.
Seated in a friend's apartment in one of Baghdad's sprawling apartment
complexes, Zaidi recalled the first party activities she undertook as a
10-year-old girl, passing out leaflets and announcing meetings. The
party, she said, was outlawed in those days, and one of her clearest
memories is of carrying party literature on a small boat across the
Tigris River as the police closed in.
In 1950, Zaidi was arrested and jailed for illegal party activities; she
was released in 1958 when the monarchy was overthrown. Later, after the
Ba'ath Party took power in 1963, she was detained and tortured. What she
recalls, she said, is hanging from the ceiling of her jail, arms cuffed
behind her, for 19 days, and the electrical shocks she was given during
her interrogation.
"I was subjected to all kinds of torture," Zaidi said. "They shocked me
with electricity, they beat me with cables. For 19 days, the whole time
it was torture."
As a result of that repression, the Communist Party here became a kind
of catch-all opposition group, one whose reputation rested more on its
resistance to Saddam's regime than its ideas for managing political
power and national wealth.
Now that it is allowed to operate freely, the party that ostensibly
stood for a workers' revolution and a dictatorship of the proletariat is
a much more ideologically loose-knit affair, with its leaders pushing
such un-Marxian proposals as elected Parliaments and a free press.
"We renovated the ideology," said Jassim Helfi, a member of the party's
Central Committee. "The events of 1991 taught us that there was
incomplete democracy. There were many failures and mistakes."
Not everyone in the Iraqi Communist Party is in touch with the times. At
the party headquarters Friday, one of the leaders delivered a speech
that could have been drafted in the 1930s. The man spoke of the struggle
between capitalist and communists blocs, and between the colonial powers
and the people rising against them.
"We have revived Marxism for Iraq," the man said, speaking into a
bullhorn before a group of about 100 mostly curious Iraqis who had
wandered in off the street.
Indeed, some of the old symbols of the communist vision have taken up
positions in the party headquarters. One of them, a pewter statue of
Lenin, the leader of the Russian Revolution, stood proudly on a
reception desk in the main lobby.
"It's for the old guys," Helfi shrugged. "They think I have deviated
from the party line."
-- 
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 Communist Party re-emerges in Iraq 
And are promptly excluded by the Americans!
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http://www.cbc.ca/stories/2003/04/30/iraq_communists030430
Communists not invited to Iraqi leadership meeting
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Dopotutto, i Comunisti Iraqeni:
- Erano la ragione per la quale gli USA hanno appoggiato l'ascesa di Saddam
- Erano l'unico partito che si e' mostrato capace di mantenere  
  un'organizzazione clandestina
- Si sono schierati contro la guerra (pur auspicando la caduta di Saddam come
  un'esito positivo)
-------------------
GT

On 1 May 2003 10:42:05 -0700, 
luno...@hotmail.com
 (Giorgio Torrieri)
wrote:

Nel frattempo qualcuno li avrà avvisati della caduta del muro e della
fine dell'Urss?
Leftorium, Il blog Riformista
http://clik.to/leftorium