Iraq: Victory to the Popular Insurrection against the Government of Abdel Mahdi!
Build Popular Councils! For a Workers and Poor Peasants Government!
Statement of the Revolutionary Communist International Tendency (RCIT), 04 October 2019, www.thecommunists.net
1. The Iraqi workers and youth are rising up against the government of Abdel Mahdi. The regime is trying to smash the protests with utmost brutality. After three days of protests, at least 44 people have been killed and more than 1,000 have been injured. The largest number of casualties occurred in the southern city of Nasiriya, where 18 people were killed, followed by the capital Baghdad where the death toll stood at 16. No doubt, a revolutionary situation has opened up in Iraq where the popular masses are fighting for power.
2. The workers and youth are protesting against an utterly corrupt and reactionary regime which is serving only the interests of the small Iraqi elite. While Iraq is one of the countries with the largest oil reserves in the world, the popular masses are living in misery. People are suffering from water shortages, power cuts and state corruption. Youth unemployment is about 25%. At the same time the Iraqi government is vacillating between U.S. imperialism and the Iranian regional power – both enemies of the people.
3. The Revolutionary Communist International Tendency (RCIT) sends its warmest greetings to the heroic brothers and sisters in Iraq! Your struggle is our struggle; your struggle is the struggle of all oppressed people in the Arab world as well as in Iran!
4. We call the Iraqi workers and popular masses to continue and deepen the struggle! In our opinion it is urgent that they organize themselves in popular councils at work places, neighborhoods, universities and villages. Likewise it is urgent to build self-defense committees defending the masses against the police and army. The people should overthrow the whole ruling elite by staging a nation-wide, indefinite, general strike leading to a popular insurrection. The goal must be the creation of a workers and poor peasants government based on popular committees of action. The insurgent masses should convoke a Revolutionary Constituent Assembly.
5. An authentic government of the workers and popular masses should nationalize the oil industry, banks and big companies under workers control and without any compensation of the capitalists! It should organize a public employment program under control of the workers and popular organization. Such a program could abolish unemployment and poverty and help reconstructing the country.
6. The popular insurrection has become such a massive force that various bourgeois and petty-bourgeois forces are now claiming to support their demands. Among them are the petty-bourgeois nationalist and Islamist movement around the powerful Shia leader Muqtada al-Sadr as well as the most important religious Shia authority, the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. These are sure signs how strong the movement has become! However, we warn that these leaders will try to utilize this movement only in order to replace the current government with one of them. But no one should have any illusions: these figures have no interest to eradicate misery from which the masses are suffering!
7. The RCIT considers the current events as a sure sign that the Iraqi people have joined now the second wave of the Arab Revolution. The Great Arab Revolution finds its heroic expressions in the ongoing liberation struggles of the Syrian people against the tyrant Assad, of the people in Sudan and Algeria, of the Egypt people fighting against the tyrant Sisi, of the Libyan people against General Haftar, of the Yemeni people against the Saudi invasion, and now the Iraqi people. The Syrian people demonstrating today on the streets of Idlib have waved the flags of Egypt and Iraq, expressing their support for their brothers and sisters in these countries. They chanted that the struggle for freedom and against tyranny is one and the same – against Assad the butcher, Sisi the killed as well as against Abdel Mahdi who is now slaughtering the Iraqi people! We repeat what we stated recently in another RCIT statement: Revolutionaries must support these struggles and advocate uniting them into a single Intifada of the entire Middle East – from Baghdad and Nasiriya, Algiers, Khartoum, Idlib, Tripoli, Sanaʽa, Gaza, Cairo to Teheran!
8. Most importantly, liberation fighters should work together in building revolutionary parties – in combination with building a Revolutionary World Party! We urge activists to unite on the basis of a program of socialist liberation and solidarity with the struggles of workers and oppressed in other countries. Join the RCIT in tackling this great task!
* Build popular councils at work places, neighborhoods, universities and villages!
* Create self-defense committees!
* Organize a general strike! Victory to the popular insurrection!
* For a Revolutionary Constituent Assembly!
* For a workers and poor peasants government!
* Forward to the second wave of the Arab Revolution! Long live the socialist world revolution!
* For a revolutionary party as part of a revolutionary world party!
International Bureau of the RCIT
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We refer readers to our website where the RCIT has published numerous booklets, statements and articles the revolutionary process and counter-revolutionary setbacks in Egypt and the Arab world. They can be viewed here: https://www.thecommunists.net/worldwide/africa-and-middle-east/. In particular we draw attention to the following documents:
Yossi Schwartz: On the Background of the Popular Uprising of the Iraqi People, 04.10.2019, https://www.thecommunists.net/worldwide/africa-and-middle-east/background-of-popular-uprising-of-the-iraqi-people/
RCIT: Iraq: Long Live the Popular Insurrection! Bring Down the Government of Haider al-Abadi! Build Popular Councils! For a Workers and Poor Peasants Government! 17 July 2018, https://www.thecommunists.net/worldwide/africa-and-middle-east/long-live-the-popular-insurrection-in-iraq/
RCIT: Egypt: Bring Down the Tyrant Sisi! Spontaneous mass protests shatter the military dictatorship of General Sisi, 23.09.2019, https://www.thecommunists.net/worldwide/africa-and-middle-east/egypt-bring-down-the-tyrant-sisi/
RCIT: Yemen: Another Humiliating Blow for the Saudi Aggressors! Yemeni popular resistance eliminates three pro-Saudi military brigades, 02.10.2019, https://www.thecommunists.net/worldwide/africa-and-middle-east/yemen-another-humiliating-blow-for-the-saudi-aggressors/