Afghanistan

The Weekly Worker Group's (CPGB)Turkish Mentors

It will be helpful first to outline the general ideas that formed the basis of the peculiar variant of Stalinism propounded by the group which today calls itself the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and publishes the Weekly Worker. The group was originally called The Leninist. All its distinctive ideas on Stalinism were picked up from a faction of the Communist Party of Turkey, Workers' Voice, which separated from the Moscow-recognised party at the beginning of the 1980s. Its views were put out in English-language pamphlets and an English-language monthly, "Turkey Today". Workers' Voice...

Under the sign of the oxymoron

The Weekly Worker group/Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) originated as a small, still ultra-Stalinist, offshoot from the New Communist Party (NCP), which was a stone-age Stalinist breakaway from the real CPGB in 1977. They were called "Tankies" because, as their critics justly said of them, they believed in a "Russian Tanks Road to Socialism". The Tankies first emerged as a distinct segment of the Communist Party in August 1968, when they loudly supported the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia to put down Alexander Dubcek's attempt to create "socialism with a human face" there. The CP...

Introduction. Afghanistan and the left

The Afghan Stalinist coup d'état of April (Saur) 1978 had enormous consequences. The "Great Saur Revolution" led directly to the Russian invasion of Afghanistan at Christmas, 1979. That in turn led to the Second Cold War. The USSR got drawn into what was soon accurately being described as "Russia's Vietnam War". In the nine years of that war, perhaps one and a half million Afghans - about one in 12 of Afghanistan's population - died. Six million - one in three - Afghans were driven over the borders as refugees. The prolonged war in Afghanistan helped shatter the elan and self-confidence of the...

Osama

Siddiq Barmak's film In the bare, shattered world of Afghanistan under Taliban rule, women can no longer work. A doctor, whose husband was killed in the Russian war, realises the only way she will feed herself and her mother is by dressing her 12-year-old daughter as a boy and sending her out to earn money. This is the deceptively simple premiss of Osama. The first full-length film to be made in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban is an intensely powerful drama. It is at once a stunning piece of film-making and an important political document. It's possible to read newspaper reports and...

New constitution for Afghanistan: Women and the warlords

By Cathy Nugent "The recovery of Afghanistan must entail a restoration of the rights of Afghan women… The rights of women in Afghanistan will not be negotiable." Colin Powell "Do not try to put yourself on a level with men. Even God has not given you equal rights because under his decision two women are counted as equal to one man." Sighbatullah, Chair of Afghanistan's Constitutional Loya Jirga On Sunday 4 January Afghanistan's Loya Jirga (a part elected, part appointed national decision-making body) agreed a new constitution for the country. Essentially a deal has been struck between the US...

Afghanistan: "constitutionalising" the warlords' rule?

By Cathy Nugent On 10 December a "loya jirga", a 500-strong assembly of regional and other delegates, will meet in Afghanistan to discuss a new constitution for the country. The draft constitution is a sketchy document which seems to propose a hybrid state, incorporating a model of an Islamic Republic - "there will be no laws contrary to Islam" - alongside a bourgeois democracy, with a bourgeois rule of law. There will be a bicameral legislature with enormous powers for the President. Nowhere in the document are explicit equal rights for women written down. Once (or perhaps, if) the...

Admitting you're wrong is possible

Rouge, the paper of the French Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire, has just published a special supplement to celebrate their 2000th issue. It is unashamedly a celebration, not a rigorous accounting. Even there, though, the LCR, influenced by a Trotskyist tradition, feels a need to acknowledge major errors. The biggest? “That on Afghanistan in 1980, when we rejected a campaign for the withdrawal of Soviet troops for fear of playing into the hands of imperialism... This errancy... revealed more profound failings, and the difficulty of taking account of the changes in the world situation”. They...

CPGB/WW: Never Stalinist?

Before responding at any length, best wait until Mark Fischer gets further in his promised series of articles . By then WW readers should have an idea of his substantive arguments, and, with luck, sight of the "substantial piece" by Sean Matgamna which he is "centrally" responding to, Sean's "Critical Notes" , rather than just quotations filleted so as to "prove" that the AWL misrepresents CPGB/WW politics. One point, however, cries out for immediate comment: Stalinism. In WW 403 (11/10/01) Mark himself proudly introduced a reprint of an article published in 1982 on the April 1978 Stalinist...

Afghanistan's peace that isn't

By Nicole Ashford On 8 September, 15 people died in fighting in the Afghan city of Khost. Precisely why they died is not clear. We do know the fighting had to do with a dispute involving a local warlord, Padshah Khan Zadran. One report suggests he feels aggrieved that he did not receive sufficient credit for his role in bringing down the Taliban. This is Afghanistan at peace. Three days earlier, President Hamid Karzai survived an assassination attempt by a margin of six inches. There are suggestions that the attack was masterminded by the warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a former Prime Minister...

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