The experience of the KKE from the struggle against NATO

Dear comrades,

We would like to thank the TKP for the organization of this meeting that gives us the possibility to coordinate our activity against the NATO imperialist organization which has “started its engine” and is preparing feverishly for a new imperialist war; this time against Syria and Iran.

The KKE has been struggling actively against the plans of NATO and for the disengagement of our country from these for 61 years, since the accession of Greece and Turkey in this organization. Over these years the communists in Greece participated in thousands of demonstrations against the crimes of NATO and have accumulated significant militant experience.

We will refer to some aspects of this struggle:

Some weeks ago it was made public that in Crete, where the big military base of Suda is installed, which has a particular importance for the wars in the Middle East, in the Balkans, Eastern Mediterranean and Africa, the forces of NATO decided to give a school a small refrigerator, two printers and printing paper. The KKE, the Greek Committee for Peace and Détente (EEDYE), the All Workers’ Militant Front (PAME) reacted immediately. The statement of the teachers’ section of PAME stresses that: “those who have the blood of the peoples of Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Libya, on their hands, those who are preparing for a new crime in Syria, those wolves in sheep’s clothing are presenting themselves as “saviors” of education, of our schools, of our students. Their dirty “gifts” are coming from murdered people’s, from murdered children”.

At the same time, the Communist Youth of Greece (KNE) is struggling against the research programmes which are organized in the Greek universities by NATO with the slogan “NATO out of the universities”. The forces of KNE have prevented the realization of NATO seminars in our country with mass mobilizations.

The KKE has been at the forefront of the struggle against these imperialist interventions both in this period with the attempts for an imperialist intervention in Syria as well as before with the wars in Libya, Yugoslavia, Iraq and Afghanistan and previously in Vietnam and Korea. It has opposed imperialist interventions and war with thousands of statements, placard protests, rallies, inside parliament, with the mass demonstrations outside the US embassy. Especially in the war against Yugoslavia, in which NATO used the territories of our country against another neighbouring country, the communists roused the people. They took the initiative and stopped the NATO troops, the NATO trains and thus delayed as much as they could their murderous activity. The action of the anti-imperialist militants in Thessalonica will go down in history of the anti-imperialist struggle as they mixed up the special road direction signs of NATO and as a result the NATO military convoy was not led to the borders but … to the local vegetable market.

Of course, in this instance as well, the people’s mobilizations may have delayed war but it was not possible to prevent it. However, the most important thing for us is that these anti-NATO activities prevented these actions of the imperialists from being legitimized in the people’s consciousness; they assisted the condemnation of the participation of the Greek bourgeoisie in these crimes to be expressed. And this aspect is particularly significant because it prepares the inevitable and total conflict with the imperialist organization of NATO, the conflict with the other bourgeois repressive mechanisms and of course with the power that they defend!

These mass activities have helped and help to expose the various arguments which are used by the imperialists so as to convince the people for the need to support war, such as the invocation of the “fatherland”, of its “interests” etc. I will remind you of some of them:

• “to stop the ethnic cleansing” and for allegedly “humanitarian reasons”, (this is what they used to tell us about the war against Yugoslavia);
• “against terrorism” and “to stop the women wearing the burqa” (this is what they told us in the war in Afghanistan);
• “to stop the use of the Weapons of Mass Destruction” (in the war against Iraq).
• or even “in order to support the Arab Spring” (as they told us regarding Libya, and now regarding the bloody developments in Syria).

These are the arguments of the bourgeois governments and media, the NATO and EU staff, which to a great extent are reproduced amongst the popular strata by various “left” forces, i.e. opportunist forces thus giving “indulgences” to the imperialist crimes.

In all these cases the KKE refused decisively to accept the pretexts of the imperialists. It called on the workers and the young people not to take the “bait” which the parasites and the capitalists use to drag them into new imperialist wars. It called on the communists, the members of KNE every consistent anti-imperialist militant to help so that the arguments of the imperialists and the fear they spread are demolished, so as to reveal the true causes of the war and the impasses of the capitalist system in its imperialist stage, so as to strengthen the ideological-political and mass struggle for the overthrow of the regime of exploitation.

This is what it does in the case of Syria: we call on the Greek people to ask themselves: is it possible the monarchs, the princes of Saudi Arabia and the various emirs to care about democratic rights of the Syrians? Is it possible the US and European imperialists, who have slaughtered so many peoples, to agonize over the alleged “restoration of democracy” in Syria?

Of course, the events which are taking place in Syria have their roots inside the country itself, in the economic, social and political problems which the working class and the other popular strata are experiencing. However, there was a simultaneous attempt for an imperialist intervention in the internal affairs of Syria by the USA, the EU, NATO, Israel, Turkey, Qatar, Saudi Arabia.

It became apparent that the USA, the EU and Israel were interested in the destabilization and weakening of the Syrian bourgeois regime, which according to the developments, opposes the imperialist positions and plans in the region and is an ally of forces in Palestine, Lebanon etc, which are in conflict with the USA, NATO and Israel. We should not forget that today Syrian territory is under foreign (Israeli) occupation!

The weakening of this regime, or even its overthrow, is connected to the efforts of the USA and the EU to impede the emerging capitalist economies, China and Russia, which maintain close relations with Iran and Syria. Such an intervention could whet the appetite of the imperialist plans to attack Iran, under the pretext of its nuclear programme. It may even lead to a new dismemberment of states in the region and to a domino-effect of destabilization and bloodshed, something which will bring new imperialist wars and interventions.

In these conditions our party focuses its attention on the most important element, which in this period is the imperialist war and similar interventions in the region, indeed with the participation of our country. Our opposition to the imperialist intervention unfolding in Syria or to a similar attack against Iran does not mean retreating from the critical attitude our party maintains in relation to the bourgeois regimes of these countries. The developments in Syria are matter for its people. It is they who have the responsibility to decide on their country’s course.

Dear comrades,

The KKE seeks to demolish the ideological constructs which the bourgeois class is promoting in Greece in relation to NATO -for instance that both the NATO and the EU contribute to security, peace, to the prevention of a military conflict with Turkey so that Greece has a “strong advantage in the negotiations” for the so called “national affairs” due to its NATO-EU membership.

The KKE refutes in a substantiated way the above mentioned arguments and demonstrates to the people that NATO and the EU are not a “safe haven” for the people’s interests but for the plutocracy which seeks to safeguard the profitability of domestic capital through the accession of the country into these imperialist unions. On the contrary, NATO and the EU are the source of the imperialist contradictions, interventions, wars, blood shedding not only for the Greek people but for the other peoples as well.

In reality the developments in South Eastern Mediterranean are deep, explosive and form a very dangerous situation with immense consequences for the life of the working people and pose even more persistently the relation capitalism-crisis-war.

It is the people who can and should put an end to this barbarity! They should struggle for the disengagement of our countries from the imperialist plans, from the imperialist war, from the imperialist unions something which can be ensured only by the working class power. Today, after two world wars and dozens of local and regional imperialist wars, the answer of the peoples to the dilemma “Socialism or Barbarity” which emerged for the first time before the First World War must be unequivocal: socialism!

In this direction our party salutes the activity of the communists in Turkey against NATO and is ready to contribute and coordinate its activity with TKP and the other communist and workers’ parties, with all the consistent anti-imperialist forces.