Joint Statement of the KKE and TKP

On the so-called “Greece-Turkey High Level Cooperation Council”

ANTI-PEOPLE “BUSINESS” AND TOUGH COMPETITION BEHIND THE “SHOP-WINDOW” OF INTER-GOVERNMENTAL COOPERATION

The Communist Party of Greece and the Communist Party of Turkey call on the peoples of our two countries to look behind the “shop-window” of the so-called “Greece-Turkey High Level Cooperation Council” and the agreements which are being signed by the two governments. Behind this they will see two things: One the one hand the joint plans of sections of the Greek and Turkish capitalists for even greater exploitation of the working class and other popular strata, and on the other the tough competition of the monopoly unions over the shares of the markets, the reserves of natural resources in the Eastern Mediterranean, the transport routes for these natural resources and the commodities in general. Cooperation and competition, in which giant international monopolies are involved, as well as capitalist states and imperialist unions.

The workers of the two countries have nothing to benefit either from the cooperation or from the tough competition of the capitalists. They must turn their backs on the governmental declarations and draw conclusions from the reality which they are experiencing: poverty, unemployment, capitalist exploitation, imperialist interventions and wars, such as the one that took place in Libya and is now taking place in Syria, with the active participation of the bourgeois classes and governments of the two countries.

The two Communist Parties which are steadily oriented to the development of friendship, of internationalist solidarity between the working class and the peoples of the two countries, are calling on the two peoples to intensify their struggle against imperialism and its unions, such as the EU and NATO, against nationalism, military spending, for the respect of the borders of the two countries, against imperialist wars and interventions.

At the same time, we do not conceal the fact that a solution that will provide security and prosperity for the two peoples cannot be ensured by those whose basic interest is the increase of the profitability of capital. The solution lies in the struggle for the overthrow of the cause that breeds contradictions, confrontations, military conflicts; in the overthrow of the capitalists’ power and the construction of the socialist society.