After the evolvement of struggles of the unemployed, working class, and all oppressed in Tunisia, into mass protests and rallies attended by teachers, lawyers, and youth, and after the expansion of demonstrations to nearby cities and townships especially the capital Tunis, and the joining of trade unions, the government, represented by its oppressive forces, began to shoot live bullets at the demonstrators. It was announced that the death toll reached 60 and many were killed in prisons as well. The mass demonstrations and confrontations had lead to the escape of the dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali who was replaced by Mohamed Ghannouchi as president and the imposition of martial law. The army is now protecting the airport and major centers of government, but the streets are still filled with people who are still unconvinced of what is happening and who have formed several councils to manage the situation and protect public property from looting and vandalism of the gangs and looters who took advantage of the current situation.
The current protest in Tunisia is a mass revolution sparked by a toiler who burned himself in a show of protest against the police assault on his means of livelihood. This incident had escalated into flames of protests of thousands of unemployed workers in all of Tunisia and evolved into a demand to topple the regime, release of political prisoners, and wider political freedoms. The masses rose up courageously and led an uprising to topple the despotic tyrant who had fled in panic. But the current ruling regime, which claims to save the country, is but an extension of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. It is incapable of serving the interests and objectives of the egalitarian revolution of the Tunisian masses. The people did not rise up to form a national-unity nor a constitution based government, or to get some sedative solutions by which the ruling class aim to defuse the revolution and bring Islamists and nationalist reactionaries to power. The Islamic and nationalist forces which, along with the global propaganda media, promote a so-called national-unity rule and consolidation of democracy, want, in fact, to abort the uprising, and to domesticate it into another velvet democratic revolution (jasmine revolution!) and allude the masses into believing that the present government is capable of solving their troubles and problems, especially deprivation, unemployment, discrimination, oppression, inequality, and lack of rights and freedoms.
Our Party asserts that the bourgeois class, which came out after the defection of Ben Ali, will try to make promises to end the situation to peoples favor, but in fact, they aim to kill the revolution and distract the masses with trivial reforms in order to perpetuate their rule. Our Party asserts that the current reactionary Arab nationalists and Islamists, guards of the regime, and army officers, are all incapable to represent the revolution or to lead it towards its goals, and that the solution lies in the hands of the Tunisian working class and millions of toilers and their socialist, leftist, and secularist forces. Our party, while seeing in this revolution a new era of liberty and emancipation to the people in the Arab region, points out that the ultimate emancipation of the masses off their deprivation, abuse, poverty, lack of political freedoms and equality to women, will only be recognized through the victory of socialism. This requires sustaining the struggles to accomplish it by the working class of Tunisia itself.
There lie difficult tasks in front of the revolution, but the most important task at the moment is to block the way on the Tunisian bourgeoisie to deceive the masses by talking about democracy, human rights, coalition governments, and so on, so it could catch its breath and regain its grip with new faces. We emphasize the need to develop means of class struggle for the workers of Tunisia, and to escalate the struggle and reach the level of determining working class political alternatives towards socialism. The formation of councils in some cities and turning them into nuclei for people’s councils, is a first step to take control of the situation, but leading the revolution requires a worker-communist party competent of leading the revolution to the victory of the Socialist Republic, is the only alternative for the direct and wide intervention of people and to restore their robbed humanity.
Victory of the Revolution of the masses of Tunisia!
Long live freedom and equality!
Long live the Socialist Republic!
The Left Worker-communist Party of Iraq – LWPI
17 January, 2011