8-22-07, 9:33 am

The leadership of the Iraqi Communist Party held a press conference on Aug. 20, at its Abu Nu'as headquarters in central Baghdad, to launch its “Patriotic Democratic Plan” to extricate the country from the current crisis. The press conference, which lasted one and a half hours, was well attended by various media, including the local press, radio and TV stations.

Comrade Al-Labban, leader of the ICP, presented the main points of the Patriotic Democratic Plan, pointing out that the Iraqi Communist Party considers this Plan to be the effective means to tackle the current crisis and reform the ongoing political process. Quoting from the Plan, he explained that “Our country has not witnessed in its contemporary history circumstances similar to the ones prevailing today, despite important steps achieved by the political process… Popular and political forces have therefore come to recognize the urgent need for a plan that charts the way out of the crisis for our country, and that ensures strengthening national unity and embarking upon building a modern democratic Iraqi state, based on the principles of citizenship and social justice, and striving to end the legacy of occupation and regain sovereignty and independence.”

He added that the plan includes two main items: First, the aims of the plan; and second, the mechanisms for its implementation. The plan aims at ensuring security and stability, ending foreign military presence and restoring full national sovereignty, improving the people's living conditions, asserting the national identity and combating sectarianism, eradicating the legacy of the dictatorial regime, providing the conditions for building a modern democratic state, abolishing all kinds of national, religious and cultural discrimination, on the basis of federalism for the Kurdistan region and guaranteeing the rights of all nationalities and minorities... The plan also calls for “providing the conditions for empowering women and enhancing their social status, ensuring better life for students and youth, promoting culture and arts along with providing prerequisites for a national cultural project, of humane orientation and democratic content…” It also aims at “combating, peacefully, any attempt to curtail public freedoms and constitutional rights… and pursuing an independent and active foreign policy.”

Al-Labban stressed that achieving these objectives require adopting a host of policies and measures that are in harmony with patriotic and democratic aspirations, and providing the political means and frameworks to support them. This requires, specifically, the following mechanisms:

• To rid the political process of sectarian tendencies.

• Resolute implementation of national reconciliation.

• Tackling the outstanding issues with a spirit of concern for the supreme interests of the people and homeland (e.g., revising the Ba'ath Eradication Law through resorting to independent judiciary; Implementing constitutional amendments; releasing detainees ...etc.)

• Employing dialog, flexibility and reciprocal concessions.

• Speedy elimination of the militias and their structures, and to ensure that arms are only held by the state.

• Cleaning up the security forces and military of elements that have penetrated them.

• Support Iraqi security plans against terrorism.

• Improve government performance and combat financial and administrative corruption.

• Strive to build the broadest political alliance between forces, parties and blocs that agree on the principal points of the Patriotic Democratic Plan. • To rely on the masses of the Iraqi people and their organizations, including trade unions, federations, associations, civil society organizations, and various popular and mass frameworks, recognizing that they have the main interest in achieving the aims of the Patriotic Democratic Plan.

Al-Labban concluded by saying that “as the Iraqi Communist Party declares its Plan, it expresses boundless confidence in the Iraqi people and their patriotic and democratic forces.”

A number of questions put forward by media representatives were then answered by Al-Labban and other Politburo and Central Committee members, including comrades Subhi al-Jumaily, Raid Fahmi and Hassan Akif.

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