We reproduce below a letter received from comrades in the New Communist Party of Yugoslavia and the response sent to the NKPJ and to the Serbian government by our party.
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Yugolav communists under attack
Dear comrades
The New Communist Party of Yugoslavia informs you that neo-nazis recently organised an attack on our headquarters in Belgrade. They demolished our windows and wrote anticommunist and neo-nazi slogans. Reactionary forces attacked our headquarters five times last year. In the last few years this has become standard. But the most recent attack on our party was the biggest.
In the last few years neo-nazis have been very active, regularly destroying antifascist monuments and other symbols of socialism in our country. The NKPJ is the most active party in defending socialist and antifascist symbols in our country. The Serbian police and authorities did not want to do anything. Our security services and police are very familiar with the neo-nazi groups and actually created many of them.
Anti-people government and reactionary forces are disturbed by our political programme. Pressure on our party has intensified in the last few years. The attack on our party has taken place in the context of a huge anticommunist hysteria in Serbia and contradiction in the world.
The anticommunist campaign in Serbia is being conducted side by side with an offensive against workers’ and people’s rights, which has been ongoing for many years. Many films, series, and ‘science programmes’ are being made to discredit the socialist construction that existed in our country. These are being shown every day.
The media portray communists and revolutionaries as criminals and adventurers, and on the other hand they portray collaborators as patriots and ‘saviours of the nation’. They want to show that the struggle for social justice is an absurdity, while treason is something to admire. By order of the European Union, Serbia enacted the law of rehabilitation, and 3,000 second world war collaborators were ‘rehabilitated’.
By their latest actions, the reactionary forces in Serbia hope to scare communists in our country. The members of NKPJ are followers of the partisans, who, led by the communists, defeated fascism and the collaborationists who served the Nazi occupiers and slaughtered their own people.
Communists are proud of that struggle, because after that glorious victory, a more just world was built, which was tailored to humanity, foresaw a future worth living in, and spread brotherhood and unity among nations, instead of a policy of hatred and exploitation.
The NKPJ sends a warning to the cowards who are hiding behind the neo-nazis that communists will not back down in the face of their threats. Communists are people of a special kind who are not afraid of cowardly neo-nazi attacks.
The communists will unreservedly and ruthlessly fight to the last breath and the last drop of blood for a world without exploitation, racism, fascism, chauvinism, inter-ethnic hatred, and all other reactionary forms of government.
The NKPJ asks our sister communist and workers’ parties to organise demonstrations in front of the Serbian embassy in the next two weeks or to send protest letters against the discrimination of NKPJ to The President of the Republic of Serbia by email: kontakt.predsednik@predsednik.rs
We thank you in advance for your solidarity!
Аleksandar Banjanac
General Secretary
British communists in solidarity
The Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist) resolutely condemns the neo-nazi attacks against the New Communist Party of Yugoslavia’s headquarters.
These attacks, of which there have been several in the past year, are one part of a wider trend of European imperialism to allow and encourage the resurgence of fascist ideology and forces as the imperialist economic crisis deepens.
Fascists across eastern Europe, equipped and supported by Nazi Germany during World War 2, were roundly defeated by the heroic local partisan forces and the Soviet Union, but not before inflicting mass casualties and terror against workers and minorities. The survivors and descendants of these fascist groups became useful tools for western imperialism in their fight against socialism.
In the most blatant and terrible recent example, neo-nazi forces were unleashed on Ukraine in the 2014 Euromaidan coup. They targeted the most progressive elements of the Ukrainian working class to facilitate the acquisition of Ukraine by western imperialism and prepare the ground for its proxy war against Russia.
As the working class of Serbia becomes more conscious of its exploitation, and more dissatisfied with the ruling class and its cronies in government, the ruling class will tolerate and support reactionary forces to try to keep the working class in line.
The imperialists’ hypocritical talk of ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom of speech’ is being exposed for what it is – talk, and nothing more. We must expose all cooperation between the state and fascism, fight against fascist ideology, and most importantly build an anti-imperialist working-class movement in order to defeat fascism!
Solidarity with the NKPJ
Solidarity with the progressive, anti-imperialist forces in Serbia
Solidarity with the working class of Serbia!