Warm welcome for KKE leader in London

By New Worker correspondent

AKEL’s community centre in Wood Green was packed out on Saturday as London comrades joined members of London’s Greek community at a social at the Cypriot communist centre in honour of visiting Greek communist leader Dimitris Koutsoumbas. Many had gone to listen to the Greek communist leader give a talk at Birkbeck College in central London earlier in the day. Many more came along for the evening reception, which included live Greek folk music and jazz as well as a Greek buffet and bar.

Dimitris Koutsoumbas, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE), spent a hectic three days in London visiting the Marx Memorial Library on Friday and Marx’s tomb at Highgate Cemetery on Sunday.

Koutsoumbas said: "The instruction of Karl Marx that 'the philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world, the point is to change it', which was the meaning of his teaching's revolutionary character, is the timeless message that exists today and illuminates the future for the new generations, for the world's working class."

Accompanied by numerous members of the British branches of the KKE and the Communist Youth of Greece (KNE), Koutsoumbas laid a wreath on Marx’s grave on behalf of the Party. With their fists raised, the Greek communists shouted "KKE, the people's party" and "A century of struggles and sacrifices, the KKE in the vanguard".

Honouring Cypriot martyrs in London

Andros Kyprianou speaking

By New Worker correspondent

The leader of AKEL, the Cypriot communist party, paid tribute to two martyred comrades at an event in north London this week.

Andros Kyprianou joined others in recalling the sacrifice of the two communists at a meeting at the Cypriot Community Centre in Wood Green on Monday, called in honour of Dervis Ali Kavazoglou and Costas Misaoulis who were campaigning to end the sectarian violence that was undermining the island that had only recently broken the shackles of British imperialism. The communists, who came from both sides of the Cypriot community, were killed by reactionary Turkish-Cypriot TMT movement gunmen on 11^th April 1965.

Fifty-four years have passed since their cowardly assassination by these agents of imperialism. In one of the darkest turns of Cyprus’ history when chauvinism and bigotry took up arms to divide the people, when partitionist imperialist plans were drawn up and elaborated one after the other, the Peoples Movement of the Left, which was fighting for genuine independence and the unity of people of the island, stood up and resisted these plans.

Kavazoglou and Misaoulis were devoted to the struggle of the Cypriot people, Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots alike, to remain united; to combat the hatred and fanaticism; to forge a wall of resistance to nationalism and strengthen the common struggle of the two communities for the salvation of their common homeland.

Dervis Ali Kavazoglou, a member of the Central Committee of AKEL and Costas Mishaoulis, a cadre in the class-based PEO trade union and a member of the District Committee of AKEL Nicosia, with their sacrifice became the symbol of this struggle. The terrorist murderers of the fascist TMT organisation set up an ambush at a turn on the Nicosia-Larnaca road, killing them in the most barbaric way. The two comrades were murdered but they have never died!

Their final embrace drowned in blood became the banner of the people’s struggle that to this day is raised high and rallies the people under the slogan “One country-One People!”.

Back then, you had to be bold and courageous to be a Kavazoglou. You needed courage to be a Misaoulis. You needed faith and conviction, an uncompromising ethos and dedication to the people’s struggle. Despite constant warnings, the two comrades defied the dangers and death itself. Their murderers ignored the truth: they murdered them because they feared them. The fascists feared what Cypriots, united, would say and do. Today, although dead, they fear Kavazoglou and Misaoulis even more because their murder was a sacrifice that inspires the Cypriot people today.

100 years of the KKE!

 By New Worker correspondent

Tilemachos Dimoulas speaking

 

NCP leader Andy Brooks joined hundreds of Greek and Cypriot communists celebrating the glorious 100-year-old history of the Communist Party of Greece (KKE) at a meeting in London last weekend. Wood Green’s Cypriot Community Centre hall was packed to the rafters on Saturday to see a video tribute to the KKE that was founded in 1918 and hear an report of the current situation in Greece by Tilemachos Dimoulas, a member of the Politburo of the Central Committee of KKE.

The KKE was founded amid the flames of the October Socialist Revolution of 1917 .  From the very first moment of its foundation in 1918, the KKE stood unwaveringly as an advocate and defender of the Soviet Union, it opposed the Greek bourgeois class which along with others on an international level, tried to supress the October revolution at its birth.

Fourteen capitalist states participated in the imperialist intervention against the Soviet Union, with capitalist Greece being among them. The KKE called upon the Greek people to condemn and oppose the imperialist intervention. From its founding Congress, it addressed

a protest resolution for the intervention of the imperialists against the young Soviet power. The Greek communists of Odessa distributed proclamations to the population and the Greek troops, which called upon the workers not to turn their guns against their class brothers but

against the real enemy, the imperialists.

            Opposing dictatorship at home and supporting the fight against fascism in Spain the KKE took up the gun to fight the Nazis during the Second World War and fought  the royalists and their Anglo-American backers during the post-war civil war.

The KKE is at the forefront of the effort for the revolutionary regroupment of the International Communist Movement, the effort of creating a Marxist-Leninist pole in the international movement. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991  the Greek communists took important initiatives in order to rally the communist forces from all over the world, to organize the international meetings of communist and workers’ parties that began in Athens in the 1990s. Today the KKE keeps up the fight  against austerity and the European Union to defend workers rights to build the revolutionary movement in Greece and throughout the world.