Message of the Fourth International to the 5th Congress of the Labour Party of Pakistan
Dear comrades,
We bring you, on the occasion of your fifth congress, the greetings of the Fourth International and its organizations.
We have followed with much enthusiasm in the last period the development of your party and the way in which you have shown how to face a political situation that was always changing but always very difficult for the popular movements.
We think in particular of your involvement in the Lawyers’ Movement of for the overthrow of the Musharraf dictatorship, your intransigent defense of democratic rights and minorities threatened by religious fundamentalism, your constant combat to offer a progressive and solidarity alternative to the joint threats of talibanism and militarism, the help which you bring to strengthening the struggles of women, workers and peasants, your active participation in the social forums and internationalism that you express in a part of the world in a permanent state of war, dominated by the Pakistan-India nuclear face-to-face and NATO-US intervention in Afghanistan.
With the workers’ and peasants’ conference of January 29th, your congress offers the possibility of a new step forward, by affirming the existence in the Pakistani political arana of a popular progressist, anti-imperialist, secular force, independent of the ruling and landowning class, their clientelist parties and their religious fronts.
You recently again had to mourn the death of cadres of your party, in Baluchistan or in the North-West, and we share your pain. Your militants are threatened by repression on the part of fundamentalists, the secret service and the army, or the hired men of the bosses. We are at your side in these tests.
We salute your combat and we bring you our internationalist solidarity,
Penny Duggan For the Bureau of the Fourth International