Flying the red flag in Pakistan

Farouk Tariq is General Secretary of the Pakistan Labour Party. Here he talks to Voice editor Alan McCombes about the impact of Western involvement in the Middle East and the rise of the socialist movement in the area.

In the villages of Tobateksingh in the heart of the Punjab, broad Glaswegian accents can frequently be heard on the streets. Many Asians in Scotland have their origins here, including Govan Labour MP Mohammed Sarwar.
Farouk Tariq also comes from this area. He knows the Sarwar family from away back.
Farouk is now general secretary of the Pakistan Labour Party, the LPP. Despite its name, Farouk's party has little in common with the Labour Party of his old acquaintance.
The LPP is a red-blooded socialist party and proud of it. Farouk himself has been arrested many times over the past two years for his political activities.
He now faces five separate court trials for violating articles 144 and 188 of the constitution drawn up by the military regime. Another 100 LPP activists face charges while 20 have already been imprisoned.
News footage of fundamentalist anti-government demos may lead some people to believe that Pakistan is a relatively free country. But they would be mistaken.
General Musharaf has allowed these demos to go ahead because he fears the consequences of a clampdown in the charged political atmosphere that now hangs over Pakistan.
But it is within the General's powers to ban all public demos, indeed all gatherings of six or more people. It is for defying this ban and for "inciting people to get together" that Farouk has been arrested on a series of occasions.
"One night 100 police with Kalashnikovs surrounded my house, sealing off the surrounding streets.
"Others surrounded the LPP office. I wasn't in either building, so under orders from the ISI, the Pakistan secret intelligence agency, they arrested my landlord and the owner of the building where our offices are based."
Today at a party press conference in Lahore, journalists from dozens of national and regional newspapers are in attendance. They interrogated Farouk for almost an hour after he announced that the LPP has withdrawn from the Alliance for the Restoration of Democracy, a broad-based campaign against the military dictatorship.
Farouk explains that the LPP can no longer work with political parties who are backing the regime's pro-America stance in Afghanistan. The questioning is sharp. Some of these journalists are sympathetic to the moderate, ex-left wing People's Party of Benazir Bhutto which is now reluctantly supporting the bombing of Afghanistan.
The argument of many liberal intellectuals in Pakistan is that General Musharaf has no choice. If Pakistan does not back America, they say, the country will be destroyed by the West.
They also point approvingly to the cash injection Pakistan will receive as a reward for its compliance.
"Blood money," says Farouk.
"In any case, these concessions are paltry compared to the billions poured into Pakistan in the 1980s to reward General Zia's support for the US-backed mujahideen who were fighting the Soviet Union in Afghanistan."
Money may have poured into Pakistan from the West in the 1980s but most of it was creamed off by the elite, leaving the mass of people in desperate poverty.
The country also paid a heavy social price. There are now three million heroin addicts in Pakistan, almost one in 25 of the adult population, as a result of American policy to develop a massive heroin industry in Afghanistan to finance the mujahideen. Farouk also describes the "Kalashnikov culture" which has gripped Pakistan ever since.
"Kalashnikovs have become an everyday household item, like cups or vases. During the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, America distributed Kalashnikovs free of charge to Islamic parties in Pakistan, via the ISI.
"Most of them never reached Afghanistan but were sold on the black market. As a result violent crime swept whole areas of the country."
Today it's possible to buy a perfect Kalashnikov copy on the Khyber Pass for 4000 rupees, less than 50 quid.
They are made by Pashtoon tribesmen who will deliver them anywhere, no questions asked, without a receipt.
Without question, the Taliban and the Al Qaeda group are armed to the teeth with these weapons.
Farouk is a fierce critic of the Taliban and of religious funadamentalism in general. He recounts a story from his university days in the mid 1970s.
"Myself and a few others organised a mixed disco, which was almost unheard of in Pakistan in those days.
"But we didn't realise it clashed with the anniversary of the death of a nephew of the prophet Mohammed.
"The religious fundamenatlists went crazy accusing us of blasphemy."
This led to violent clashes and Farouk has been in political conflict with fundamentalists ever since, even though he describes himself as a Muslim.
But neither has Farouk any sympathy for those liberal intellectuals who support the American bombing campaign of Afghanistan because they believe the West is more progressive.
"Innocent people are being killed to save the face of the rulers of America, because they are under pressure to deliver revenge." "Our first goal is to stop this war, but we are trying to build a secular anti-war movement."
The LPP played a major role in establishing the Joint Action Committee for Peace and Justice, a broad coalition against the war which includes human rights groups, women's groups, peace organisations and trade unions.
Tomorrow, Tuesday November 6, they have planned a mass demo in Isamabad and expect to mobilise thousands in the biggest non-fundamentalist anti-war demo seen in Pakistan since the bombing began.
Farouk is of the opinion that America will remove the Taliban by sheer will and superior technology.
"This would strengthen the influence of America in this region. For fundamentalist Muslims it would diminish the idea that, with Allah's protection, they are invincible.
"But on the other side, the Taliban will just go into the mountains and carry on the war. And it won't be so easy to find Bin Laden.
"Even if they do kill him, he will become even more of a folk hero than he is right now."
There is no doubt that Bin Laden is a hero to sections of the Pakistani youth. While in a Lahore printers to get photos scanned, I notice that the screensavers on the computers depict the portrait of Bin Laden adorned with the message "Osama, We Are With You".
Farouk reveals that he was approached to produce Osama posters on the printing presses owned by the LPP. "We could have made millions of rupees," he says. "But of course, we couldn't have done it."
Whatever the outcome of this war, Farouk believes that Pakistan is entering one of the most turbulent periods in its troubled 54 year history.
"There is certain to be a move towards more general terrorism in Pakistan.
"And the religious fundamentalists will make big electoral advances."
There are seven major fundamentalist parties in Pakistan. They boycotted the last general election in 1997 - under pressure from sections of the military, according to Farouk, who were afraid they would prevent a landslide for the moderate conservative Muslim League against Benazir's People's Party.
In the election before that, in 1993, they took nine per cent of the vote. But Farouk believes that in the next general election, scheduled for October 2002, they could take over 20 per cent of the vote and hold the balance of power.
That's if everything goes to plan in Afghanistan. Farouk acknowledges that General Musharaf is an astute politician, who has even introduced some progressive reforms to bolster his support among the liberal middle classes.
For example, he introduced a law stipulating that one third of council seats should be reserved for women.
But now he is under siege. The fundamentalists have called a one-day general strike on November 9 and have pledged that no vehicles will move that day.
"This is a test of strength," says Farouk. "If they succeed they may go on to carry out their threat to occupy Islamabad, the national capital. Then bloodshed would be inevitable because Musharaf has to act."
Where this will lead, no-one knows. But there is no doubt that Pakistan is a political minefield for the West.
One wrong step and the whole country could go up in flames.
So what about the future of Farouk's own party, the LPP?
"It's still a small party of a few thousand. But the party is now well known, especially among the political activists in Pakistan.
"In the whole history of Pakistan, there has never been a genuinely independent party of the working class, the labouring classes. "Even the People's Party was always a business party, even when it spoke in the language of the left in the 1970s."
The LPP was formed in 1997. It involved the unification of different left trends and immediately many of the new, emerging trade unions came towards it.
The party's ranks includes leaders of the workers in the brick kiln industry, the sugar industry, the cement industry, the pesticides industry, the railway industry the motorcycle industry, the print industry and local government.
It is also influential in unions representing health workers, carpet workers, clerical staff and printers.
"We are still at the stage of winning over key activists rather than leading the broad masses.
"But we have built a high profile nationally and now have 67 councillors across the country, two thirds of them women."
Before the bombing began, the LPP in Lahore organised a women's peace rally. The hall was packed full with 500 women.
I spoke at an LPP meeting in Lahore on the first day of my visit and was tremendously impressed by their commitment, conviction, political understanding and fighting spirit.
They have raised the red flag of socialism in Pakistan and, even under difficult and dangerous conditions, have kept that flag flying defiantly.
Like the Afghan socialists I have met in Pakistan, the LPP deserve the support of socialists right across the globe.

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