HENRY FOWLER, assistant general secretary of the General Federation of Trade Unions (GFTU), reports on Day 2 from the GFTU’s residential Summer School at the Workers’ Retreat, Quorn Grange Hotel
FOUR decades ago, the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) was in power. The government was secular not religious and the country a republic.
The advances the PDPA government made in the late 1970s and 1980s for the people of Afghanistan, and for women in particular, were enormous — before the US and its allies, including Britain, Nato, the theocratic dictatorships in Iran and Saudi Arabia, and the secret services of Pakistan, together with the most reactionary forces in Afghanistan, so shamefully brought it down in 1992.
Moves to release women from centuries of feudal subjugation and less than human treatment had begun in earnest in the 1920s, profoundly influenced by the 1917 Revolution which replaced the tsar’s Russian empire with a socialist republic, with which Afghanistan signed a friendship treaty in 1921.
The civilian toll climbs past 1,000 as women, children and families are struck in their homes, schools and public spaces – a stark illustration of the human cost of war. AZAR SEPEHR emphasises that the future of Iran is solely determinable by the people of that country and them alone
Trump’s ‘Peace Council’ is not a peace project, but a war and colonial council that renews Western colonialism, writes SEVIM DAGDELEN
Trump threatens war and punitive tariffs to recapture Iranian resources – just as in 1953, when the CIA overthrew Mossadegh and US corporations immediately seized 40% of the oil, says SEVIM DAGDELEN
MOHAMMAD OMIDVAR, a senior figure in the Tudeh Party of Iran, tells the Morning Star that mass protests are rooted in poverty, corruption and neoliberal rule and warns against monarchist revival and US-engineered regime change


