In the light of recent developments in the Middle Eastern region, the PCP alerts to the fact that intensified imperialist scheming – foreign interference and blackmail against sovereign countries such as Syria and Iran – is posing serious threats regional and international peace and security.
The PCP expresses its outright rejection for the major NATO powers' strategy that is being implemented – in coordination with Turkey and the Gulf Cooperation Council monarchies and dictatorial regimes – against Iran and Syria, to destabilise these countries internally, instigate sectarian conflicts and prepare new imperialist aggressions against sovereign peoples and states.
While alerting to the dire consequences that new imperialist military ventures would have for the already tense situation in the Middle East and Central Asia, the PCP denounces and deplores the huge ongoing international campaign of misinformation and lies. This campaign is seeking to cover up the true reasons behind the violence that has been plaguing Syria for several months now, and to make operations of brazen foreign interference, infiltration of special forces and secret services, financing, training and arming of armed mercenaries and terrorist groups, pass off as a genuine popular struggle for democracy.
This campaign is shown to be false with every passing day. Above all, by the events themselves – by the successive terrorist attacks against public infrastructure and buildings, the thousands of civilian victims of the armed “opposition”, the thousands of Syrian soldiers killed in combat; by the statements of the main figureheads on the “National Transition Council” – asking for more foreign financing and weapons, or threatening Syria's Head of State with death; by the Syrian authorities' repeated exposures – completely passed over in silence by the dominant mass media; by the accounts of independent journalists and researchers and even by the Arab League mission observers' report – intentionally hidden from public opinion, to the extent that the mission's Chairman resigned on the same day that the Arab League decided to terminate the observation mission.
What real events on the ground show is that the NATO powers and their backers in this new warmongering venture have no authority to demand more democracy or justice – the stream of lies they used to wage the imperialist aggression against libya, and their stands on situations such as Bahrain, Yemen or Palestine are there to prove it. On the contrary, the rulers and ruling classes of those countries are the main culprits for criminal attacks against their workers' and peoples' rights. What real events show the world is a trail of death and destruction left behind by the work of NATO and its supporters during and after their wars of aggression, as witnessed in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya.
The imperialist powers involved in the escalation against Syria and Iran have one single goal: to change the balance of forces in the region, and ensure control over its abundant natural and energy resources and over the major petroleum trade routes. That is to say, precisely the same reasons behind the wars of aggression against Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, among others.
Independently of the legitimate concerns and criticisms the PCP has about the domestic situation in several countries of that region, the PCP reasserts its continuing solidarity with the workers and peoples who in various Middle eastern countries continue to fight for social, democratic and national rights, and to defend their countries' sovereignty and territorial integrity.
We denounce the ongoing attempts to embroil the United Nations Organisation into imperialism's war plans. If these attempts were to be successful they would push the UN into a position that is contrary to its own founding Charter, a position of growing and probably irreparable international disrepute. The PCP strogly deplores the Portuguese Government's dangerous, servile hanger-on attitude, in particular the actions of Foreign Affairs Minister Paulo Portas. This attitude is completely contrary to the values of peace, the national interests and the principles enshrined in the Constitution of the Portuguese Republic.
At a time when international developments foreshadow a great and very real danger of fresh imperialist crimes against the peoples of the Middle East and against international security – as a result of capitalism's deepening crisis, in its various aspects – the PCP calls upon Portugal's workers and people, upon the peace movement and progressive organisations, to – through awareness-raising, involvement and struggle – assert the values of peace and internationalist solidarity, against imperialist war, and for a foreign policy in keeping with the Constitution of the Republic.
