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Far-right slanders

Ukraine’s government should learn from the mass resignation of Kiev District Administrative Court judges and immediately drop its anti-democratic bid to ban the Communist Party.

The fact that the Prosecutor General’s Office and Ministry of Justice were reduced to raiding Judge Valery Kuzmenko’s house in a futile bid to intimidate him expose the flimsiness of their case.

Officials claim the communists are guilty of “treason,” the specific charges relating to their alleged support for Crimea’s reunification with Russia last year and claims that they have links to anti-fascist resistance forces in the east.

The motley crew of oligarchs, EU-worshipping neoliberals and out-and-out fascists who usurped power in Ukraine last year also charge that the communists were supporters of the government they overthrew — the corrupt but elected regime of Viktor Yanukovych.

But the Communist Party of Ukraine has remained true to its principles despite the slander of the far right.

Far from backing Yanukovych, the party was calling for the abolition of the presidency and greater regional autonomy long before he was ousted.

Naturally it opposed his armed overthrow by the neonazi thugs of Right Sector and Svoboda, but it has not encouraged separatism, whatever Kiev says.

Instead it has rightly pointed out that the anti-fascist militias sprang up in the east as a result of far-right threats to ban the Russian language, assaults on trade unionists including the murder of 42 people burned to death in Odessa’s House of Trade Unions last May and the virulent nationalism emanating from the capital.

Nato expansion and Kiev warmongering are responsible for the war raging in eastern Ukraine, it charges — and lays the blame for losses of Ukrainian territory squarely on the regime.

And despite physical attacks on its members, the party is bravely continuing to resist the human cost of the Poroshenko government’s flirtation with the European Union and IMF.

While Western observers see nothing happening in Ukraine but the flash and roar of civil war, the communists have been on the streets fighting to prevent the privatisation of public assets such as the Odessa Portside Plant, campaigning against a cost-cutting budget that slashes social security payments to the disabled and acting as a lonely voice for peace.

It is this, rather than any alleged treason, that makes the party’s existence so unpalatable to the authorities.

But their game is up. After the judges’ principled decision to refuse to have anything to do with such a blatant stitch-up, nobody can continue to take this prosecution seriously.

Kiev would be well-advised to stop persecuting the party, investigate what the Justice Ministry was up to raiding judges’ homes and start tackling the real criminals — the far-right paramilitaries committing war crimes in its name.

Bowled over

When the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament threw down the gauntlet and challenged the Star staff to a bowling match, we anticipated an easy victory.

How could a bunch of hippy peaceniks stand against the might of the Morning All Stars?

But the anti-nuke activists displayed an alarming first-strike capability and in the end Wednesday night’s tense contest ended in an honourable draw.

It seems Britain’s peace movement is no pushover.

Still, we’re just glad we didn’t bomb.

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