17 October 2005. A World to Win News Service. Following is the first of a series of excerpts from a recent interview with a spokesman for the Communist (Maoist) Party of Afghanistan, founded in May 2004. It was conducted by Haghighat, the newspaper of the Communist Party of Iran (Marxist-Leninist-Maoist). Both parties are participants in the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement, the embryonic centre of the world’s Maoists.

Afghanistani Maoists speak on the elections and the people’s discontent

17 October 2005. A World to Win News Service. Following is the first of a series of excerpts from a recent interview with a spokesman for the Communist (Maoist) Party of Afghanistan, founded in May 2004. It was conducted by Haghighat, the newspaper of the Communist Party of Iran (Marxist-Leninist-Maoist). Both parties are participants in the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement, the embryonic centre of the world’s Maoists.

How do you view the upcoming parliamentary elections in Afghanistan?

In a system based on exploitation and oppression, all elections are a trick. In the semi-feudal and semi-colonial countries of the third world, elections are usually nothing but a thin cover for the despotic system dominating the country. Even in the advanced capitalist countries, where the electoral system has some ground and basis, at best elections really mean nothing more than the people getting the chance every few years to choose one or another exploiter to rule over them. But in Afghanistan elections are not even in that level. Elections here are not even the kind you would expect in a “normal