[The following appeared in a box with the above article on Afghanistan in the February 12 issue of Rouge, the weekly newspaper of the Revolutionary Communist League (LCR), the French section of the Fourth International. The translation is by Intercontinental Press.]
The Movement to Support the Resistance of the Afghan People (MSRA), whose bulletin "Afghanistan in Struggle" is the best source of current information on Afghanistan, held its general assembly on November 29, 1981, at the end of which the following program was put forward and adopted.
The occupation of Afghanistan by Soviet troops continues. It flouts Afghanistan's sovereignty and violates the right of the Afghan people to freely determine their future. We refuse to be reduced to silence by the false counterposition: "Either you are on the USSR's side, or you are on the USA's side." Without ceasing to denounce U.S. interventions in the world, we condemn the invasion of Afghanistan and we demand the withdrawal of Soviet troops.
The USSR is imposing by force a regime that in no way corresponds to the aspirations of the Afghan people. In the context of rivalry between the great powers, its intervention worsens the dangers weighing on world peace and on the independence of all the peoples of that region.
By resisting this aggression, the Afghan people are fighting for their survival and to be masters of their own destiny.
The MSRA declares its solidarity with all the Afghan resistance fighters in their battle for the independence of their country. The MSRA supports all those in Afghanistan who contribute to the development of the struggle for national liberation.
Far from being, as some would like us to believe, a pro-Western plot or a feudal rebellion led by religious fundamentalists, this resistance is a national and people's resistance which involves a broad range of social and political forces.
The Afghan patriots know that their unity is a decisive factor for their victory over the Soviet occupier. The MSRA supports all the resistance parties and fronts that, with different outlooks, demonstrate their desire to unite to drive out the occupier, and it denounces the acts of intolerance by the fundamentalist forces. The MSRA feels a special closeness to the Afghan forces that have an attachment to social emancipation, and who see democracy as the precondition for the exercise of the Afghan people's right to control their own future.
The MSRA supports all the initiatives that aim for a political resolution of the Afghan problem on the following bases:
• recognition of the resistance as sole representative of the Afghan people,
• complete withdrawal of Soviet troops,
• guarantees of the territorial integrity and national sovereignty of Afghanistan,
• guarantees of the real exercise of the Afghan people's right to freely decide their own future.
The MSRA will align itself with any initiatives the French government might take along these lines. The MSRA demands that the government now support the Afghan resistance diplomatically and materially.
The MSRA provides its political and material support to the Afghan people's resistance along these lines:
• political: by ongoing and precise reporting, by demonstrations, by activity alongside democratic forces and governmental bodies, by contributing to international support demonstrations;
• material: by expressing our adherence to the Afghan cause materially through collecting and delivering to the fronts in the interior [of Afghanistan] all the resources that are useful for the development of the Afghan people's liberation struggle. The support will be developed in special cooperation with organizations and movements that have a humanitarian goal.
This support must be protracted: spurred by our activity and by that of all the democratic forces, it must root itself among the French people in order to contribute to developing greater breadth to the support to the Afghan people and to the struggle for peace.