MOSCOW, April 7 (Itar-Tass) — The Russian Communist Party (KPRF) is against plans of establishing a NATO centre for transit shipments in Ulyanovsk, for resignation of CEC head Vladimir Churov and for political reforms in the country.
To lend an additional weight to their demands, party activists released dozens of red balloons into the sky at the rally that gathered 1,500 people in Moscow’s Pushkin Square.
According to Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov, creation in Ulyanovsk of a point for transshipment of cargoes, designed for the NATO contingent in Afghanistan, will be “the first case over 1,000 years when a base of foreign troops will be on the Russian soil”.
Calling NATO “an iron road-roller”, Zyuganov expressed a supposition that a transit centre which he stubbornly called “a NATO base”, will be also “a point of drug trafficking from Afghanistan to Russia”. “This will be not just a transshipment base. This will be one of the main drug transit points,” said Zyuganov.
He noted that Afghan produces up to 800 tonnes of heroine annually and 700 of them flow to Russia. “Establishment of such a base is a humiliation of our country,” suggested the Communist leader. In Zyuganov’s opinion, “following the elections, the authorities started surrendering national interests”.
In the Communist leader’s words, the KPRF plans to mount a large-scale protest action on April 21 to bar “the NATO jackboot to land on the sacred Russian soil”.
Communists again spelled out their view on the past presidential elections. “We regard this day for Russia a black day when powers that be did their utmost to rig the elections,” said first secretary of the Moscow city committee of the Communist Party and deputy to the State Duma Valery Rashkin.
He reiterated the communist thesis that the past election race was “illegitimate, dishonest and dirty”. According to Communists, Zyuganov collected 240,000 votes more in Moscow on March 4 than four years ago.
“Churov must be sacked at the earliest,” underlined the legislator, noting that there will be new elections ahead. He is convinced that “the illegitimate power will have no backing among Muscovites”. “Let us do the following way: the movement ‘For honest elections' should be transformed into a movement for changes,” Rashkin suggested.
Apart from sympathizers of the Communist Party, the rally in the Pushkin Square was attended by representatives of the Left Front, Union of Communist Youth, the movement of deceived flat owners and the movement Garage Defence. Posters of rally participants read: “Falsifiers into the dock” and “No to NATO jackboot on Russian soil”.