Dear comrades,

I greet you all on behalf of the New Communist Party of Montenegro and I would like to thank the hosts for organising this important event and for the invitation.

Dear comrades, I would like to start this speech by saying that our party wholeheartedly supports the statements of the World Anti-Imperialist Platform.

Comrades, Montenegro is, again, victim of shock therapy once inflicted upon the peoples of Yugoslavia. Our government, under the guise of anti-corruption, is privatising the state and its enterprises to both the international bourgeoisie and local mafia, both being on the side of western imperialism. To the unsurprising horror, all of this is performed withminimal compensation or demands. We are ashamed to say that our country got dragged into the imperialist NATO alliance in 2017 without a referendum being passed.

With the Russo-Ukrainian conflict, greatly provoked by NATO (remember Euromaidan, the bombings of Donbass by Ukrainian forces, suppression of Russian language, culture and media), Montenegro is suddenly expected to devote everything towards a nation it had no obligation to assist or finance in any conceivable method. The Montenegrin working class is expected to give up what few possessions they hold as a sign of “solidarity”. Even before the current escalation of the conflict in Ukraine Montenegrin government under western pressure has put numbers of sanctions on Russia, which used to be our strategic ally since the very creation of the Montenegrin state.

Nonetheless, Montenegro’s position is a difficult one. Bordered by fellow NATO members, except for Serbia and Bosnia, makes it a nation of an unusual geopolitical climate. Constant “concessions”, “dialogues” and “negotiations” have been thrown around as excuses to evade Montenegrin national issues and to never address the contradictions apparent within the nation. Most people in Montenegro divide themselves based on useless nationalist labels forced on them by both the pro-NATO mafia that has been ruling Montenegro with an iron fist for the last 30 years on one side and the Serbian Orthodox Church on the other side, thus suppressing the class consciousness. Our task as the communists of Montenegro is to smash the divide between the working class of our country and to show them that there is a light at the end of the tunnel, to show them that Montenegro has nothing to gain by siding with the imperialist NATO alliance and the EU.

Our approach is clear, there must be a bigger emphasis on the Balkan peninsula, to understand the collapse of Yugoslavia, the expansion of  NATO, and the economic crises suffered in the past 30-40 years.

Most montenegrins, both those who lived in socialist Yugoslavia and the youth hold the memory and the spirit of Yugoslav socialist construction in their hearts. Our government tries to manipulate the working class by being tolerant towards symbolical remnants of socialist Yugoslavia, such as monuments and street names while doing the exact opposite of what Yugoslav communists stood for. Communism isn’t as demonised as in other post-Yugoslav states.

Montenegro is a very fertile ground for future communist activities, thanks to our newly formed youth league our ideas are starting to spread at a very fast rate with our membership growing day by day, at the moment, as we are still low in numbers we still lack sufficient resources to organise education and political mobilisation under a vanguard, to thwart jingoist policy in Montenegro, and to annihilate suppressors of class-consciousness. We can proudly state that our party and the people of Montenegro in the recent year have been more successful in combating imperialism by holding massive pro-Palestinian rallies and by demanding freedom to our Ukrainian comrades detained by the fascist Ukranian state. At the moment, our party oughts to organise delegations in larger municipalities dedicated to seeking viable and capable membership. In doing so, we would develop a capable, honourable and diligent Marxist-Leninist vanguard party. This would be a massive step for the working class of Europe – seeing the cradle of Yugoslav anti-fascism and socialist revolution once again, alive and moving.

Long live international solidarity!

Long live Marxism-Leninism!

Death to NATO imperialism!