In memory of comrade Amar Bagdache, general secretary of the Syrian Communist Party

The Communist Party (Switzerland) has learned with sadness of the sudden death of Comrade Amar Bagdache, General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Syrian Communist Party, who was in Athens after having had to flee his country to escape the repression of the despotic coup regime that seized power with the complicity of the US and EU last December.  

Comrade Amar Bagdache was born in Damascus to a family of Kurdish origin on 16 August 1954, son of the historic communist leader Khaled Bagdache, and had been a Party militant since 1969. He then moved to Moscow where, after earning a master's degree in economic planning from Plekhanov University, he obtained a doctorate in economics from Lomonosov State University. After his studies, he returned to Syria in 1984 and devoted himself completely to politics and the socialist cause.  

In 1986, he was elected general secretary of the Syrian Democratic Youth Union and in 1990 he became a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Syria (SCP), of which he became general secretary in 2010. In 2003, he was also elected as a member of the Syrian parliament, but following the pro-Western coup d'état of December 2024, the SCP was declared illegal along with all left-wing parties and numerous Syrian patriots and members of ethnic and religious minorities were assassinated. To escape such persecution, Comrade Bagdache managed to flee to Athens where he died today of a heart attack.  

We remember him for his tenacious fight in favour of secularism and the sovereignty of the nation-state represented by the Syrian Arab Republic, whose territorial integrity was essential to him: despite being of Kurdish origin, he never defended Rojava, but unmasked the pro-imperialist role of ethnic separatism. Comrade Bagdache was also one of the most influential Marxist-Leninist leaders in the Arab world and committed himself, coherent with his internationalist vision, to the unity of the Arab peoples against imperialism and Zionism.  

As Swiss communists, we remember with emotion the bilateral meetings of October 2011 and summer 2018, his friendship and his communist consistency, and we express our most sincere condolences to his family members and to the Central Committee of the Syrian Communist Party (which acts courageously today secretly to free the Syrian people from terror).