British Labour parliamentarian John McDonnell is rightly catching hell for speaking under the flag of Bashar al-Assad’s regime at a May Day rally in London. When he tweeted out a photo of himself from the event, Assad’s flag was cropped out of the picture.

The May Day rally appears to have been the work of a socialist sect known as the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist) — their flag is right next to Assad’s.

The Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons on women and children, airstrikes on hospitals and the Syrian Red Crescent, and brutal military campaign that has killed hundreds of thousands of Syrians and driven 12 million more from their homes are well known crimes that make the presence of its flag at a May Day rally — in front of a human rights banner, no less — indefensible.

What is less known is the Assad regime’s suppression and torture of leftists and trade unionists and the sordid role of Syria’s regime-approved Communist Party (SCP) in those crimes.

The Ba’ath Party came to power in 1963 via a military coup and in 1968 banned independent trade unions. As the International Trade Union Confederation’s Syria page notes:

“Syria has been ruled by emergency legislation since 1963 allowing the government to adopt autocratic policies that cannot be challenged effectively by the legislature and the judiciary. … It is impossible for workers to enjoy their rights in a country where governmental institutions have fundamentally failed to hold those who are responsible for systematic violations of human rights and humanitarian law accountable. Respect for the rule of law is essential when it comes to the protection of the rights of workers.”

Not long after Hafez al-Assad’s coup in 1971 and despite the regime’s suppression of unions, the SCP jumped at the chance to obtain two cabinet-level posts in his regime in March 1972. Assad’s regime allowed SCP to print a newspaper but continued to deny the party the legal right to exist.

But the SCP’s crass collaborationism was not without benefits. During 1978, 108 party members flew to Moscow for ‘training’ at Soviet expense — most of them friends or relatives of party leaders. In 1979 alone, the Kremlin made five payments totaling $275,000 to the party leadership and lucrative trading Syria-soviet companies were set up under the party’s control.

When dissident communists led by Riyadh al-Turk challenged the SCP’s nepotistic opportunism, his supporters:

“were jailed, forced to leave the Party, driven underground or went into exile. Some were tortured. According to reports by Amnesty International and

human rights groups during the 1980s, al-Turk was systematically tortured throughout the decade, and was rushed to hospital at least six times on the verge of death to be resuscitated for further abuse, which included breaking bones in all his limbs.”

Al-Turk went on to participate in the 2011 uprising and founded the Syrian People’s Democratic Party. He and the people who founded the first independent trade union in Syria for more than half a century in rebel-held Manbij are Syria’s Chartists. It is their flag — the flag of the pre-Ba’athist post-independence Syrian republic — that should have been flying over McDonnell’s head at the London May Day rally.