Hitherto philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways. The point however is to change it. Karl Marx 
Economic & Philosophic Science Review
Subscriptions  £20 p.a. [P&P Bulletin Publications, PO Box 50 London SW17 9NL] [Post Office Regd]  
No 0997 May 05th 1999                                                                                                                     10p

Marxist philosophy classes from Sat May 13

A re-vindication of fascist blitzkrieg warmongering as the 'best way to solve world problems' is NATO's sole reason for the destruction of Serbia. Incurable imperialist world-economic crisis from 'overproduction surpluses' faces every monopoly-capitalist ruling class with ruin. Concern for 'ethnic minority rights' is just a hypocritical stunt, made easier by imperialist stooges on the fake-'left' all falling for it. All outside intervention is only making a two-sided nasty civil war in Serbia a million times worse. Let Serbs and Albanians settle their own differences in Kosovo without interference. Let imperialist warmongering come to humiliating defeat and disaster. Down with shameful Goebbels-level Big Lies about 'ethnic cleansing', setting Serbia up for slaughter.

The entire imperialist system is going back on the warpath because a free-market catastrophe of tradewar and collapse is imminent and only the massive destruction of so-called 'surplus capacity' in the world can hope to keep the monopoly capitalists in power and ultimately heading back towards renewed free-for-all profiteering.

The great crash is already devastating Japan and the Far East, and it is only a matter of months before the Western economies begin to plunge deep into slump and cutthroat competition for survival.

Serbia is the victim of being too independent minded (current regime and throughout history) and of being situated right where American and German rivalry for imperialist dominance in Europe intersect, in the Balkans.

The German and US influences are essentially at loggerheads over their FUTURE conflict for imperialist world supremacy, but they appear to be in warmongering 'unity' now in order to prevent each other from imposing a diktat on the Balkans, and in order to rival each other to see who can gain the most from the plunder of Serbia.

The rest of the imperialist gangsters hang on to either major economic player's coat-tails, with the insecure British Establishment under its second-team management (Labour) as usual posturing far more belligerently than the main bullying warmonger the USA, which is inflicting 90% of the blitzkrieg destruction, and will claim 90% of the plunder, (already spelled out in the fine print of the Rambouillet surrender terms which would have given 'NATO' troops the right of complete occupation over Serbia, not just its Kosovo province, and ordered the privatisation of all Yugoslavia's extensive publicly owned industries and economic services, starting in Kosovo, but obviously soon spreading all over under NATO military occupation of Serbia.)

Serbia is effectively to become a US tradewar colony in the heart of Europe. Concern for the ethnic minority rights and the refugees? It does not come into it. Imperialist system wars and crises have created 10 million new refugees just in this decade, but all left rotting throughout Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Imperialism created 4 million Palestinian refugees 50 years ago to make way for the Zionist colony in the Near East (Israel), and they still rot in tents to this day, and get regularly blitzed if they try to fight back. NATO's Turkey regularly butchers its nearly 20 million Kurdish minority. The US and Britain supply the planes and ammunition.

The fake-'left' Trots & Revisionists provide cover for NATO warmongering with academic treatises on 'self-determination rights', etc, — completely irrelevant in these circumstances of a deliberate NATO drive to war. Defeat for this blitzkrieg is the best hope, — then overthrow for humiliated criminal warmongers & their disgraceful Goebbels propaganda, demonising Serbia.

Anti-imperialist triumph by Irish national liberation revolution remains on course, shaming the cynical petty bourgeois arrogance of the likes of Socialist News and Weekly Worker which pronounced it dead.

Exactly how British imperialism's agreement for a snail's-pace termination of its colonial interest in the occupied north of Ireland is to be further evolved is not yet clear because a period of small practical conciliation steps between the conflicting communities is being promoted so as to apparently deliberately avoid any major new milestones in Orange-colonist retreat and Irish nationalist advance.

But several things are more obvious than ever, - principally that the fake-'lefts' who merely exercised their own Trot or Revisionist subjective prejudices to sneer that the far more successful anti-imperialism of the Irish national-liberation struggle had 'sold out to US New World Order pressure' when Sinn Féin and the IRA accepted the Good Friday deal,-have been proved humiliatingly wrong.

The slightest real sensitivity to the heroic thread of triumphant REVOLUTIONARY defiance (of imperialist domination) running through the 20th century would have made it obvious that the new settlement for Ireland was an outstanding victory for the IRA and Sinn Féin and a historic defeat for fast-degenerating British imperialism's former strong position in the world, as expressed in its arrogant Partition (continued colonisation) of Ireland in 1921, denying Irish national liberation's complete triumph then.

That dreadful wrong is slowly being righted. The Good Friday Agreement towards a completely new Ireland effectively terminates the hated 'Northern Ireland' colonial statelet as it was, and effectively opens all doors towards Ireland’s reunification which will follow in due course.

What this summer now seems to be about is to give still more time for the die-hard Orange-colonist community to posture, protest, gesture, and threaten about how they will 'never surrender', etc, etc, but at the same time get on quietly swallowing the agreement and all its implications, - slowly opening up All-Ireland government institutions, accepting equality and conciliation measures in all directions, and suffering the curtailment of built-in Orange-colonist rights in the areas of policing, legal processes, culture & language, state symbolism, etc, etc. British imperialist weapons and 'unofficial' weapons will be decommissioned simultaneously, - still leaving a capitalist state in charge, obviously, but no longer a British colonial state automatically hostile to the Irish in their own country. 'A Nation Once Again' indeed, at last.

What to make of the sour little brains of the SLP leadership and the CPGB/SWP Trot spectrum who have had their newspapers pumping out demoralising contempt for a 'Sinn Féin/IRA capitulation'? over this past period, or a 'dead peace process'???

They are not remotely just "commenting on what they see". They are aggressively presenting their own subjective conceit as 'superior political Leaders' unwilling to acknowledge the brilliant political generalship of Sinn Féin over the last 30 years, and demonstrating their profound ignorance of the whole historical process of imperialist-system decay.

An early tilt towards total international warmongering by the whole imperialist system just faintly hovers in the distance to provide a last-ditch reprieve for the doomed colonialism in the north of Ireland if the British Establishment gets sucked into a "nothing more to lose" conflict early-on in monopoly-capitalism's final warmongering degradation. But as things stand at the moment, British imperialism remains convinced that it has lost more than it has gained from trying to defeat Irish national-liberation guerrilla war and political revolution (led by Sinn Féin), and that it should continue to cut its losses by getting on with dismantling its Partition colonial structure. 
Douglas Bell

The EPSR and the SLP.

A test for communist support for the SLP project was always going to come when Socialist Labour had to respond to world events with adequate leadership or at least with an opportunity to argue for a correct response.

Scargillism is providing neither, and is failing the test. The SLP project already requires testing to destruction on these issues.

To try to fight NATO imperialist warmongering with the latest issue of Socialist News could only imply an abandonment of Leninism or an unhealthy attachment to the power of Scargill's name for the longer-term interests of the fight for socialism.

The destruction of Serbia goes on solely in the interests of reviving fascist-imperialist blitzkrieg as the right way to sort out world problems, - the spirit of World Wars I & II, the Vietnam War, Korean War, Suez War, Algerian War, Cold War, etc, etc, but with US imperialism taking the lead role played by German imperialism in the 1930s as the 'only solution' to insoluble inter-imperialist crisis then.

To help act as fake-'left' stooges for a return to imperialist warmongering now in this new insoluble inter-imperialist crisis as Socialist News is doing by promoting the KLA’s interests and totally ignoring the sinister imperialist warmongering strategy behind it, - is suicidal.

To maintain solidarity with Scargillism because it will help revive the mass struggle for socialism in the long run is a tragic delusion.

The anticipated conflict with centrism over import controls is already here, as it is over attitudes to war. Events are moving faster than expected because the imperialist world leaders KNOW that what the EPSR has described about incurable catastrophic economic crisis is true, whereas EPSR readers still do not believe it or fully take it in.

Imperialism’s leaders are preparing for devastating all-round conflict in all directions. Trade war is a certainty, and the warmongering preparations behind it are already well in hand. Scargillism is not only vacuous on this utterly decisive question for the future of mankind. It has deliberately, consciously walled itself off from any involvement in such theoretical struggle.

Socialist News is dumbed down ON PURPOSE, - in the condescending belief that "the educator must start from where the workers are actually at, from their perception of the world, - not from where the educator would like them to be". Socialist News contributors are told to "aim for the average Sun or Mirror reader, where our recruits come from". Conference platforms spout endlessly: "workers don't want to hear what one dead Russian revolutionary said to another", (any chauvinist significance in it being OK to quote good British sources like James Connolly or Keir Hardie??).

A case has already been made in the EPSR about the appalling and fatal nationalist slant in the SLP’s Euro-election appeal and its devolution propaganda. Let others refute these conclusions if they can. To say that such nationalism is no worse than was already apparent in previous manifestos is a cop out. The inadequacies of a centrist project, - a millionfold, - need dealing with as and when they come to the fore, dictated by events. The event is now, - the Euro elections. The problem is a completely incorrect misleadership of the working class by the SLP spouting chauvinist nonsense as a 'solution' to the crisis of monopoly imperialism. Conflict on this can no longer wait.

The significance of Scargillism's moves to try to get the EPS Review shut down is being missed. It was a planned assault by philistinism to maintain the SLP as a quiescent, undisturbed ideological swamp for use as foot-soldiers or voting fodder behind a sycophantic mafia-clique leadership. Every measure to restrict Socialist News discussion, hold back local and regional party development, and discourage regional and national party schools and debate speaks volumes in the same direction. Not a scrap of discussion about monopoly-imperialism in Europe and the world has been undertaken, all the Euro-election fuss notwithstanding. Not one word of discussion was had, even on the NEC, about the published Euro-election appeal itself. No mass meetings have been called on the NATO blitzkrieg, and the latest Socialist News is just pathetic on the warmongering by the West, consciously so.

The personal expulsion is more than just "a sordid disgrace" or "the reactionary potential of revisionist muddle" as keep-faith-with-the-SLP circles have described it, suggesting it is no worse than the Revisionist backwardness that unconditional support for the workers states required communists to suffer. Preserving the ultimate essential breakthrough against imperialism, - the dictatorship of the proletariat, - at all costs is one thing. Putting up with opportunist philistine conceit for any longer than necessary because it can lay claim to mass working-class support is a different proposition entirely.

A useful role for Scargillism was never guaranteed. How it shaped up under pressure was always going to matter. Its personal treachery is part of its emerging reactionary inadequacy. A workers state making mistakes is one thing. An adjunct of bourgeois-confusion society, putting the boot into good communists, is something else altogether. And such deliberately duplicitous back-stabbing to protect a mafia-sycophancy clique (pretending to run a democratic workers party of socialism) in order to protect itself from prying communist eyes, elected or not, is no different from any rightwing thuggery. Terms used in the EPSR were a matter of descriptive choice, not political definition.

And the nationalist anti-EU policy just does happen factually to be nearer to the National Front line than anything else in bourgeois or 'left'-swamp politics. Discuss. Roy Bull

"Protest at the war" say the Trot and Labour 'left' opportunists - from Tariq Ali to Mark Steel to Bruce Kent. "But let’s also bring down Milosevic and push for a 'proper' peacekeeping force in Yugoslavia, and help dismember that country for the sake of Kosovo". The Western arrogance and anti-communist contempt towards the victims of fascist NATO bombing is breathtaking. These fake-'lefts' keep the door open for imperialism’s lying "human rights" propaganda, and sustain every foul illusion in Western "democracy".

Just as the fascist NATO warmongering on Yugoslavia is doomed to disaster, so the opportunist fake-'left' are doomed to humiliate themselves by being caught out having MORE putrid illusions in “Western values” than the bourgeoisie themselves.

At the Committee for Peace in the Balkans meeting on 21 April, old IMG Trot Tariq Ali, Labour 'left' MP Alice Mahon, the SWP former Guardian columnist Mark Steel all kicked off lambasting the stupidity and hypocrisy of the West’s propaganda about the bombing of Yugoslavia, only then to suggest how the "Balkans problem" could be solved by the United Nations (an imperialist-controlled den of thieves); by “a proper peacekeeping force imposed on Yugoslavia to stop Serbian ethnic cleansing” (never mind there’s a civil war, with murderous behaviour on all sides, like all wars, which doesn’t define at all which is the anti-imperialist side(e.g. the ANC accept that they were rough and ready in the liberation war, but don’t accept they should be pilloried for it like the apartheid regime deserves to be)); and these fakers permanently treat the warmongering as a policy "mistake", rectifiable by sufficient protest.

No reason was advanced in the hall for the West’s warmongering in Europe other than NATO’s own reasons for going to war i.e. that there was a "Balkans crisis" that the West had to deal with, intended to help the Albanian refugees and stop Serbian "ethnic cleansing". And while supposedly "attacking" the West’s propaganda tall-tales and hypocrisy, the 'left' platform speakers then all pilloried the Serbs as "ethnic cleansers", calling them "monstrous", but utterly failed to identify the NATO warmongering as a colonial-fascist blitzkrieg that spews out of the capitalist system’s global economic crisis. There was no call from the speakers whatsoever for socialist revolution to end imperialism, and its warmongering.

The Trots’ petty-bourgeois hatred of proletarian dictatorship (such as the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia at its best, China, Vietnam, Cuba etc),combined with their complacent Western lifestyle-existence, is such that they are a MILLION MILES from being able to show any genuine solidarity with the anti-imperialist struggle against the fascist Western bombing. Instead, they are - just as contemptuously as a NATO tinpot general, but twice as self-righteously - drawing up schemes to "solve the Balkans crisis".

They are so arrogant that they can even say that such things SHOULDN’T be done (as Mark Steel did in his cynical remarks) and then proceed to do it! Steel advocated campaigning for "an end to rotten Balkans nationalism" which was so against the interests of the working class in the region!! Go "cure" Britain (your country), the US, France, Germany, Italy, Turkey, Croatia, Bosnia, Albania - and all the countries that ripped apart Serbia’s efforts to hold Yugoslavia together first.

On the doorstep of Friends House, the contemptible media-Trot Tariq Ali was well rattled by an EPSR supporter who said: “Since it’s imperialist warmongering on Yugoslavia - why are you calling for a Western peacekeeping force??”
Ali lamely replied that it wouldn’t be one involving the NATO countries, and Serbia accepted the idea of such a force...

[How foul. Serbia/Yugoslavia is having ultimatums thrown at it by the NATO warmongers at the point of a gun.]

"And don’t raise your voice at me..." said this professorial pillock, only used to the pathetic fawning adulation he received in the hall, where he was warmly applauded by the middle-class Trot 'left' and CND types for fretting that NATO’s warmongering was destroying the imperialist figleaf (the United Nations) and putting it out of business, like the League of Nations before it. He advocated the UN and the imperialist Organisation for Security in Europe to resolve the war.

What these hopeless stooges for Western colonial meddling NEVER advocate is DEFEAT for imperialism, including defeat for its military adventure by whatever fightback can be mustered by the region’s anti-imperialist forces and/or whatever INTER-imperialist skulduggery happens.

Outside the hall, Ann Murphy of the Weekly Worker Trots also couldn’t be made to see sense over her group’s support for the KLA terrorists’ 'rights to self-determination' (despite a sensible letter in her own paper by Sandy McBumey). It won’t take many more weeks of stinking fascist NATO bombing of Serbia and the rest of Yugoslavia, plus more obvious evidence that the imperialists are arming up the KLA, and that they are only behaving like dirty little stooges for fascist warmongering, before the Weekly Worker Trots will face greater humiliation than ever.

"National self-determination" is an ABSTRACT right used as a means of understanding by communist fighters against imperialism. If in concrete circumstances, as with the war on Yugoslavia, it serves imperialism then anti-imperialists have no truck with it.

Murphy sneered that this showed that the EPSR supporter wasn’t for democracy at all. The EPSR reply was that she was only for proletarian dictatorship, to which Murphy went off in a huff - getting into the spirit of the WW's copying of the West’s hate propaganda, that all opponents of the West and its "democracy" are "fascists" who must be blitzed.

They are so motivated by anti-communism, these fake-'left' counter-revolutionaries, that Mark Steel spent more time discussing how the “monster Milosevic” should be overthrown by (unspecified) "democratic forces" than he did having a poke at what he didn’t like about the NATO bombing.

But such 'forces' are ALL supported by the "free world" NATO killers.

The Trots fall for and suck up to the watchwords of the "free world" because they are middle-class collaborators with monopoly capitalism right down to their boots.

What an incredibly cheeky but utterly disgusting fraud that these Trots (like Steel and Ali) say they’d like to see "a voluntary confederation of the peoples of the Balkans" or "an end to the nationalisms of the Balkans in favour of socialism" when they NEVER supported the heroic stab at doing just that - the 50-year existence of socialist Yugoslavia (whatever its revisionist weaknesses and failings).

Embattled Serbia/Yugoslavia still retains the spirit of some of those best communist and partisan fighter traditions, but the Trots hate that as being "totalitarian" and "state capitalist", and "not democratic socialism", "far too like the Soviet Union".

Instead, the Trots egg on all the reactionary political forces of the Cold War against the workers states, acting as 'left' cover for the West’s non-stop subversion of workers states in the anti-Soviet Cold War, and now as agents of non-stop pro-imperialist "democratic socialism with a human face" garbage when the last vestiges of such a workers state is being (the West intends) bombed out of existence.

BUT - for genuine anti-imperialists - the Hitlerite NATO warmongering on Yugoslavia conveys exactly the OPPOSITE message. The only way for the embattled workers states like the USSR, Yugoslavia, Eastern Europe etc to survive after WW2, -(besieged by Western Cold War subversion, atomic-bombing threats, and armed to the teeth NATO armies on their borders, plus very quickly re-armed but un-deNazified Germany) - was for the workers states to build and maintain powerful Red Armies; ruthless KGB counter-subversion, ideological war against imperialism, and the crushing of political agents funded and inspired by the West.

The savage destruction of Yugoslavia shows how right the Chinese were at Tianamen Square to stop counter-revolution in its tracks; how right East Germany was to have a Berlin Wall; how right Lenin was to crush counter-revolution at Krondstat; how right the Soviet Union was to smash pro-fascist counter-revolution in Hungary in 1956.

The Trots are calling for workers in Britain to SUPPORT anti-Yugoslavian forces - a fifth column - right now, just when their own imperialist countries are trying to blast Yugoslavia to bits. They did the same with the West’s favourite "workers movement" Solidarity in Poland in the 1980s, helping the CIA and the Vatican. In other circumstances, it could have been a total attempted NATO blitzkrieg against the workers states THEN.

Now imperialist-crisis has moved on, and with it has come the final wretched liquidation of Soviet revisionism in 1989 under the idealist-stooge for "free market glamour", Gorbachev. What comes in its wake?

Warmongering NATO mayhem and recolonisation directed against the whole of Central Europe AND directed at boxing in German imperialism (just the very thing NATO was founded for, it admits). It will rightly provoke millions across the planet - but especially in the former Soviet Union to say:

"Everything the communists used to say about the Western imperialists is TRUE. These warmongering bastards will never stop until they are overthrown; and no country can be free of imperialism unless it builds a tough-minded Leninist party, a giant Red Army, and a KGB, and is ready to fight every inch for the working class."

Defeat and disaster for Western imperialism and its lying "democratic values" and "human rights" hypocrisy!

Build Leninism. Chris Barratt

Defeat imperialist warmongering - the only issue

The outpourings of supposed "humanitarian concern" by sanctimonious Western politicians and their toady press, to justify the disgusting blitzing of Serbia, is a grotesque and monstrous hypocrisy. And the central pretext for launching the barbaric raids, the supposed Recak "massacre" is a set-up [job].

Imperialism has no interest whatsoever in "protecting downtrodden people" anywhere, ever.

Just the opposite, imperialism causes and executes such oppression worldwide, or directs and funds stooges to do so, in order to maintain its system of endless exploitation.

And it is the ONLY cause.

Over 200 wars, coups and intelligence interventions in the world have been carried out since 1945 including the (Labour Government led) napalming of the Greek Communist war in l945-9; the Malay anti-communist brutalities, the CIA directed massacre of one million Indonesian communists and sympathisers in 1965; the decade of horrors in Vietnam and Kampuchea; the continuing genocidal war in East Timor; endless atrocities in Africa from Angola to Mozambique to Ethiopia, (while tolerating South African apartheid and white minority rebellion in Rhodesia); savage ongoing CIA trained death squad interventions throughout South America; the slow decades long genocide of the Palestinian people; the endless subversion and economic strangulation of the heroic Cuban workers state, and of course, right now, the NATO blitzing (via member Turkey) of the oppressed Kurdish people.

This war on Serbian troops and civilians has nothing to do with humanitarian concern and nothing to do with rights for Kosova.

Whatever the case for self-determination, it cannot be analysed outside the overall context - the world balance of class forces between workers and imperialists and the capitalist system. In the current context the KLA is nothing more than a provocateur and stooge for NATO.

World capitalism is whipping up warmongering because of its rapidly intensifying political and economic crisis across the world. The endlessly deepening Asian crisis, its spread to South America, the ever-expanding unsustainable balloon of the US budget deficit and the escalating the EU-USA trade-tariffs hostility, are all symptoms of the biggest slump/trade war crash in history, now imminent.

And, just as twice before this century, it can only be "solved" by allout war to destroy "excess production capacity" and capital.
        
It is not a coincidence that imperialist intrigue and manipulation in the Balkans is now the focus for its crisis - just as it was a major factor in the eruption of the First and Second World Wars.

Renewed capitalist crisis has put Yugoslavia again at the heart of nearly a decade of imperialist interventions and competitive manipulation, imperialism is striving both to dismember a hated workers state and to divide up the spoils. Most of all the area has become an arena tor broader inter-imperialist rivalries, skulduggery and intrigue.

It all reflects the world struggle for influence and the battle for shrinking markets, with the revived strength of German imperialism a key factor (which along with Japan is challenging again the monopoly dominance of the USA). It is not a coincidence either that German planes have gone into action again after 55 years.

Serbia, the core of the old Yugoslavian communist state, and the one showing the greatest anti-imperialist resistance, is the targeted scapegoat round which to pivot these murky rivalries. It has taken endless vilification and demonising by a sustained CIA, MI6 and other intelligence agency hate campaign - as even, astonishingly, some Tories have said.

Black propaganda throughout has presented a topsy-turvy view of an allegedly “expansionist” Serbia - rather than the truth - one element of the old Yugoslavia trying to defend itself only within the old borders. Whatever crudities and rough edges Serbian nationalism shows - (and since it is not Leninism by any means it is capable of some fairly heavy-handed and sometimes misguided actions),- the old core of workers state consciousness is still partially mingled into it, along with a heroic and principled history of anti-imperialism.               

That history has included 45 years of conflict-free multinational society in communist (F.R.Y.) Yugoslavia - with the rights and autonomies for different peoples. And the total historical record is that the core Serbian leadership of that state not only did NOT oppress minorities but respected them and helped and aided their autonomy.

Conflict has arisen only as imperialism has intrigued behind the scenes since 1990 to carve up the Balkans into spheres of influence (revived Ustashe Nazi Croatia for the Germans e.g.).

That is why imperialism hates FRY and twists the truth so completely.

And no lie has been bigger than the kick-off for the whole war, the alleged Recak "massacre", a set-up job on a par with the non existent gulf of Tonkin incident which US imperialism used to justify its Vietnam war. It never happened and neither did a "cold-blooded massacre" happen in Recak.

People were killed in fighting between the official Serbs forces and the KLA, which has endlessly broken the agreed cease-fire, sniped and killed Serbian civilians, re-armed courtesy of western supplies, and invaded supposedly agreed “neutral territories. This incident was part of that skirmishing. It was already being shouted about as a massacre before any forensic investigation has been made or anyone could know what happened. Then it was revealed the bodies had been moved and arranged with some of them shot again when cold to lend credibility to a "massacre" story.

(This has hardly been mentioned in western reports except buried in obscure foreign news reports so the press can claim "even-handedness".)

Even the western forensic team from Finland which stalled its reporting for weeks (to allow the world to swallow the "massacre" lies) was unable to bring itself to call the event a massacre.

But this has not stopped the inconvenient details being suppressed while western politicians from Clinton to Blair have lyingly screamed "massacre" in best Goebbels style.

So thin is the Recak excuse that the western agencies have been pumping out even more lurid stories since bombing began (completely unverifiable) of brutality and massacre. Of course brutality happens; this is a war. And undoubtedly - though it is never mentioned by the western press - with the huge onslaught by NATO, the KLA will have escalated its attacks. Of course there will be fighting and refugees.

But to present all that as further evidence of "Serb inhumanity" as if they happen to be rampaging around an otherwise utterly peaceful and unprovocative countryside - is to turn reality inside out.

But imperialism needs its pretexts. Imperialism needs a war.
Its leaders need warmongering in the air. Eventually, and historically soon, imperialism will erupt again in world war,- bigger than even before because its system is more developed and wider-spread than ever before.

The only thing that will stop it is the ending of imperialism and the establishment of socialism worldwide. Any defeat for its bloody warmongering system will help weaken it -and help strengthen the eventual workers struggle to overturn it.

Any defeat. By any forces pitched against it, whatever their defects. Imperialism is the sole and only cause of world conflict and destruction. The more it is smashed the better. Don Hoskins

World Revolutionary Socialist Review
(edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles).

Republican News analyses the UN report that highlights collusion between the RUC and loyalist death squads and again demands an inquiry into the murder of Pat Finucane. The report raises serious concerns at a time the Rosemary Nelson inquiry is set to stay in the hands of the RUC

Dato Param Cumaraswamy’s report, presented to 53 governments and hundreds of non-governmental organisations, is one of the most damning reports ever produced and raises alarming concerns at a time when the Rosemary Nelson murder inquiry is set to remain in the hands of the RUC.

According to a source working with a human rights NGO, had the report been written after the murder of Rosemary Nelson, it would have been even more critical than it is. And his conclusions on collusion between the RUC and loyalist death squads and the whole attitude, ethos and motivations of the organisation naturally led him to demand a public inquiry into Pat Finucane’s murder and an independent international judicial inquiry and investigation into the brutal killing of Rosemary Nelson.

Unveiled on Monday at the United Nations Human Rights Annual Commission in Geneva, the special investigator who previously found evidence of Systematic harassment of solicitors by RUC members again slammed the RUC and the British government.

FLANAGAN ACCUSED OF NEGLIGENCE

By accusing the RUC Chief Constable of treating with 'complete indifference' reports of intimidation by RUC members as well as information about death threats, Dato Param Cumaraswamy is directly accusing Ronnie Flanagan of negligence which led to the murder of Rosemary Nelson.

The report states that the threatened solicitors “were easy to identify”. However, Flanagan did not call for any meetings. The lack of confidence in the complaints system was not addressed. ‘‘This the chief constable failed to do and allowed the situation to deteriorate,” the report states.

On the issue of Pat Finucane’s murder, Dr Cumaraswamy expresses ‘surprise” at comments by Ronnie Flanagan that there had never been allegations of RUC involvement. He also states that there is sufficient concrete evidence to suggest RUC collusion with loyalist death squads.

The British government is also urged to publish the second report of the Stevens inquiry into allegations of institutionalised collusion between the RUC and loyalists.

RUC/LOYALIST COLLUSION

It was in the oral submission to the commission that Dr Cumaraswamy was most outspoken. He directly accused the British government, like Ronnie Flanagan, of negligence.

He went much farther than in the written report, (drafted before Rosemary Nelson’s death when making indirect reference to collusion between the RUC and loyalist death squads that could be covered up in an RUC-led investigation. He stated: “I have expressed concern for her personal security and raised the threats on her life in communications to the government.”)

By stating that he hoped “the involvement of the RUC in the investigations will not affect and taint the impartiality and credibility of the investigation," he voiced such concerns. 

But he went further: “I say this because the late Rosemary Nelson lodged several complaints against RUC officials and expressed no confidence in the RUC investigatory mechanism.”

Curaswamy said he was “even more convinced that there is now a stronger case made out” for an inquiry into Pat Finucane’s murder. Hinting that the British government is attempting to cover-up yet darker findings of the Stevens, he again demanded the full and public release of the inquiry.

He also talked of the Law Society as a biased association and launched a stinging attack on those who refuse to take up delicate cases. “I appeal to the 1,800-plus members of the Law Society to set aside their sectarian differences and join ranks in defence of the independence of their profession.”

Speaking at a memorial service for Rosemary Nelson in Geneva, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson, echoed Cumaraswamy’s comments by saying that there were “dark elements" in the murders of Rosemary Nelson and Pat Finucane that needed to be addressed.

Speaking in Geneva, Geraldine Finucane, referring to the murders of her husband Pat and of Rosemary Nelson, commented: “Both were subjected to death threats from the same state authorities during the period prior to their murders. The circumstances surrounding both murders point almost conclusively to collusion between the RUC, British military and loyalist armed terrorist groups.” 

She later added: “The recent outrageous murder of Rosemary Nelson emphasises the urgent need for serious public scrutiny of the. whole issue of collusion, which has never been investigated to public satisfaction”. •

Gerry Kelly spells out imperialist intransigence that is blocking the Good Friday Agreement for a new Ireland.

SINCE the conclusion of the multi-party negotiations last Good Friday there has been an impasse in the peace process. The Ulster Unionist Party have blocked the establishment of the political Institutions agreed last year and have demanded the decommissioning of IRA weapons as a precondition to forward movement. As a result of this, a series of deadlines have been missed over the past 12 months.

The Shadow Executive was to have been established in July. It is still not in existence. The all-Ireland Ministerial Council was to have met and completed a work program by October 31. The all-lreland Ministerial Council has not yet been established. The d’Hondt procedure was to have been triggered on 10 March: it was not. It was then to have been triggered in the week beginning 29 March: it was not.

The survival of the entire Good Friday Agreement is now in serious doubt.

This was the context in which the British and Irish governments convened a series of discussions at Hillsborough Castle. By Thursday 1 April it was clear that the UUP remained wedded to their precondition, which is no part of the Good Friday Agreement and which Sinn Féin simply cannot deliver.

Sinn Féin proposed that the d’Hondt procedure be triggered as promised by the British government. Instead, the two governments produced a draft declaration and adjourned the discussions. The draft declaration was not an agreed position. If adopted, this declaration would represent a significant departure from the terms of the Good Friday Agreement, an agreement that was endorsed democratically in referendums North and South. Rewriting of the Good Friday Agreement is not acceptable. It has the potential to undo all the work of the last number of years.

THE GOOD FRIDAY AGREEMENT

The negotiations leading up to the Good Friday Agreement commenced in September 1997 and took a full eight months to reach their conclusion. The wider peace process in which all of this is situated publicly emerged a full six years ago in April 1993 with the first joint statement by Gerry Adams and John Hume. In cumulative terms, the IRA' s two cessations have existed for three years and two months of that time. The IRA's guns remain silent. 

The Good Friday Agreement of 10 April 1998 does not represent Sinn Féin's preferred position. It does not represent the preferred position of republicans throughout Ireland. It is a compromise position, the essential compromise for this phase of the peace process. The Good Friday Agreement is, in effect, a contract between opponents.

The various compromises in the Agreement were hard fought and hard won over a protracted period. It represents all that is possible at this time.

OBLIGATIONS

The Good Friday Agreement is a contract between opponents: not an agreement between friends. In that context, the critical importance of the application of the letter of the Agreement is obvious. Implementation, according to the letter of the Agreement, is the mutual guarantee in the absence of trust and confidence between opponents.

Moreover, all of the players — governments and parties alike — understand that to be the case. The application of the letter of the Agreement is the contractual obligation entered into by all of the parties to it. These obligations have been given the full force of the democratic imperative resulting from the endorsement by the overwhelming majority of the electorate in referendums: they have been given political imperative in the international agreement between the Dublin and London governments. These are obligations freely entered into by the parties, the electorate, the two legislatures and the two governments. They are not options. They are imperatives of agreement, democratic mandate, law and international agreement. They are obligations under a contract between opponents. A contract to develop a lasting peace.

OBLIGATIONS NOT HONOURED

The political institutions are not an option. Their establishment is an imperative; an obligation freely entered into. They should have existed in 'shadow' form since last year: since last July or at latest, in practical terms of fulfilling their remit, since last September. They have not.

Powers and responsibilities should have been transferred to the political institutions before now. This has not happened. Obligations have not been honoured. The seeds of trust and confidence have not even been sown, let alone nurtured and developed. Only the ‘shadow’ Assembly is in existence. A concession to unionism to which republicans reluctantly and very conditionally agreed.

This has been a year of broken promises and missed deadlines. A year which the credibility of the Agreement and of politics in general has been significantly eroded.

The Executive is the passport institution to all of the other political institutions. The UUP have erected a barrier to this. This blatant breach of obligations and commitments, a breach of the terms of the Agreement itself, has not been confronted. Other players have begun to acquiesce.

MINISTERIAL OFFICE

Under the terms of the Agreement there is no precondition to membership of the Executive, save sufficient mandate from the electorate and taking the Ministerial pledge of office. All parties to the Agreement freely entered into this obligation. Sinn Féin Ministers will uphold the ministerial pledge of office. So must all other members of the Executive. No one party needs to take the other parties’ word for this. For in the absence of trust and confidence, the terms of the Agreement make specific provision for the exclusion from the Executive of any party which does not honour the Ministerial pledge of office.

This, amongst other commitments, binds Ministers — all Ministers — to a commitment to non-violence and exclusively peaceful and democratic means and to serve all the people equally and to act in accordance with the general obligations to promote equality and prevent discrimination and sectarian harassment.

In other words, promote or support discrimination, inequality, violence or undemocratic methods and you are gone.

DECOMMISSIONING

Despite all of these safeguards. however, collectively negotiated and agreed last Easter, the UUP have been allowed to reduce the entire Agreement and potentially the entire wider peace process to the single issue of decommissioning. They have made this a precondition to the establishment of the political institutions where no such precondition exists in the Agreement. That is the letter of the Agreement.

Nationalists have real and grave concerns about the issue of weapons. British, Royal Ulster Constabulary, Ulster Defence Regiment/Royal Irish Regiment and loyalist guns, bombs and knives have claimed 1,500 lives. There is a proliferation of licensed weapons, primarily in unionist hands. These weapons need to be dealt with. But nationalists are prepared to see this matter dealt with under the terms of the Agreement and in the context of the wider peace process. For the logic and implicit obligation of the peace process if it is to be successful means and end to violence and the removal of all tools of war.

The terms of the Agreement in relation to the issue of decommissioning are a significant step in that direction. They are also unambiguous.

Commitments have been made by all of the parties. Their obligations in relation to these commitments must be upheld. Those commitments and the obligation to uphold them were collectively agreed and cast in both the reality of the situation and the real-politik of this phase of the peace process. That is:

■ None of the parties to the Agreement was in direct control or possession of weapons of any kind or category save for the two governments;

■ Decommissioning will only result from a voluntary act by those who are in possession of them;

■ All parties are obliged to use any influence they may have to achieve the stated objective and to work constructively and in good faith with the Independent International Commission to achieve this end in the context of the implementation of the overall agreement.

THE INDEPENDENT INTERNATIONAL COMMISSION

We must be clear about the role of the Commission under the terms of the Agreement: That is to monitor, review, verify and report. In this regard, General John de Chastelain’s integrity is beyond dispute. All of the parties are obliged to work constructively and in good faith with the Commission. Sinn Féin has honoured and will continue to honour this obligation. And I would guess that a record of the number of meetings between the Commission and the parties would show a paucity of meetings with those who snout the loudest on this issue.

The obligations on all parties to the Agreement is to the achievement of an objective over which none of us have any direct control; to an objective which can only be worked for politically and can only be accomplished by the voluntary actions of those in possession of arms. Hence the obligation on all of the parties to use any influence they may have in that context. In essence, decommissioning is a commitment and objective towards which all of the parties are obliged to work towards politically.

INFLUENCE

The commitment to the objective under the terms of the Agreement is absolute. All parties to the Agreement have an obligation to work politically for disarmament, to use any influence they may have to achieve this and to work constructively and in good faith with the International Commission. That is to work politically towards this end. And obviously influence is not static. It is subject to and effected by wider considerations.

In the context of the peace process and the Agreement, the overall implementation of what was agreed is one of these considerations. Where are the political institutions? Is this not the same RUC? The same military fortifications? The same repressive legislation? Are we more equal today than Good Friday 1998? And what bearing on Sinn Féin’s influence does anyone imagine the whole catalogue of events on the ground since Good Friday 1998 have had? Six people, including three children, killed by loyalists as a result of events surrounding Orange marches! Almost 90 loyalist bombing attacks against nationalists and Catholics! The nationalist population of Garvaghy Road, under daily threat, intimidation and periodic violence. The shadow of collusion on some of this! 

None of which is to mention the negative influence of the securocrats who steered the process onto the rocks under John Major’s government.

CONCLUSION

Sinn Féin has honoured, and will continue to honour, every commitment and fulfil every obligation contained in the Good Friday Agreement. We expect everyone else to do the same. Sinn Féin can go no further than the terms of the Good Friday Agreement and we accept that this is the same for the other parties. The reality is that the Agreement represents the outer limits of what is possible at this point in time. It is a compromise, which was talked out and agreed last year. The implementation of this compromise cannot now become the subject of a renegotiation. Just as the Agreement was not a unionist document, nor a republican document, it cannot be implemented in a partisan manner, neither according to unionist nor nationalist dictates.

Sinn Féin accepts this reality. In committing ourselves to the Good Friday Agreement, Sinn Féin made substantial concessions. We have honoured every commitment and promise we made. We have taken the republican constituency to the limit. And we will continue to stretch ourselves politically, for that is the responsibility of all political leaderships. But we can only work within the terms of the Agreement itself.

No party can be allowed to retrospectively rewrite those elements of the Agreement with which they were or are unhappy. The UUP cannot unilaterally decide how the issue of decommissioning is to be dealt with. The Agreement sets out procedures and a mechanism tor this. Sinn Féin is prepared to work these procedures and mechanisms constructively. We are prepared to use our influence to secure disarmament. We are prepared to fulfil all obligations and commitments set out in the Good Friday Agreement. We want to see a process of conflict resolution that removes all manifestations of war. We want to see a process of reconciliation and healing.

Despite the difficulties and stalling, Sinn Féin remains totally committed to the Good Friday Agreement This is what we signed up to. It is what the majority of the Irish people voted for. There is a democratic imperative on all parties, including the two governments to defend the Good Friday Agreement and to resist any attempt to rewrite it

Much has been achieved over the past -six years. We have a peace process, IRA guns are silent We have an Agreement which many believed was not possible.

There are procedures and mechanisms for addressing any of the issues which led to conflict. This progress needs to be consolidated and built upon. It certainly cannot be taken tor granted.

The Good Friday Agreement needs to be implemented in full. Any proposals to overcome the current impasse must be set firmly within the provisions of the Agreement. This will be Sinn Féin's approach to the resumed discussions this week. •