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 1044 May l6 2000                                                                                                                                    10p

Bristol seminar Sat July 15.EPSR.

Defeats for imperialism are a vital ingredient for sparking revolutionary socialism, but the fight for Marxist-Leninist theory to analyse capitalist crisis with needs to start now. The sizist or 'tactical' reasons for ignoring theoretical polemics are a fatal part of the Stalinist disaster and of the impotent isolation of the fake-'left' now. The failures by anti-imperialist struggles to give leadership for world revolutionary solutions to capitalist-warmongering crisis must be challenged.

The foul mess of imperialist-backed diamond-trade exploitation in Sierra Leone is troubling even bourgeois conservatives, but for 'left' critics of capitalism-colonialism, it again raises the much more difficult question of exactly how is reaction to be fought.

Condemning the filthy intrigues of Western profiteering intervention to prop up their corrupt stooge 'president' Kabbah via United Nations, British, or sometimes openly mercenary troops like Sandline, is straightforward enough, — as is totally disbelieving on principle every single word of the cunningly edited media picture of rebel RUF 'atrocities'.

The difficulties start with how far any positive statements can go concerning the existing resistance to imperialism, and the further political perspectives both affecting the situation locally and the international anti-imperialist struggle beyond that.

Foday Sankoh's Revolutionary United Front may turn out to be not much more than diamond-intrigue stooges themselves, (or there could be little choice anyway, given the utter impoverishment of the populace and the total corruption of government in the country), — and no comparison is being made between Sierra Leone's anti-imperialist problems and those elsewhere, — but political analysis of this latest aspect of 'free world' warmongering crisis does raise some of the same questions that the fake-'left' fails to answer also with regard to the West's vendettas against Saddam, Milosevic, and Mugabe.

Flawed, weak, or incomplete anti-imperialism must be described as such for the international working-class to be able to proceed to conscious world socialist revolution through an increasing number of trial-and-error experiences. 

Such consciousness is the whole aim and the whole content of the struggle for Marxist-Leninist philosophy.

The current Lalkar (May-June) epitomises the wretched failure of the petty-bourgeois fake-'left' to provide a scrap of revolutionary-communist leadership on these questions. An attack on New Labour racism (over asylum-seekers, etc) wallows in utterly useless reformist moralising, urging workers not to be racist or urging improved conditions for council estates so that people would be less demoralised-inclined to be racist, — and failing completely to bring out fully the crucial political-diversion role that racism plays, bemusing workers with asylum-seekers issues to distract attention from the revolutionary crisis gripping world imperialism which is producing the refugee issue and to which the only possible 'solution' is the international revolutionary overthrow of the imperialist system, nothing less.

A rehash of the NATO blitzkrieg on Serbia goes backwards from even the wishy-washy humbug of last summer when the Lalkarites, wearing their SLP hat, loyally defended 'No to war' social pacifist nonsense to keep in with Scargill, and only tacked on the call for NATO's defeat at the very end of their own piece, coupled with one reference to Bolshevik Revolution as being the only final answer to imperialist war, — feeling the pressure from the EPSR's non-stop analysis of imperialist war from a detailed and wholly Marxist-Leninist position. Now there is no longer even any reference to a defeat for imperialism, let alone any proper discussion of this as the only serious political perspective for the supposed 'left' (including the SLP) to agitate through.

Instead, critical bourgeois hindsight is amassed, expressing dissatisfaction from Simon Jenkins and others at the wretched outcome of the destruction of Yugoslavia and at the dishonest way it was conducted and reported, — (which is nice), — climaxing in the notion that certain North American academic moves to indict NATO leaders for outlawry and war crimes (which would also be nice) deserve communist support.

But once again, this discussion is consciously left with a totally hollow centre, with all analysis of where and how the next defeats for imperialism might come, and the crucial question of what is/was the Milosevic regime, and where, did it go right/wrong, deliberately omitted. It is all very well again tacking on at the end a brief reference to revolution as the only solution to imperialist warmongering, but until the gigantic setbacks in modern revolutionary history are finally fully analysed and sorted, — (and the Milosevic disaster is only the latest in a whole series of vital historical lessons which Lalkar's museum-Stalinism is incapable of discussing), —  then building new leadership for a revived world socialist movement is just a pipe dream.

Workers everywhere more and more insistently want to know: What went wrong with socialism, and how is it to be put right. Diverting their attention to the antics of some academic bourgeois lawyers trying to indict NATO leaders for war crimes in Yugoslavia is just that, — a reformist diversion.

Lalkar's Zimbabwe piece is just as barren. Apparently written in a spirit a bit critical of the EPSR's cautious scepticism towards Mugabeism, it bizarrely refuses itself to identify wholeheartedly with ZANU policy, but once again merely tells the story of imperialist counter-revolutionary skulduggery, past and present, and of rotten bourgeois propaganda, masquerading as media coverage of the conflict, backed of course by New Labour.

All well and true, but how does the 20-year record of Mugabeism match up to the requirements for world anti-imperialist leadership? What did ZANU tell us about Gorbachev at the time? What do they think now? What is the future for international class-collaboration South Africa style? What should Milosevic have done? 

Etc, etc, — not just Lalkar's responsibility to have a go at, nor ZANU's. But how do these issues need arguing with regard to the confused 'left' in Britain (including the SLP and Lalkar) and its inability to build a new leadership in the working class???

When Lalkar cannot even openly discuss its own failings and problems, let alone those of the SLP, it is obviously fatally handicapped for seriously discussing Mugabeism either, — or anything else. 

The EPSR was circumspect about Mugabe because international leadership is now the crucial issue facing the worldwide anti-imperialist struggle, and ZANU merely hovers between not saying nearly enough and not saying anything at all. 

Obviously, its revolutionary actions against imperialism will take the socialist cause further forward than a thousand new programmes for socialism will, — but that perspectives are still vitally needed for the longterm defeat of monopoly-imperialism is beyond question now civilisation's greatest requirement.

EPSR 1040 placed Zimbabwe properly in the context of the international class struggle and the unsolvable world imperialist crisis, fully explaining the anti-communist and CIA background to such phenomena as the suddenly mushroomed MDC in Zimbabwe, and spelling out and analysing in detail how fake 'leftism' in Britain was, as usual, helping to promote the anti-ZANU counter-revolutionary garbage in the British media. It then went further and linked the miserable counter-revolutionary 'left' performance on Zimbabwe's trouble with imperialism to the fake 'socialists' eager support for the pro-imperialist careerist Livingstone in the London Assembly elections, and to their unthinking acceptance of the whole regional Assembly/elected mayor stunt itself, finishing with the following Leninist-revolutionary challenge to fake-'leftism' on the asylum-seekers question: 

'If capital is free to cross borders, then workers must be free to do the same.'

It is a complete recipe for continued imperialist disaster on earth. There is not even a hint that there is anything wrong with domination of the planet by free-market capital. 

There is not even the slightest suggestion that what the world's masses really need is to get monopoly-capitalist exploitation off their backs so that their own homelands can be transformed into flourishing countries, all roughly equal the whole world over. 

In reality, it reveals cynical contempt towards the struggle for international socialist revolution, faith in which gets an occasional routine airing as the redeeming grace of these 'left purists'. 

In practice, it amounts to the most demented 'reformist' nonsense imaginable. It implies that as world capitalist crisis relentlessly deepens, bringing with it inevitable increases in divide-and-rule racist tensions deliberately being stoked up by collapsing imperialist establishments everywhere as a last hope of political survival, — then simple altruistic urging on the doorstep by self-righteous 'lefts' such as the LSA will achieve instant racial harmony, and the fascist danger rampant in every imperialist slump in history, will simply disappear without trace. 

The working class will allegedly respond to growing mass unemployment and poverty by swarming forward to demand an end to all immigration controls as their most pressing anti-crisis demand. This LSA 'left' swamp is not just fake-'socialist' but is close to being mentally deranged. This is Jehovah Witness territory, and as remote from practical blood-and-guts Bolshevik revolutionary reality as it is possible to be.

Right round the world, racial conflict is escalating rapidly as crisis-induced class-war frictions explode uncontrollably. Indonesia, in flames from racial-conflict diversions almost from end to end, is the obvious way the whole world is going to go. 

Mere reformist preaching at this problem to make it go away is just playing into the hands of the imperialist ruling-class, gaining time for them. Only by taking the international economic and political system completely out of the hands of the free-market bourgeoisie will a real start even begin to be made to ending the racist nonsense in human culture once and for all. No class-exploitation mode of production (the free market) can possibly avoid systematic breeding of racist prejudices and backwardness of all kinds, no matter what reformist laws or altruistic examples are introduced. 

Of course racist attitudes should not be tolerated anywhere, and racist prejudice should be constantly re-educated, and of course Bill Morris is right to accuse even this oh-so-politically-correct New Labour regime of creating "a climate of fear" by its "degrading, divisive, and stigmatising" asylum voucher system. And Margaret Jay's reply, Blair's minister, that Morris was just covering up for his lorry drivers whose professed ignorance that they had illegal immigrants stowed aboard "beggars belief", was a monstrous disgrace.

But the reality that mafia crime is already deeply established in the sordid exploitation of immigrant transportation (using the pattern of frequent container-transport changeovers, etc, and a thousand and one other ways of making money out of smuggling illegal immigrants past Customs) should help bring all sides to their senses. Like drugs and prostitution, if the free-market world wants it, the free-market world will get it. Despite all barriers, if people want to migrate, the free-market system will, for money, find a way to make it happen, legally or illegally.

But like all bourgeois law, agitating for 'no immigration controls', - with the implication that this will help defeat racism, - is almost as big an illusion as the Blairite deception that 'firm but fair' asylum controls will 'calm fears' and 'help enhance social harmony'. For as long as the capitalist system lasts with its free-market national rivalry and its periodic slump and unemployment catastrophes, the whole migration question will incurably remain a source of racist mischief. 

All immigration controls are obviously racist by their very definition; but educating the world out of those prejudices by trying to treat the immigration-control symptom, is as futile as trying to cure bubonic plague by offering someone a box of tissues to help with their sneezing. 

Far from achieving anti-racist re-education, the reformist pipe-dream of 'no immigration controls at all', while the capitalist free-market and national economic rivalry remains the way of the world, will simply add fuel to the fire of this deliberate imperialist diversion. 

Getting rid of capitalism is the only serious and practicable anti-racist policy. It is the same paradox as with revolution. It might seem simpler to just try to reform capitalism. In practice, that will prove impossible, and it will be easier, in fact, to overthrow it.'

This is just one of scores of challenging issues which the fake-'left', — Lalkar and the SLP included, — are choosing deliberately to evade for opportunist reasons of internal difficulties and an insane suicidal wish to dumb things down for the working class (or write things for the average Sun or Mirror reader, in the Socialist News's patronising directive). 

Being merely supportive of Mugabe, and raising no challenging questions about ZANU's 20-year record as a ruling party, is just as uselessly patronising. It reeks of the hopeless museum-Stalinism approach to history.

But having said all that, drawing conclusions for anti-imperialist leadership from the Sierra Leone debacle is not easy. First it can be recorded, from the capitalist press's own admissions, — that completely contrary to 'New World Order' crap which the fake-'left' is so disoriented by, the colonial-imperialist position in this diamond-grabbing disaster is self-evidently not a strong one (in the light of all the constant messy upheavals) and is openly disowned by prominent bourgeois-conservative opinion-makers, — this from the Times:

Take up the White Man's burden
 Send forth the best ye breed — 
Go, bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives' need;

To wait in heavy harness
 On fluttered folk and wild — 
Your new-caught, sullen peoples. 
Half devil and half child.

A spearhead battalion of 250 paratroops had already secured the airport outside the capital of Freetown to evacuate 500 British citizens. The paratroops will also offer support to the apparently helpless 8,000-strong United Nations force on the ground. Seven British warships, one armed with Harrier jets, are on the way to the area. Mr Cook's language and past actions suggest that they will stay a long time. He is the maestro of mission creep.

Mr Cook and his boss, Tony Blair, have long cut a dash as Kipling's new imperialists. The baggage changes. Humanitarian-ism and democracy are in the soldier's knapsack, rather than the Bible. The talk is now of human rights and the credibility of the United Nations. Yet the burden is still a burden. The white man is still the intervener, the boss. And in Sierra Leone, as in Somalia and. Rwanda, local warriors make passable proxies for "new-caught, sullen peoples, half devil and half child".

Those who dabble in African diamonds have always accepted risk. Not to mince words, they should be grateful that, the British taxpayer is prepared to bail them out when the going gets hot. Yet that is only front-of-stage. Britain is not going to Sierra Leone merely to evacuate its nationals.

Why else has the carrier, HMS Illustrious, been diverted from duty? Why are 550 Marines setting sail this week from Marseilles aboard the helicopter carrier, HMS Ocean, as part of a full "Amphibious Ready Group", complete with the frigate, HMS Chatham, two Royal Fleet Auxiliary landing ships and a replenishment ship. Already four Chinooks are in theatre, alongside eight C130 Hercules. Are they not enough? There are only 500 Britons in Sierra Leone. Many of those interviewed seem prepared to sit out the latest round of the local mayhem, which has been continuous for almost a decade. What is going on?

Sierra Leone, like Somalia, is the archetypal road to hell that is paved with good intentions. The wealth of diamonds and aid (£60 million from Britain alone in four years) has showered money on any who could get their hands on it. Civil, war, spilling over from Liberia, is endemic. The only chance of stability has appeared to come from Western mining interests prepared to work with the local mafias and guarded by mercenaries. This was the realpolitik "Sandline" policy, which crushed the RUF rebellion in 1998 and caused the "ethical" Mr Cook such angst. If ever there was a case for leaving Africa's murky political economy alone, it is Sierra Leone. As Stephen Ellis wrote in yesterday's Times, it has "no realistic chance of seeing a decent government in the foreseeable future".

Britain engineered the 1998 reinstatement of the corrupt President Kabbah. Britain was party to dispatching 11,000 African and other UN troops to "keep the peace".

Wise counsel might have advised the UN to be cautious. After shambles in Congo, Somalia, Angola,  Rwanda, Liberia and Sierra Leone itself, peacekeeping in Africa should be attempted with extreme delicacy. Instead, hundreds of ill-trained Zambians were thrown into the midst of a fast-reviving civil war. Their weapons, even their clothes, were seized by the rebels and the soldiers taken hostage. This was the largest such UN operation in the world and has become the "peace-keeping" equivalent of Gallipoli. Presumably Mr Cook's objective is to save the UN soldiers from their self-inflicted fate. Heroic British paratroops will shepherd them to safety under the British flag. Mr Cook will walk tall.

Then what? Mr Cook promised yesterday morning that British soldiers were not in Sierra Leone as "combat troops alongside the UN". What is a troop if not a combat troop when in the midst of combat? Thus did Douglas Hurd promise that British soldiers in Bosnia were "only to escort aid convoys". They would never get "bogged down". Mr Cook likewise promised that British troops in Kosovo were to "stop ethnic cleansing". Foreign Secretaries making such pledges know that they are probably lying, but hope something will turn up to get them off the hook. 

The fact must be that British soldiers are going to Sierra Leone to do more than evacuate civilians. "The mere presence of British forces may help to deter the rebels from advancing on Freetown," says Mr Cook. The troops are also to secure UN premises  in  Freetown  and guard the main hotel, the Mamma Yoko. This hotel is full of the world's media. Outside, Sierra Leoneans are in the habit of rioting, shooting and chopping off each other's arms. For years this has been of little concern to the world. But in full view of the cameras, women and children will scream for "something to be done". To such calls, Mr Cook has never failed to respond. Within ten days he will have a huge tonnage of naval hardware bobbing offshore. He will have the world's best-trained infantry on the streets, and Harrier jets screaming overhead. What else can soldiers do but get involved? What does Mr Cook expect? Why else is he sending so many soldiers to such a hellhole?

I do not think Mr Cook or his colleagues are dishonest in telling the British people one thing — in Iraq or Kosovo or Sierra Leone — then doing something else. Politicians always take the line of least resistance. It starts with rhetoric a flourish of "unacceptables", "intolerables" and "humanitarian outrages". Troops are alerted, pledged and then sent. They are accompanied by a heavy press contingent, eager for action. Mr Cook finds himself at summit conferences, in the spotlight, on television. Ultimatums are made. Critics of intervention are dismissed as cynics. Bombs are loaded. It all gets rather exciting. Suddenly Britain is involved in a war in which its interests are minimal and nobody has the foggiest idea how to stop. Such intervention may do some good while it lasts, as did the American presence in Somalia. It rarely does good after it has gone. And go it one day must. Even this British Government does not plan to rule the world.

Mr Cook is merely playing with imperialism. He is at best half-hearted in fighting Kipling's "savage wars of peace". But he should remember that Kipling's poem was not a celebration of such adventure. Kipling had seen war. He wrote his poem to warn America, which had just seized Spain's Pacific colonies, what imperialism really involved. It started in glory. It ended with entrapment, ingratitude, dead bodies and "the hate of those ye guard".

And even more gung-ho aggressive imperialists of the old Daily Mail - Daily Express type are keener these days for proper mercenaries to do the diamond corporations' dirty work for them, — completely lacking confidence as they do in direct British imperialism being able to rule any part of the world successfully any more, — even such a small, battered, and corrupted piece as Sierra Leone.

But the murk of the diamond wars is even more complicated than that, as the following broad sweep of scarcely-believable allegations from the Observer makes clear. As monopoly-imperialist evolution approaches a new anarchic trade-war crisis worldwide, so do certain features of it reduce towards the robber-baron capitalism now rampant in Russia.

Gamely, the bourgeois Observer tries to convince itself that world imperialist leadership (i.e. the US ruling class, plus occasionally-canvassed stooge 'allies') have plans to "curb this trade's worst excesses", but in view of all the crooked regimes and movements involved, many of them with almost exclusively American connections and support like Unita and Liberia, and in view of bourgeois-state connections so close to the West such as Belgium and the Zionists, — it is impossible not to conclude that this racketeering and brigandage has been going on for 40 years with the West's full knowledge, but turning a blind eye:

ON A H0T, HUMID day three years ago the rebels hacked off Jonah Dumbuya's right arm and his ears.

He may not know it, but he is a tiny and bloody link in a huge and complex chain that links cities from New York and London to Tel Aviv and Johannesburg; that links the richest countries of the world with the very poorest, that links warehouses full of Kalashnikov rifles in Eastern Europe with huts full of maimed children in tropical jungles; that links the gleaming gems on the ring fingers of half the world's brides with blood and sweat and pain. They are gems fuelling half a continent's wars.

The trail starts in places like the dusty town of Catoca,  in Angola, or in the jungles around the war-scarred city of Kisangani in the Congo.

Catoca is a huge industrial site where 1,000 workers and huge earthmovers sift yellow, arid dust. It is guarded by heavily armed paramilitaries. Around Kisangani the scene is different. Deep in the fetid rainforest, half-naked men work around the clock with sieves and a shovels in the hope that they will be lucky just this once and that their lives will change. Usually they find just a $20 stone which, if not stolen by local bandits or ill-disciplined Congolese troops, might buy food to give them the strength to go on digging.

For all its immense variety the African diamond trade is a slick, well-run business. From the bottom — the myriad workers slaving under the hot sun — to the consumers on the high streets of London, the stones move efficiently along well-worked routes. First, in the case of the small mines, the miner will sell his gem to a local dealer. The dealer will have split the haul with the local military commander, who will pass his stash on to his seniors. After taking a little for themselves they pass the growing hoard on towards the top.

With armies of up to 35,000 troops, spread over hundreds of thousands of square diamond-rich miles, huge quantities of diamonds amass quickly. Local warlords — or governments — typically sell concessions for the bigger mines, and the concession-owners then feed the gems on to the world market.

Either way, the amounts' involved are huge. Jonas Savimbi, who leads the Unita guerilla movement in Angola, has spent an estimated £2 billion on supplies for his rag-tag army in the last 10 years. Diamonds have allowed him to convert a motley group of ill-trained fighters into one of the best armed irregular forces in the world, capable of fighting a war that has cost 500,000 lives.

THE POOR AFRICAN state of Liberia has, according to a US State Department report, sent out at least £200 million worth of diamonds a year, though it has no real gem reserves of its own. Almost all the diamonds were from Sierra Leone, and were collected by troops loyal to Foday Sankoh, the rebel Revolutionary United Front leader whose troops look set to confront the British Army within days.

The sheer wealth involved explains why Sankoh is willing to take such risks to prevent United Nations troops entering the key diamond producing areas in the east of the country.

US State Department sources estimate that between 10 and 15 per cent of the global diamond trade  — worth between $5bn and $7bn a year — is made up of smuggled stones. That sort of money buys a lot of AK47s. Though men like Sankoh and Savimbi are the key figures, a host of minor players have essential roles.

Dozens of different African countries are involved, both directly in the trade and in the conflict it provokes.  Some, such as Blaise Compaore, the President of Burkina Faso, and Charles Taylor, the leader of Liberia, help by facilitating the transfer of diamonds from 'conflict' countries to circumvent many of the controls placed on the trade by the UN other regulators and the big diamond companies such as De Beers.

Others help fuel the trade by providing military support to warlords in return for packets of stones or permission to mine, such as the governments of Sudan, Zimbabwe, Rwanda, Burundi and Uganda.

Zimbabwe's involvement is particularly murky. Critics of President Robert Mugabe's regime in Zimbabwe accuse the elderly autocrat of committing 11,000 of his country's troops to the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo in return for vastly lucrative concessions on its diamond fields.

Zimbabwe's economy suffers enormously, hundreds of its soldiers are being killed and Mugabe and senior army officers are getting richer. But the system would fall apart without the shadowy western middlemen who set up the deals, fly the diamonds to the main dealing markets in the West and supply the weapons that the Africans so desperately want.

A recent UN report into the failure of the sanctions imposed to stop the trading of stones from Angola lists a score of men such as Victor Bout, a Russian former KGB agent who runs an airfreight service out of Dubai, and the De Decker brothers, two South African businessmen alleged to have funnelled weapons into — and gems out of — half the countries along the continent's west coast.

The Observer has also learnt that at least two British-based companies are involved in the trade, and that a number of mercenary organisations with UK links have been drawn into the shadowy world of smuggled diamonds. There are even some British mercenaries who are reported to have trained the rebels in Sierra Leone.

The UN report's findings are confirmed by US State Department and Central Intelligence Agency sources. It reveals that almost all the weapons being flown into Africa come from Eastern Europe. Most are from Bulgaria, though increasing quantities are now sourced in the Ukraine. Everything from tank parts and multiple rocket launchers to handguns and bayonets are flown in, often with trainers. The Sierra Leone rebels are reported to have former Soviet surface-to-air missiles. At the height of the Angolan war, 22 Ilyushin transport aircraft were landing on a single airstrip each night. Without such arms supplies, war on the scale seen now in Africa would be impossible.

The consequences of the rush for the diamonds — and the bloody fighting it provokes — are obvious. 'Even the Cold War superpowers did not allow the wholesale ripping up of the economy, the use of children as soldiers and attacks on relief groups,' says Herbert Rowe, political scientist and Africa specialist at Georgetown University in Washington.

As for Sierra Leone, the UN report blames diamonds for 'destabilising the country for the better part   of three decades, stealing its patrimony and robbing an entire generation of children, putting the country dead last in the UN's human development index'.

THE KEY TO the whole system that drives the diamond wars is found, however, not in a stinking bush war bunker but in one of Europe's most well-heeled cities.

Two thirds of the world's diamond trade is dealt through the Belgian port of Antwerp. It is there that, campaigners allege, the blood-stained stones from African conflicts are laundered clean and sent out to be worn on the fingers of lovers around the world. The business is done on the grey functional walkway round the corner called the Hovenier-Straat. Here diamonds are dealt wholesale to the tune of $20bn a year.

The street is overshadowed by a series of huge office blocks: the five main diamond exchanges. For years, when the warlords of Africa placed their packets of rough diamonds into the sweaty hands of their arms dealer's gem experts, it was to the cramped rooms behind these doors that the gems were brought to be evaluated and sold. A culture of ignoring a stone's provenance gave the city an ugly reputation as the world's leading gem-laundering centre.

The Antwerp trade's governing body, the Diamond High Council says the business is now reformed. The latest regulation, introduced late last year, means that independent experts check that no diamonds have been imported or exported without documents proving the gems are not from war zones, he said. But it was not hard for The Observer to find a buyer for seven, one carat rough diamonds that 'were from Sierra Leone and had no papers'. 

After two hours of making calls, a dealer agreed to take our stones for $5,000.

The cash was to be paid in notes with non-consecutive serial numbers, the following day in the company's Hovenier-straat office. Once the rough diamonds were polished, it would be almost impossible to tell where they had been mined.

One young diamond polisher, Kollon S, was not surprised. 'People here don't care where [rough diamonds] come from,' he said. 'Money, mines and the right people are all there together in Africa. You can send in the UN, but they can't control it. Everyone trusts each other to keep quiet.'

The UN report describes Antwerp as a 'diamond smugglers' dream', where 'even over the most overt cases of questionable behaviour, little is done'.

A few thousand miles to the South, however, a disparate alliance is gradually forming to force change.

Three weeks ago, key American diplomatic and development staff stationed in Sierra Leone called a meeting. Around a table the suited officials sat opposite a number of key mining figures and half a dozen rival military commanders, including rebel leader Sankoh and representatives of the government. Outside the central African sun beat down. Inside the atmosphere was tense.

It was an acrimonious few hours. One American source said the RUF was 'intransigent' over control of the mining areas and the sort of distribution of profits that was envisaged by the peace agreement last year. Finally, an exasperated UN commander is reported to have said the peacekeeping force would attempt to seize back control of the country's mining areas before the end of July. Now that operation has begun, under the leadership of the British Army. 

DIPLOMATIC PRESSURE IS being put on Belgium, and a close eye is being kept on the burgeoning diamond markets of Tel Aviv and Kiev. The Foreign Office has been lobbying quietly for reform.

Other factors may help too. New mines in Canada threaten to undercut prices. Synthetic diamonds are eating into the market. The age of diamonds may be over.

In Africa too, the movement is gathering pace. Last Friday experts at a meeting of the African Diamond Technical Forum, chaired by South African Minister of Minerals and Energy Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, urged governments on the continent to prevent smuggling by creating fair and transparent trading of diamonds.

The participants, including representatives from the governments of the US, Britain, Belgium, urged the diamond industry to contribute towards the development 'of the communities and countries in which they derive their wealth'.

 No one expects change to come swiftly, however, and no one doubts that for Jonah Dumbuya and the people of Sierra Leone, it is now far too late. 'We used to talk of this country as rich because of the diamonds,' said Dumbuya. 'It was a glamorous thing — a country with diamonds. Even people who had nothing to do with diamonds would call their shops Diamond Restaurant, or Diamond Clothes Shop. But they don't do that any more because diamonds have become a nightmare.'

Even if only a fraction of this mayhem is accurate, it also paints a picture of pressures within the capitalist system's own mechanisms pushing things increasingly out-of-control, — much as is happening within the escalating inter-imperialist trade-war crisis in many other markets already such as the cut-throat surplus-capacity knockout contest in the world car market, e.g. 

After all, the Sierra Leone civil-war turmoil which has been 40 years in the making, has only in the last few years escalated from mere piracy to such out-of-control international conflict as to require first OAS (Organisation of African States) intervention; then a more direct United Nations input after the Nigerian Ecomog pulled out; and now direct Western imperialist intervention to try to rescue the UN mission; and with American 'consultative' involvement looming beyond that. For such a dirty business as this diamond-trade dispute, the massive attention it is now getting suggests that it is the capitalist system and imperialist economic and power relationships themselves which are in crisis, rather than just one sordid mafia-riddled gem market.

Automatically, just the sheer relentless propaganda barrage against Foday Sankoh's RUF in the Western media prompts a query that his 'Revolution' might be for more than just a routine share-out increase from the diamond-smuggling spoils, or might be reaching a quantity and quality of successful tactical opportunism as to re-ignite a real nationalist geopolitical rivalry—threat to former imperialist domination which smooth Western control can no longer live with, — much as happened to Noriega in Panama, and Saddam Hussein in Iraq. 

Both subsequent conflicts with US-led military interventions absolutely required a 'defeat for imperialism' call from the international communist movement. If the RUF turn out to be worth even better support than that, it will be good to hear, from whatever source.

Interestingly, another embarrassing defeat for imperialism might just be on the cards in Sierra Leone, — such is the extreme volatility and chaotic nature of its affairs, — as this wary comment from the Economist correspondent gloomily indicates:

Freetown sometimes feels like that. It was Britain's biggest naval base in the South Atlantic for centuries.

It was last used as a fuelling depot in the Falklands war. The ties with Britain are long and deep, felt strongly by Sierra Leoneans. That, however, is not why British troops are there.

Are they there to keep Africa at bay? Freetown's hinterland was always a worry. In the late 19th century the British authorities proposed building a rampart across the peninsula to keep out malaria. And there was always a threat of a native uprising.

Are the troops there to protect some vital British interest? The once-rich diamond areas are now commercially ruined by freelance diggers. We no longer need the naval base.

Sierra Leone became independent 40 years ago, so Britain should have no direct responsibility. There should have been a normal robust relationship between equals. 

Britain's only responsibility, as the Western country with the strongest diplomatic links, should have been to keep Sierra Leone connected to the rest of the world. 

Instead, imperial guilt and bad aid created a dysfunctional relationship, like that between an absent-minded parent and a delinquent child.

There was a pretence of closeness. Money was sent, but no one cared how it was spent. Britain fitfully helped prop up corrupt governments and nearly sent troops five years ago. 

Its fitful attention was typified by the Sandline affair. When the government was overthrown in 1997, Sandline, a British security company, tried to provide weapons to help restore the exiled government. But it fell foul of a badly drafted United Nations arms embargo on Sierra Leone intended only to apply to the rebel junta. 

While Sierra Leoneans were going through their armageddon, the British Government was worrying about which bureaucratic papers had been seen by which diplomats.

Now Britain finds itself with the only effective troops to defend the elected government and the people of Freetown from one of the nastiest movements to emerge from Africa in recent years. Recent interventions in Somalia, Rwanda and Angola have failed. Talk of an African economic revival a few years ago was wrong. Thabo Mbeki's African Renaissance? A good idea, but death looks more likely than birth at the moment. This week an American-led UN mission failed to secure peace between Ethiopia and Eritrea; in Congo, Rwanda and Uganda, old allies have started a new war; while Zimbabwe seems headed for self-destruction. It is not hard to conclude that Africa is going to hell and then walk away.

That seems unlikely. The British military have clearly decided they can not only defend Freetown but give the rebels a good hiding. They will have to chase them out of the diamond areas which have provided the rebels with the resources to wage their war. This could be the intervention that redeems the UN failure in Somalia, Rwanda and Angola. It has huge long-term problems to solve but in the short-term it has to work. The alternative would have been to walk away.

That would be impossible. Freetown is as much part of the world as Bournemouth. If Britain left Sierra Leone now and the people of Freetown were butchered the UN might as well close down and the world accept, that it is two, not one.

At this very moment, British Imperialism, under New Labour incompetence, is climbing down in one of the most humiliating retreats from Empire that it has ever suffered, — having to admit that its last-minute propaganda stunt to try to wrong-foot Sinn Féin and the IRA by withdrawing the Good Friday Agreement on a hoax 'resignation' threat from Trimble to take no further part in all-Ireland power sharing until all IRA weaponry had been disarmed, — had failed utterly. 

Last week's Review covered the full significance of the Blair-Mandelson humiliation, and the importance of this revolutionary defeat for imperialism, but just one further capitalist-press admission of total British bourgeois misery at this snail's-pace withdrawal from Ireland (which the EPSR has been providing a Marxist-Leninist detailed analysis of for 20 years) deserves to be recorded here, — from the Times under the headline "And the cry in Ulster is 'Slow surrender'. This is a shameful deal that will wrench Northern Ireland from our country". 

It starts with sarcastic cynicism, — and then just grows more bitter as the full realisation sinks in that a defeated British imperialism is at last going to concede a reunified and independent Ireland (which should never have been Partitioned behind British bayonets in 1921 in the first place):

Don't listen to the doubters. This is an historic breakthrough. We do have decommissioning in our time. The accord struck at Hillsborough Castle this weekend does mark the fulfilment of a long-cherished ambition of a key party in the peace process. But that party is not the Ulster Unionists, it is Sinn Féin. We will now have, in the words of IRA commander, Brian Keenan, "the decommissioning of the British state in Ireland".

Mr Keenan coined that phrase when addressing a republican meeting at a time when the Prime Minister had said terrorists should not enjoy executive power over their fellow citizens until their arms had been surrendered, their beatings had stopped and their military structures were dismantled.

The IRA's "Napoleon" made it clear then that there was to be no surrender of his illegal arsenal, that the only things to be dismantled were the British military and political structures in Northern Ireland. And, as so often, Mr Keenan has proved a shrewder reader of British government intentions than most observers of the peace process. Maybe The Guardian should offer him a column.

For the events of this weekend prove Mr Keenan right. Triumphantly so. Just look at what the IRA has actually agreed to do with its arsenal. In its Saturday statement there was no commitment to the destruction of any weaponry, no commitment to tell anyone just what was in its arsenal, no commitment to open anything other than a few of what could be very many arms dumps, and no commitment not to use any of its weapons again. Anyone who thinks this is decommissioning, as defined by this Government for so long, deserves to be committed themselves.

Would a tax inspector accept an arrangement whereby a known criminal would only allow him to inspect one or two bank accounts, reserving the right to keep others secret and dispose of that money as he wishes? You wouldn't take such a naïve attitude over Kenny Noye's cash, so why do we take it towards Brian Keenan's arms?

Because our Government is so pathetically grateful for a concession, any concession, from the terrorists that it will forget any scepticism. And also the reason why we fought the IRA in the first place. The war in Northern Ireland was prosecuted to defend the basic wish of the overwhelming majority that they should be governed in the same way as other British citizens. Now that right, and all the accompanying mechanisms which underpin it, are being dismantled.

While attention, if not proper scrutiny, was focused on the IRA's statement at the weekend another, equally significant, document was passed over. The London and Dublin Governments issued a letter to the Northern Ireland parties on Saturday morning in which they outlined their plans for Ulster's future. In it, they gave timetables for the winding-down of the British military presence, a process which will include the dismantling of security watchtowers in areas such as South Armagh where militant republican activity continues.

They also agreed fixed dates for the release of those terrorist prisoners who remain in the Maze, fixed dates for the replacement of the RUC with a new police force answerable to Sinn Fein politicians, fixed dates for the stripping of British symbols from the courts, fixed dates for a programme to privilege the Irish language and fixed dates for the implementation of new "human rights", to be framed in consultation with Dublin, which will supersede British legal traditions.

At every level in society, Ulster is being absorbed into the Irish republic. Why is there a firm timetable for the de-Britishing of Ulster and no fixed schedule for the decommissioning of arms? Because the first is now an imperative and the second now an illusion. There should be no difficulty in the IRA now declaring the war is over. They've won.

David Trimble may be back in office in two weeks' time. But he won't be in power. There may be a few beads for the natives, a cosmetic concession for the police force formerly known as the RUC, a proconsular speech in which the minister feels Unionist pain. But there will be no means of stopping the pain. How can there be when Ulster is being wrenched slowly out of Britain? In the 72 days of devolution Ulster has already endured Sinn Fein ministers were able, with impunity, to put convicted murderers on to ministerial payrolls and make decisions on hospital closures for nakedly sectarian reasons. And no Unionist could stop them.

The assembly by which some Unionists set such store proved incapable of putting a brake on republican actions. The requirement that all major parties be automatically included in power can now be seen to have robbed Ulster's citizens of the fundamental democratic right — the ability to hold failing ministers to account by throwing them out of office. And it also gives the lie to the notion that we have a permanent settlement in Ulster rather than just a temporary agreement.

How can you have a durable system of government built on the basis that there is no Opposition which can ever form an alternative administration? The all-party Northern Ireland executive only makes sense as a transitional body on the road to something else. In this case, on a motorway, without exits, out of the United Kingdom. The Stormont executive is thus, in every sense, a provisional government.

It may be that this deal is the best that Ulster's Unionists can hope for. That is for them to decide, for they will have to live with it. All I can feel is shame that my Government is forcing it on them.

A comparable defeat of incompetent imperialism in Sierra Leone would be an excellent next development in turning capitalist crisis towards a conscious revolutionary
movement for the overthrow of the monopoly-bourgeois class system and free-market anarchy everywhere.

It is pointless for a 'communist' paper to pretend to 'deal with' the Zimbabwe issue but deliberately avoid any questions about Mugabe and the wider matter of international revolutionary leadership against the imperialist crisis-system as a whole, – as Lalkar does in order to keep off difficult historical problems and to avoid upsetting anti-theory rightwing Scargillism too often inside the SLP.

The "tactical explanation" excuse for Lalkar fudges is the nastiest opportunism of all. Castro's weakness in Marxist-Leninist science is always being excused in similar ways as 'wise tactics under the threat of instant US imperialist obliteration if he says too much', etc. This meant going along with the catastrophic defence of Gorbachevism by Castro, the ANC/SACP, and others, as it unfolded from 1984 to 1991. It meant going along with Havana's zero-useful advice to the Sandinista Revolution, helping its downfall to a CIA electoral sucker-punch because of an absence of any understanding historically about imperialist boom and crisis, Soviet revisionist retreat, and the neglect of the dictatorship of the proletariat. It meant the criminal destruction of the Grenada Revolution without a fight because of Castro's friendship with the anti-Leninist populist Maurice Bishop. It meant watching Cuba lending tragic support to the anti-Leninist delusions of Allende in Chile, culminating in predictable counter-revolutionary disaster.

Castro's heroic Cuba remains the greatest practical revolutionary example to mankind that could be imagined, worth a thousand communist programmes. But the rest of the international working class desperately needs programmed communist perspectives as well. It is still getting no such leadership (see Group of 77 Castro speech on a later page).

Lalkar's creepy Stalinist-opportunist mentality cannot be pinned by extension on Mugabe who they write about so reverently. But ZANU can and must be challenged for any failure to speak out beyond Zimbabwe's detailed local problems to address the international crisis of the imperialist system which only world socialist revolution has any answer to.

In response, Lalkar of course will affect to play the 'strong, silent, sizist role' beloved of all the fake-'lefts' with a bit of a following. "We are big enough to be able to ignore the EPSR". It is, of course, one of the classic postures of philistine bureaucratic degeneracy, which the cult-of-Stalin strangulation of Marxist-Leninist theory taught to generations of old communists, and which nervous sectarian manoeuvring has taught to 57 varieties of fake-'leftism' ever since.

It is a gamble, of course, on Marxism ultimately proving to be utter historical and philosophical nonsense. It is saying that mass revolutionary socialist consciousness is not the end-product of all class-war history, - but that instead a deliberately-blinkered and carefully corralled following will deliver the socialist goods. The pathetic self-liquidation of the Soviet workers state, - the hopelessly inadequate, self-isolating, blinkered-revisionist leadership created by Stalin (and copied throughout most of the Third International) led a theoretically-passive (denied all cut-and-thrust of real world-politics controversy) populace into one of the most inglorious and shameful developments in civilisation's history, - the Soviet workers state just laying down and dying. Lessons???

The SLP-Lalkar alliance would have its following trained along exactly the same Stalinist lines, - just ignoring, stifling, or removing alternative ideas for developing political understanding and leadership; censoring the party press; encouraging no debate; suppressing information about splits on policy instead of deliberately publicising them as the highest point of class-struggle understanding and therefore of class education; and really just banking on the leadership entourage thrashing out a line in private and never submitting it to written polemics from any quarter.

In continuing conditions of international anti-imperialist class war, organising a disciplined workers state for survival against all manner of hostile bourgeois ideological pollution and subversion might well require an understanding of open theoretical political polemics which firmly rules out just letting any garbage or degeneracy be published or disseminated "freely" in the sense of being given the same rights to be heard or seen as everything else. Workers parties also have every right to rule out persistent deliberate hostile factional disruption once decisions have been reasonably taken. 

But the culture which the Scargill-Brar following are incubating is just nervous, incompetent, small-minded, Stalinist philistinism. It has already been the death of Marxist-Leninist theory once in history (and repeated dozens of times throughout the Third International). It is the crassest stupidity to help it survive to further damage the fight for the world socialist revolution and the real interests of the working people of Britain and elsewhere.

The numbers game is the silliest nonsense of all. It was just playing the numbers game which helped set the destructive mindset of the CPSU which kidded itself (and most of the world communist movement) that the Soviet Union having become so powerfully well-established as a thriving workers state, nothing could ever go really wrong with it thereafter, or with the CPSU. The contempt for the crucial role of constantly struggling for the most up-to-date correct revolutionary theory of world development was complete. 

World development temporarily then went backwards, in a sense, - and the shallow meaningless complacency about numbers, and about being the 'official' communist movement, etc, played a part in that catastrophe. Saddest of all, it is precisely among those who still play these ludicrous numbers games ("we're not polemicising with you because you're too small") that total confusion about what caused that catastrophe still reigns supreme, - and unchallenged.

This anti-theory climate is obviously helped by the growing dislike for all 'politics' which inevitably spills over from the justified contempt now felt for most bourgeois party politics in Britain (and elsewhere). Anarchist direct action and Green environmentalism win support to the extent that they seem to be free of longwinded but disregarded political programmes, manifesto promises, conference resolutions, committee decisions and the like, - and the fight for revolutionary theory can be shallowly misunderstood as coming into the same category.

This temporary philosophical triumph for complacent cynicism and individualism is so affecting the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia that even Sartre's half-hearted fellow-travelling output is being de-theorised to titillate people with yet more vicarious idiot artistic effect on stage:

Last week, a new staging by Sir Richard Eyre of Sartre's play, Dirty Hands, opened in London. But the liberal knight saw fit to rename it (The Novice), and strip the play of its crucial political context.

Out went all references to the Soviet Union. Out went the terrible dilemmas which confronted communist/socialist parties in small eastern European countries squeezed between two imperialistic ideologies — the second world war. 

It seems that Europe in the 21st century has been declared an ideology-free zone, and you can't expect anyone to be much interested in 20th-century history unless they are studying for their GCSE, so sorry Sartre. What we are left with is a study of a young man's troubled relationship with himself, with his wife (how can he prove to her he is a real man?) and with his faith.

It is good theatre with plenty of gender and sexual politics for us to mull over — hints of homoerotic affection, Oedipus, infidelity and frigidity. But the whole point of Sartre's play — the tension between the personal and the political and how private emotional experience feeds into a political process — has been filleted out. Please, no politics, we're British.

What is interesting about Sartre and de Beauvoir's rehabilitation is not the tired debate about dumbing down, but how completely we have shifted our focus of interest from the political to the personal. This is the triumph of the therapeutic culture — its chatter pervades the media and our minds and it has succeeded in almost drowning out political or intellectual debate. De Beauvoir becomes a subject for a film not because of her ideas but because of our voyeuristic fascination with her relationship (sexual and otherwise) with Algren.

Let's be honest, who cares much about politics beyond a small elite of professional politicians, commentators, policy wonks and a rump of party activists? When did you last have a raging row —or even a brief conversation — with anyone about politics? A frighteningly large number of people claim to be either totally uninterested or bored — the politicians-are-all-the-same line.

They may not have bothered to vote in London's first mayoral election, but they're mustard keen to be among the first through Bankside's doors. What they find is not a million miles away from the themes of Eyre's The Novice: through an intense subjectivity, the same quest for personal and sexual identity. At every step, one's visual sense — of colour, space, form — is delighted, challenged and subverted. There is plenty of humour, beauty and curiosity. But according to this cornucopia of modern art — the biggest in the world — at some point in the 20th century it seems to me, western European art gave up trying to say much about how we organise ourselves, politically and economically, and largely retreated into individual experience.

So would Mr Blair have found the gallery's success a comfort if he had sipped a pint with his electorate in front of Bankside at the weekend? He could, reflect that there is a political payback to these grands projets; even Tracey Emin says Bankside makes her proud to be British, and for someone who has made a career out of subversion, that is something. But the bigger picture is worrying for Mr Blair because no matter what he does "for the people", they are never going to love him.

Paradoxically New Labour, despite its sponsorship of the therapeutic culture (most noticeably at the funeral of Princess Diana), is not a beneficiary of it — it is a victim. Its pragmatic managerialism has not engaged the electorate's heart; in previous less emotional ages, that might not much have mattered, it does now.

But there is no crumb of comfort for anyone else down the river in the Palace of Westminster. What the political establishment has to contend with is the failure of liberal democracies to inspire a kind of political emotion, which underpinned commitment, and the willing sacrifice of individual self-interest for the collective. Sartre and de Beauvoir knew all about this — as did every European living through the 20th century — and it both appalled and inspired them. The liberal fear of such emotion has led us to overlook the fact that the alternative, apathy, holds its own horrors — a political culture which has effectively disenfranchised the uninspired non-voter — with all its potential for frustration and alienation.

Madeleine Bunting's Guardian stable would want to save Blairism if it could, but the writing is on the wall, just like the crap bogus 'art'. What is dying is not political theory as such but the whole political self-confidence and social assumptions of the ruling British bourgeois class and its petty-bourgeois camp followers. 

Their system is producing a crap civilisation as well as crap art and crap political leaders. Its free-market ideology is collapsing in terminal self-contradiction, creating aspirations for a fuller better life than has ever existed before, but producing (because of the monopoly-imperialist profiteering straitjacket) only increasing amounts of cultural garbage, ideological mindlessness, and economic/social alienation because of primitive unreconstructed (and unreconstructable) wage exploitation, nepotism, unequal rewards, and hire-and-fire frustrations. 

The real futility of Blairism is not registered by the posturing pseuds nerding it around the Tate Modern but by the up-in-flames explosive turmoil now racking large areas of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and already threatening Europe's stability too. 

The imperialist system is now an intolerable burden on modern civilisation. Revolution is the only way forward. The consciousness of revolutionary theory is now mankind's greatest need. Build Leninism.  Roy Bull

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

From Castro's speech to the closing session of the Group of 77 summit conference in Havana calling for the fight against imperialism to be stepped up.

I have attended many summit meetings, but never before had I seen such a coincidence of opinion among the Third World leaders. This shows two things:

Firstly: talent, clear thinking, the ability to elaborate and communicate ideas, and the experience accumulated by the leaders of our countries throughout 40 years, since the inception of the Non-Aligned Movement and later the Group of 77, as many of the peoples represented here achieved independence and we supported each other as free states or as liberation movements.

Secondly: the severity of the crises facing our countries in their efforts to achieve development, and the growing inequality and discrimination they suffer.

The participants here have denounced, one by one, the injustices and calamities that plague our nations and are a constant source of concern to us all.

Every single speaker alluded to the debt tragedy that limits our resources for economic and social development in a thousand different ways.

There was practically unanimous agreement on the view that the benefits of globalization extend to only 20% of the world's population, at the expense of the other 80%, while the gap between the wealthy countries and the marginalized world grows increasingly wider.

There was also a unanimous approach to the need for a transformation of both the United Nations and the international financial system.                                    

One way or another, every delegation expressed the view that unequal and unfair trade is decimating the Third World's export revenues through tariff and non-tariff barriers that deprive it of the minimum amount required to pay off debts and achieve sustainable economic and social development.

Equally unanimous was the complaint that scientific and technical development, currently monopolized by the privileged club of wealthy countries, remains beyond our reach, for it is the wealthy countries that control the research centers, hold almost 100% of patents, and increasingly hinder our access to know-how and technology. 

Quite a few leaders of the South took it upon themselves to remind us of something that is barely mentioned in the manuals on neo-liberal policies and economics: the shameless theft of the most highly qualified minds of the Third World. The North countries are appropriating them because the South cannot offer enough research centers, and much less the high salaries that draw these minds to the consumer societies, which did not spend a penny on training them. In addition, many of the outstanding youths from the Third World studying at universities in the former colonial powers or other wealthy countries do not return home after graduation.

Many of our world leaders used really overwhelming figures and statistics to reflect the sum total of accumulated financial obligations and the brutal mockery at dozens of the poorest countries of which only four have been targeted for a slight relief. There is a clearly resounding clamor for the Third World's debt to be considerably reduced if it cannot be completely cancelled, which is what would be most fair and equitable for the peoples who have paid it off many times over in the course of centuries past and present. 

When one hears the participants at this Summit describe the billions of people who receive less than two dollars, less than one dollar or only a few cents with which to survive, one might come to believe that our planet is devoid of even the slightest sense of humanity. Nobody could have imagined that after the century of the revolution for liberty, equality and fraternity over 200 years ago, the century of accelerated industrialization that followed or that of great breakthroughs in communications, science and the productivity of human labor, which has just come to an end, we would be discussing the hundreds of millions of people who are going hungry, malnourished, illiterate, unemployed and suffering from disease; in addition to the colossal numbers of children who are undersized or underweight for their age, who have no access to schools or medical care, or who are forced to work at grueling and low-paying jobs, not to mention infant mortality rates that are sometimes over 20 times higher than in the wealthy nations, These are the permanent human rights reserved to us.

One way or another, practically everyone here expressed their expectations about this Summit.

Never before had I seen such awareness. Let us hope that we are as aware of our combined strength as we are of the pettiness and the injustices we suffer.

Perhaps in the future people will speak in terms of before and after the first South Summit. It is up to us to make, it happen.

People used to talk about apartheid in Africa. Today, we can talk about apartheid throughout the world where more than four billion people are deprived of the most basic rights of human beings: the fight to life, to health, to education, to clean water, to food, to housing, to employment, to hope for their future and that of their children.

At the rate we are going, we will soon be deprived even of the air we breathe, increasingly poisoned by the wasteful consumer societies that pollute the elements essential for life and destroy human habitat. Natural disasters like those that have affected Central America, Venezuela, Mozambique and many other countries —almost all of them in the Third World and all in the course of barely 18 months—were completely unprecedented in the 20 century. They took the lives of thousands of people. These are the consequences of climatic changes and the destruction of nature and the blame cannot be laid upon those of us gathered here to fight not only for universal standards of justice but also for the preservation of life on the planet.

The wealthy world pretends to ignore that slavery, colonialism and the brutal exploitation, and plunder to which our countries were subjected for centuries are the causes of underdevelopment and poverty. They look upon us as inferior nations. They attribute the poverty we suffer to the inability of African, Asian, Caribbean and Latin American peoples, that is, of dark and yellow skinned, indigenous and mixed-race peoples to achieve any degree of development or even to govern ourselves. They speak of our flaws as if it were not they themselves who impregnated our pure and noble ancestral peoples with the vices of the colonizers or the exploiters.

They also pretend to ignore that when Europe was populated by those whom the Roman Empire called barbarians, there were civilizations in China, India, the Far East, the Middle East, and north and central Africa that had created what are still known today as World Wonders and that had developed written languages before the Greeks learned to read and Homer wrote The Iliad. In our own hemisphere, the Mayans and pre-lncan civilizations had attained knowledge that still today continues to astound the world.

I am firmly convinced that the current economic order imposed by the wealthy countries is not only cruel, unjust, inhuman and contrary to the inevitable course of history but also inherently racist. It reflects racist conceptions like those that once inspired the Nazi holocaust and concentration camps of Europe, mirrored today in the so-called refugee camps of the Third World, which actually serve to concentrate the effects of poverty, hunger and violence. These are the same racist conceptions that inspired the monstrous system of apartheid in Africa.

At this Summit, our reflections were aimed at building unity, accumulating forces, strategies, tactics and the means to coordinate and guide our efforts to ensure that our vital economic rights are recognized. But this Summit also reflects our obligation to fight for our dignity, our culture and our right to be treated as equals.

In the same way that, in a not-so-distant past, we defeated colonialism and attained the status of independent countries, and much more recently crushed the heinous and fascist apartheid system through the common efforts of the Third World in support of the heroic South African fighters, we can show that we are not inferior to anyone when it comes to fighting capacity, bravery, talent and virtues.

We are fighting for the most sacred rights of the poor countries; but we are also fighting for the salvation of a First World incapable of preserving the existence of the human species of governing itself in the midst of contradictions and self-serving interests and much less of governing the world whose leadership must be democratically shared. It could almost be mathematically demonstrated that we are fighting to preserve life on Earth.  •