Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is the touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism is to be tested. V. I. Lenin 
Economic & Philosophic Science Review 
Subscriptions (£25 p a.) & circulation:  078679 96074     www.epsr-marx-lenin.co.uk    [P&P Bulletin Publications PO B0X 50, London SW 17 9NL] [ Post Office Regd.]
No 1161 November 19 2002                                                                                                                                  25p 
Sat 2pm Northwest seminar. Rcpts pse.

Revolt by America’s UN stooges against hawkish sneers at inspection farce reveals deepening nervous doubts troubling the international bourgeoisie over warmongering, as NATO bombers keep up their criminal onslaught on-the illegally imposed "no fly zones" of Iraq, condemned by the world. Born-again zealotry behind Bush is barmier than the sickest fascist ideology of previous imperialist aggression to get out of disastrous economic slump. US military expansion into E Europe won't halt capitalism's economic collapse or the inter-imperialist falling apart as the burdens of the slump start hitting ruling class security in each country. But fake-’left’ all continue ignoring revolutionary theoretical perspectives in favour of "internecine" guru-knocking. 'Liberal' second thoughts on Afghan invasion-disaster shame feminism irrevocably. Fake-'left' FBU axe on politics lets Blairism off the hook.

Intense 'moral' outrage against imperialist warmongering continues usefully growing worldwide, and significant new attacks on the rottenness of the British colonial legacy, for example, by the BBC, Straw, and others, interestingly reflect these changing public-opinion pressures. And also (below), new 'liberal' doubts about the NATO occupation of Afghanistan helpfully add to the Western sense of unease.

But as in the most famous quote from Marx, the big question is what can be done to effectively change things. No amount of moral reproaching is going to halt this Western imperialist warmongering crusade.

The anarchists planning to disrupt this week's NATO warmongering summit in Prague have the right revolutionary approach in terms of personal commitment, but remain essentially a protest movement, hostile to the only GREATER force which can eventually effectively put the whole capitalist-imperialist system out of business, - namely, the dictatorship of the proletariat organised in strong workers states which will at last give the chance for the world to grow slowly and steadily into a cooperative socialist society supplying all human needs equally, planet-wide, (but not withering away with the job only half done, as the Soviet workers state did under the puddled influences of Revisionism).

The only Marxist answer to 'all-powerful' imperialist warmongering remains simple but still totally ignored by the entire fake-'left'.

Out of uncontrollable and incurable economic crisis, the billions of internationally exploited victims of the ruling class's economic, military, and police domination rackets will eventually be FORCED to an organised level of fightback able to CRUSH the persecutors.

At the same time, crucial and inevitable SPLITS in the imperialist ranks will facilitate this final overthrow of the out-of-date and now poisonous capitalist system.

The fake-'left' all continue to morally expose and denounce the ruling-class tyranny on single issues, here and there, and call endlessly for huge reform campaigns to oblige Western governments to change their ways, etc, etc, etc.

But all too often, when serious revolt, in any shape or form, starts to threaten Western interests, the fake-'left' gurus and sects will choose respectability rather than cheer on imperialism's setbacks, and invent all sorts of spurious reasons for not putting the boot themselves into the West at its moments of defeat. 

Instead of US imperialism getting the jeering it deserved at the time of Sept 11, it was the inevitably crude and wacky suicidal fundamentalist terrorism of al-Qaeda which drew the fake-'left' indignation and scorn. Ditto North Korea's nuclear weapons response to US imperialist nuclear encirclement and non-step menace.

And throughout the history of Cold War conflict between the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie (the capitalist imperialist Western system) forcing the working class to adopt the dictatorship of the proletariat as socialism's only defence against nonstop attack and subversion, and forcing those workers states inevitably into many wrong turnings, mistakes, or excesses, - it was always the 'crimes' of the dictatorship of the proletariat that the fake-'left' came down against, never the West's responsibility for imposing the whole Cold War situation in the first place by its continued worldwide imperialist domination.

But even though the Cold War's supposed great victory for "freedom" over "communist tyranny" has now left the world facing the worst warmongering and the greatest-ever economic slump disaster in history, proving the utter emptiness of that lunatic "freedom" claim, the fake-'left' still remains the incorrigible stooge of "democracy" and "the Western way of doing things", - i.e. of continued imperialist domination.

Not a scrap of perspective is ever given on the coming collapse of the 800-year world rule by Western bourgeois colonial tyranny, and the inevitable emergence of new proletarian-dictatorship workers states to take up the fight against imperialism abandoned by Stalinist Revisionist stupidity.

Not once dare they ever breathe a word that all-out revolutionary conflict is the only way forward for civilisation.

The development of an organised ability to fight back successfully against imperialist domination continues its steady progress in small pockets like Palestine, Colombia, Nepal, Zimbabwe, Indonesia, Philippines, Venezuela, Cuba, etc, etc, on which the EPSR tries regularly to report.

But in Britain and the West generally, it is signs of the splits in the imperialist camp and the collapse of bourgeois ideological resilience, in step with the terrifying collapse of the capitalist economy without remedy, which is the inevitable first object of attention.

The likely strength and success of the US warmongering drive against Iraq still remains hard to call.

A fresh interest is the insanity/insecurity of the moralising Christian mentality directly 'inspiring' Bush.

His "key foreign affairs adviser" and Pentagon groupie Richard Perle left mixed messages in his current propaganda rallying in Britain (to rubbish in advance any verdict by the UN weapons inspectors giving Iraq the all-clear on "banned" mass destruction materials (which all major Western countries have, and which the USA has in mountainous surpluses).)

"Don't trust Blix & Co. The UN inspectors will be fooled in Iraq", he whined.

His "solution" comes direct from medieval witch-finding whereby if a suspect refused to admit their witchcraft despite being half-drowned in the torture chamber, then that was only held to prove what true witches they really must be.

Perle's version pretends that Iraqi arms industry officials would admit to weapons of mass destruction "if only" they could be taken out of Iraq to be quizzed in safety; or "if only" they and their immediate family could be taken out of Iraq (to avoid the silencing pressure of a fear of anti-family reprisals for talking); or "if only" the many hundreds in a typically Middle Eastern extended family could be taken out of Iraq for safekeeping, Perle ended up by suggesting.

Only the punchline remained unstated: "And if they still won't tell, that only proves that they're all as evil as Saddam himself", etc, etc.

And even all this pantomime is still beside the point, for why should Iraq, alone among middle-size and not-unimportant states on Earth, be denied the normal arms-race weaponry development that all other states claim as their right?? -especially since modern Iraq has an utterly insignificant "aggression" record compared to all its NATO persecutors (see last EPSR's list of over 130 acts (large and small) of colonial-imperialist aggression by the USA alone in the past 100 years).

But nor are Iraq's weapons a direct revolutionary anti-imperialist interest either.

The question is irrelevant. A complete red herring.

The only interest here is in Perle's hysteria. Where does this demented self-righteousness come from, and what are its prospects?????

To call it "confident" would be misleading and to mistake the subjective bile around Perle's 'wisdom' for the objective basis on which this influential layer of American opinion is resting.

It partly comes from the 'Born Again' Christian revivalism currently helping frightened and confused bourgeois minds in the USA (and elsewhere) to 'purposefully' continue striding through this epoch of massive capitalist system (and Western guilt-feelings and doubt arising from the "free market" rotten colonial-warmongering record; its laughable inability to solve a single one of its own metropolitan domestic and social-disaster problems; and its now certain economic-failure humiliation in the very near future).

The rationalising barminess of this 'religious' fervour can scarcely be believed when printed in black and white in capitalism's own sources, desperately finding Godly "justification" for every rotten warmongering-colonial stunt the West gets up to:

This support is not offered with any ifs or buts either. The placards round the hall insist that every inch of the Holy Land should belong to Israel and that there should never be a Palestinian state. These assertions are backed up by biblical quotations. It could be a rally in Jerusalem for those Israelis who think Ariel Sharon is a dangerous softie.

But something very strange is going on here. There are thousands of people cheering for Israel in the huge Washington Convention Centre. But not one of them appears to be Jewish, at least not in the conventional sense. For this is the annual gathering of a very non-Jewish organisation indeed: the Christian Coalition of America.

And there is little doubt that, last spring, when President Bush dithered and dallied over his Middle East policy before finally coming down on Israel's side, he was influenced nor by the overrated Jewish vote, but by the opinion of Christian "religious conservatives" - the self-description of between 15% and 18% of the electorate. When the president demanded that Israel withdraw its tanks from the West Bank in April, the White House allegedly received 100,000 angry e-mails from Christian conservatives.

A decade ago, when the president's father was in the White House, his eldest son's election time job was to act as unofficial ambassador to this group, offer assurances that they and the administration were at one on such matters as abortion and pornography and prayer in schools, the issues they like to group together as "family values".

What has really changed is the emergence of the doctrine known as "dispensationalism", popularised in the novels of the Rev Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins. LaHaye and Jenkins may not mean much to you or to the readers of the New York Times Book Review, but the ninth volume of their Left Behind series sold three million hardback copies in the US last year, eclipsing John Grisham.

Central to the theory baked on a reading of scripture Brown would prefer not to discuss is the Rapture, the second coming of Christ, which will presage the end of the world. A happy ending depends on the conversion of the Jews. And that, to cut a long story very short, can only happen if the Jews are in possession of all the lands given to them by God. In other words, these Christians are supporting the Jews in order to abolish them.

Oh yes, agreed Marion Pollard. a charming lady from Dallas who was selling hand-painted Jerusalem crystal in the exhibition hall at the conference. "God is the sovereign. He'll do what he pleases. But based on the scripture, those are the guidelines." She calls herself a fervent supporter of Israel, as does Lewis Hall of North Carolina. "I believe they do have to accept the Messiah." 

And if they don't? "I believe they will when they know who He is. I believe that one day they are going to wake up. It might take a third world war to do that."

You might think these Christian activists represent the furthest shores of American politico-religious wackiness. The politicians don't think so. This conference began with a videotaped benediction straight from the Oval office. Some of the most influential republicans in Congress addressed the gathering including - not once, but twice - Tom DeLay, who is hot favourite to take over as majority leader of the House of Representatives after the midterm elections on November 5, thus becoming arguably the most powerful man on Capitol Hill.

"Are you tired of all this, are you?" he yelled to the audience. "Nooooooo!" they roared back. "Not when you're standing up for Jews and Jesus, that's for sure," he replied.

Jews habitually do not stand up for Jesus (although this conference did have a sprinkling of Messianic Jews, who do just that). But most Jewish leaders have opted to shrug, accept the Christians' support and let them whistle for their conversions. That certainly goes for Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister, reportedly greeted "like a rock star" by Christian evangelicals in Jerusalem last month.

The linkage between the Christian right and the Republican party is getting ever stronger, especially in the electorally crucial states of the south and west. And Lynn is alarmed at the prospects for the midterm elections. The Republicans are quite likely to regain control of the Senate, removing the roadblock that currently stops the president appointing conservative judges ("impartial judges", according to most Republicans; "rabid rightwingers," according to their opponents) to lower courts and, when the expected vacancies arise, to the supreme court. This will give the right, and most particularly the religious right, unprecedented influence over all three branches of government in Washington.

"Karl Rove [Bush's political guru] has said publicly you cannot alienate your base. You cannot alienate that 18% of religious conservatives. You don't mess with these people," says Lynn. "They want you to be just as they are. And Bush is just as they are: He may waffle on one or two issues, such as stem-cell research. But fundamentally he comes down on their side."

The "confidence" of this is not the issue. The total lunacy of it is all that matters in what is an ever increasingly rational and material world underneath all the terrified and dying bourgeois ideological hysteria.

And the 'moral-stiffening' visit of Perle was just as big a giveaway about the underlying ultimate hopelessness of the imperialist cause in his remarks on America's "allies" in the imperialist racket, - recorded directly by the capitalist press itself in interview:

Richard Perle, a leading Pentagon adviser on Iraq, last night launched an extraordinary tirade against Europe, which he accused of losing its moral direction and providing succour to Saddam Hussein.

"I think Europe has lost its moral compass. Many Europeans have become so obsessed by the prospect of violence they have failed to notice who we are dealing with," he said in an interview with the Guardian.

Mr Perle expressed serious reservations about the United Nations chief weapons inspector, Hans Blix, and the ability of his team to disarm Iraq. But he reserved his most scathing comments for Germany and Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's new anti-war stance.

"Germany has subsided into a moral numbing pacifism. For the German chancellor to say he will have nothing to do with action against Saddam Hussein, even if approved by the United Nations, is unilateralism," Mr Perle said.

France, which led resistance within the UN security council to the Bush administration's drive for an automatic mandate for war against Iraq, fared little better. "I have seen diplomatic manoeuvre, but not moral fibre," Mr Perle said.

Once again, the grotesque hypocrisy and sordid historical bias of this deranged self-interest is of less immediate concern than the reality of the inter-imperialist contradiction itself.

It is that time of disaster for the whole centuries-long Western world-domination game when thieves fall out and rats desert sinking ships.

The colonial-imperialist economic system is basically crisis bound, and only at each others’ expense will the 'free market' monopoly-capitalist economic giants stagger on from here, surviving as best they can by trade-war back-stabbing each other; by putting as much of the economic burdens as they can onto the already starving and suffering Third World (consistent with not provoking revolutionary situations too readily if at all possible); and profiting from whatever warmongering adventures kick-started by any of the imperialist giants in their blustering warmongering aggression (as cover to avoid having to face up to the humiliating failure of the 'free-market’ system).

For the moment, Perle's bout of rival imperialist verbal bashing has spared Britain but for how long?

Blair & Co’s bluster looks increasingly thin, despairing, and unconvincing stuff, barely tolerated by public opinion as it is.

No doubt Foreign Secretary Straw can be dismissed as a guilt-ridden lightweight, but how has "the project" of the "tightest and most successful control freakery government in history" ever allowed itself to sink into this own goal, morally-doubtful-about-foreign/colonial-warmongering, situation in the first place (bearing in mind the self-righteous "Go kill them" crusading spirit that the Bush/Blair axis of evil is supposed to be instilling into everyone at the moment):

"India, Pakistan -- we made some quite serious mistakes," Mr Straw said. "We were complacent with what happened in Kashmir, the boundaries weren't published until two days after independence. Bad story for us, the consequences are still there." He also singled out Afghanistan, "where we played less than a glorious role over a century and a half".

He blamed Britain for many of the troubles in the Middle East, where the Government is pressing without success the search for peace between Israelis and Palestinians and possibly preparing for a war against Iraq this winter.

"The odd lines for Iraq's borders were drawn by Brits," , said Mr Straw. "The Balfour declaration and the contradictory assurances which were being given to Palestinians in private at the same time as they were being given to the Israelis - again an interesting story for us but not an entirely honourable one." His most provocative remarks concerned Zimbabwe, where Britain has been locked in a dispute with President Mugabe over the seizure of white-owned farms and the violent intimidation of the opposition.

Mr Straw said that he had had "huge arguments" with Mr Mugabe, but added: "However, when any Zimbabwean, any African, says to me land is a key issue . . . the early colonisers were all about taking land."

Maybe Straw was aware of the devastating revelations to come in a BBC television documentary at the weekend detailing British colonial brutality in the very recent past in Kenya which is just being acknowledged:

Dramatic evidence has been unearthed of such systematic British brutality in the former colony of Kenya that it may require the rewriting of imperial history. Hitherto secret files show that the then colonial secretary, Alan Lennox Boyd, sanctioned a policy of violence towards interned guerrilla suspects.

A former colonial official, Terence Gavaghan, now living in London, was, according to a memo written by the governor, Sir Evelyn Baring, authorised to use force. Some detainees allegedly had their mouths stuffed with mud and were beaten unconscious by his men.

The revelations appear to bear out the suspicions at the time of campaigners, such as the late Labour MP Barbara Castle, that terrible abuses were taking place. She and others unearthed individual scandals involving security forces during the 1950s, but the Tory government, headed by Harold Macmillan, denied there was a policy of assaulting prisoners.

Mau Mau veterans are preparing to visit London next year to discuss a potentially huge legal action for compensation. A dossier of evidence was handed in to the British high commission in Nairobi a fortnight ago. Campaigners' demands include the investigation for alleged war crimes and human rights abuses of surviving former British officials.

In 1957 Mr Gavaghan was ordered to assume the position of officer in charge of rehabilitation at the Mwea camps. Virtually all members of the Kikuyu tribe had taken a secret Mau Mau "oath" and it was considered impossible to release these men until they had "confessed" taking it. A long "secret and personal" memo from Sir Evelyn to Lennox Boyd describes how their resistance was broken. It was discovered at the public record office in Kew, west London, by a Harvard history professor, Caroline Elkins.

	The colonial attorney general, Eric Griffiths-Jones, visited the camp. In an attached memorandum he described the treatment he witnessed of a group of 80 prisoners transferred from a holding camp.

Each group of detainees was ordered to strip and have their heads shorn.

"Any who showed any reluctance or hesitation to do so were hit with fists and/or slapped with the open hand," he wrote. "This was usually enough to dispel any disposition to disobey the order to change. In some cases, however, defiance was more obstinate and on the first indication of such obstinacy, three or four of the European officers immediately converged on the man and 'rough housed' him, stripping his clothes off him, hitting him, on occasion kicking him and, if necessary, putting him on the ground. Blows struck were solid, hard ones, mostly with closed fists and about the head, stomach, sides and back.

Gavaghan explained, however, that there had, in past intakes, been more persistent resistors who had been forcibly changed into camp clothing. Some of them had started the 'Mau Mau howl’ a familiar cry which was taken up by the rest of the camp, representing a concerted and symbolic defiance of the camp authorities. In such cases it was essential to prevent the infection of this 'oath' spreading throughout the camp, and the 'resistor' who started it was put on the ground, a foot placed on his throat and mud stuffed in his mouth. In the last resort, a man whose resistance could not be broken down was knocked unconscious."

Another section of the 11-page memo, headed Use of Force in Enforcing Discipline, said: The detainees... are particularly ugly customers and there is no doubt that the use of orthodox methods of non violent persuasion and normal camp punishments for disobedience would be, and indeed have proved to be, useless and ineffective. With possibly a few exceptions they are of the type which understands and reacts to violence."

Sir Evelyn tells Lennox Boyd in his covering note that their colonial task "depends on our ability to deal with a small number of very difficult men; and if we are to do this successfully, risks are unavoidable". This regime carried on for 12 months, after which time only a few thousand recalcitrant Mau Mau detainees were still behind the wire.

After he left Mwea, Mr Gavaghan was awarded the OBE. Sir Evelyn wrote to him, calling his work "one of the outstanding successes of the emergency".

Mr Gavaghan is not implicated in the other widespread allegations of torture, rape and murder detailed in the programme. Witnesses came forward to recount tortures and murders committed throughout the eight-year emergency involving other white officials and local soldiers under British command. 

One man says he was castrated and blinded for defying his captors. A woman recalls how her two-year-old child was whipped to death by a white police officer. Women claim that thousands of civilians mainly women and children, died of beatings, starvation and disease.

Professor Elkins says the scale of suffering and death was far higher than previously thought and the Kikuyu death toll could have been as high as 50,000.

John Nottingham, a district colonial officer at the time who stayed on in Kenya, said compensation could not wait because the victims were now-mostly in their 80s. "What went on in the Kenya camps, the Kenya villages was brutal, savage torture by people who have to be condemned as war criminals. I feel ashamed to have come from a Britain that did what it did."

Good to hear such capitalist press and TV admissions now, but much better would be some critical self-examination of what nasty nazi warmongering propaganda lies they were all churning out at the time, justifying what "our boys" and "our kith and kin" were doing in the fascist colonial repression of Kenya's legitimate self-determination struggle.

And even better still would be some critical health warning, stamped all over the warmongering hysterical garbage currently being churned to justify renewed colonial tyranny against Iraq.

But just in time, the very delicate 'moral' and 'democratic' sensitivities of the 'liberal' Guardian have stepped into the breach, visibly fretting now about whether the whole Western imperialist warmongering blitzkrieg against Afghanistan last year was justified at all!!!

One of the most vociferous feminist-reformist (and therefore politically-reactionary and imperialist-ignorant) champions of the bloodbath and total devastation was sent to find out.

Cutting out all the 'nice' crap which such profound international class-war naïvety was bound to rake together in 'justification’ of the colonialist brutality, what remains are admissions which should put a stop to all such 'liberal' pontificators for ever (but probably won't):

So was it worth it after all? The daisy-cutters and the cluster bombs, the misguided missiles butchering wedding parties while al-Qaida slipped away? Now, a year after Kabul fell as the Taliban left their hot dinners on the front line and ran, was it worth the killing of anything from 800 to 3,000 men, women and children?

Shrouded in pale blue prisons with tiny grilles restricting their vision, even women who in communist times wore mini skirts were buried alive in these stifling pleated gowns.

So did things get better for them in this last year? Nine out of 10 women still wear burkas: those who ripped them off to swap them for headscarves are few. The burka's ghostly outline still turns women into subhuman objects, non-persons. Now they walk alone in the streets without the need for a male relative, but often they stay together in small flotillas, and it's easy to see why. Drivers seem to charge at them as they cross the streets. They are jostled aside on pavements as men seem irritated by these faceless, depersonalised obstacles in their path. Travelling in cars full of men, women in burkas often peer out of the back window from the cramped space of hatchback car boots. Poor women begging are chased out of the way by angry shopkeepers.

However symbolic they seem, the truth is that the burka is the very least of their problems, mere outward garments, easily discarded. The inner scars of the way women are treated here in this darkly savage place will be harder to erase. As the women talked of their lives, terrible stories tumbled out. Though none of them knew each other already, they wept when they listened to one another. Fahina, a woman in her 30s, wearing a thin black veil and swaying back and forth a little as she spoke, began to tell how she was beaten daily by her husband, a drug addict who had sold everything in the house. So why did this woman not leave a dangerous drug-addict husband who drained her money away? Because, she explained, she would have to leave her 12-year-old daughter behind with him. By now several other women were crying in sympathy.

At the start of this session, many had proclaimed that women should have absolutely equal rights with men, so I asked the translator if they thought it right and fair that this abusive father should keep the child. The translator looked at me nervously and whispered, "I don't think I can ask that "Why not?" "Because it is our Islamic law, in the Koran, that after the age of nine a daughter belongs to the father." "But ask them if it is fair in this extreme case?" Quietly the translator asked them, and they fell silent and gazed down at the carpet. No one spoke until Fahina, the battered wife, said softly, "It is the law", with tears falling down her face. Once the shutter of religion falls, the rest is silence. The women are indoctrinated so deep with it that their own inferiority is branded on their brains. Every time sophisticated Muslims in the west use sophistry to explain that the prophet was actually a great liberator of women, every time they fail to condemn outright some of the Koranic laws themselves and demand reformation, they help condemn women across the Islamic world to this self-immolating damage.

It was time to go, and the women pulled on their burkas and walked out into the street. Under the flapping blue pleats many younger women now wear high heels: as one clacked away down the street, I considered this strange cultural juxtaposition. The west hobbles its women with toe-crushing shoes, Islam with burkas and chadors.

Harmid Karzai's minister of women's affairs is Mahuba Hoququmal, professor of law at Kabul University. She was surprisingly blunt: "We are in a very dangerous position at this moment. After the loya jirga insisted on changing the name of the country to the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, the fundamentalists are fighting to have Sharia law here. We need progressive civil law."

That very day, the new Constitutional Commission had just been formally opened by the Aga Khan, and a mighty battle is now beginning over the heart and soul of the country: a bill of human rights or an Islamic Sharia constitution? Yet again, the future of the country is to be fought out symbolically over women's bodies. "The test of the new constitution will be whether women have absolute equality enshrined in it." 

"Already the security situation is very dangerous. Kabul does not yet rule the country and there are not enough international troops, none outside Kabul. If the Americans attack Iraq, then I fear you will all forget about us."

Only weeks ago Afghanistan was a whisker away from plunging back into chaos after a bullet whistled past President Karzai. Violence breaks out often - last week two newly opened girls' schools were bombed and two musicians at a wedding party were beaten by anti-music Islamic fundamentalists. If they get Karzai, there is no plan B, no understudy learning his lines. One senior British official told me: "It they get him, pack fast."

Two government ministers have been shot dead in the last few months, one probably at the instigation of defence minister Field Marshal Fahim, a thuggish warlord with 10,000 men of his own. But he wears a suit now and sits behind his desk talking the talk of the new multi-ethnic Afghan national army that will soon be in place to keep the peace across the land. The Brits will tell you with a straight face what a good chap he has become and how fast he is learning the new skills of politics under western tutelage. In theory he will soon be running an indigenous, multi-ethnic army, yet the new recruits trained by various western nations have no uniforms, guns or pay.

Everything here is rumour, assertion, malicious factoid or wishful romance. On the one hand, British and American officials will tell fables of such staggeringly unreal optimism that you wonder their eyes don't pop out and roll away. On the other, there are doom merchants of every variety and faction who will tell you that the place is cursed to perpetual anarchy and mayhem; nothing can save it now or ever. Some have a deep, dark interest in undermining all efforts at reconstruction, spreading the Nothing Works anti-western message for their own nefarious political ends. Others are trying hard to make it work, but are exhausted and close to despair, with shamefully little money.

The truth is that every day that civil war does not resume is a minor miracle.

High up in Estalif, a village to the north of Kabul that looked utterly destroyed, a family were growing tomatoes in the ruins of their home, while camping outside for the winter with a family next door who had only two rooms. They would rebuild in the spring, but were desperate for help: "Do not abandon us now" the father begged - a refrain that you hear everywhere.

Some distance north, on the Shamali plain at the crossroads of Qarabak, some hundred stalls have sprung up in the last month. This tragic place was once the golden bread basket of the country, rich with vines, tomatoes, almond trees, and orchards. In one battle, the retreating Taliban razed and scorched the land for a hundred miles in every direction, chopping down fruit trees, burning vines, poisoning thousands of wells and smashing the ancient underground irrigation system. Here ACTED, a French charity financed by Clare Short, is giving returning refugees basic shelter kits to build new houses - beams, windows, doors. An agricultural cooperative lets people borrow seed, fertilisers and tractors. Women are being given chickens, vegetable seeds and implements.

But here, as everywhere else, the scheme is swamped by the sheer scale of need. Last week the weather turned suddenly cooler, the first sign of a winter fast approaching. There are only a couple of weeks left in which shelters can be built and the money for more has run out. Twenty thousand shelter kits have been provided, but 40,000 families here have nothing but tents to survive the bitter winter snow.

The same story is reported everywhere, as 1.5 million refugees have poured back to ruin and desolation. Standing outside a tent in the pouring rain, I talked to two women cowering inside. They were unable to step out while strange men were near, so they called out answers to my questions to their brother who stood outside, a scarf hiding the half of his face that had been blasted away in the fighting. It was a laborious process: he called out their responses to my (male) translator, who stood far away, relaying the translation back to me. Since their responses were short and his were long, I doubted that I was hearing much from the women themselves. Men here have a habit of simply not listening to women, as if their voices were in some inaudible dog-whistle register. But what the young man with the blown-away face said was this: "This is what we have returned to! We were promised by the world that if we fought the Russians for you, you would look after us, but you didn't. Then we fought the Taliban and al-Qaida, and now look at us, here on this hillside in the mud, the winter coming and our children will die of cold. Where is your help now?"

Wherever you go, they say the same. Thanks for coming, the war was worth it, but now it is payback time. Lifting the iron heel of the Taliban was not enough. In Tokyo, the rich world agreed to stump up only a paltry $4.5bn for Afghanistan over five years. It is a mere $75 a head per year, while world aid to Rwanda, East Timor and Bosnia was $250 a head. Why so little? And why has even this been paid out painfully slowly when the need is urgent?

The Karzai government last week fixed its budget for next year: it is just $460m, less than that of most English local authorities. $1.2bn has been spent already, most of it on emergency food, not reconstruction. "One of the most miserable states in the world," the World Bank rightly called Afghanistan. It is the fourth poorest place on earth: 95% are illiterate, and 95% have never seen a doctor or nurse in their lives.

Afghani barons rule their feudal fiefdoms and fighting still breaks out between them in small turf dust-ups, such as that between Dostum and Atta in the North. Ismail Khan, lord of the west, controls the country's only rich pickings on the Iranian border, ruling with absolute disregard of Kabul, remitting none of his fat border extortions to the central government.

In the south, the angry, excluded Pashtun majority festers and fumes dangerously, lobbing the occasional bomb at the US army, which pokes and prods the populace insensitively, still failing to find al-Qaeda.

Nothing can save this place but long-standing military presence by ISAF, the international force currently headed by the Turks. If the west looks away, the surrounding tyrannous countries will be back to their old tricks, arming warlords to fight their own rivalries by proxy. The US, seemingly having learned nothing from past experience, has this year again armed some of the worst warlords, who pretended to search for al-Qaeda operatives yet yielded nothing.

And yet in a country holding its breath, with every day of peace, Kabul's influence grows a little stronger. War zones attract an astounding whirl of people. Kabul is awash with seasoned professionals, hopeful carpet-baggers, long-exiled, educated Afghans wanting to help or to cash in, or a bit of both. Old NGO hands greet each other, recalling great times in East Timor, Rwanda, Bosnia or Kosovo. "Last met in Mogadishu! How's Mad Jack, ha ha?" An Australian doctor with a magic box of dressing-up clothes and masks takes it out to traumatised children in war zones to help them act out their feelings: he hasn't missed a war in years.

Things here are often not what they seem. At a party of Afghan returners in an old Soviet-era concrete flat one night, a man in full Afghan rig was playing the rebob - a kind of Afghan sitar. Was he a musician returning after the Taliban music ban? No, he was Dr John Baily, reader in ethno-musicology from Goldsmiths College. One woman was keen to set up a new charity for sufferers of type 2 diabetes: I suggested she look at the children's hospital first. There had been no electricity there for two days when I visited: the two generators sent from Japan were unusable without money for the oil to run them. The only rusty oxygen flask had run out and minute babies newborn to malnourished mothers were turning grey and dying before my eyes. A boy with both hands and one foot blasted away by a landmine was lying groaning on a sheetless mattress with no pain relief and no parents.

The western presence brings its own trials and tribulations. Kabul property prices have shot through the roof. The 30% of the town left standing is jammed with UN agencies and non-governmental organisations scores from each western nation, 1,025 in all. Between them they have seized every habitable house, sending rents that were $150 a month not long ago up to $2,000 a month now. This has brought many middle-class Afghans pouring home to repossess their now extortionately valuable properties, but poorer ones have no hope of finding affordable homes here. There is, anyway, precious little electricity, clean water, sewerage, telephones or anything else.

Seething resentment of the UN and the NGOs bursts out everywhere, with the usual unavoidable ugly spectacle of highly paid western aid experts rubbing up against Karzai cabinet ministers - "They expect Pringles wherever they go" said one Afghan aid worker acidly of the itinerant aid community.

When I spoke to the Afghan minister for public works, he flailed his long arms in the air, expostulating with frustration, claiming that the UN and NGOs spend all the country's donated money, and spend it badly. "Stand outside my window and you'll see 200 white Land Cruisers pass by in an hour, I swear it! Our money, they spend! How can I build my roads?"

Another minister - for housing and planning - lists outrageous extravagances by foreign agencies, but in the same breath despairs of his own barely literate civil servants' ability to deliver anything. He says he sent them on a four-month "capacity building" course, but they came back no better. The civil service is choked with over 300,000 cronies of all the past regimes, all unsackable. The Karzai government needs to earn credibility fast with some reconstruction everyone can see.

Fewer by the day now are the buccaneering freelance journalists and photographers. They are grumbling that the story has gone cold here: work is drying up. Fox News has already pulled out and the other US networks are off soon, itching to move on to Iraq. "Next year in Baghdad!" the journos and the old NGO hands call out cheerily when anyone leaves. 

Has the Afghan story gone cold? I am not sure whether to hope or fear it. On the one hand, the story going cold would mean an absence of war: no more footage of fighting men in pancake hats perched up in the mountains firing off Stingers into what's left of Kabul. No more bleeding Afghan children and women screaming into their burkas.

But the story growing cold may also mean that the world forgets and walks away bored, looking for the next hot new war. If the west turns its back now and lets the country slide back into tribal warfare and despair, there will be no moral justification for any future great interventions in the name of human rights. 

History will write this episode down as no more than a brief, self-interested expedition to eliminate al-Qaida training camps, another bunch of outsiders fighting their own battles on Afghan soil. Forget Tony Blair's impassioned vision of a western world committed to spreading freedom across the globe. There may be no more stony and infertile ground than this for planting democratic ideals, but if Afghanistan remains a miserably poor and oppressed place, then all that high-minded talk will be exposed as self-serving hypocrisy.

Much moral rhetoric accompanied this expedition: I was among those who welcomed the cluster bombs in the name of peace and freedom.

But the prospect of lasting peace and respect for human rights in this desperate place hangs by a hair. All the old dark fundamentalist forces are waiting for Karzai to fail; only more money and deep commitment over many years offer any hope of keeping them at bay.

Afghanistan needs far more money than the Karzai's disgraceful $460m for next year (roughly the same sum as the British treasury has wasted on drawing up contracts for the London tube public/private partnership.) It is incumbent on all those of us who supported the war to keep the world's brief and fickle attention focused on the task of trying to build a nation from the rubble. 

And quite deliberately by this Guardian/feminist hypocrisy, of course, - the one all telling historical development to set against this tale of unrelenting capitalist-system misery and failure, namely the astonishing economic, political, social and cultural progress Afghan society made as a Soviet workers-state protectorate (from eternal Western colonial-imperialist meddling) eventually abandoned because of the high cost of defence against the CIA's relentless Stinger-missile supplied and organised 'Mojaheddin' campaign, - does not even get a mention, apart from the typical feminist trivia that Kabul even saw mini-skirts "in communist times".

Where Afghanistan has gone after yet more indescribable devastation to oust the Taleban (who were themselves only the end-product of the West's earlier anti-Soviet destructive intervention) is from one aspect of regional cultural backwardness (but at least independent minded to a certain extent as far as imperialism's international anti-Third World tyrannies were concerned) to another far worse aspect (local conservatism deliberately built-up and encouraged solely to suit Western exploitation purposes, - exactly the same as when British colonialism first arrived (see Straw) 150 years ago).

The above bourgeois admissions of what a travesty of a "democratic, ordered way of life" imperialist domination achieves in its exploitation of the Third World, should make even a block of wood see the need to become revolutionary anti-imperialists in this modern world, building workers states and nothing else, - (but probably won't).

However, despite this abysmal way in which petty-bourgeois feminists, 'liberals', and 'lefts' endlessly kid themselves about their own 'moral' self-righteousness (when in practice rarely doing anything less than imperialism’s work for it in doubting the historic role played by revolution and proletarian dictatorship), - nevertheless the splits and despair throughout the "democratic" ideological camp continue to fester dramatically.

It could be hoped that the firefighters dispute represents more than just wage bargaining for the dubious 'solution', to their discontent, of merely having more money in their pockets under capitalism.

Gilchrist hints at a grasp of the capitalist class system's hopeless outdatedness, but he then stops short of any real political broadsides against the ludicrous gulf between the lavishly-rewarded but useless fat cats of British industrial and political management, and the firemen:

What really seems to stick in Bain's craw is the FBU's role in jointly regulating working practices, particularly duty systems. To us this is an essential element of social partnership and the foundation stone of industrial democracy. To Bain it is a barrier to the right of employers to use men and women as mere factors of production, without any say in work organisation or service policy. Forget the percentages, £30,000 is a reasonable and realistic salary for the job our members do for society. 

The strikes will end as soon as there is a reasonable pay offer underpinned by funding for a truly modernised fire service, based on full recognition of workers' rights to participate in decision making. Surely this is genuine modernisation, not a return to overtime and rest day working to boost inadequate basic salaries. 

Bain belongs to a previous age to the Thatcher era, with its master and servant attitude to union rights: The key question is whether the labour movement will allow this approach to become a hallmark of New Labour in government as well.

Gilchrist should use his speeches and articles to spell out exactly the hypocrisy of politicians on three times a firefighters salary but still moonlighting for lavishly paid directorships and lawyers' briefs and journalism, etc, etc, while denouncing firefighters for having to moonlight to make ends meet. 

He should throw the book at the capitalist big-business reward system which increases remunerations of already several £s million annually with RAISES of a further million or two a year, - and all for helping to drive the economy towards the greatest slump in history, and back up the imperialist warmongering system which is set to drag mankind towards the greatest holocaust in history.

But fake-'left' politics prevails, and no word is mentioned anywhere of turning the firefighters’ grievance into a political challenge against the whole stinking ruling class capitalist system.

Fake-'lefts' are still busy making unprincipled sectarian manoeuvres against each other from wildly differing ideological standpoints within the 'same' supposed 'socialist' party.

Although still reeling from more Socialist Alliance 'leadership' defections due to SWP racketeering, an SA source has delivered the following sneer against the SLP's dwindling membership, now beset by open warfare between rival gurus, both equally reluctant either to say what they think about each other, or to enter full and open discussion in front of the working class on their own personal rival barmy philosophies:

The Socialist Labour Party's 5th Congress, held in London's Conway Hall, saw the ultra-Stalinites - whose alliance with newly re-elected president Arthur Scargill has become increasingly uneasy over recent months  - gain substantial ground.

Although it would be wrong to say that the Scargill-Stalinite alliance is now at an end, the internal tensions between the various forms mean that things are likely to become more and more fraught. The dwindling numbers of old Labourites, Scargillite trade unionists, single-issue campaigners and more moderate ex-'official communists' have been expressing their displeasure at what they see as a takeover of the party and forced Scargill to attempt to create some distance between himself and the ultra-Stalinites.

These tensions burst into the open over the weekend. They resulted in Scargill's first ever defeat on congress floor in the six-and-a-half-year history of the SLP This came symbolically in a debate on North Korea.

An amendment from Crawley CSLP sought to delete this paragraph. While expressing solidarity with the "people of the DPRK in their heroic struggle against US imperialism", it denounced the "cult of personality" and "extreme veneration" of the monarchical regime as "irrational". Karl Stewart stated that he fully supported "people's Korea" but "the idea that one individual should be deified is at odds with our principles".  

Harpal Brar, a prominent figure in the Stalin Society and Indian Workers Association, editor of Lalkar and de facto leader of the SLP ultra-Stalinites, strode to the microphone. The amendment, he said, was an "abstract and idealist" distraction. It was permissible to advise the North Korean 'comrades' -  in private  - that "there are certain things that do not go down well in our country", but there should be no question of telling them what to do, of openly criticising them.

The role of individual leaders is important, he continued - for example, everybody knows that the SLP would not exist but for one man. Just as Brar supports Scargill and recognises his contribution to the cause of the working class, so it is with Kim Il Sung: "I salute him. I call him Great Leader."

Then it was the turn of Scargill himself. Whereas up to this point he had, whenever he considered it necessary, directed comrades uncertain how to vote by announcing from the platform the NEC recommendation at the end of each debate, on this occasion for dramatic effect he came down to the floor - to be introduced as the "delegate from Barnsley Central" by chair Linda Muir.

"I support the amendment," he declared. "Not that long ago, we supported Brezhnev and Gorbachev, who sold out the Russian Revolution." Kim Il Sung "spent millions of dollars on a birthday party" for his son, while the North Korean "people were starving".

He concluded: "I don't support the cult of personality - whether it's Joseph Stalin, Kim Il Sung or Arthur Scargill." 

Blanch Carpenter was outraged by this "ultimate insult to the Korean people. Our general secretary has the nerve to criticise Kim Il Sung" -  who was "not a normal person", but the creator of the Juche concept. Comrade Carpenter recounted how she had recently spoken with the survivors of the North Korean football team in Middlesbrough - scene of their victory over Italy in the 1996 World Cup. When the Great Leader had asked them to try and win a couple of games, they told her they had wept.

Replying to the debate, comrade McLeod - who, together with Carpenter, had been a member of the SLP delegation to North Korea last year - decried the opposition to the cult of personality as "cultural imperialism". Didn't comrades realise that  "honouring the dead" and treating them as though they were still alive was a Korean tradition? Besides, when Stalin was condemned in the same terms, the "real target was Lenin".

These two speeches were enough to carry the day: the amendment was defeated - in the face of Scargill's strongly expressed support - by around two to one. In another unusual turn, Scargill's most loyal devotee, Nell Myers, who was stepping down both from the executive and as editor of Socialist News, publicly contradicted Scargill's "distorted comments" about an NEC committee which, he had claimed, already dealt with housing.

Card trick

This seemed to seal it for the delegates, who overwhelmingly ignored the president's wishes and voted in the first motion. A furious Scargill rose again to point out that "members of the NEC who agreed unanimously on a recommendation are now voting the opposite way". This showed a lack of discipline and any recurrence would be punished by a card vote.

Sure enough, within seconds he was carrying out his threat after a show of hands gave a clear majority to Liverpool West Derby's passionate but rambling motion. In his earlier advice Scargill had said that the mover, Kai Andersen, had made an "excellent contribution", but he was not actually calling on the SLP to do anything. Agreed, so what did it matter if the motion was carried?

For Scargill that was not the point. He had to reassert his authority - this he duly achieved by the NWCCMA's 3,000 votes. The card votes of the constituency delegates had been swamped by those of Paul Hardman, Scargill's creature and tame official of the North West retired miners.

The 'members' of this organisation - consisting mostly of people who know nothing or what is being done on their behalf, who have never heard of the SLP or who in some cases are dead - had their votes cast in an even more blatantly rigged way in the elections for officers.

At the last two congresses, in 1998 and 1999, before the change to triennial gatherings, the NWCCMA had abstained in some such contests, but now it seemed Stalinite Zane Carpenter might actually have majority support amongst delegates in the contest for general secretary.

So, quite unashamedly, comrade Hardman voted 3,000 times ... for himself. As it turned out, this was unnecessary, since his total was 3,160, as against 127 for comrade Carpenter.  Linda Muir defeated Harpal Brar by an almost identical margin in the election for vice-president, while Scargill himself was, of course, unopposed as president.

	However, in the constituency section, Scargill has much less influence, and this year the Stalinites almost swept the board. Apart, that is, from peacenik Katrina Howse, who actually topped the poll. Two members of the Rule clan - Ella and Carlos - are additional Stalinite NEC members. They represent the tiny women's and youth sections respectively, both of which are controlled by the Brarites.

	The tensions between the two main SLP forces first appeared during the debate on a composite motion that condemned the 'war on terror' in legalistic, reformist terms and called for affiliation at all levels of the party to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. The Stalinites did not actually oppose this composite, but certainly made clear their differences with the Scargillites.

Giles Shorter of Wansdyke declared that "all forms of anti-imperialist resistance are themselves principled" - including the September 11 outrage, obviously. Ranjeet Brar (son of Harpal) said that while he was not opposed to joining the CND, we should remember it is a bourgeois organisation and that there is a difference between nuclear weapons held by the imperialists and those held by socialist countries (like North Korea, he meant).

Comrade Brar junior then went on to bring up the fact that there had been "a lot of discussion on the executive" (he was the outgoing youth section representative) about September 11. Actually there had been a deep split over whether or not the suicide attack on the World Trade Center ought to have been condemned. According to Brar the "balance" of discussion on the NEC whose subsequent statement did condemn the attack - had favoured the approach he outlined: i.e., that muslims, for example, "will find a way to fight back" against US imperialism and it is "not our job to go around condemning them as terrorists".

Scargill said that Brar's speech was "deplorable. We do condemn whoever was responsible" for the attack on the WTC. However Scargill himself has signed up to a full-blown conspiracy theory. As he states in the executive report to congress, "No-one to this day has provided any evidence or proof to establish what really happened, and who was responsible."

The report continues: "...how is it possible for four planes to be hijacked in the course of one morning...without the most sophisticated military nation on earth sending one plane into the air to intercept...?

Scargill went on to assert from the platform: "To say that there is a difference between nuclear weapons possessed by a capitalist country and a socialist country is absolute hypocrisy." Socialist Labour is against nuclear weapons, full stop.

However, since none of these fundamental difference were mentioned in the wording of the motion, both sides could go ahead and vote for it, and it was carried without opposition. But the same debate was raging again a few minutes later - this time on a motion on Palestine. Comrade Shorter insisted that the SLP ought to differentiate between imperialist and 'socialist' nuclear weapons, and compared Scargill's position to Gorbachev's hankering after classless ‘human values'.

Despite the fact that the motion on Palestine noted that "... the future progress of human society is best served by setbacks and defeats for the warmongers..."  -  Shorter's coded way of signalling his welcome for September 11 - it was not opposed by the NEC and Scargill remained in his seat. This leads me to wonder whether he actually agreed with the sentiment - if you believe, as he does, that it was actually the US regime itself that attacked not only the WTC but its own military HQ, then it follows that there is no problem in condemning the perpetrators. 

The motion also hailed the "new and daring forms of struggle" adopted by the Palestinians. This was challenged by speakers from the floor who wondered whether this was another code for fundamentalist suicide bombs. They were not wrong. But the executive had recommended support and this disgraceful motion was carried by a large majority.

Until ALL political perspectives and versions of historical science are debated openly with ALL comers in front of the working class, then these cautious manoeuvres between one sect of closed brethren and another will remain incapable of inspiring the kind of mass revolutionary cadre movement which will be needed for the advance to socialism when conditions ripen.

Centrist developments of one kind or another may well kick things off, but the sectarian traditions (opposed to open theoretical polemics) of the 57 Trot and Revisionist varieties currently manoeuvring on the 'left' look like nothing remotely approaching such centrist developments yet.

Continuing to develop an independent struggle for Marxist-Leninist science as rapidly and far-reaching as possible still remains the most fruitful option. Spread the Review. EPSR.

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

New 'Catholic' minister; same old British rot.

What, emphatically, does not matter is Murphy's Catholicism, which has been mulled over in minute detail as if it were his single defining characteristic and as if that, in itself, makes him more "acceptable" to (a) Sinn Féin (b) republicans in general, and (c) the whole nationalist community. It is stupid, insulting and rather depressing to think that British politicians, including the Prime Minister, honestly believe that we will thank them to have had two Catholics in a row (imagine!) to indulge David Trimble.

Sectarian considerations may come above all else for others but Sinn Féin will deal in the same way with whoever - and whatever - is put in front of them; Brooke (patrician hauteur) Mayhew (snooty Anglo ennui), Mowlam (hands-on wigs-off moist-eyed chumminess), Mandelson (arch, snake-eyed careerism), or Reid (come-and-have-a-go-if-you-think-you're-hard-enough abrasiveness).

It doesn't matter. In the end, they are all what they are, and what they have been for 30 years, regardless of individual characteristics; that is, agents of British rule in Ireland.

Having a pleasant personality, as we are told Paul Murphy has, or being of a particular religious persuasion does not alter that simple fact. Republicans could not care less that Murphy is a Catholic, or how devout, about his Papal knighthood (whatever that is), his marital status, that he is Welsh, who he takes his holidays with or where his great-granddaddy came from.

What Republicans care about above all else is his politics and Murphy is, by definition, a unionist. Not an Ulster Unionist maybe, but a unionist nonetheless. In that respect, a more interesting and more revealing nugget of information might be that, earlier in his political career, Murphy was an opponent of Welsh devolution.

The only point worth noting on his personal - and private - religious preference, is that it required Tony Blair to check with David Trimble before Murphy was appointed to ensure that the erstwhile First Minister could tolerate having yet another Catholic about the place - that little gem also passed without comment.

Murphy's personality is really not what is at issue here. Whilst dealing with an affable individual may make the day-to-day job of nationalists' elected representatives more bearable, Murphy, from what we have seen so far, has shown little inclination or ability to do more than, act as a messenger relaying present British Government policy, policy which is avowedly pro-Ulster Unionist. Whatever Trimble demands, Tony demands too; decommissioning, verifiable decommissioning, total decommissioning, disbandment of the IRA, surrender, whatever. Murphy has not said much, but what he has said amounts to little more than a repetition of the demand that the IRA disband. Murphy's role, if he has one other than to simply repeat David Trimble and Tony Blair, ought to be to ensure that the institutions are fully restored and soon - and that the Good Friday Agreement is genuinely implemented. The way to achieve that is not, as his predecessor did, by continuously undermining Sinn Féin's policy of meticulous adherence to the Agreement and thus the confidence of the party's constituency in it.

He should not be wasting time haranguing Sinn Féin with unrealisable unionist inspired demands. His role should be to bring whatever influence he has to bear in order to address his own government's unspoken intent to try and renegotiate the Agreement, to stand firm in the face of Trimble's hysteria, and to remember that nobody in the Six Counties voted for him or his party.

Murphy's Law was the one that states that whatever can go wrong, will.  •

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

INQUIRY

Also giving evidence this week was a former British Army photographer, identified as INQ2030, then a sergeant in the Royal Army Ordinance Corps. In his statement, the soldier claimed that on Bloody Sunday the helicopter from which he was filming using a cine camera was fired on twice. "One could hear the crack of the round passing the helicopter. I believe we started off flying at 500 feet but after this shooting incident we went up to 1,000 feet, probably as a result of a direct order," he said.

However, under questioning from Lord Saville,. INQ2030 said he could not in fact be certain that the incident had occurred on Bloody Sunday at all and conceded that it may well have been on one of the many other occasions in which he flew in a helicopter.

The inquiry also heard that the crucial moments after the Parachute Regiment had entered the Bogside were missing from the film he took. Under questioning from Barry MacDonald QC for the families, Soldier INQ2030 said he could not explain how the gap had arisen.

"Your mission had been to take maximum photographic coverage of the march and all associated incidents," said McDonald, "and you did not see any of this or film any of this shooting, which means that either you failed miserably in your task, or the film that you did take was cut; there are really only two options there, are there not?" When asked which of these options he thought it was, INQ2030 replied: "I have no idea."

The former soldier also couldn't explain why he did not hand his films to his superior officer, Colin Wallace, and instead handed them over to a more senior officer. He said he had no recollection of the incident and could not recall to whom had passed the films.

Also giving evidence was INQ3, a former major in the Special Investigation Branch (SIB) of the Royal Military Police. He told the inquiry that the way in which SIB statement taking was carried out encouraged soldiers to "fabricate" accounts when they were accused of misdemeanours, not only on Bloody Sunday but also more generally. He admitted that soldiers' accounts of incidents were not questioned or tested and that if a soldier did volunteer information that might incriminate him, the interview was stopped.

He agreed with MacDonald that "soldiers tended to close ranks when they were being questioned about the possibility of either themselves or other soldiers committing criminal acts" and that the entire purpose of the policy he had described was to ensure that the conduct of soldiers could be protected from scrutiny.