FRFI 163 October/November 2001
RCG statement on the destruction of the World Trade Centre, New York, and the attack on the Pentagon, Washington, USA, 11 September 2001
On 11 September we witnessed the mass murder of more than 6,000 people in the space of an hour. We watched as ordinary people, many with great courage, faced death at the hands of hijackers. Since then their families and friends, from many nations, have done their best to make sense of what has happened. They have issued posters, placed flowers, burned candles, prayed and held minutes of silence – all attempts to grasp the barbaric atrocity which has devastated their lives. It is now becoming clear that they will never find many of the victims’ bodies which will literally have disappeared off the face of the earth. We send them our sincere condolences.
We do not extend the same sympathy to the US and British governments. These self-proclaimed leaders of the ‘free world’, at first simply terrified (‘it could have been Downing Street or Whitehall’, whined Peter Hain), quickly assumed the pious expressions necessary to whip up a frenzy of patriotism. This was an act of war against ‘democracy and civilisation’, they said. British Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, described it as ‘the most worrying situation I can remember since the Cuban missile crisis in the 1960s’; he stands in a long line of Anglocentric Foreign Secretaries whose failed imaginations have not extended beyond their own class interests and the Home Counties. For generations of Palestinian children, for instance, there must have been myriad worrying situations in the last forty years. For the working class of Chile there would have been horror exactly 28 years ago, on 11 September 1973. ‘The worst terrorist attack in history’, ran the headlines: true only if you discount imperialism’s own history. It is already clear that the leaders of the ‘free world’ will plan their ‘Christian’, ‘democratic’ and ‘civilised’ revenge with the tunnel vision of true imperialists: this event is earthshaking because they are under attack.
The imperialists’ bullying characteristics are to the fore as they attempt to whip the world into line: ‘You are either with us or against us’, they proclaim. In that case, we have to say we are against you, and we will explain why.
Ten days after the World Trade Centre attack, the US and UK, Bush and Blair, have set themselves up as the 5-Star Generals in a War against Terrorism. This is tantamount to the Mafia running a Temperance League. As always, they describe it as a war of Good against Evil, but this is counter-information. A long list of the world’s worst tyrants and mass murderers were and are financed, trained, armed and nurtured by the US and UK governments: Mobutu (Congo), Marcos (Philippines), Saddam Hussein (Iraq), Suharto (Indonesia), Duvalier (Haiti), Noriega (Panama), for example, are imperialism’s children. These tyrants were ‘the good guys’ until their own interests as local warlords conflicted with the interests of imperialism – it is only then that they became ‘evil’.
The list of US aggression since 1945 is long:
Direct military interventions: Korea (1950-53); the Dominican Republic (1965); South East Asia (Vietnam) (1962-75); Grenada (1983); Panama (1989); Kuwait (1991); Yugoslavia and the Balkans (1990s).
Large scale involvement in or organisation of coups and destabilisation campaigns (the most prominent): Italy (1948); Iran (1953); Guatemala (1954); Brazil (1964); Indonesia (1965); Chile (1973); East Timor (1975 onwards); Somalia (1992/3).
Supply of arms or aid to overthrow or destabilise governments: Cuba; Laos; Iraq; Angola; Cambodia; Afghanistan; Nicaragua.
And this list does not include the sponsorship of Israeli terror in Palestine and Lebanon, or the despoiling of Colombia and most of central and South America.
30 million people have been killed in conflicts since the Second World War. It is significant that Britain has been involved in most of these: the ‘special relationship’ is forged in the infliction of terror and death. Today, these leaders of the ‘free world’, Generals in the ‘never-ending War against Terrorism’, are responsible for the deaths of 5,000 Iraqi children every month (UNICEF figures).
Two examples of the scale and barbarity of this terrorism will suffice: Indonesia and Iraq.
Indonesia and East Timor
Who are the terrorists?
In 1965 General Suharto came to power in an army-led coup in Indonesia. In a series of brutal massacres between half a million and a million people were killed. The aim was to oust the democratic President Sukarno and to annihilate the popular communist PKI party. The coup was backed by the USA and the UK. Not only did they finance this mass murder and later attempt to cover it up, the CIA also supplied a list of left-wing activists for elimination. Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, informed Congress that US military aid and training had paid ‘enormous dividends’.
In 1975 Indonesia, still run by US-backed Suharto, invaded East Timor; within two months 60,000 people had been killed. Despite a United Nations Security Council unanimous order that Indonesia should withdraw its invading force without delay, the US secretly increased military supplies. By 1978 the massacres had reached genocidal levels, but the military aid continued. The US was happy to partake of East Timor’s rich mineral and oil reserves. In his memoirs, US Ambassador to the UN, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, recalled how proud he was to render the UN ‘utterly ineffective’. Even up to the 1990s when Indonesia’s occupation of East Timor ended and Suharto was deposed, the Clinton administration was still describing this tyrant as ‘our kind of guy’.
Favoured friend or ‘Beast of Baghdad’?
Throughout the 1980s Saddam Hussein was viewed as a favoured ally and trading partner of the west. He waged war on Iran on behalf of western imperialism. He was even given the job of training hundreds of Libyans to overthrow the Qaddafi government on imperialism’s behalf. By 1998, Madeleine Albright was claiming that ‘the US and the civilised world cannot deal with somebody who is willing to use those weapons of mass destruction on his own people, not to speak of his neighbours.’ But the US had no difficulty in doing precisely that in March 1988 when hundreds of Kurds were gassed at Halabja. Throughout this period the US was shipping biological materials to Iraq which were identical to those later found and destroyed by UN inspectors in the period following the Gulf War. Britain was exporting materials usable for biological weapons up to at least December 1996, after the Scott Inquiry had exposed the British government’s export policy. Iraq did not become a ‘rogue state’ because of its undoubted brutality or sponsorship of terrorism, but when it decided to invade Kuwait in 1991. This was a challenge to imperialism’s favoured balance of power in the Middle East: Saddam Hussein had gone too far.
That is why we are not on the side of Bush and Blair. In this Looking Glass world the call to ‘defend democracy’ comes from the enemies of democracy; the ‘war against terrorism’ is sponsored by the terrorists. They will use this ‘crisis’ to destroy democracy and to inflict terror if they can. The Labour government’s reflex action is a further attack on civil liberties: the Bush Administration, with Blair in tow, threatens to carpet bomb the world’s poor, starving people.
The imperialists’ definition of ‘terrorism’ is utterly phoney and self-serving. It encompasses only their own opponents. They use it to justify acts of violence against any who oppose their brutality or their terrorism, and especially any opposition to capitalism and imperialism. The US has long justified its terrorist actions against Cuba and the illegal blockade on the grounds of the threat socialism poses: ‘the spread of the Castro idea of taking matters into one’s own hands’ which might encourage ‘the poor and underprivileged elsewhere who are now demanding opportunities for a decent living’ (Arthur Schlesinger, reporting on Latin America to President Kennedy in 1961).
We oppose the violence which imperialism uses to rule the world, and, unlike the imperialists, the terror which their former friends, like Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, use to dispute the spoils of imperialism and to oppress humanity. It is no accident that Osama bin Laden, now wanted ‘dead or alive’ for acts of terrorism, including the 11 September massacre, is also the creature of imperialism. He is one of a long line of former friends whose interests now diverge. He and his cohorts do not represent the progressive interests of Afghanistan or any other oppressed people: they are the vultures who fight over the spoils.
As the imperialists scan the world for opponents to bomb and terrorise, communists are proud to stand with the oppressed masses of the world, with Cuba and with Castro. We stand for the interests of the mass of humanity, against capitalism, against imperialism and against their terror.
As Fidel Castro said on 1 September at the World Conference on Racism, in Durban, South Africa:
‘We are on the verge of a huge economic, social and political crisis… History has shown that it is only from deep crisis that great solutions have emerged. The people’s right to life and justice will definitely assert itself under a thousand different shapes.’
21 September 2001
