9/11 - Terrorist Attack in the USA

The attacks on the US leave many questions unresolved. What will the final death toll be? Who carried out the attack and what will be the US response? Why was the attack carried out? Any answers at the moment are purely speculative.


Osama bin Laden is widely believed to be behind the terror attacks. He is a billionaire Islamic fundamentalist, former US ally and protégé, who fronts a terrorist organisation whose fighters were trained and financed by the CIA during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Following the car bomb attack at the World Trade Centre eight years ago, four of those arrested and charged with the attack were found to be amongst those trained by the US (Robert Fox, New York’s regional FBI director revealed this in a TV interview in 1993). When the US attacked bin Laden’s bases near the village of Khost in Afghanistan (along with the Sudanese pharmaceutical factory) following attacks on US embassies in Africa, they could do so with pin point accuracy for the CIA had planned and designed them.


US surveillance was well aware of bin Laden’s absence prior to the attack and it seems they purposely chose not to target him because a dead bin Laden would dangerously enhance his legendary charisma amongst the Islamic fundamentalists he inspires, his death inciting his followers to more crazed acts of vengeance - the logic that has informed the US decision not to assassinate Saddam Hussein (one described as the world’s no. 1 mad man).


The US is now reaping the bitter harvest of its foreign policy which used Islamic fundamentalism as a puppet in its perennial game of globo-political profit-making. For years it courted some of the most dangerous, conservative and fanatical followers of Islam and is now paying the price.


Whilst the world is outraged at the terrorist attacks on the USA mainland, it must be remembered that the US has been conducting just as deadly covert acts of terrorism around the globe for 50 years (ie their support for Suharto’s military coup in 1966 which resulted in the deaths of 600,000 members of the PKI and their more recent support for an Indonesian regime that massacred thousands who voted for independence in East Timor). In this same period the US has toppled some 30 governments and supported every dictator imaginable (Pol Pot, Mobuto, Amin, Papa Doc Duvalier and Saddam Hussein) whilst seriously interfering in the domestic affairs of almost 70 countries.


In recent years the US has devastated Iraq in continuous bombing raids – even for using radar to scan the Iraqi airspace its own air force is excluded from, imposed sanctions on Iraq that have resulted in the deaths of perhaps 2 million people, bombed Iraq in defence of the Kurds from the same air bases Turkey uses to bomb Kurdish villages. In the wake of the Iraqi Gulf War defeat, the US attacked a retreating Iraqi army on the Basra road and fried to death 60,000 ill-equipped soldiers, the vast majority never wanting any part in the conflict in the first place. The US has launched attacks upon Libya, Somalia and Grenada and supported right wing tendencies in Panama, Haiti, El Salvador and Colombia whilst at the same time ensuring there is no Middle Eastern solution, that the Palestinian people are kept in a state of subjection and that UN Resolutions pertaining to the occupied territories are ignored. During the retaliatory raids following the attacks on the US embassies in Africa, the US fired 20 cruise missiles into Afghanistan and killed tens of thousands in Sudan (a true figure is not available because the US blocked an inquiry). The list is indeed a long one.


The question should perhaps not be who bombed the US, but why was such an attack so late in coming. This question does not suggest we condone the attack, but hints at the number of US-created Frankensteins walking the world prepared to destroy the life of their master. It hints at the number of enemies the US has created in pursuit of global domination, all with a score to settle – and they are legion, and it hints at the misery and deprivation inflicted on hundreds of millions of workers as the US carves out ever larger chunks of the world on behalf of its corporate elite.


If we set this terrorist attack in a wider context, however, then the loss of life in New York and Washington is not that alarming. Is it not an atrocity that 40,000 children die of starvation each day? Do we consider it a most heinous crime when 1,000 children die each hour of preventable disease (these are UNICEF statistics) and do we not find sickening the thought that twice that number of women die or suffer disability during pregnancy because of a lack of simple remedies or medical attention? We are speaking here of an Hiroshima a day which never gets reported, which is taken as accepted because it is so much a part of our way of life in capitalist society. Where is the 25 page newspaper pull-out that accompanies the recent WHO revelation that more people died of starvation in the last two years than were killed in two world wars?


The attacks on the US will perhaps serve to show republican hawks the futility of a national missile defence system. These hijacked planes could well have flown into nuclear power stations or bases containing US stockpiles of biological weapons (the US is the world’s biggest stockpile of such weapons). The most sophisticated missile defence system imaginable simply cannot be programmed to read the mind of a religious fanatic incensed with the notion that his death (and those of 10,000 infidels with him) is a passport to heaven.


Whilst we gasp in disbelief at the deaths of perhaps 25,000 workers in the biggest terrorist attack in history, it is worth pausing and remembering that the US, Britain, France, China and the Soviet Union have between them thousands of nuclear weapons capable of destroying the planet a hundred times over. Any one of these war-heads is indeed capable of creating death and destruction on a scale that would make the attack in question look like a playground firecracker.


All of this may sound churlish, but is in no way intended to diminish the fact that there has been an enormous loss of life in the USA. Those lying dead beneath the rubble are our fellow workers, members of the working class. Whilst we are revolted, we do not seek the comfort of revenge, for the eye for an eye philosophy can only make the whole world blind, as Ghandi observed.


Western leaders have claimed the attack to be an assault on civilisation. When Ghandi was asked what he thought of western civilisation he replied, “it sounds like a good idea.” What is this civilisation that has been attacked, where 600 million have no home, where 800 million are chronically malnourished, where 1 billion have no access to clean water? What is this civilisation where 3 individuals have more wealth than the combined income of the word’s 48 poorest nations? How can we condemn attacks on our ‘civilisation’ when we destroy food to keep prices high and employ scientists on weapons programmes whilst children die of preventable disease? What questions we can ask of those who destroy the lives of millions, then run for the moral high ground when disaster hits their own backyard


The entire episode serves to show the insanity of the system we live in, and the desperate need to wrest control of our planet away from the madmen before it is indeed to late. In the 20th century, some 220 million lost their lives in wars, in conflicts over trade routes, areas of influence, foreign markets, mineral wealth and the strategic points from which the same can be defended or in other words, in the name of profit. The globalisation process, which the US pursued obsessively, only served to make political Islam more reactionary in defence of its own culture and strategic interests.

The solution remains the same. There is one world and we exist as one people in need of each other and with the same basic needs. There is far more that unites us than can ever divide us along cultural, nationalistic or religious lines. Together we can create a civilisation worth living in, but before that happens we need the conscious cooperation of ordinary people across the world, united in one common cause – to create a world in which each person has fee access to the benefits of civilisation, a world without borders or frontiers, social classes or leaders and a world in which production is at last freed

Son of Star Wars

Rarely have Americans elected to office a president as impetuous, callous and as indifferent to the well being of others as George W Bush, who even as a presidential candidate, signing more death warrants than any Governor in history, made no secret of his hawkish ambitions, determined to forge ahead with the ‘Son of Star Wars’ National Missile Defence system and to propel the world into another arms race and all the old cold war hostilities that accompany it and, indeed, perhaps signing the future death warrants of hundreds of millions.


The recent Pentagon report Proliferation: Threat and Response came as a god-send for the Bush camp, anxious to rationalise a planned $60 billion increase in defence spending, inclusive of investment in the NMD programme which would deploy thousands of air defence missiles to intercept intercontinental ballistic weapons fired by the proverbial ‘rogue states’.


The report would have it that the threat to mainland America is as great now as during the Cold War era and that apocalypse is just over the horizon, discerning a credible threat from North Korea within 10 years, Iran within 15 years and Iraq within 20 years. The report is critical of China for its continuing use of arms sales to ‘advance its strategic and economic interests’, but is silent on the US domination of the global arms market and its related hegemonic aspirations. Likewise, the amnesiacs who compiled the report lambaste Iraq for its ‘pursuit of regional hegemony’, Syria for its excessive $1 billion defence budget (the US defence budget is currently $300 billion) and North Korea for its stockpiling of chemical weapons (when the US has the largest stockpile of chemical weapons on the planet). At every turn, it seems, there’s a rogue state just itching to lob a nuclear or biological weapon at the defender of global peace and democracy, and it is this warped logic that informs the hawkish stance in Washington. No mention is made of the fact that even without NMD, any state stupid enough to throw anything bigger than a grenade at the US would be bombed back into the Stone Age.


Nevertheless, it is talk that is demanding a $60 billion increase in US defence spending (which is actually China’s total military budget), and rhetoric that the cold warriors Bush has given cabinet posts to are more than familiar with. Once a critic of NMD, Colin Powell, of Gulf War fame (a man who came to prominence covering up the My Lai massacre and later up to his neck in the arms for hostages scandal and the illegal supplying of arms to the Contras) is now Secretary of State and the Pentagon’s top NMD salesperson. Other cabinet posts have gone to other Reaganite hawks such as Richard Armitage, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Candaleezza Rice. Bush’s choice for key cabinet posts alone should warn us there is some serious ass kicking to be done.


Whereas Bush sees NMD as a ‘constitutional and moral requisite’ (he incidentally also believes humans and fish can coexist peacefully) US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld agrees that ‘it is in many respects a moral issue’, that NMD is essential to counter ‘the raw and random violence of the outlaw regime or the rogue state armed with missiles of mass destruction’, that NMD would make the US ‘less isolationist’, less vulnerable and more prepared to help its allies.’


At a defence conference in Munich in early February, at which the implications of NMD were discussed, concern was raised that NMD would undoubtedly spark an arms race. Rumsfeld declared that NMD would not destroy arms control agreements including the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, but later suggested the 1972 treaty was ‘ancient history’.


Sergei Ivanov, head of the Russian National Security Council told the conference that ‘the destruction of the 1972 ABM Treaty will result in annihilation of the whole structure of strategic stability and create prerequisites for a new arms race.’ As much, and more was hinted at back in late 1999 when Republican hawks celebrated a Senate vote not to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and announced their intention to scupper the 1972 ABM Treaty which outlawed Star Wars’ missiles systems capable of intercepting incoming missiles. For it was them that Russian Defence Minister Nikolai Mikolov, acknowledging Russia could not match US technology, declared Russia would simply deploy more warheads capable of overwhelming the US nuclear umbrella system.


In November of 2000 the Kremlin announced plans to cut its number of men under arms by 360,000 and to shift the emphasis from nuclear weapons to conventional arms. This decision has since been shelved and will be reconsidered in March at the earliest. Meanwhile, in direct response to Washington’s announcement that the US intends to go through with the Son of Star Wars anti-missile programme, whatever shape this may be (air-based, sea-based, space-based) and regardless of any objections, Russia has announced it will seek an anti-US diplomatic alliance with China, North Korea and Iran.


As well as Russia, both India and China have expressed concern about the NMD, fearing it will very much provoke an arms race and force them to expand their own nuclear weapons programmes. Whist France and Germany are wholly opposed to NMD, the British government is currently playing its cards close to its chest. Though the MoD and the foreign Office claim they are ‘not convinced of the merits’ of NMD, Defence Secretary Geoffrey Hoon, asked if the US would be allowed to upgrade their early warning system at Flyingdales in Yorkshire replied: ‘We share of course US concerns about emerging threats. The US is our closest ally.’ For Tony Blair’s part, whilst it is felt he is bending towards the idea, keen to placate his US cronies, his government is under no pressure to make a decision for several months, which suits New Labour down to the ground. It should also be remembered that Blair is facing a General Election this year so has no intentions of losing votes as a result of arguments with anti-nuclear protestors. It is, however, a safe bet that Blair will indeed see an election victory as his mandate to commit Britain to Bush’s wider game plan for global US domination.


It is a fair guess that there is more behind NMD than Washington lets on. For instance, the moment you begin installing a sophisticated missile defence shield is the moment your adversaries begin seeking ways around it. Whilst NMD may well take out the incoming missile, what of the biological or nuclear bomb in the suitcase or the suicide bomber?


A more likely explanation lies in the fears of the Republican right that the only discernible threat to US hegemony in the 21st Century will come from China as it develops into the economic giant many think it capable of - a serious challenger for US profits. What better way to curtail China’s economic ambitions than to compel it to channel more money into defence and away from other social programmes, economically hamstringing it? A similar tactic had been employed against the former Soviet Union during the Reagan administration in the late eighties, forcing state capitalism into an early grave as it found itself unable to meet the costly demands of an escalating arms race weighted heavily in the favour of the US.


It is poignantly ironic that George W Bush is preparing to raise the global security stakes when just over ten years ago his father George Bush, as president, announced to the world the benefits of the coming ‘peace dividend’ in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the ‘collapse of communism’; a world in which there would no longer be the need for countries to invest heavily in military hardware now the bogeyman had been exorcised – that money was now to be used for health, education and other social programmes. But there again, George senior did announce at his inauguration that the 20th Century had been the ‘American Century’ and that he’d be doing his damnedest to ensure the 21st was also an ‘American Century’. So maybe George junior is simply following out his father’s promises. Ensuring the 21st century will also be ruled by force and woe betides any one silly enough to mess with US interests.


One thing is sure. The US is deadly serious about possible threats to its strategic and economic interests in the 21st Century and has already toyed with a future confrontation with a possible rising superpower. In January, the US air force, along with 250 military and civilian ‘experts’, completed its first major war games in space at the Space Warfare Centre in Colorado, rehearsing a conflict set in 2017 between China and the US. It is no great leap of the imagination to envisage the projected winner.


As we have announced several times in the past year, if we are to prevent the 21st Century becoming a more violent re-run of the 20th, that witnessed Two world wars, the first use of nuclear weapons and many hundreds of smaller conflicts – all in the name of profit – it is essential we, the victims, the cannon fodder, the class that has the biggest price to pay to satisfy the whims of the mighty, begin to organise now; not tomorrow when NMD is in place, nor in years to come when the sirens are screaming. We as a class have suffered too much and have too much to lose to leave decisions regarding the future of our planet in the hands of group of arrogant, conceited and profit crazed individuals. Let’s really organise to take their power away, before it is too late.

Macedonia

Late June and early July saw much tension in Macedonia, threatening once more to ignite nationalist hatreds that have ripped the Balkans apart now for almost a decade.

It was uncannily ironic that as Yugoslavia was sending former president Slobodan Milosevic to stand trial in The Hague on war crimes, a mob of 5,000 Macedonian protestors, including police, soldiers and reservists, stormed their parliament and forced president Boris Trajkovski flee in fear of his life. His crime? He had agreed to a western brokered cease-fire with ethnic Albanian rebels and also allowed NATO to ferry rebel fighters to safety from a village they had captured six miles away from the capital Skopje . Not only was the mob furious that their government had signed a ceasefire with a movement that Nato’s own command had labelled ‘terrorists’ and ‘murderers’, but here was the west once again coming to the aid of insurgents.

Ostensibly, the Albanian rebels claim to be only interested in winning equal civil rights for ethnic Albanians and constitutional changes, but this however is no civil rights movement. If so, then why the armed insurgents and why do they call themselves the Albanian National Liberation Army (NLA)? The answer is simple, they are nationalists bent on creating a greater Albania. They are after territorial gain and control of the porous borders which show a fair profit in drugs and arms smuggling and the lucrative trade in ‘illegal’ immigrants. Violence and guerrilla warfare as practised by the NLA is not normally the stuff of ‘civil-rights’ movements, which generally pursue a non-violent agenda. It is the remit of liberation forces intent on wresting territory from its present owners. What has prompted the NLA to pass themselves off as a ‘civil-rights’ movement is NATO’s refusal to redraw the borders of the Balkans.

Moreover, why do they launch attacks on government forces? Simple – they hope to incur a heavy handed response from Macedonian forces which would win them support from Macedonia’s Albanian population, who perhaps need little egging on bearing in mind their social and economic gripes, and from Kosovo Albanians and Albania itself. They have further counted on benefiting from a similar situation when their parent organisation, the KLA, incurred such a harsh and brutal response from Serb forces that NATO was forced to intervene on behalf of the Albanians in 1998.

The risk of all out war is serious enough. It is feared that the mob fury could now be focused on isolated pockets of Albanians in Macedonia (they make up one third of the population) now that Trajkovski has agreed to the temporary EU brokered ceasefire. At present the rebels have captured areas of territory in the west of the country and have cut off water and electricity supplies, further inciting Macedonian hardliners in Skopje to demand armed intervention – a situation made all the worse with the rebels threatening to descend on Skopje to protect Albanians living there.

Chief protagonists of the Macedonian Slav majority, including prime minister Ljubco Georevski still hanker after a ham-fisted solution to the problem and perhaps the fact that the government has recently taking delivery of eight new attack aircraft – doubling the size of its air force – and that Georgevbski’s VMRO-DPMNE political party have recently handed out automatic weapons to 2000 reservists suggests they are not putting much faith in a peaceful solution to the crisis. If Macedonian Slavs, tired at the slow pace of a settlement in their favour, frustrated with the unchecked gains of the rebels, decide to even the score and attack ethnic Albanian areas, this will most certainly witness the beginning of a new wave of civil war.

A political settlement however is still on the cards as I write, with negotiators from the EU and NATO having set an unofficial mid July deadline for a peaceful solution, which would then pave the way for British, French, Italian and Greek soldiers to take part in a mission to disarm ethnic Albanian rebels. The ceasefire, signed by the heads of the Macedonian army and police force as well as the NLA, consists of two linked agreements - one between the NLA and NATO and the other between the Macedonian forces and NATO, with the NLA agreeing to disarm if a political settlement can be reached.

Critics, meanwhile, warn that by acknowledging the NLA as a legitimate protagonists in debates about Macedonia’s future, the west has effectively conceded the carving up of Macedonia along ethnic lines - and this is cold comfort for Macedonian nationalists and the paramilitary groups now springing up and arguing for the expulsion of ethnic Albanians from Macedonia’s mixed communities. Many Macedonians still remain distrustful of the US, who they see as pro-Albanian- following the bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 and are contemptuous of any western-designed solution.

Little surprise, then, that Balkan analysts see only a deteriorating situation and one that can’t be solved by further western solutions that sparked the storming of the Macedonian parliament.

To date the present conflict has not been as bloody as previous Balkan disagreements, but it has nevertheless resulted in 100,000 refugees who represent perhaps 5 per cent of the population. It is perhaps too early to predict events in the coming weeks in Macedonia. Whilst nationalism, like the disease it is, can be diagnosed, there remains no immediate prognosis. For it feeds on fear and insecurity, alienation and ignorance which themselves can lead to irrational passions and attempts at quick-fix and spontaneous violent attempts at remedy which always prove counterproductive and detrimental to all concerned.

Nationalist conflict has raged for 10 long years in the Balkans. What, in all honesty, have any of the victors gained? What is the ‘independence’ they yearn after, if it means being trapped within borders – artificial constructs, no, prisons – inside of the bigger prison of capitalism?

THE COMING BALKAN CONFLICT?

Two years after Nato and the UN moved into the former Yugoslavia to police a region beset by conflict since the Balkan break-up of the early 90s, a new conflagration threatens. Macedonian troops have clashed with Albanian rebels on the Kosovo border and, on the Serbian border, Albanian nationalists have launched attacks against Serb police positions.


Along the Kosovo/Macedonia and Kosovo/Serbia border, former members of the KLA have formed into guerrilla units intent on creating a ‘Greater Kosovo.’ In the south of Kosovo the small and nascent Albanian National Liberation Army (NLA) aims to annex north and eastern Macedonia, whilst on Kosovo’s eastern border, a sister organisation, the UCBMP (Liberation Army of Prosevo Medvedja and Bujanovo) – all towns in the southern part of Serbia with an Albanian ethnic majority - is demanding border changes so that 70,000 ethnic Albanians living in Serbia are included in Kosovo.


Whilst the nationalist insurgents would have it that a ‘greater Kosovo’ is at stake, that includes the ethnic Albanian populations of Serbia and Macedonia, others envisage a ‘greater’ Albania, an Albania merged with Kosovo which would become the largest state in the Balkans, if not the most impoverished. Control of the borders is also allegedly a reason for the recent wave of unrest, for whoever controls these also controls the lucrative and illicit trade in drugs and arms and ‘illegal migration’


The UCBMP have caused such much mayhem in the Presevo Valley that Nato has handed back part of the border buffer zone to Yugolsav military control, to special units of the 7th battalion of the Yugolsav army created by former Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic. In other words, the west has sided with forces that battled for a greater Serbia and only two years after Nato went to war with Serbia on behalf of Kosovo Albanians.


Once thing is certain – the west has clearly underestimated the threat of Albanian nationalism and indeed dissipated the once popular belief in Kosovo and Albania that Nato was an ally of Kosovo Albanians. There is also a lack of any consensus between Nato and the UN about the shape of any final Kosovo settlement, and US policy is still out of step with the other Nato allies. Neither is it in Nato’s remit to cross the border and control the Kosovo side of the border, in spite of the fact that Kosovo, though technically part of Serbia, is a Nato protectorate.


Whilst UN officials see in KLA violence a game plan intended to provoke a swift retaliation from Macedonia (home to 600,000 ethnic Albanians) which will in turn incite Kosovos, Stratfor (the US Security consultants) sees the ‘primary motive for the [UCPMB] campaign in the Presevo valley [to be the desire] to provoke a harsh response and thus damage relations between the new Yugoslav government and K-For.” The UCPMB plan – if indeed it was a plan – has turned sour. The demilitarised Zone is now being policed by Serbian troops under the watchful eye of Nato and the US wishes to settle the Kosovo problem peacefully and to integrate Yugoslavia into a plan for long-term regional stability.


All the signs are that Nato’s Frankenstein is up and walking, fed on the same raw nationalism that has brought so much bloodshed to the Balkans this past decade, bent on carving out a greater Albania from Albania, Kosovo and the ethnic Albanian regions of Macedonia and Serbia. But they face repeated obstacles: not least is the desire by Western powers to cement relations between new President of Serbia Vojislav Kostunicas


K-For (the western peace keeping force set up to police the region) failed to disarm the KLA, which went on the initiate a criminal network safe in the knowledge they had the backing of US Intelligence. And as The Observer reported on 11th March, that the CIA encouraged KLA fighters to mount a rebellion in southern Serbia to undermine support from President Milosevic. As one K-For battalion commander pointed out:

“
The CIA have been allowed to run riot in Kosovo with a private army designed to overthrow Slobodan Milosevic. Now he’s gone, the US State Dept. seems incapable of reigning in its bastard army.”


One Foreign Office analyst observes:


“We are not looking at a repeat of the circumstances when Yugoslavia began to disintegrate at the beginning of the 1990s. The people we are now dealing with are the fanatics who became wealthy out of national politics, crime and war. They feel that their power is being eroded and they will fight to survive.” (Guardian, 3/3/01).


Elsewhere, to the west of Kosovo, nationalists in Montenegro, lulled by the US into believing it would be permitted to split from Serbia once Milosevic was ousted, have been told to put aside these aspirations and re-forge ties with Serbia – news that is already inciting the nationalists of Montenegro. Meanwhile, Croat nationalists allied to Bosnian Croat leader Ante Jelavic are denouncing the government of the Muslim-Croat Federation, threatening to unravel the 1995 Dayton agreement which partitioned Bosnia along ethnic lines. Suddenly, Spring-time in the Balkans looks set to see war once again blossom.


For almost a century, this journal has been consistent in its opposition to nationalism, in the belief that nationalism is a killer epidemic, creating conflict from which those with the least to gain have the most to lose. Whatever cause and victory the misinformed defenders of nationhood believe they are fighting for, it pales into insignificance when compared to the real war that needs to be waged on the battlefield of ideas and against an elite who perpetuate the myth of nationhood for their own ends and always to our detriment.


We maintain that, regardless of the ‘century-old hatreds’ that still lie unchecked in the Balkans, their cultural, historical and religious differences, there is more that unites Muslims and Christians, Albanians and Serbs, than can ever divide them. Their real needs – needs people the world over identify with – can only ever be fulfilled in a world devoid of borders or frontiers. We can only hope it is not too long before the long suffering people of the Balkans come to realise this.

Depleted Uranium? Depleted Minds!

The recent and indeed ongoing debate about the effects of depleted uranium adds a whole new dimension to the time-honoured quote that truth is the first casualty of war. Recent evidence would suggest that dishonesty is not only a midwife to war, but very much its bastard offspring.


Depleted uranium (or U238) is what is left of natural or pure uranium after the isotope U235 has been removed for use in the manufacture of nuclear weapons and in nuclear power plants. It further contains up to 60 per cent of the radioactivity found in its pure form and, because it is more concentrated, it is potentially more lethal.


A heavy and dense silvery metal, U238 is also highly pyrophoric which makes it an ideal core material in anti-tank projectiles and bunker-busting Tomahawk missiles (each one of these contains 3kg of DU).


Upon impact, the core of the DU projectile ignites and oxidises at such high temperatures it becomes glass or ceramic micro and nano particles, containing lethal alpha, beta and gamma rays. The ensuing conflagration other than burning to a cinder the inhabitants, smothers the target tank or bunker with a fine radioactive dust, contaminating a surrounding area for up to 50 metres of the impact sight with lesser contamination detectable many kilometres away. The extent to which British, European and American servicemen’s health has been effected as a result of such contamination forms the basis of the debate.


The British and US governments, Nato and the medical experts they have hired to fight their corner insist there are no medical side effects to the inhalation of DU dust particles. Just as John Speller the armed forces minister, could claim in December of last year that ‘we are unaware of anything that shows depleted uranium has caused any ill health or death of people who served in Kosovo or Bosnia,’ so too could Nato Secretary General Lord Robertson, in a 10th January damage limitation press conference nonchalantly argue there was ‘no link of any kind’ between depleted uranium and leukaemia, that there was ‘nothing to fear from this particular type of munitions’, and that ‘we act with the interests of our troops and civilians in mind.’ (Independent, 11/1/01).


So convinced was Nato of the rightness of its cause and its preparedness to continue using DU munitions, their staff distributed dossiers of scientific evidence stifling claims that DU was harmful and even called upon the services of two Pentagon medical experts to refute the claim that DU was harmful.


The broadsheet press, however, wasted no time in revealing an army report entitled The Use and Hazards of DU Munitions, dated 8th March 1997 which stated that ‘All personnel…should be aware that uranium dust inhalation carries a long term risk to health.’ This same MOD report warned that exposure to depleted uranium, as used in British and US tank shells, increased eight-fold the risk of lung, lymph and brain cancers.


It was at the same time revealed that the government’s own nuclear safety advisers at the Atomic Energy Agency warned 10 years ago that depleted uranium shells fired during the Gulf War would pose a health risk. The 1991 AEA report says:


‘Handling heavy metal munitions does pose some potential hazards as does the spread of radioactivity and toxic contamination as a result of firing in battle…and can become a long-term problem…and pose a risk to both the military and civilian population.’ (Times, 15/1/01).


All of which cuts no ice with Defence Secretary Geoffrey Hoon who still maintained days after the revelation of the MoD report that ‘there is no scientific evidence to support that the use of radioactive material caused illness, including leukaemia…there are no risks associated with depleted uranium and certainly no proven link between its use and illness.’ (Times, ibid). If this was the case then why the Mo D warning? What scientific evidence were they working from?


One wonders whether those defending the government and manufacturers of DU munitions are aware of the related facts. That of the 53,000 servicemen/women who were stationed in the Gulf, 5,000 are recorded as suffering illnesses including leukaemia and that there have since been 521 deaths.


Are they aware that British and US tank ammunition alone during the Gulf War contained 55,000 lbs of depleted uranium? That 300,000 rounds of depleted uranium rounds were fired during the Gulf War, or that levels of irradiated particles in the air above Kuwait and Saudi Arabia are 20 times higher than over Baghdad?


Researcher Dr Chris Busby found that urine samples taken from Gulf War vets showed that mass spectrometry tests revealed soldiers inhaling dust received doses of up to 778 millisieverts, not the 20-30 claimed by the MoD and suggested as being ‘of no cause for concern’.


Malcolm Hooper, emeritus professor of medicinal chemistry at the University of Sunderland revealed that DU particles stayed in the lungs for 10-20 years and that 10,500 of Britain’s Gulf War personnel could develop fatal cancers. He further warned that thousands of people living near the firing ranges in Britain and the factories producing the DU munitions were likewise at risk of contamination.

The present government position is that there is no case for an inquiry because they refuse to acknowledge any evidence of a significant risk to personnel. The Health and Safety Executive are supposedly monitoring ranges in Britain, but as their findings are of ringing no alarm bells their level of monitoring can be seriously questioned.


The most the 19 Nato ambassadors will agree to is a ‘working party’ to coordinate information on DU shells. Reluctant to conduct their own inquiry, they have passed the task over to the UN who they believe are ‘better equipped’ to deal with the matter, not least because the UN is largely controlled by the US. However, to their credit, they have since demanded that 11 of the 112 sites Nato have pointed them at be cordoned off.


The underlying factor of course is costs. A clean up operation in Bosnia and the Gulf would, it is estimated, run into $trillions, not to mention the cost in compensation to the military and civilian population involved.


Moreover, the DU shells are a relatively cheap and highly effective method of murder, bearing in mind the core material is a waste product, and indeed manufactured by an industry that governments do not wish to take contracts from- they exist as powerful lobbies. And which government would ever come clean and admit to error? That so much of the evidence emerging pertains to the Gulf War, when the Conservative Party were in power, helps explain why they, the Tories, have not sought to make political capital out of the issue, and hasn’t Tony Blair an election on the horizon?


So we can expect the issue to be no nearer a propitious outcome in the coming months
than we can expect the causes of war itself to be abolished. The lies and disinformation will counter every new revelation proving the detrimental effects of DU. For the defenders of capitalism, there is too much at stake for them to concede just one inch that maybe, just maybe, their critics are right. When it comes to counting the casualties of war, we must still be prepared to list truth right up there with them.

David Blunkett

Britain, under Home Secretary David Blunkett, is increasingly coming to resemble something from a Kafkaesque novel, where ordinary people can be arrested in the dead of nigh and locked up without trial and without being told the charges that have led to their imprisonment. Internment – trial and imprisonment without jury is Blunkett’s latest piece of legislation and awaits any ‘foreigner’ mildly suspected of links to a terrorist organisations.

Those lucky enough to be locked up, according to Blunkett’s plans, would be permitted an appeal to a special immigration tribunal, but would be denied access to the information that allegedly lead to their arrest. Moreover, the suspected terrorist could remain in prison indefinitely, subject only to six monthly reviews.

This new chunk of legislation, based on the threat Britain supposedly faces since September 11th – is a technical twist to allow Britain to opt out of Article 5 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which presently bands detention without trial.

Internment, however, is not new. During the Gulf War, 100 Iraqis and Palestinians were detained without trial in the UK – not one being charged or deported. Amongst them was the writer Abbas Shiblak, who had been an outspoken opponent of Saddam in the days when Britain was arming Iraq to the teeth.

It was more memorably reintroduced into Northern Ireland in 1971 by a Heath Government determined to smash the IRA. By March the following year 924 were interned – 98% of them released without charge. The mass and indiscriminate arrests of Catholics (only) led to widespread rioting and protests and 23 deaths. Indeed, more people were killed in the following week than had been killed in the previous six months. On one night alone, 3000 British troops descended on Catholic areas and arrested hundreds of men. Rather than crush the IRA, the manure swelled their ranks, with many seeing the IRA as legitimate defenders of their communities..

We can only ever be wary of such legislation – not welcome it with open arms. It has little to do with terrorism and far more to do with the state placing itself in a better position from which it can place more control over our lives.

ROGUE STATES: The Rule of Force in World Affairs (book review

This from the previous year:

ROGUE STATES: The Rule of Force in World Affairs

By Noam Chomsky
2000, Pluto Press

Over the years, Noam Chomsky has been described in various ways: as ‘the medic trying to cure a national endemic of selective amnesia’; as ‘the most dangerous man in the US’; as ‘the little boy who told the emperor he was naked’ and, more recently by the New York Times, as ‘an exploder of received truths.’ In his latest book, Rogue States, we find Chomsky very much living up to this time-honoured reputation.


It is often aid that if you’ve read one Chomsky book, you’ve read them all, which is perhaps true in so far as Chomsky is a relentless critic of US foreign and domestic policy, sinking his teeth deeper into the same old foe like a vengeful rottweiler with each new publication. Rogue States is no departure from the norm – it’s Chomsky doing what he does best.


Through skilful analysis of internal documents combined with historical context, a meticulous scrutiny of the activities of the US State Dept and a thorough gleaning of the quality broadsheets both sides of the pond, Chomsky again sets himself the task of gauging the US and its allies by the Standards they use as justification for the interference in the lives of others.


The Balkans, East Timor and Colombia come in for close scrutiny in separate Chapters which reveal the extent of US collusion in the ongoing misery there. In Kosovo, observes Chomsky, the US “has chosen a course of action that, as it explicitly recognises, escalates atrocities and violence…a course of action that undermines – perhaps destroys – promising democratic development”(p.47). The Clinton regime’s praise for Colombia as ‘a leading democracy’ is stringently challenged by Chomsky. Citing Colombia’s human right’s record as one of the worst in the world, Chomsky provides ample proof that the Clinton/Blair doctrine of ‘new humanism – “the historic mission of bringing justice and freedom to the suffering people of the world” (p.84) – is a total sham. Colombia, notorious for its state terror, produces 300,000 refugees and 3,000 deaths per year at the hands of its security forces, yet is presently the biggest recipient of US military aid in Latin America. The same favoured nation status is reserved for Turkey, whose security forces, in their persecution of the Kurdish people, have destroyed 3,500 villages and created 3 million refugees. Meanwhile, the US is keen to promote the redeeming qualities of mineral rich Indonesia ahead of the political fate of East Timor at the hands of the former.


Chomsky further reveals the US to be wholly contemptuous and dismissal of UN resolutions and the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights it helped to bring into existence and to be severely lacking in any credible justification for its policies beyond its own borders. In this regard, Chomsky further highlights the US passion for free trade, pointing to the developing countries compelled not only to accept US cigarettes and other drugs and commodities, but also to advertise them under threat of trade sanctions.


Sanctions and indeed debt “is a very powerful weapon of control” says Chomsky, with half the world subject to US unilateral sanctions – a cruel form of economic coercion condemned repeatedly by the UN. In a chapter on the paranoiac US relationship with Cuba, Chomsky reminds us that Cuba has suffered 40 years of embargoes – the longest in history, and in spite of two thirds of the US population opposing the sanctions and in breach of WTO rules, all of which is dismissed with the defence that Cuba is a threat to US national security.


Though this can at times be a hard going book for the uninitiated, the mountains of information make it an indispensable reference work and guide to the methods the powerful use to further their own interests to the detriment of so many. It is moreover an invaluable tool for deciphering the rhetoric the powerful use to rationalise their excesses.

History repeats itself at The Hague

As much anticipated, the global summit at The Hague, called to debate the issue of pollution that causes global warming collapsed on 25th November. We were not alone in foreseeing the debacle – environmentalists had in fact warned months previous that the Hague round of talks would be doomed to failure for the same reasons we cited.


At its simplest, the meeting ended in disaster because European countries, headed by France, shunned an eleventh hour compromise brokered by John Prescott – the self appointed mediator between the US and the EU. If accepted, it would have necessitated the US ditching its plans to offset forests planted abroad against its domestic targets for the reduction of carbon emissions.


Throughout the talks the US insisted on a market for carbon trading – a plan which, if agreed upon, would have given the US the ‘right’ to pollute the planet at will. The details of this issue became increasingly confusing for many delegates, with European negotiators, opposed to a market approach, querying how such a set up could be regulated and without corruption. Neither were delegates from Sweden, France, Denmark and Germany calmed by the fact that Prescott had persuaded the US delegates that they could not buy ‘carbon credits’ by planting forests abroad.


Even if the compromise had have been agreed upon it would have had a negligible effect upon the main problem – the unwillingness of the US – presently producing 25% of global Carbon emissions – to check its insatiable appetite for gas.


Moreover, European delegates were upset that a second key stumbling block – the US insistence that forestry and agricultural changes at home be allowed to be counted as carbon credits – remained unresolved.


Throughout the conference and indeed during the three years it was in preparation the US sought to widen loopholes to undermine the Kyoto protocol. Many now think that with Bush in the White House – himself a fierce opponent of the Kyoto agreement – future compromises will be nigh on impossible.


Many delegates made the same criticism of the US, namely that the world’s most powerful country is reluctant to risk the campaign contributions it gets from oil firms nor to put in jeopardy its cosy relationship with the US corporate elite it represents.


The latter is indeed an indictment on a system that continually prioritises profit to the detriment of matters far more pressing. As Klaus Tapfer, executive director of the United Nations Environmental Programme informed the conference : “Climatic change is not a programme for the future, it is beginning now” (Independent, 26/11/00).


And the facts were well presented to the Hague meeting. For instance, that polar glaciers are retreating faster than in any period during the last 5,000 years; that the Arctic cap is half as thick as 25 years ago and that flooding and droughts have tripled in the past 10 years.


Robert Watson, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climatic Change presented a report to the conference which showed that global warming was happening twice as fast as previously thought, and further predicted that in coming years successive harvests would fail dramatically in India, Africa and Latin America, that diseases such as malaria would spread and that sea level rises would displace millions of people.


If capitalism is presently incapable of solving the more pressing problems faced by humanity, we can well ponder what a difficult time ahead we face in a world in which we are increasingly at the mercy of the elements.


For many, environmental issues are new. As socialists, forever scrutinising the effects of the capitalist mode of production, we have been aware of them for generations. In fact one of our spokespersons had this to say 125 years ago, a statement that well anticipated the discussions at The Hague:

“At every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing over nature – but that we, with flesh and blood and brain, belong to nature and exist in its midst, and that all our mastery of it consists in the fact that we have the advantage over all other creatures of being able to learn its laws and apply them correctly. We are gradually learning to get a clear view of the indirect, more remote social effects of our productive activity, and so are afforded the opportunity to control and regulate these effects well. This regulation, however, requires a complete revolution in our existing mode of production…in our whole contemporary social order” (Frederic Engel’s in Dialectics of Nature, 1875).

CLIMATIC TALKS AT THE HAGUE

As I write, it is with the talks on climatic change in the Hague still in process and looking to last a further week, so I also write somewhat prophetically, albeit basing my judgement on previous knowledge of similar rounds of talks in recent years.


On June 28th 1997, The Guardian announced: “Earth Summit ends in failure.” Six months later, on 12th December 1997, it ran a related story: “Kyoto deal leaves US free to pollute.” On 16th November this year came the headline we well could have anticipated: “Climatic talks stalemate as EU rejects US forest plan.”


The current round of talks in The Hague are about the very agreement which, back in December of 1997, was hailed as a major advance when targets were set for industrialised countries for cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. The problem now is over the issue of loopholes – well anticipated at Kyoto - which allows countries to avoid cutting back on carbon emissions.


Whilst the EU insists that countries should in the first instance cut back on fossil fuels, there is an umbrella group of countries – the US, Japan, Canada, New Zealand and Australia – which believe in alternative methods of ‘reducing ‘carbon dioxide emissions. The latter are taking the ‘flexibility mechanism’, allowed under the Kyoto Protocol, to new extremes. Instead of cutting their fossil fuel (carbon) emissions they buy carbon credits from countries that are not likely to exceed their carbon emission quota as laid down at Kyoto and thus continue to pollute as before.


As the quotas are based on 1990 levels of emissions, countries, for instance of the former USSR which since 1990 have seen a drastic reduction in heavy industry, are selling their unused entitlements to the US. In this respect even moralistic Britain is just as guilty of carbon trading as those countries it criticises, with the UK hoping to sell carbon dioxide it would have produced were the coal mines not closed.


George Monbiot, writing in The Guardian (16th November 2000), poignantly observers that in July, the UK “laid down £30 million to help private companies start bidding for each others’ reduced emissions. A research institute in the US calculates that the weather market will be worth $13 trillion by 2050.”


Whilst the EU insists the US must make at least half of its reduction from genuine energy cutbacks at home, the US is adamant that the loopholes it exploits must remain in place before it is prepared to sign up to any agreement to curb emissions. As well as the carbon trading loophole, there are indeed other loopholes and dodges the US and others are taking advantage of, such as ‘sinks’. As forests absorb carbon from the atmosphere, the US and other countries, now plant and indeed buy forests, at home and in other countries, and count the carbon this is estimated to save against their own emissions. This is already proving a lucrative business. One Malaysian logging firm is presently replacing the forests it depletes with new plantations and selling pollution permits to the US. Another loophole is to be found with countries paying for a project in a lesser developed country, with the aim of reducing carbon and counting it against their own emissions.


You name the dodge and the profit-greedy have thought of it. This includes feeding cattle, pigs and sheep new diets that help reduce the amount of methane they emit when they pass wind and pumping carbon dioxide into the ocean to be absorbed by the seas and sprinkling iron filings across the surface of the ocean to stimulate plankton growth (then calculate how much plankton dies and sinks to the bottom of the seam, taking the carbon with them, and claim credit for it).


The perennial problem is that countries are reluctant to promote the investment in more environmentally friendly methods of production and transport because their respective governments, being the executive arm of the capitalist class, prefer to bow with suppliant knee to powerful oil, coal, iron and steel lobbies, rather than openly acknowledge that we are ecologically fast approaching the point of no return.


When we consider that at Kyoto, it was announced that a global 60 per cent reduction in carbon emissions was necessary to maintain a stable climate, with the US asked to reduce their emissions by 7 per cent of 1990 levels (which would mean a 34 per cent reduction now), and that the US, with 4 per cent of the world’s population is currently responsible for 24 per cent of global carbon emissions, we get some idea of the pathos of the whole issue.


In spite of all the evidence that suggests that deforestation, present production and transport methods are primary responsible for climatic warning – the disappearing polar ice caps, global flooding, rising sea levels, vegetation dieback, the loss of thousands of species of life, and that the speed and scale of global warming has no precedent – the world’s governments still insist these wasteful, though profit-generating methods must remain. And this in spite of recent evidence from the hundreds of scientists that inform the Intergovernmental Panel on Climatic Change that suggests the atmosphere will warm at twice the rate predicted 10 years ago – by 6C.


At the Rio Summit in 1992, at the Earth Summit in New York in June 1997 and at the Earth II Summit in Kyoto, Japan, six months later – all at which carbon emissions were the core issue – the delegates fought and bickered over deals that would best suit their respective paymasters, their countries reneging on the agreements they signed up to. If the Guardian quote for November 16th – published after only three days of talks – is anything to go by, then we can well expect this current round of talks to be another waste of time whilst providing us with further evidence that capitalism has long outlived its usefulness and that it is time to hand over control of the world to those who could best decide its future – a global socialist majority. That companies can get exited about the profits to be made from trading in pollution credits – whilst the planet we inhabit faces environmental catastrophe from pollution – says much about the insanity of the system we live in and very much begs the question: are you with us or against us?

THE MIDDLE EAST CRISIS

Ariel Sharon’s untimely visit to Temple Mount on September 28th, with his entourage of 1,000 soldiers, was perhaps the final slap in the face for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who had suffered decades of poverty, degradation and discrimination since Israel annexed their land in the wake of a failed Arab invasion in 1967.


For the crimes of their forbears, the youth of Palestine have perhaps suffered the most at the hands of the Israeli state. Indeed, it is the Palestinian youth that have largely carried the new intifada and been its first victims.


The statistical injustices which are very much part of the present unrest speak for themselves. Since the start of the Oslo peace process seven years ago, Palestinian GNP has fallen by 35%, unemployment in some areas stands at 40% and the average income per head of the population living in Gaza and the West Bank is $1,500 (compared to $17,000 per head in Israel proper). The Israel/Palestine disparity is also echoed in access to land and water. Whilst Israel’s population of 6 million share 2.1 million hectares of land, with access to 2 billion cubic feet of water, the 3 million Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza share only 0.6 hectares of land and have access to a miserly 232 cubic metres of water. When it comes to other serious issues such as health housing and education, it is evident that Palestinians are very much second class citizens.


Moreover, since the Oslo round of talks, Israel has continued with a closure policy which has restricted movement from one part of Palestine to another – a freedom of movement guaranteed under the Oslo and Wye Valley agreements – and isolated towns and cities and further exacerbated Palestinian social and economic problems. Like the black South African resistance movement, engaged in an age long struggle against white minority rule, the stone-throwing youth of Palestine can perhaps be forgiven for perceiving their struggle to be one against a Middle Eastern form of apartheid and ethnic cleansing.


There is nothing exceptionally unique about the present crisis in the Middle East. For the Palestinians, it is a familiar tale about conflict over land and resources between an occupier and a subject people. But there is one significant difference here. This is an ‘occupation’ deemed illegal by the United Nations under resolutions 242 and 338 which call upon Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories.


And it is further an occupation sanctioned by the world’s only super power – regardless of the hypocritical cant mouthed by US peace brokers at the negotiation table. As Tim Llewellyn commented in The Observer of 15th October:


“The US of Bill Clinton and any foreseeable US of George W. Bush is the friend, mentor, armourer and financier of Israel, advocate, judge, progenitor and saviour of unilateral Israel’s rights and executioner of Palestinian aspirations.”


This is the US which allegedly plays an objective role at the negotiating table, whilst propping up the Israel state to the tune of $4 billion per year – money which is dressed up as aid, which is never accounted for and in breach of US legislation which outlaws the financing of a state with a covert nuclear weapons programme. Hence Senator Pat Buchanan’s remark that “Congress is Israeli occupied territory.”


For its part the US has invariably steered peace negotiations away from the UN whilst refraining from every opportunity to invite Israel’s European neighbours or the wider international community to the peace talks. Meanwhile, at the United Nations, the US has consistently sided with Israel, the two countries almost alone in opposing resolutions censorious of Israeli policy; the two countries siding, in fact, as sole opponents of a myriad pro-human rights resolutions. Little wonder, with so much US support Israel feels vindicated in invading Lebanon, bombing who and wherever it chooses, restricting the movement of Palestinians, annexing East Jerusalem and building settlements in areas that could only ever frustrate the peace process. With regards the latter, in the seven years since Oslo, Israel’s ‘illegal’ settler population in Gaza and the West Bank has increased from 110,000 to 195,000 – 60% of this increase in the West Bank. And for all Bill Clinton’s apparent eagerness to get the peace process back on track, it is clear that this is one outgoing president pursuing his own agenda, looking for a foreign policy success to lay before the US electorate in time for November’s presidential elections. Throughout his term in office, like his predecessors, Clinton and team have overtly and covertly worked the Middle East peace process to advance US-Israeli interests only.


Neither would it seem can Yasser Arafat, leader of the PLO and heading the Palestine Authority, deliver the much hankered after peace. Arafat was the leader that so many Palestinians invested their hopes in, but like all ‘good’ leaders, he is at the mercy of those with even more power. In recent years there has been a growing image of Arafat as a puppet of Mossad and the CIA, whose reputation for corruption is not concealed by his life-long struggle against Israeli perpetrated injustice. Only three years ago, his own accountants were forced to admit that $400 million had gone astray. Out of his current budget, some 60% is dispersed by Arafat to his bureaucracy and security forces. Of the remainder only 2% goes to infrastructure. While he surrounds himself with a police force of 40,000, (a 33,000 increase since Oslo) prepared to arrest and detain anyone perceived as a threat – union leaders, human rights activists, those militants Israel deem a serious threat to their interests, his regime censoring a press critical of his ideas, and with the Fatah faction and the tanzim militia bent on a pro-Hamas line that Arafat seems reluctant to follow, Palestine is looking increasingly like a dictatorial regime inside a more repressive state in which those with the most to lose are those with the least.


In recent weeks we have witnessed the painful fractioning of society across the Palestine territories. Both sides of the religious/nationalist divide have organised into militias. In the increasing ‘lebanonisation’ of the region. Fatah commanders pursue a 1970’s agenda of all out war against Israel, whilst right-wing Jewish extremists refuse to acknowledge the rights of Palestinians in defiance of previous Israeli commitments. As we go to press in the wake of another US brokered deal in Egypt, the shallow trust it had taken seven years to build seems about to evaporate. Although ostensibly the basis for a ceasefire, as the ink was drying on the Sharm el-Sheikh agreement, the violence of the preceding weeks continues with Palestinian extremists still firing on Israeli soldiers and Israeli tanks still positioned at roadblocks and outside key Palestinian cities. Seven years after the Oslo round of negotiations and two years after the agreement at Wye Valley that saw the PLO detach itself from its promise to destroy the state of Israel, the prospects of peace in the wake of the latest agreement seem as distant as ever. As the editorial of The Guardian commented (18th October): “[the Sharm el-Sheikh agreement] is as fragile as a gossamer thread on a windy autumn’s day, and possibly just as transient.”


So where do socialists stand in all of this? When it comes to the nationalistic zeal and religious fervour of recent weeks, there is nothing at all with which we can identify, for both are abstractions that have imbued the workers of the region with a false consciousness that prevents them identifying their real interests. The label Jew or Moslem, Palestinian or Israeli do not camouflage the bigger and more permanent label of ‘working class’, a label most caught up in the present crisis could, if challenged, identify with. Though we have focused here on the Palestinian grievances against injustice, it is fair to add that the majority of Israel’s Jews are also exploited and degraded and live lives of relative poverty too, and within a system that depends on the exploitation of a global majority and their division for it continued survival. And as the warring camps in the Middle East continue to vent their hatreds we can only maintain that there is more that unites them as members of that exploited majority, with the same basic needs and desires than can ever divide them along religious or national lines. For the real conflict is yet to be waged – that between ourselves, the exploited, and the master class – though with ideas, not rifles and catapults.

AFRICA'S DIAMOND TRADE

It is a profound and tragic irony that diamonds, marketed in London, New York and Antwerp as the eternal symbol of love and beauty, are potent symbols of hate and disfigurement, misery and suffering to the millions of people in whose countries they are mined.


In Sierra Leone, Liberia, The Democratic republic of the Congo and Angola, the diamond trade has brought with it years of conflict and instability and the deaths and maiming of hundreds of thousands of Africans perceived as standing in the way of The lucrative profits the increasingly illicit trade brings.


The statistics speak for themselves. In Angola, between 1992 and 1997, Unita earned $3.7 billion from illegal diamond sales, helping them fuel a war in which 500,000 were killed. In under ten years of fighting, Jonas Savimbi built his rag-tag army up into one of the best armed irregular forces around, all thanks to diamonds he traded for state-of-the-art weaponry. In Sierra Leone, between 1991 and 1999, over 50,000 died and many more were maimed (their limbs hacked off with machetes) whilst government forces fought the rebel RUF over an illegal diamond industry worth over $200 million a year. And in nearby Liberia, between 1989 and 1997, 150,000 died as a result of a conflict fought over control of the diamond trade. Liberia, which incidentally has no significant diamond deposits of its own, nevertheless runs a $300 million plus diamond trade with the help of troops loyal to Sierra Leone’s RUF leader Foday Sankah. Such is the illicit global trade in diamonds that the US State Department believes it to be worth anything up to $7 billion a year.


The diamond trail usually starts in the dusty towns of Angola, in the Sierra Leonie wilderness or the jungle terrain surrounding Kisangani in the Congo, where half naked workers labour with pick, spade and drill, guarded by miniature and well-equipped armies. Small mine owners pass on their stones they unearth to local dealers, though not before the guards’ commanders have had their share, and likewise the local dealers have to make payment to the local militia leaders, who similarly have to pass a share to their seniors.


Immense armies can be spread over hundreds of thousands of miles of diamond rich land, providing safe passage to all prepared to pay the price, whilst governments and warlords sell concessions to mine, with concession purchasers selling them on to anyone keen on making a killing (no pun intended).


There are of course other key figures, albeit playing as low a profile as possible. They include Burkino Faso’s leader Blaise Compaore and Liberia’s Charles Taylor, who help speed smooth passage by circumventing the controls imposed by the UN and other regulatory bodies. Meanwhile, the governments of Uganda, Sudan, Rwanda, Burundi and Zimbabwe provide military help to warlords in exchange for these little shiny stones and the right to mine them. In the case of the latter, critics of Robert Mugabe accuse him of donating 11,000 troops to the conflict in the Congo in return for diamond field concessions.


And of course there is the middle men who make the deals, find further safe passage for the diamonds to the western markets and supply the weapons that fuel the conflicts and ensure the diamonds keep coming.


Investigators working with the UN recognise a well organised international network of smuggling involving numerous west and southern African countries, with further links to freight companies supplying arms from the UAE to Bulgaria and the Ukraine. Whilst the RUF in Sierra Leone have been provided with former Soviet surface-to-air missiles, at the height of the Angolan war over twenty Ilyushin aircraft could be found landing on one airstrip each evening, each loaded with military hardware.


Whilst pressure groups, such as Global Witness, the UN and other diamond industry regulatory bodies try to introduce an ethical dimension into the trade, the dealers themselves fear their efforts will undermine consumer demand because of the diamond’s link with limbless children in West Africa. Provenance certificates, supposedly implying that this and that diamond has no blood on it have been suggested, but such a move would require the cooperation of bankers, brokers and buyers in Tel Aviv, Antwerp and Bombay – the three main diamond centres - and indeed the governments of several countries, including Liberia, who are only too happy to overlook the fact that a few hundred carats true cost is a child hobbling along on crutches and provide forged documents.


As Herbert Rowe, a political scientist specialising in African affairs at Georgetown University in Washington noted: “Even in the Cold War, superpowers did not allow the wholesale ripping up of the economy, the use of children as soldiers and attacks upon relief groups” (Guardian, 14th May, 2000). He is of course referring to countries like Sierra Leone, now the poorest country on earth and whose population has enjoyed no health or education system for 10 years, as a direct result of the mayhem that has been set loose because of the greed for the profits that diamonds bring.


Further anti-diamond trade measures have included a boycott of diamonds. But the truth is that – although the trade brings so much misery in its wake – the average piece of diamond-ladened jewellery on display in the local high street has only a 4 per cent chance of having an illicit source and that the diamond most likely originated in Namibia, Botswana, South Africa or the Russian Federation. Further, any such embargo would hit innocent diamond producing and cutting countries such as Botswana and India, the latter with a diamond industry employing 800,000.


The fact that only 4 per cent of the diamonds that adorn our loved ones are bloodstained and that this 4 per cent has caused so much chaos and upset throughout Africa suggests, more than anything, the intrinsic danger of the incentive to make a profit at any cost. All the controls it is possible to impose upon the diamond trade would not distract one iota from the fact that, at whatever human cost, if there are profits to be made from the trade then profits will be made. This is the essential nature of capitalism, even in its more overt and legal forms. If profits can be made, no matter how small, they will be made and to hell with anyone who stands in the way.


The task is not to try to regulate the diamond trade more efficiently, but to end the system that makes the diamond the commodity it is; to banish forever the system that conditions us into thinking that wearing a shiny stone brings status and respect. Since this journals inception 95 years ago, we have consistently reported the wars and conflicts, the misery and sufferings our class has endured in the name of the profits derived from mineral wealth and its possession by an elite. We expect, for the foreseeable future, to carry on in this tradition until our class truly wakes up.

NEW TIMES FOR SYRIA?

Rarely are constitutions changed so quickly. On June 10th, the corpse of President Hafez al-Assad had hardly cooled when the powers that be in Syria changed the age at which ministers are allowed to hold office from 40 to 34, thus enabling his son Bashar to be named as perhaps the sole presidential candidate in a referendum to be held within 90 days.


As is the norm when a president dies, the condolences and tributes flow in. Whilst Israel newspaper Yedioth Abronoth could announce they were “not too sorry over Assad’s death…we are happy”, the Western line was that he had been ‘a great statesman’, and whilst Hafez al-Assad was remembered as ‘the Lion of Damascus’, the obstinate stance he maintained in the Middle East peace process and the missed opportunities he notched up over thirty years of autocratic rule were enough to earn himself the title ‘the Donkey of Damascus’.


All things considered, Hassad was no first-rate statesman. Never democratically elected, he came to power during a bloodless coup d’etat in 1970, was the leader of a quasi-military dictatorship, with a corrupt Ba’athist political faction – religiously an Alawite minority elite who dominated all aspects of Syrian society - whilst overseeing a parlous command economy and a country noted for internal repression and scant civil rights.


In the perennial game of Middle Eastern politics, Hassad upset as many Arab states as he won friends, whilst siding with both superpowers as needs dictated. As well as Israel, neighbouring Lebanon, Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Egypt and Turkey came to view Hassad’s Syria as a thorn in the side of Middle Eastern peace. His implacable position on the US brokered round of talks resulted in constant hold-ups with the present round of discussions having been on the back burner since January, with Syria demanding land at the foot of Golan and access to Lake Galilee. Whilst Israel might have contemplated such a move, it was widely viewed in Israel to be part of a wider Syrian game plan to get Israel to withdraw beyond the 1967 borders, and in this respect Israel could no more sell the idea of a Golan withdrawal to its people than Hassad could coerce the Alawite elite into accepting they had no hopes of retrieving this strategic gem.


What path Bashar heads down remains to be seen. Up until now he has held no official party post, though he has been delegated policy briefs such as Lebanon and the rooting out of high-ranking corruption. Whilst he can generally depend upon the support of the military, it is probable his anti-corruption drive against those in power – the chief culprits being those loyal to his father – will make him enemies. Studying ophthalmology in Britain before he was called back to Syria to begin his grooming for leadership, he is said to be ‘modest, considerate and intelligent’, keen on new technology and with ideas on reform and political change, such as more representative forms of government, that will undoubtedly sicken Syria’s old guard - an elite made up of the security services, the army and the Ba’athist party hierarchy.


And it remains to be seen just how much of his father’s baggage Bashar will inherit.Hafez was after all a staunch anti-zionist, still maintaining 35,000 troops in Lebanon - in which he held sway over the guerrilla movement Hizbullah - after the Israeli withdrawal, reluctant to concede Israel an inch, cautious about investing in new civil and military technology or to reform the country’s clannish hierarchy.


Bashar, though, comes with the full backing of British Foreign Minister Peter Haines – which perhaps amounts to little, bearing in mind Britain’s track record on giving its support to bloodstained dictators for 30 years - and with hopes in Washington that he can make some headway in the Middle East peace process and in time for the US Presidential elections in which the Clinton clique will be aiming to present some foreign policy success to US voters.


Waiting in the wings - though at a distance - is uncle Rifaat, younger brother to Hafez and the former vice-president; the same disgraced vice-president who once ordered the bombardment of the town of Hama (a Sunni Muslim Brotherhood haven) killing 40,000 inhabitants and who attempted a coup d’etat when Hafez was ill in 1983. Presently in exile in France with an entourage of 30 bodyguards and threatened with arrest the moment he enters Syria with presidential ambitions, Rifaat has a fortune of $2 - $4 billion, looks after 100 companies, controls two newspapers and is therefore more than capable of buying many strategically placed allies. Rifaat maintains that Bashar’s ascension to the throne of Syrian power will be ‘illegal’ and many anticipate he will mount some challenge.


The chances are, however, that Bashar will be the sole presidential candidate, if for no other reason than his father’s Alawite cronies will close ranks to ease his political ascendancy and safeguard their own interests. And whilst some equate his reformist ambitions with an Israeli/Syrian peace, it does seem unlikely that in the foreseeable future he will advocate the concessions that Middle Eastern peace is claimed to necessitate. If politics is difficult to predict in the West, then it is nigh on impossible to make any forecast as to how events will unfold in this part of the world, where the number of competing factions is only matched by the number of religions, where there are numerous strategic and mineral interests to be fought over and in which the West continue to manoeuvre their pawns as if playing on a gigantic chess board


Of course, as socialists, we side with no leaders or any Middle Eastern faction, taking no sides in their wars over territory; for we have the insight to see where disagreements over resources, such as oil and water, and artificial borders lead and in whose interests such conflicts are waged. Our thoughts lie with the exploited majority of the Middle East – the common folk – who continue to pay the price of power politics, and eagerly await the day when they have the chance, along with their counterparts the world over, to at last vote for themselves and, more, in their own interests, a world devoid of Assads, Saddams and Ayaltollahs and the misery their games bring.