The New Worker
The Weekly paper of the New Communist Party of Britain
Week commencing 22nd August 2003
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The UN headquarters in Baghdad
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Lead
BOMBS ROCK IMPERIALIST PLANS
by our Arab Affairs Correspondent
DEVASTATING RESISTANCE attacks in Baghdad and Jerusalem shattered
imperialist dreams of dominating the Arab world this week. Last Tuesday a
truck packed with explosives rammed the UN headquarters in Baghdad. The same
day another bomb blew up a bus in Jerusalem.
At least 18 people were killed, including the United Nations special representative
for Iraq, Sergio Vierra de Mello, in the attack on the UN compound in the
occupied Iraqi capital. Over 100 others were injured.
Iraqi resistance forces launched a new offensive against the American-led
occupation army last week. Oil pipelines have been blown up, utilities sabotaged
and American patrols and convoys ambushed throughout central and southern
Iraq.
Israel to blame
No one has claimed responsibility for the Baghdad bombing. But the
Jerusalem attack was carried out by a member of the Islamic resistance in
revenge for the killing of several of their leaders. Twenty Israelis were
killed and over a hundred injured in the attack carried out by a suicide bomber.
“Israel started the bloodshed. The Israeli army assassinated our activists
in Jenin and Hebron and it is carrying out daily attacks against our people,”
a spokesman for Islamic Jehad declared. And this was echoed by a senior member
of Hamas, the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood. “This is a reaction to Israeli
atrocities against our people. They should understand that their blood is
not more precious than our blood”.
“Everyone had expected a revenge attack by Islamic Jehad following
Israel’s killing of senior Jehad operative Mohammed Sidr last week. Violence
begets violence as history and daily life remind us,” the Palestinian Human
Rights Monitoring Group said in a statement issued on Wednesday.
According to the Jerusalem-based human rights organisation Israel has violated
the current cease-fire 146 times since it came into force on 29 June.
General Sharon, the leader of Israel’s hard-line Zionist coalition government,
has called off planned talks with the Palestinian Authority and he is threatening
to take reprisals of his own unless the Authority cracks down on the Islamic
movements.
Palestinian premier Mahmoud Abbas has condemned the bombing and he has ordered
the arrest of Hamas and Islamic Jehad leaders. But this can only undermine
what little credibility he has left with the Palestinian Arabs.
Though few would blame him for getting next to nothing out of the “road
map” talks with Sharon many feel that his tactics are playing into the hands
of an Israeli leadership which has no intention of giving the Palestinians
even a fraction of what justice demands.
Independence for Iraq
Anglo-American imperialism had hoped to buy off Arab acceptance of their
occupation of Iraq with some sort of settlement of the Palestinian issue based
on the “road-map” proposals. But the “road-map”, which offered the Palestinians
very little and gave the Zionists most of what they want, is unravelling
before it has even started and the occupation of Iraq is turning into a bloody
shambles for the Americans.
The worthless Iraqi “interim council”, comprised largely of hand-picked
Iraqi émigrés with a long track-record of service to imperialism,
has no standing with the Iraqi masses or the Arab world. It does the bidding
of the American governor, Paul Bremer, who himself is now only a cover for
the American military administration. And that administration’s authority
stretches little beyond the US army barracks and their army’s roving patrols.
The death of the UN representative has led to a flurry of activity on the
UN Security Council and renewed demands by some European powers for an independent
UN “peace-keeping” force to protect its own mission and eventually replace
the US-led army of occupation.
Washington is expected to resist this. It would mean sharing the spoils
with Western European imperialism.
It could possibly lead to UN-sponsored elections in Iraq. And there’s no
doubt that any free election would return an Iraqi leadership which would
have no interest, or indeed any economic need given the country’s immense
oil reserves, to serve American imperialism.
The Blair government has played a shameful role in backing US imperialism
to the hilt in its crazed determination to recolonise the Arab world and control
the global oil market.
British troops, who do the Americans’ dirty work in southern Iraq, are little
more than US auxiliaries in danger of being sucked into the increasing quagmire
of Iraq.
All British troops must be withdrawn from Iraq. The fundamental demand of
the Iraqi and Palestinian people for self-determination and independence must
be raised throughout the labour and peace movement. We must accept nothing
less.
*************
Editorial
Bombs in Baghdad
ANY DOUBTS that Anglo-American imperialism
is facing a full-scale guerrilla war in Iraq were dispelled this week with
the wave of deadly attacks and sabotage, culminating in the devastating bombing
of the UN headquarters in the heart of Baghdad on Tuesday.
Only the mouthpieces of the war party in America and Britain would doubt
the fact that the occupiers are hated by the mass of the Iraqi people. Only
the most craven apologists of imperialism would believe that the puppet Iraqi
“interim council” has a shred of credibility with the Iraqi people. And only
the most venal bourgeois pundits can continue to argue against the obvious
fact that the only way to end the violence is to end the occupation of Iraq
and end it now.
Bombs in Jerusalem
Wherever there is oppression there is always resistance and the Palestinian
Islamic resistance bombing in Jerusalem this week proved the point.
Peace in the Middle East can only come when the legitimate rights of the
Palestinian people are recognised. For over fifty years the Palestinian Arabs
have been denied their basic rights – the right of the refugees to return
to Palestine and the right to independence.
Imperialist and Zionist attempts to impose a surrender peace on the Palestinian
Arabs will never succeed. Until the Palestinian Arabs get justice, there will
never be peace in the region.
War in Afghanistan
Meanwhile in Afghanistan, resistance to imperialism is growing. During the
past week over 90 people have been killed in clashes between the Taliban fighters
and the Karzai government across the south of the country.
The authority of the American-installed president, Hamid Karzai, barely
extends beyond the capital, Kabul. And that only due to the presence of American
and Nato troops.
Afghanistan was George W Bush’s first target in the wake of the suicide
attacks on New York and Washington. Bush’s declared aim was to capture or
kill Osama bin Laden, the Al Qaida leader believed to have masterminded the
11 September attacks, and remove Mullah Omar’s Taliban regime which had given
him protection. The American warlord also talked about “nation-building”
in Afghanistan along with the usual platitudes about “human rights” and “reconstruction”
used to justify imperialist aggression these days.
Well, Mullah Omar and Bin Laden are still alive. There’s no “reconstruction”
and the only real growth has been in the cultivation of opium for the Western
drug market following the collapse of the Taliban regime.
Afghanistan is dominated by tribal leaders and warlords. Those in
the north and the west of the country have the support to a varying degree
of the big powers in the region - Iran, Russia and India. None of them, however,
have sent troops into the country.
All these powers have vested reasons for seeking Afghan allies - to secure
their borders, constrain the drugs trade and, in India’s case, create a pivot
against Pakistan, which helped create the Taliban militias in the first place.
US imperialism blames the instability and weakness of the Karzai regime
on outside interference – particularly focusing on Iran – just as they used
to attack the old Soviet Union for intervening to back the revolutionary Afghan
government that the Americans worked to destroy with the help of the same
tribal leaders that they are now at odds with.
The biggest outside interference in Afghan affairs comes from the United
States and the thousands of US and Nato troops there to act out Bush’s fantasy
of “regime change” as part of his “new world order”.
The Afghan people, who won their full independence from British imperialism
in 1919, enjoyed periods of peace and stability when they were free to choose
their own leaders and their own form of government. No colonial power has
ever managed to conquer and subdue the mountain peoples of Afghanistan.
British imperialism was taught that lesson after several ferocious
Afghan wars. Now that lesson is being repeated for the benefit of the Americans.
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