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Lead

NO STRIKE ON IRAN!

by our Arab Affairs Correspondent

ARAB LEADERS gather in Riyadh for yet another Arab League summit on Palestine amid reports that the United States is preparing a massive air-strike against Iran to resolve the nuclear crisis imperialism’s way.

US imperialism has never favoured Arab summitry but this meeting in the Saudi Arabian capital is an exception. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and the European Union’s foreign policy chief Javier Solana will be in attendance and American foreign minister Condoleezza Rice has just spent four days in the Middle East calling on the Arabs to “reach out” to Israel.

The Riyadh summit is expected to re-affirm its commitment to its own Beirut Declaration of 2002, which offered a “full peace” in return for a “full” Israeli withdrawal from all the Arab territories it has occupied since 1967, along with a “just solution to the Palestinian refugee problem”. Israel rejected it at the time but Tel Aviv is now under pressure from its master in Washington to at least pay lip-service to this initiative and this, many Arabs fear, is because US imperialism wants at least some Arab rulers on its side if and when the White House decides to hit Iran.

None of this is good news for the Blair government which has asked Russia and Turkey help win the release of 15 Royal Navy sailors detained by Iranian naval forces for allegedly entering Iranian waters. The sailors and marines from HMS Cornwall were inspecting ships for contraband in what the Royal Navy claim were Iraqi waters.

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But former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, has endorsed the Iranian action.

“In international law the Iranian government were not out of order in detaining foreign military personnel in waters to which they have a legitimate claim,” Murray said, who was also a previous head of Foreign Office’s maritime section, carrying out negotiations on the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea.

“For the Royal Navy, to be interdicting shipping within the 12 mile limit of territorial seas in a region they know full well is subject to maritime boundary dispute, is unnecessarily provocative,” he said.

The former envoy said that this was “especially true as apparently they were not looking for weapons but for smuggled vehicles attempting to evade car duty”.

“What has the evasion of Iranian or Iraqi taxes go to do with the Royal Navy?” he questioned in comments on his webpage, set up after he was sacked from his post in 2004 after criticising British foreign policy.

Russian military intelligence has reported a flurry of activity by US armed forces near Iran’s borders, a high-ranking security source said in Moscow on Tuesday.

“The latest military intelligence data point to heightened US military preparations for both an air and ground operation against Iran,” the official said, adding that the Pentagon has probably not yet made a final decision as to when an attack will be launched.

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The Pentagon is looking for a way to deliver a strike against Iran “that would enable the Americans to bring the country to its knees at minimal cost” he said, adding that the American naval presence in the Persian Gulf has for the first time in the past four years reached the level that existed shortly before the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

Inside Iraq the much-vaunted imperialist “surge” offensive has run out of steam without achieving any of its original objectives. Sectarian killings are rising again and the resistance has gone on to the attack again across the country and in the heart of the capital Baghdad.

The top-security “Green Zone” in Baghdad is under regular fire – the most spectacular being last week’s rocket fire that forced the end to meeting of the UN Secretary General with puppet Iraqi “premier” Nouri al Maliki.

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Puppet “deputy premier” Salam al Zawbi’i was severely wounded and a number of his bodyguards killed in coordinated Resistance attack last Friday in Baghdad. Three people were injured when the US embassy inside the “Green Zone” came under indirect fire last week and two Americans, a soldier and a mercenary “contractor” died when another rocket slammed into the US military compound on Tuesday.

Two vehicles laden with explosives and chlorine gas smashed into the main gate of a US military base in Fallujah on Wednesday causing a powerful explosion and sending a cloud of toxic gas across the base. Eight puppet police were killed and 20 more wounded along with a number of US troops.

And so it goes on, as Izzat Ibrahim, the leader of the underground Arab Renaissance Socialist Party (Baath) stressed in his appeal for help to the Arab leaders meeting in Riyadh. The “heroic resistance will not stop jihad and expanding and widening this jihad until the last invader soldier has been expelled from the soil of Iraq and until the utter and complete liberation from every kind of control, blackmail, and exploitation, whatever time this may take and whatever sacrifices this may require”.

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Editorial

Slavery is a class issue

THE ARCHBISHOPS of Canterbury and York last Sunday led a procession through London that included five middle-aged white men and a 15-year-old youth; they wore chains and were yoked together with makeshift wooden yokes, wearing T-shirts that said “So sorry”. It was an event to mark the abolition of the slave trade (though not slavery itself) and to put pressure on the Government to make a formal apology for Britain’s leading role in the transatlantic slave trade.

Tony Blair, as ever, made a commemorative speech in which he expressed profound sorrow for the harm done by the slave trade but hedged and fudged and did not deliver the all-important direct apology. Why not? Because to do so would be to admit liability and in capitalist legal terms that means coughing up with compensation. And there is not enough money in the universe to compensate for the horrors that were inflicted on slaves.

So instead the bourgeois politicians and press try to say that slavery is old history, and no one alive today has any responsibility. But the products of slavery are still very present in the modern world. The sugar plantations of the West Indies created the wealth that made Britain powerful. Many existing and still prosperous families and companies became wealthy on the back of the slave trade – companies like Baring’s Bank, Tate and Lyle and the Bank of England. These companies are still benefiting from the imperialist exploitation of Third World countries where the resultant poverty is still driving desperate families to sell their own children to modern slave owners, in the hope that this will secure food and work for them. There are still around five million child slaves in the world, according to United Nations estimates.

If the imperialists ever said sorry for slavery, they might have to stop doing it, or at least stop creating the conditions where it still flourishes.

Black workers demanding an apology need the support of their fellow white-working class. They are not seeking to impose an impossible guilt trip on white workers – who are also victims of the imperialist ruling class. In the 17th, 18th, and early 19th centuries while these rulers were buying and selling black workers in the West Indies, in Britain they were driving native British workers out of their homes and their common grazing land in the enclosure movement to, replace them with more profitable sheep.

Black workers do need an acknowledgement of the vast contribution their work made to the wealth and prosperity of western capitalism and of the suffering it caused and still causes. They need an acknowledgement that their struggles against slavery and imperialism are a major dimension in the struggles of the working class as a whole. We all need an acknowledgement that the struggle of black workers against slavery is not something marginal, faraway and long ago, but a vital part of the mainstream working class struggle and that it continues today.

Meanwhile those who have inherited the big banks and estates founded on the backs of slavery could stop pretending it has nothing to do with them and use their wealth and power to rescue and compensate the modern victims of slavery. They could – as a gesture – wipe out Third World debt; they could stop dumping cheap subsidised products on Africa and Asia – bankrupting small local farmers; they could stop using loans and “aid” as a way of stripping these countries of all their wealth. But they won’t; that’s not the way that capitalism works.

They won’t stop until the united working class, black, white and all colours, stops them. This started happening in Russia in 1917, and later in China, in Korea, in Cuba and Vietnam. Now, while the armed might of imperialism is pinned down by the heroic resistance in Iraq and Afghanistan, it is continuing in Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua and Nepal. Workers of many nations are liberating themselves – as did the slaves of the West Indies.

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