War and Resistance is a translation of the Swedish book Draksådd, originally published in 2004. It analyzes the most important wars of the past hundred years. It examines the role of UN, civil disobedience and many other failed attempts to stop war. And as a contrast explains why other forms of resistance to war have been successful.

Whatever has overstepped its due bounds is always in a state of instability.1

Seneca the Younger, Roman philosopher, 1st Century AD

The era of the Cold War and the wars of national liberation came to an end in 1989 when the Berlin Wall collapsed.

The new world situation did not mean the end of war. The entire world en­tered a new epoch, one of spiralling instability – economic, political, social, diplomatic and military. And the number of casualties increased. However, wars in the new situation had characteristics that were different from those of the 1950’s to the 1980’s. In the following chapters we look at the three types of wars that developed in the 1990’s.

1. The first set of wars was caused directly by the collapse of the Soviet Un­ion and the end of the Cold War. Defence spending in Russia fell by 95% up to 1998.2 The American ruling elite was intoxicated by the power that had come their way and by the opportunities this opened up. Having ac­quired military superiority, they attempted to redraw the political map by at­tacking regimes they wished to eliminate – in Iraq, Serbia, and Afghanistan. At the same time, wars broke out in the former Soviet Union – in Moldavia, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Chechnya.

2. Global economic problems and the removal of the Soviet ‘threat’ meant tougher competition between the big capitalist powers. This led to France and the US supplying arms to different sides in wars in Africa – in Rwanda, Congo-Kinshasa, Congo-Brazzaville, and Sudan. It also led to war in Eu­rope for the first time since the Second World War – in Yugoslavia.

3. The crisis of the developed countries economies caused the economies of many of the developing countries to go into free fall at the same time as Soviet oriented movements disintegrated at the same pace as the Soviet Union. Africa suffered the most. In the wake of growing poverty, civil wars broke out. These wars began to turn the clock back. In many parts of Af­rica something approaching barbarism began to spread.

The Iraq war begun in 2003 includes elements of all these wars.

To understand these types of wars, it is necessary to understand how and why the new world situation developed. The end of the post-war boom in the mid-seventies prepared the ground. The end of Stalinism in Eastern Europe decisively pushed the world into instability.

Economic crisis

1974/75 saw the deepest downturn in the world economy since the end of the Second World War. Since then, economic development has been increasingly unstable. The recessions that developed in the early 1980s, the early 1990s, and at the beginning of the new century, were all deeper than those that occurred during the post-war upswing. All eighteen major finan­cial crises since the Second World War have occurred after 1974.

Although the economy boomed for periods both in the 1980s and the 1990s, recovery was not as complete as before. Class divisions continued to widen and, in most countries, there were cutbacks or stagnation in many areas: the public sector, terms of employment, job availability, pay, and working environment. Workplace stress increased greatly.

Between 1947 and 1973, productivity (production output per hour worked) in the OECD countries increased at an average annual rate of 3%. Growth in productivity means that there is more for all to share. Between 1974 and 1991, the increase was only 1% a year.

Productivity rose again to an average annual rate of 1.3% between 1992 and 1998, mainly as a result of an intensification of work. The rate then leaped ahead for a few years, which led to hopes that investment in com­puters and IT would end the economic problems that had started in the mid-1970s. But these predictions proved over-optimistic. As early as 1989, Robert Solow, winner of a Nobel Prize for economics, pointed out: “You can see computers everywhere but in the productivity statistics”.3 This is a crucial point.

Industrial production in the West was computerized in the 1970s, and of­fices in the 1980s. During the 1990s, people’s homes filled up with comput­ers. Homes, however, are hardly likely to generate much of an increase in productivity. The Internet, which developed rapidly in the late 1990s, may well have a more lasting effect on productivity. It makes the distribution of goods more efficient and makes it easier for companies to purchase what they want. But this process will take time and it will never be enough to bring about any great change in Western economic development.

If the rise in productivity in the late 1990s was not caused by the more widespread use of computers, what did cause it? The answer is that it was due to a higher rate of computer production. When the breakthrough came for personal computers, production was moved out of garage workshops, and into hyper-modern factories that cost billions to build. This meant that production became far more rational – so efficient that the average productivity rate soared, despite the fact that the rest of the economy was performing poorly. The American economist Robert Gordon spelled it out: “The productivity performance of the manufacturing sector of the United States economy since 1995 has been abysmal rather than admirable. Not only has productivity growth in non-durable manufacturing decelerated in 1995-99 compared to 1972-95, but productivity growth in durable manu­facturing stripped of computers has decelerated even more.” 4

Falling investments

The development of productivity is heavily dependant on investments. Investment in new machinery, better buildings and distribution systems, enable goods to be produced more cheaply and efficiently.

The big difference between economic activity during the upswing after the Second World War and the situation in later years lay in a decline in invest­ments. In the EU zone, the investment rate fell from an average of about 25% of the GDP in the 1950s and 1960s, to about 20% in the 1980s and 1990s. In Japan, it fell from around 35% to 30%, and in the US from 20% to 18%.5

What are the reasons for the low rate of investment since the 1970s com­pared to the previous period? To understand this, it is first necessary to give an outline of how a business cycle works.

The cycle begins with some capitalists investing in new machinery. This allows them to produce the same or better goods cheaper. They do this in order to stay ahead of the competition and earn bigger profits than their rivals. Employers who make machines will have to employ more people. The new people employed will get higher wages than when they were un­employed. Thus demand for consumer goods rises and employers in the consumer goods industries will employ more people as well. This leads to greater demand, and further investment.

A spiral of growth, a boom, has begun.

However, this cannot go on for ever. The first companies to invest in new machinery make a larger profit than those that come after. Everybody has to follow suit, if they are not going to fall hopelessly behind. When every­one is standing there with large, expensive new machines that churn out any number of goods, all find it harder to sell their goods – at a profit. A crisis of over-overproduction develops. According to Marx, the reason for this is that too much money has been invested in new equipment in relation to the size of the workforce. 6 This leads to what he calls the tendency of the profit rate to fall.7

Once profits have fallen to the extent that the least profitable companies no longer have resources to invest, unemployment increases. People buy less and investments dry up.

A downward spiral, a recession, begins.

However, just like when things go up, when they go down they don’t go down for ever. When enough investments have been destroyed to restore the balance between machines and employees, profits will be restored. The machines are seldom destroyed physically. Normally, it is their value that is destroyed. This happens, for instance, when machinery is auctioned off for a fraction of its original price after a bankruptcy. The companies that have not gone bankrupt are strengthened by the disappearance of others. Profits rise and the ground is prepared for another boom.

The key question is this: At what level of investment have profits fallen enough for the economy to turn downwards? Why was it at around 27% of GDP in Europe in the 1950s and 1960s but at 22% in the 1970s and 1980s?

Economic development can be thought of as a combustion engine, where investment is the petrol. The more petrol you inject, the faster the engine goes – but only up to a certain point, after which the engine chokes unless you add more air. It is the growth in world trade that provides the capitalist engine with air.

After the Second World War, the rapid growth in world trade that resulted from the economic dominance of the US led to an unprecedented eco­nomic upswing. As world trade expanded, the benefits of specialization and large-scale production made sure that the value of machines (and wages) could be reduced even during the boom. This kept profits high, even at high levels of investment. Slumps mainly expressed themselves as a fall in the rate of growth, not as contraction of the economy.

Since the early seventies, investment levels have declined for three main reasons.

1. Trade conflicts

Despite all the talk about globalization, trade barriers made it increasingly difficult for world trade to develop. In time, Germany and Japan rose and began to challenge the US in the economic arena. The world was divided up into three big trade blocs, each of them led by a powerful imperialist state. Tension between the blocs was great. In 1999, it caused the collapse of the trade talks organized by the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle. Nor were later trade talks successful.

In North America, the NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) zone, including Canada in the north and Mexico in the south, was formed. It was dominated by the US. The US also viewed the whole of South America as its backyard and tried to negotiate a pan-American trade bloc that would embrace the whole continent.

In Europe, through the European Union, the EU, the European capitalists tried to unite against their competitors. 8

Thirdly, Japan sought to extend its role internationally.

While countries within the various blocs have integrated to some extent since the 1970s, the growth in world trade has slowed considerably despite all the talk of globalization.

Although it got nowhere near the level of the 1950s and 1960s, world trade picked up a bit in the 1990s. This was due to more trade within the trading blocks. However, the effect on the growth of production was less than pre­viously. The existence of trading blocks has increased the incentive to move factories in search for cheaper labor and bigger subsidies. This appears in the statistics as a growth of world trade, but it does not actually increase the amount of production. During the recession in 2002-2003 world trade actually fell. The following graph show this, http://www.wto.org/english/res_e/statis_e/its2006_e/its06_longterm_e.pdf, (Average annual percentage change in volume terms).

Relatively unobserved, a qualitative change occurred in trade disputes during the 1990s. Previously, the combatants engaged mostly in a war of words. Now, they began using more painful methods to out-compete one another. To start with, they used non-tariff barriers (import regulations, technical requirements, legal complexities, etc) as “a strategy for impeding world trade”, to quote the Office of the US Trade Representatives.9 This led to different systems for DVDs and mobile phones in the US and Eu­rope, for instance, and different environmental provisions.

Trade sanctions were also imposed more frequently. As a result of the EU’s insistence on limiting the import of ‘dollar bananas’, in favour primarily of bananas from the former French colonies, the US imposed trade sanc­tions on a whole series of European products. These included Swedish ginger snaps and sewing machines from the Swedish company Husqvarna. Subsequently, trade sanctions were imposed as a result of the EU refusal to import American meat treated with hormones. Disputes between the US and Japan over the sale of spare vehicle-parts, and between the US and Canada over timber, also resulted in trade sanctions. The steel trade was hit. Even the collective agreement governing the Swedish cinema industry was affected by this trade war. The 2004 agreement was delayed as a result of American objections that Swedish public funding created unfair com­petition for Hollywood. Which is absurd, as without public funding there would be no films made at all in Swedish, and Swedish films hardly compete with American films outside of Sweden.

The EU countries were also feuding with one another. Germany with France. The poorer EU countries with the wealthier. And Britain with eve­ryone else. But they agreed on one thing: Keep out the US and Japan! Increas­ingly, this became the glue that bound them together. The EU, accordingly, did not back down on the banana issue, despite the fact that the restrictions clearly infringed the WTO regulations they themselves helped to draw up.

2. Speculation and debt

The instability caused by the decrease in world trade was compounded by the reappearance of massive speculation. Although a normal part of life under capitalism, speculation had played relative insignificant role during the post-war upswing. Then, high profits could be earned by making in­vestments in production. As world trade declined, it became more profit­able to use money for speculation. In 2000, the American Stock Exchange was estimated to be worth 150% of the country’s GDP, which was almost twice as much as in 1929 (the year of the Wall Street Crash). Stock values increasingly lost touch with the actual value of the companies concerned, especially in the IT sector.

Money invested in the stock exchange is not translated into investment in actual production.10 Stock-market money is part of a giant pyramid game. There is also a huge trade in derivates, bonds, art and not least – currencies. Before 1973, the US dollar was the world currency. Most other currencies were pegged to the dollar, and the dollar was tied to gold. This ensured financial stability. In those days, 90% of all international monetary transac­tions were payments for goods and services. Twenty years later, such pay­ments accounted for only 10%. The rest was speculation.11

Debt has the same effect as speculation. In the US, private sector debt was, by 2001, at its highest level since the Second World War – 68 % of GDP.12 In many other industrialized countries, the debt rate was even higher. State debt also reached record levels.

3. Cuts and lower living standards

Spurred by increased competition on the world market, capitalists tried to compensate themselves by attacking workers’ pay and working conditions, and the public sector, even during a boom. As living standards declined, the market for many of the capitalists’ products, and consequently investments, also declined. The capitalists were sawing off the branch they themselves sat on.

Thus, the barriers to capitalist development – national boundaries and private ownership of the major companies – that were partially overcome during the post-war upswing, grew and become more difficult to surmount. A capitalist world economy dominated by the US became a thing of the past (although the USA’s military dominance was larger than ever). State intervention in the economy and the welfare state eroded. The system had greater difficulty in recovering from each crisis.

The fall of Stalinism

The other crucial reason for the rising instability in the world was the fall of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of the Eastern bloc. The collapse was preceded by growing economic problems, but the problems were of a very different kind from those that imperialism has to grapple with.

In the Soviet Union, capitalism and the rule of the landlords were abol­ished, but power was not in the hands of the workers. There was a pecu­liar combination of economic planning and ruthless dictatorship. Despite the dictatorship, considerable progress was made in a number of fields. In 1917, Russia had been a backward, semi-feudal country with a largely illiterate population. The Soviet Union, however, grew into a modern de­veloped economy with a quarter of the world’s scientists, with health and educational systems that could compete with anything the West could offer, and with the capacity to put the first satellite in orbit and the first man in space. By the late 1970s, the Soviet Union was a powerful industrial nation that in terms of output had overtaken the rest of the world in a number of key sectors, such as oil, steel and cement. All this was achieved without unemployment or inflation. Prior to perestroika (Gorbachov’s reform pro­gramme), which was launched in the late 1980s, the price of dairy products and meat had not risen since 1962. The price of bread, sugar and most food products had not gone up since 1955. And rents were extremely low.13

After 1965, growth begun to slow. At the end of the Brezhnev era (Brezh­nev died in 1982), the Soviet economy was completely stagnant. In 1936, Leon Trotsky wrote: “It is possible to build gigantic factories according to a ready-made Western pattern by bureaucratic command—although, to be sure, at triple the normal cost. But the farther you go, the more the economy runs into the problem of quality, which slips out of the hands of a bureaucracy like a shadow. The Soviet products are as though branded with the grey label of indifference. Under a nationalized economy, quality demands a democracy of producers and consumers, freedom of criticism and initiative —conditions incompatible with a totalitarian regime of fear, lies and flattery.”14

During the Stalinist era, the bureaucrats had only been required to take simple decisions, like “more steel industry” or “more agriculture”. But when the volume of goods approached the million mark, this small elite of bureaucrats could no longer manage the economy. As there were no broad-based democratic controls to guide them in their work and no profit-hungry market to provide brutal, short-term solutions, the problems piled up. Moreover, the whole system was thoroughly corrupt, which is inevitable in a totalitarian state. Stagnation was unavoidable.

As the economy stagnated, dissatisfaction with the system grew. Many people could accept oppression as long as there was a steady improvement in their living standards, but once this was not forthcoming, oppression became intolerable. In many Eastern European states, the general discon­tent erupted in mass demonstrations. Among the slogans heard from the crowds on the streets of Berlin in 1989 was: “It’s we who are the people!”

The bureaucrats in power were not happy with the situation either. In part this was because they were feeling the pressure from below, but an economy that did not grow at all also meant bad times for many in the bureaucracy. They began to look for a way out of the crisis. This was during the late 1980s, a period when the fragile boom that had been gathering momentum during the decade reached its peak. Western media proclaimed that all crises were over, and that the economy had entered a new period of long-term growth. Imperialism had already enmeshed many of the Eastern European countries by giving them large loans. When the economic crisis became deeper in Eastern Europe they pushed harder. The resistance of the bu­reaucracy crumbled. Many also hoped that if they became capitalists they would do well for themselves.

The Berlin Wall opens, a new world order is proclaimed

On the night of 9 November 1989, the gates in the Berlin Wall were opened. When the astonished Berliners finally realised that the passage between East and West was truly permitted, wild scenes of rejoicing broke out. Young people climbed up on to the hated monument that had divided the city since 1961 and began hacking off pieces of concrete with hammers and chisels. Others played music and danced on top of the Wall. People threw themselves into one another’s arms, laughing and crying, at the place, where in previous years, fleeing East Germans had been caught by the bul­lets of the border guards. Many people have testified to the sense of release and joy they felt during the spontaneous festivities that would grip Berlin for days.

Those who celebrated in Berlin were witness to a turning point in history. It was not just a wall that fell in 1989 – the entire Eastern bloc of Communist countries, which had been ruled by dictators since the Second World War, had begun to disintegrate. Two years later, the Soviet Union was no more.

“We won!” trumpeted an editorial in the Wall Street Journal, arguing that the capitalist system had finally defeated all form of socialist experiment. The Cold War era and the balance of terror were a thing of the past. American political economist Francis Fukuyama went so far as to assert that it was not just the end of the Cold War but “the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.15

George Bush the elder, who was US president at the time, promised a fu­ture of peace and growing prosperity throughout the world. He called it the New World Order. A new world order did develop. But it was nothing like what Bush had promised.

Wider gap

By the end of the 1990’s the 200 richest people in the world owned as much as the two billion poorest.16 Statistics from the UN’s Human Development Report 2002 claim that this was not due to a redistribution from the poor to the rich, but because things got better for everybody, just more so for the rich. The report says that the proportion of the global population living in extreme poverty declined from 29% in 1990 to 23% in 1999. However, the improvement recorded during the decade was almost entirely due to growth in a handful of East Asian countries. By far the largest among them was China, whose economy was to a great extent state-controlled. In China alone, the number of people living under the poverty line declined by 147 million between 1990 and 1998.17 (Over the same period, however, the gap between rich and poor in China widened.) Other countries with growth economies included Mongolia and Vietnam that also had mainly state-con­trolled economies.

In the African countries south of the Sahara, the number below the poverty line increased in the 1990s from 242 million to 300 million. In Latin America, too, the number of extremely poor people increased in the 1990s, as it did in Central Asia, Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. The UN’s Human Development Report for 2003 warned that the socio-economic situation worsened in 21 countries during the decade. UN studies showed that in the 1980s only four countries had experienced such lengthy declines.

Furthermore, at the end of the 1990s, the World Bank moved the inter­national poverty line by a few hundredths. In the case of the Middle East and North Africa, this change in how statistics were compiled halved the number of people living in extreme poverty from 4 to 2%. In Latin Amer­ica, the number was reduced from 24 to 15%.18

Rearmament costs and new wars

1989 was followed by several years of military disarmament around the world. Costs fell globally by about a third, up to 1998.19 This was mainly due to the collapse of Russia’s planned economy. But by 1996, the US had already begun to increase its defence spending, and after 1998 the overall global curve turned upwards. Since then, rearmament costs have risen every year. The US, which even before 11 September 2001 accounted for 36% of the world’s defence spending, increased its lead further. In 2003, it ac­counted for 43% of all arms purchasing around the world.20

During the decade, the total number of people killed in wars between states fell by two thirds, to 220 000, compared with the 1980s. (In the 1980s, it was the war between Iraq and Iran that claimed most lives.) But the number of deaths in civil wars increased to 3.6 million. Half of all civilians killed in war were children.21

The wars listed below involve major conflicts that began in the 1990s. Wars that ended before 1994 are not included, and nor are deaths indirectly caused by war, through starvation, disease and the like. Even if the figures may not be totally accurate, they give an idea of the situation.

Azerbaijan (22 000 dead), Kashmir (26 000 dead), Sierra Leone (43 000 dead), Chechnya (47 000 dead), Eritrea (50 000 dead), Tajikistan (51 000 dead), Sudan (54 000 dead), Algeria (87 000 dead), Bosnia-Herzegovina (90 000 dead), Afghanistan (90 000 dead), Congo-Kinshasa (109 000 dead), Liberia (150 000 dead), Burundi (212 000 dead), Somalia (359 000 dead), Rwanda (815 000 dead). 22

The New World Order brought a downward spiral of disintegration, chaos and violence, each war serving as a catalyst to further decline.

_________________________

1 http://www.etni.org.il/farside/funquotes.htm

2 Swedish Peace and Arbitration Association (18 December 2003).

www.svenska-freds.se/konflikthantering/faktablad/militarutgifter.shtml

3 www.guardian.co.uk/online/insideit/story/0,13270,946779,00.html

4 The Economist, 22 July 1999

5 Swedish economic report: LO-ekonomerna: Ekonomiska utsikter, 1997

6 Marx uses the more precise expressions ‘constant capital’ for machines, factories and raw

materials, ‘variable capital’ for the employees, and ‘organic composition of capital’ for the relationship between the two.

7 The profit rate is the relationship between, on the one hand, expenditure on labour, raw

materials and machinery, and, on the other, profit. Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill and John Maynard Keynes also noted the tendency for the rate of profit to fall.

8 http://www.wto.org/english/res_e/statis_e/its2006_e/its06_longterm_e.pdf,

(Average annual percentage change in volume terms)

9 Statement issued on 2 April, 2002

10 Doug Henwood: Wall St.,1998

11 Bror Perjus: Casino Jorden, 1998

12 Michael Roberts: Deflation and Depression, 2002

13 Ted Grant: Russia – from Revolution to Counter-Revolution, 1997

14 Leon Trotsky: The Revolution Betrayed, 1936

15 Frances Fukuyama: End of History?, 1989

16 UN Human Development Report, 1999

17 Mats Wingborg and Markus Larsson: Har världen blivit bättre? 2003 (www.forumsyd.se)

The figures are taken from the World Bank.

18 Sven Lindquist, Dagens Nyheter, 5 november, 2003

19 The data is taken from the 1999 Yearbook of the Stockholm International

Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).

20 Dagens Nyheter, 18 June 2003, quoting the 2003 SIPRI Yearbook.

21 These figures have been taken from the UN’s Human Development Balance Sheet 2002 and

seem low when compared with other reports. The proportion of civilian war victims increased dramatically during the century as a whole. At the beginning of the 20th cen­tury, 10% of the war dead were civilians, while at the beginning of the 1990 as many as 90 per cent of those killed in war were non-combatants.

War and Resistance is a translation of the Swedish book Draksådd, originally published in 2004. It analyzes the most important wars of the past hundred years. It examines the role of UN, civil disobedience and many other failed attempts to stop war. And as a contrast explains why other forms of resistance to war have been successful.

”How did you arrive at that resolution on Sierra Leone?”

I’d asked an American diplo­mat on his way out of the UN building in Manhattan.

”You don’t want to know,” he replied. ”Resolutions are like hot dogs. If you knew how they were made, you wouldn’t eat them. You just swallow. You don’t ask any questions.”

Linda Polman in the book We Did Nothing –

Why the truth doesn´t always come out when the UN goes in

East Timor1 was a Portuguese colony. When Portugal’s fascist dictator António de Oliviera Salazar was overthrown in a revolution in April 1974, the people of East Timor saw their chance for independence. In No­vember 1975, Fretilin, the leading resistance movement under Portuguese colonialism, declared East Timor an independent state. But imperialist pow­ers were afraid that East Timor might develop into an Asian Cuba. Moreo­ver, there were rich deposits of natural gas and oil in the waters around East Timor that they wanted to get their hands on. The United Nations played an absolutely shameful role in helping them achieve this end.

The 1975 massacre – no sanctions

Within weeks of East Timor being declared independent, the Indonesian military invaded East Timor with the backing of the American and Austral­ian governments. The invasion was launched on the day after US President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger left Indonesia, where they had met General Suharto. “We [the US] sent the Indonesian gener­als everything that you need to fight a major war against somebody who doesn’t have any guns. We sent them rifles, ammunition, mortars, grenades, food, helicopters. You name it; they got it. And they got it direct.”2

Previously confidential documents from the Department of Foreign Af­fairs shows that Australia was aware of Indonesian plans to invade East Timor more than a year before the military acted in 1975. Documents from 1974-76 show that Australia’s former premier Gough Whitlam (Labour!) strongly advocated incorporating East Timor into Indonesia.3

The Indonesian army instigated a bloodbath that was scarcely reported in the Western press. One Timorese in ten – 60 000 people – were murdered in a matter of weeks. In 1989, Amnesty International estimated that since the invasion, the Indonesian military had killed about 200 000 of East Timor’s population of 600-700 000. Other reports spoke of 300 000.4

Five days after the invasion, the UN denounced it as a typical example of an international act of aggression. The US abstained from voting. No sanctions were imposed and no other action was taken. Time and again, representatives of the East Timorese people appealed to the UN. In 1989, Bishop Belo (the Catholic bishop of East Timor) wrote to the UN Secre­tary General at the time, Pérez de Cuéllar, begging for help from the outside world. The response came five years later, from the new Secretary General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali. He wrote: “The United Nations is determined to do everything in its power to achieve a final, just, comprehensive and inter­nationally acceptable solution”.5

Countries such as the US, Australia and Britain continued to supply the Indonesian regime with money, investments and arms up until 1998. The Australian government reached an agreement with Jakarta to exploit the rich reserves of natural gas and oil in the Timor Gap. Oil prospecting con­tracts were signed with oil companies from Australia, Britain, Japan, the Netherlands and North America.6

Swedish companies, too, have benefited from the oppression, with the approval of the ‘neutral’ Swedish government. After 1995, sales of Swed­ish arms and ammunition to Jakarta increased, with exports totalling more than SEK 64 million (about € 6.4 million) in 1996. Paul Beijer (head of the division for strategic export control at the Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs) said that there was “little risk” of the arms exported from Sweden being used to violate people’s human rights. Jens Petersson, Secretary Gen­eral of the Swedish Peace and Arbitration Association , notes that prior to independence Swedish anti-aircraft guns were used to attack the East Timorese guerrilla army.7

Terror and the 1999 referendum

In May 1998, Indonesian dictator General Suharto was overthrown by militant students, workers and peasants. The tyranny in East Timor had frequently been a focus of attention for the Indonesian mass movement that was fighting the government. Activists from the Timorese liberation movement took part in mass meetings in Indonesia, and freedom for East Timor was one of the demands of the Indonesian student movement.

Suharto’s first successor was Bacharuddin Jusuf Habibie, a close ally of the ousted dictator and a man of like mind. In January 1999, in an attempt both to appease the masses and to give his regime a more democratic image in the eyes of the world, he offered to hold a referendum in East Timor. The voters were to choose between independence and Timorese autonomy within Indonesia’s national borders. Habibie was also affected by a change of stance among the leaders of the Timorese liberation movement. Fretilin leader Xanana Gusmão and others had moved to the right and abandoned their Marxist rhetoric in favour of support for a market economy. Habibie doubtless reasoned that a free, capitalist East Timor was far less threaten­ing than a socialist one. The ruling class in Indonesia was apparently not unanimous in its support for this step. Powerful elements in the military were critical of the referendum. A free East Timor would not only mean that Indonesia risked losing access to Timorese natural resources. There was also a danger it might serve as inspiration to the liberation struggle of oppressed people in parts of Indonesia, such as West Papua and Aceh. The divergence of views among the ruling class was not a reflection of any sud­den sympathy for the East Timorese cause, but simply of disagreement on how best to maintain exploitation there.

When Habibie announced the referendum, the Indonesian military imme­diately began building up, training and arming paramilitary gangs (militias) in East Timor. These gangs had been in existence for some time, but were now extensively reinforced and given a vital role to play. In May 1999, Indo­nesia, Portugal and the UN signed an agreement scheduling a referendum for August 1999. The vote was to be organized under UN auspices, but controlled by the Indonesian military.8

This was the signal for the second massacre of the East Timorese people. The gangs sought to terrorize them into voting for autonomy and against independence. Defenseless, unarmed people were raped, beaten and mur­dered by the gangs, under Indonesian army control. During this time, UN observers were in place but did nothing to intervene. They just observed. The referendum was postponed many times by the UN, and the gangs con­tinued to terrorize the population.

All the UN managed to do was to lull the East Timorese into a false sense of security, by giving them the impression that they were under the protec­tion of the ‘international community’.

As part of the May Agreement, the liberation movement was to lay down its arms. The leaders of the independence movement trusted the UN, chose the path of non-violence and disarmed their supporters. This mistake was costly for the people of East Timor. In the absence of armed and organized resistance, the gangs were free to do as they pleased. Xanana Gusmão, head of the National Council for Timorese Resistance, CNRT, an umbrella body for pro-independence groups such as Fretilin, the right-wing UDP and a number of smaller organizations, used his position to urge the people not to make any move to defend themselves against the brutal attacks of the gangs and the Indonesian army.

When young Timorese activists wanted to mobilize the people in massive demonstrations against the gangs’ attacks, Gusmão rejected the idea. In a CNRT statement in May 1999, he declared that such a move would “only give the militia further reason to continue murdering the people” and called on everyone to “follow the UN line” in preparing for the referendum.9

The vote was eventually held at the end of August 1999. The people of the region displayed tremendous courage and a clear determination to fight for their freedom. Despite the threats and violence of the gangs, nearly every­one took part, and the result was clear and unequivocal. Almost 80% voted for total independence.

Directly after the result became known, the pro-Indonesian paramilitaries exacted terrible retribution. The military and the Indonesian elite wanted to show the Timorese, and the other oppressed peoples of Indonesia, that the price of independence was a heavy one. People were raped, maimed and murdered indiscriminately. Some 200 000 were driven from their homes, and almost all the buildings in the capital of Dili were looted and razed to the ground. Schools, hospitals and other infrastructures were destroyed. Hundreds of thousands of people were forced to flee to Indonesian West Timor.

During this horrific wave of terror, the UN appealed to the Indonesian army to pull back the gangs and protect the people of East Timor. The UN did so despite the fact that the Indonesian military had for years been oppressing and murdering the East Timorese and that it was they who were ultimately responsible for the paramilitary gang’s criminal acts.

Xanana Gusmão and the other pro-independence leaders continued to place their trust in the UN. They appealed to the UN to intervene to stop the killings, though for 25 years the UN had been indifferent to the suffer­ing of the East Timorese people. Gusmão also advised the Falintil guerrilla forces not to hit back at the gangs. In the beginning of September 1999, five days after the referendum, a CNRT statement urged the people “not to do anything that could be interpreted as starting a civil war”.10 In point of fact, a bloody, one-sided civil war was already under way in villages and towns throughout East Timor.

3 000 guerrillas of the Falintil movement, who had been fighting the In­donesian army in the jungle for 24 years, were standing passively by while the paramilitaries were murdering unarmed and defenceless civilians just a few hours’ journey from their base. In full accordance with the May Agree­ment, José Ramos Horta, another of the independence movement’s leaders, praised the “incredible discipline” of these soldiers He added that they had acted “on direct orders from Xanana Gusmão”.11

It would have been perfectly possible to set up armed self-defence groups based on elected neighbourhood, village and town committees of work­ers, peasants and young people. Such groups would have been able to or­ganise the majority of the East Timorese people and confront the gangs. Young Timorese in fact made moves in this direction during the final weeks of the terror, but were strongly advised to hold back by the leaders of the freedom movement.

Australian workers expressed their solidarity by organizing strikes and boy­cotts directed against Indonesia. Telecommunications and dock workers organized economic sanctions. All postal deliveries to Indonesian compa­nies and diplomatic bodies were stopped. No repairs of telephone lines to Indonesia were undertaken. At a number of airports, construction workers initiated a blockade against flights from Australia by Garuda, the Indonesian airline. Mass demonstrations drew tens of thousands of students and work­ers from all over the continent. 40 000 took part in Melbourne and 20 000 in Sydney.12

Protests also broke out in other countries, such as Portugal, Canada and the US. On the American West Coast, dock workers refused to handle In­donesian cargoes. In Canada, postal workers set an example by stopping all deliveries in any way connected with Indonesian interests. “We have not the slightest doubt that the Indonesian government can start and stop the vio­lence whenever it likes,” declared the head of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers, Dale Clark. “Our action, like the actions of other trade unions, is intended to pressure them into stopping the violence.” The Canadian La­bour Congress refused to handle goods and services to or from Indonesia. Had the whole international Labour Movement mobilized, the Indonesian regime would have been paralyzed.

UN administrators take over

Western governments came under pressure, but were not prepared to do anything that might damage their relations with Indonesia. Instead, they waited until the Jakarta regime had achieved its aims, i.e. had lain waste East Timor as a warning to other peoples in Indonesia.

In September 1999, eight days after the Indonesian government had agreed to let UN troops into East Timor, the first units of the UN’s force arrived on the island. This force was mainly comprised of Australian soldiers. The Aus­tralian government was anxious to have a say in the new country’s future.

In October 1999, the Indonesian parliament formally approved the ref­erendum outcome. But it took another two years, until August 2001, for a constituent assembly to be elected. In the meantime, the UN ruled the country via a transitional administration, the UNTAET, and with the aid of peacekeeping forces and special UN police. Backed by both Gusmão and Horta, UN administrator Sergio Vieiera de Mello13 was invested with powers similar to those of a colonial master. He was authorised to appoint ministries comprising UN officials and hand-picked East Timorese.

The UN administrators were not keen to hand over community planning and organization to the grassroots bodies of the independence movement, assembled in the CNRT. After the Indonesian troops left the island in September 1999, these organisations had taken over responsibility for local government, the police and the judiciary, and had organised the distribution of emergency food supplies. An internal UNTAET report, leaked to the press, showed that the UN’s strategy took power out of the hands of or­dinary East Timorese and their organizations. Instead, new structures were erected, led by foreigners.

“CNRT involvement in the distribution of humanitarian as­sistance has been extremely important due to the fact that the NGOs have been incapable of organiszing food distribution …CNRT have the strong support and trust of the majority of the population, and are highly coordinated and efficient in their management of programmes”. 14 Nonetheless, the report recommended that CNRT involvement be reduced because “their direct involvement creates pressure from the population”. Another report recommends that the UNTAET take over the CNRT’s role as “it is essential that … UNTAET is seen to be the administrative authority”.

These reports are in sharp contrast to the claims of the UN administrators that they were in East Timor to help the inhabitants develop basic skills in how to run a country. The East Timorese activists already possessed these skills. What the UN in fact did was to select, train and build up a more trust­worthy corps of officials, technicians, police, military and diplomatic staff: a corps that could be counted on to show loyalty to the capitalist system.

Another sign that the UN was in practice creating a colonial-style adminis­tration was its decision to make Portuguese the official language of the new country – despite the fact that only 8% of the population spoke it. Portu­guese was the language of the new oligarchy and the East Timorese elite, while the overwhelming bulk of the population spoke Tetum. Moreover, the UNTAET decided that the American dollar was to be the national cur­rency – a choice that showed the true nature of Timorese ‘independence’. A year after independence, workers, peasants and the poor were still using the Indonesian rupee, which naturally was not accepted in the country’s new restaurants, bars and shops.15

A hollow independence

East Timor became a divided country. While UN personnel, business peo­ple (mainly Australians) and the Timorese elite lived in luxury, the great majority of peasants and workers had to eke out a living in extreme poverty. The presence of the 10 000 well-paid ‘peacekeepers’ and other UN staff, most of them earning around USD 50 000 a year, changed the face of the capital, Dili. Just a few months after the Indonesian military, police and gangs had totally destroyed and burnt down the city, new luxury hotels, bars, restaurants and other facilities were being built for the rich. Expensive cars plied the streets of the city.

East Timor was described in the Australian media as a future tourist and tax haven. A journalist gave a lyrical account of the picturesque attractions that people with money could enjoy in East Timor, and offered the following tip: “Do as UN Secretary General Kofi Annan did on his recent visit – en­joy good food and wine served in the ruins of a burnt-out house.”16

After all these events, ordinary Timorese lived in extreme poverty. In 2002 many could not fill their stomachs. Over 40% lived below the poverty level of 0.55 dollars (55 cents) a day, and over half of the population were illiter­ate.17 Most Timorese in Dili lived in shacks or the ruins of houses without roofs. No health service worthy of the name was available to ordinary citi­zens. More than twice as many women died giving birth in East Timor as in the rest of South-East Asia. The country’s only significant export product was coffee, but falling prices in the global market led to a sharp fall in GDP growth in 2002.

The difficult conditions under which ordinary workers had to live in East Timor, and the huge wage gap between them and the Timorese employed by the UN, led to worker protests and even instances of open rebellion against discrimination and miserable living standards. As the economy had been destroyed by the rampaging gangs, the main employers were the UN administrative machine, foreign charity organizations and a limited number of foreign companies. When almost a thousand job-seekers gathered in March 2000 to demand information about their job applications from the UN administrators, they were met by UN forces armed with riot shields, batons and tear gas.

In August 2001, a constituent assembly was elected in East Timor. The Fretilin Party won a majority of the votes. Mari Alkatari was appointed prime minister and Xanana Gusmão president. When Independence Day was celebrated on 20 May 2002, the poverty of the new state and the hollow nature of its sovereignty became plain to all. The festivities were entirely fi­nanced by sponsors, whose names and logos were carried on TV and radio, on banners and even on a memorial to the ‘Heroes of the Resistance’ that was to be erected in a planned park.18 The biggest sponsors, of course, were the oil and gas companies looking forward to reaping huge profits from the reserves in Timorese waters. Meanwhile, the Australian and Timorese governments were arguing about where to draw the line between their re­spective territorial waters.

On Independence Day, 2002, the UN mandate expired. But the UNTAET was promptly supplanted by a new UN body, UNMISET. This was later replaced by UNOTIL, whose mandate ended in 2006. However,”a series of events culminating in a political, humanitarian and security crisis of major dimensions led the [Security] Council to prolong UNOTIL’s mandate and ultimately in August 2006 to establish a new mission – UNMIT.”19

All in all, the role of the UN in East Timor is a complete failure. Many, not only in East Timor, have had high hopes that the UN can be an instrument for peace. However, the UN’s entire history and organization show that the UN cannot fulfil these hopes, and that what happened in East Timor was no accident.

The UN structure

Prior to the end of the Second World War, representatives of the three strongest Allies – Winston Churchill (Britain), Franklin D. Roosevelt (US), and Josef Stalin (Soviet Union) – met at Yalta in the Crimea to divide the world into spheres of interest. During the conference, the basic framework for a future international peace organization was drawn up. The United Na­tions Charter begins by declaring that the organization was founded by the victors in the Second World War in order to “save future generations from the scourge of war”. It goes on to affirm the goal of social and economic development for all peoples. The UN’s Declaration of Human Rights came into being.

Most of the UN’s power is concentrated in the Security Council. The Council is dominated by five countries with the right of veto. Originally, those were Britain, the US, the Soviet Union, France and Taiwan. Taiwan has since been replaced by China. Only the Security Council may adopt decisions that are binding on the UN member states, including coercive economic and military measures. Thus the vast majority of member states are required to submit to actions that are not of their own making.

The General Assembly, at which all the member states are represented, is entitled to discuss all matters that come within the UN’s remit – with one important restriction: When something is being discussed in the Security Council, the General Assembly is not allowed to submit any proposals concerning that particular issue unless requested to do so by the Council. The US took advantage of this clause when a number of states requested that the Vietnam War be raised. The Council was split and unable to reach a decision, but as the war was on the Council agenda, the General Assembly was not allowed to discuss it.20

The UN structure shows that at best the organization can be a forum for the ventilation of views. But whether anything is actually done about the issues discussed is entirely up to the big powers. If they fail to agree, the UN is paralyzed and disregarded.

Sanctions

One step the UN can take, other than military intervention, is to introduce sanctions. During the Cold War, the UN Security Council only twice im­posed sanctions on an individual country – Rhodesia in 1966 and South Africa in 1977. In both cases, the aim was to forcibly bring about the aboli­tion of systematic racial discrimination. The sanctions imposed on Rho­desia had no effect, as South Africa continued to supply the regime with everything needed.

The sanctions against South Africa, on the other hand, are often put for­ward as contributing to the collapse of apartheid in the early 1990s. While the sanctions may have aggravated the situation somewhat for the country’s white leadership, the role played by the black workers and the black youth community was decisive. They fought for years under very difficult condi­tions to bring down the regime, and it was they who ultimately brought about its downfall.

Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the UN Security Council has imposed sanctions more often. But only in the case of Libya did these have the desired effect. Libya was the first country to be exposed to UN sanctions aimed at “combating international terrorism”. After a seven-year embargo on weapons and air flights, Libya agreed in 1999 to hand over two persons suspected of the Lockerbie bombing in 1988. One of them was subsequently acquitted by a panel of three Scottish judges.

Other UN sanctions said to target terrorism (Afghanistan, Cambodia, Su­dan), genocide (Rwanda) or others forms of indiscriminate violence (An­gola, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Liberia, Haiti) have had little or no effect.21

In the 1990s, Iraq was subjected to the most wide-ranging sanctions that the UN has ever directed at an individual country. And this time the sanctions had an impact – a disastrous one. Estimates show that 400 000 children below the age of five died.22 Saddam, meanwhile, remained in power.

The UN Security Council imposed economic sanctions on Milosevic’s regime on three separate occasions: the arms embargo of 1991-95, when Yugoslavia was torn apart, economic sanctions at the time of the Bosnian war of 1992-95, and finally another arms embargo in the early stages of the Kosovo crisis. The economic sanctions were far-reaching. Under Resolu­tion 757, member states were not allowed to import goods or products from the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro). No products were allowed to pass the Yugoslav borders, except for certain medicines and other goods approved by a UN committee. This naturally caused suffering among the people of Yugoslavia, but the sanctions had very little effect on the behaviour of the Belgrade regime.

Prostitution

Dispatching UN forces to different parts of the world has had one clearly perceptible effect: prostitution and violence against women increased.23 In the Cambodian capital of Phnom Phen, for instance, the number of prosti­tutes increased from 6 000 in 1992 to 20 000 the following year, due to the presence of the UN peacekeeping force, UNCTAC.

The demand for prostitutes was high among UN troops. Unemployed or under-paid young women from Romania, Moldavia, Bulgaria and Belarus were lured away by offers of well-paid jobs, or were quite simply kidnapped and taken away by force. They were then sold from country to country, il­legally taken across borders in cars and boats and offered in markets where they were undressed and sold like cattle. They ultimately ended up in broth­els in Bosnia and Kosovo, where they were kept confined as debt slaves, forced to sell their bodies day and night. If they tried to escape they risked their lives. There were up to ten brothels in every major Bosnian town or city, concentrated around the bases of the 20 000-strong UN-mandated NATO-forces.24

Can the UN be reformed?

When confronted with the facts about how the UN works in practice, many in the Labour Movement call for the organization to be reformed and made more democratic. They believe that while the UN may be a tool of imperialism at present, it could become an anti-imperialist force for a better, fairer world.

The Programme of Principles issued in 1999 by the Young Left in Sweden is a case in point:

“The UN could become an important international organ for dialogue and conflict resolution. Today, the UN is powerless as it is controlled by the US, which dictates how it is to operate. If the UN is to become a proper instrument for a just world order, the poor countries must be given a greater say and the UN must be made more democratic. This means that the right of veto must be abolished, along with the practice of having permanent members of the Security Council. Such changes should be accompanied by an increase in the UN’s powers and resources.”

But who actually ‘represents’ the poor countries in the UN? The answer is, of course, the governments of the Third World – largely dictatorships and quasi-dictatorships – the governments of countries where the leaders live in luxury while the people starve. These leaders are economically and militarily dependent on imperialism, and mainly sit docilely on their laps. Some, like the prime minister of Malaysia, occasionally make rhetorical gestures to appease their own people and denounce the ravages of imperialism. Occasionally, too, some unpredictable dictator like Saddam Hussein will act against the interests of the big powers – but only to further his own ambitions, not to alleviate poverty in his country.

Many of these countries also pursue local imperialist policies with the approval of the big powers. Turkey, for instance, fights the Kurds, and finances and supports rebels and warlords who murder and plunder in northern Iraq. For the most part, such countries willingly allow the imperialists to exploit their natural resources and workers under appalling conditions. In the Sudan, the government attacks and murders its own people so that the big corporations can plunder the country’s oil reserves in peace. Military and paramilitary groups are despatched in Mexico, Guatemala and El Salvador to harass, jail and murder organized workers. In India and Brazil, soldiers and riot police are used against workers and poor peasants fighting for better conditions. The leaders of many poor countries are not afraid of using nationalism, racism or ethnic violence to divert attention from the causes of the miserable conditions in which most people are forced to live.

The UN would not be more democratic if the governments of Afghanistan, Iran and DR Congo were to be given a greater say, or if more power were placed in the hands of the Indonesian, Pakistani, Nigerian, and Algerian government. These governments are definitely not a part of the solution but a part of the problem, and they must be overthrown. But this is something the UN will not concern itself with.

Even in the hypothetical situation that the bulk of Third World governments decide to pursue policies for peace in a democratized UN, what would happen? The UN’s day-to-day activities, its officials and its agencies are financed by powerful capitalist countries. Without the money of the imperialist powers, the UN is nothing but a collection of 50 000 or so officials who would not even get paid. The UN would collapse.

When the UN was founded in 1945, the Security Council was introduced because of the lessons learned from its predecessor – the League of Nations. The US, which took the initiative to start the League, never became a member. The Soviet Union was not allowed to join until the late 1920s, and was expelled a few years later. Germany quit in 1933, because the big powers were not granted the right of veto. The League’s standing was much reduced as a result. After the Second World War, it was understood that if a United Nations was to be a viable proposition, the big powers would have to be given the right of veto.

Principles about democracy and human rights do not govern the world. Nor is it governed by a powerless international gathering of officials in a building in New York. International conflicts have never been resolved and will never be resolved by simply presenting the best arguments. They are decided by the economic and military balance of power that prevails. The UN exists in an imperialist world. It is a part of and a product of it. Reformed or not, the UN has nothing with which to offset the vast military and economic might of the imperialist powers, led by the US. The brutal experience of East Timor confirms once again that workers solidarity is shown to be the only realistic alternative.

___________________

1 After independence East Timor changed its name to Timor-Leste. For the sake of

simplicity we use the name East Timor throughout as the chapter in the main takes up East Timor’s struggle for independence.

2 According to Philip Liechty, the CIAs contact man in Jakarta at the time. See http://

www.medialens.org/articles_2001/silent_democracy.html

3 http://www.wsws.org/articles/1999/mar1999/whit-m09.shtml

4 John Pilger: Hidden Agenda, 1999

5 ibid

6 Noam Chomsky: Man kan inte mörda historien, 1995

7 Amnesty Press, No. 4, September 2000

8 Mike Head and Linda Tenenbaum: East Timor’s Independence: Illusion and Reality, 18 May

2002

9 Jean Duval & Ted Grant: East Timor: Can We Trust the United Nations? September 1999

10 Mike Head and Linda Tenenbaum: East Timor’s Independence: Illusion and Reality, 18 May

2002

11 Australian Financial Review, 14 September 1999

12 Jean Duval: Referendum in East Timor, 6 September 1999

13 Sergio Vieira de Mello was killed in a bomb attack in Iraq in 2003

14 Sam King: Discrimination in East Timor. www.greenleft.org.au/back/2000/389/389p3.htm

15 Jean Duval: One Year after the Independence Referendum, September 2000

16 http://www.blythe.org/nytransfer-subs/2000pac/Timor_Nows_Suffers_Cultural_

Assault_of_UN_Peacekeepers

17 The UN’s Human Development Report, 2002

18 Mike Head and Linda Tenenbaum: East Timor’s Independence: Illusion and Reality, 18 May

2002

19 http://www.un.org/Depts/dpko/missions/unmiset/background.html

20 Segerstedt Wiberg: Mötesplats FN, 1990

21 Eds. David Cortright and George Lopez: The Sanctions Decade, 2000

22 Global Policy Forum: Iraq Sanctions: Humanitarian Implications and Options for the

Future, August 2002

23 Louise Olsson: Gendering UN peacekeeping, Dept of Peace and Conflict Research, Uppsala

University

24 Amnesty Press: No. 2, April 2001

We should declare war on North Vietnam. . . .

We could pave the whole country and put parking strips on it, and still be home by Christmas.1

Ronald Reagan, US President 1981-89, in

a statement in October 1965.

I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong. No Viet Cong ever

called me ‘nigger’.2

Muhammed Ali, on why he refused the draft.

In Vietnam the mighty US army suffered its one and only major defeat, so far.

How was this possible? Was it the guerrilla war in Vietnam combined with student struggle in the US that was responsible? This is commonly how it is presented, but in reality it was the struggle of the American working class that decided the issue.

The US comes to Vietnam

Vietnam became a French colony in middle of the nineteenth century. Dur­ing the Second World War Vietnam was occupied by Japan. After a crushing defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, France was forced to pull out of Vietnam, ending a century of colonial rule. The Vietnamese Communist Party led by Ho Chi Minh was poised to take control of the country.

China and the Soviet Union probably feared that such a setback would be too hard to swallow for imperialism and might upset the Cold War balance of terror between the great powers. Instead of letting the French army pull out, they insisted on a settlement that would compel Ho Chi Minh to withdraw his troops to North Vietnam, and leaving the French occupying the south. France would continue to administer the southern part of the country until a general election in 1956, and the victor at that poll would then rule the entire country.

The US president at the time, Dwight Eisenhower, said later that he be­lieved Ho Chi Minh would have won 80 per cent of the vote.3 So, a general election was never called. Ngo Ding Diem, a Vietnamese living in the US, was flown to Vietnam and installed in office instead. By injecting massive political, economic and military support, the US created a new state in South Vietnam. This state then began to attack both the opposition in the south and North Vietnam.4

The American government did not want another country to leave its sphere of influence. Moreover, traditional imperialist interests played a part. The conservative newspaper U.S. News and World Report carried an article headed Why the US is risking war in Indochina. It explained: “One of the world’s rich­est areas is open to the winner in Indochina. That’s behind the growing U.S. concern … tin, rubber, rice, key strategic raw materials are what the war is really all about. The U.S. sees it as a place to hold – at any cost.”5

The war was also about the export of capital, i.e. the exploitation of cheap labour. This is how the influential magazine Business Week expressed it in 1963: “Late in the 1940’s – and with increasing speed all through the 1950’s and up to the present – (in) industry after industry, U.S. companies found that their overseas earnings were soaring, and that their return on invest­ment was frequently much higher than in the U.S.”6

In South Vietnam, the Communist Party organised a guerrilla army, the NLF (National Liberation Front), to fight Diem and the US. Due to the extensive support from the population, particularly in rural areas, the guer­rillas were able to carry out rapid attacks and then vanish back into the jun­gle. Increasingly, the Americans response was to terrorise the population in order to get at the guerrillas. By 1967, killing entire families had become an integral part of the CIA’s campaign in South Vietnam.7

Operation Rolling Thunder and the Tet Offensive

As the South Vietnamese government proved incapable of defeating the guerrillas, the US was drawn deeper into the war. American military inter­vention in Vietnam began in 1963. In August of that year, US President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered the bombing of North Vietnam. Six months later, Operation Rolling Thunder got under way. In that campaign alone – which lasted for five years – more bombs were dropped on North Viet­nam than were used throughout the Second World War. This corresponds to about 150 kilos of bombs for every man, woman and child in Vietnam.8 Two million Vietnamese and 50 000 American soldiers were to die in this war. The trees across 10% of the country’s surface were defoliated with the help of toxins, primarily Agent Orange, in a bid to get at the guerrillas, who used the jungle as cover.9

The number of American soldiers in Vietnam rose from 23,300 in 1963 to 184 000 in 1966. In January 1969, their number peaked – at 542 000. Despite this, the US was unable to subdue the country. And on the night of 31 January 1968, the North Vietnamese army and the NLF launched the Tet Offensive. The guerrillas broke the truce they had promised to observe during the Vietnamese New Year celebrations, and stormed into more than 100 cities and towns, having first launched a diversionary attack in Khesan province. One of their targets was the South Vietnamese capital, Saigon.

The Americans were caught by surprise by the Tet Offensive, and the NLF even managed to take over the US embassy in the capital. They had accu­mulated weapons, ammunition and explosives at a secret location in prepa­ration for the attack. In the middle of the night, a group of guerrilla soldiers drove up to the embassy in a taxi. Within minutes they had shot the Marines on guard and taken control of the building. The guerrillas also stormed the headquarters of the US and the South Vietnamese armies, as well as the giant US army base at Bienhoa, north of Saigon airport. Fourteen guerrilla soldiers attacked the leading radio station in Saigon. After having controlled it for 18 hours, they blew themselves and the entire building into the air. The NLF also made a half-hearted attempt to stage an uprising in urban areas. The response was very limited.

The size and range of the Offensive astounded the American generals. One of them said later the pattern of attack on the map resembled a pinball game, with lights flashing for each raid. Without doubt, this was one of the most daring and remarkable campaigns in military history. The North Vietnamese general Vo Nguyen Giap had begun preparations for it in 1967 when he realised that the war had reached a military deadlock.

In military terms, the Tet Offensive was not a success. The NLF lost over 50 000 fighters, as compared to 6 000 Americans and South Vietnamese. The NLF also lost almost its entire command structure in South Vietnam. Within days, the guerrillas had been driven out of most of the positions they had captured.

The Tet Offensive was both the high point of guerrilla activity and the beginning of the NLF’s marginalisation in the continuing war. It was the regular North Vietnamese army that took over most of the fighting in the south after the Tet Offensive.

The Offensive nonetheless represented a vital turning point in other re­spects. It had a strong impact on working-class opinion back in the US and internationally. For the first time, Americans were effected by the crucial role television can play in a major war. Fifty million viewers saw the devas­tation caused by war. The US administration could no longer present it as a nice, clean operation that would soon be over. Then, when news of the Song My massacre (in the small village of My Lai) began to leak out in the media, opposition to the war grew dramatically.

The Song My massacre

At dawn on 16 March 1968, a group of American soldiers moved into My Lai. Between 450 and 500 people, mainly old men, women and children, were slain:

“Those Vietnamese who were not killed on the spot were being shepherded by the first platoon to a large drainage ditch at the eastern end of the hamlet. After Grzesik left, Meadlo and a few others gathered seven or eight villagers in one hut and were pre­paring to toss in a hand grenade when an order came to take them to the ditch. There he found Calley, along with a dozen other first platoon members, and perhaps seventy-five Vietnamese, mostly women, old men and children. Calley then turned his attention back to the crowd of Vietnamese and issued an order: “Push all those people in the ditch.” Three or four GIs complied. Calley struck a woman with a rifle as he pushed her down. Stanley re­membered that some of the civilians “kept trying to get out. Some made it to the top. . . .” Calley began the shooting and ordered Meadlo to join in. Meadlo told about it later: “So we pushed our seven to eight people in with the big bunch of them. And so I began shooting them all. So did Mitchell, Calley… I guess I shot maybe twenty-five or twenty people in the ditch . . . men, women and children. And babies.” Some of the GIs switched from auto­matic fire to single-shot to conserve ammunition. Herbert Carter watched the mothers “grabbing their kids and the kids grabbing their mothers. I didn’t know what to do.”

(…)

Some GIs. . . didn’t hesitate to use their bayonets. Nineteen-year-old Nguyen Thi Ngoc Tuyet watched a baby trying to open her slain mother’s blouse to nurse. A soldier shot the infant while it was struggling with the blouse, and the slashed at it with his bayo­net. Tuyet also said she saw another baby hacked to death by GIs wielding their bayonets. Le Tong, a twenty-eight-year-old rice farmer, reported seeing one woman raped after GIs killed her children . Nguyen Khoa, a thirty-seven- year-old peasant, told of a thirteen-year-old girl who was raped before being killed. GIs then attacked Khoa’s wife, tearing off her clothes. Before they could rape her, however, Khoa said, their six-year-old son, riddled with bullets, fell and saturated her with blood. The GIs left her alone . . . .

In the early afternoon the men of Charlie Company mopped up to make sure all the houses and goods in My Lai 4 were destroyed. Medina ordered the underground tunnels in the hamlet blown up; most of them already had been blocked. Within another hour My Lai 4 was no more: its red-brick buildings demolished by explo­sives, its huts burned to the ground, its people dead or dying.”10

It later transpired that officers higher up were responsible both for the massacre, and for the attempts to cover it up. However, only four soldiers were brought to trial and only one of them, William Calley, was convicted. After three years of house arrest, he was pardoned by President Nixon and released. The Song My outrage was one of the more brutal events of the war, but the abuse and killing of civilians was commonplace. In for example Operation Speedy Express focused on the Mekong Delta in early 1969, the US army claimed that 10,899 enemies were killed. Yet only 784 weapons were seized.11

It was not until 13 November 1969, more than one and half years after the event, that the true story of what happened at Song My emerged in the American media. As the war continued, American journalists increasingly dared to tell the truth about the Vietnam War. This was because public opinion more and more swung against the war. A few years earlier, journal­ists would have been fired if they had ventured to report the facts. But by the end of 1969, such persecution would have led to an uproar.

US national security adviser Henry Kissinger realised after the Tet Offen­sive that: “Regardless of how effective our actions are, the present strategy can no longer reach its goals within the period or with the level of force that is acceptable to the American Public.”12 The US is a highly developed country where the working class makes up the overwhelming bulk of the population. It is the working class that is the American public.

Initially, just as at the invasion of Iraq, many workers supported the Viet­nam War. However, that declined as the war continued. A look at which groups expressed the greatest dissatisfaction is particularly interesting. A Gallup poll conducted in January 1971 showed that 60% of those with a college education advocated withdrawing the troops from Vietnam and 75% with a high school education supported such a move, while as many as 80% of those with only an elementary education were in favour. These facts have become completely obscured.13

At a popular exhibition entitled Resistance at Stockholm’s modern art mu­seum, Moderna Museet, the only picture showing workers was one of American construction workers in hard hats beating up protesting students. The exhibition was supposed to be about struggle from the 1960s onwards. The impression it gave was that the only Americans principled enough to stand up against US imperialism were students and a handful of courageous individuals.

On a number of occasions in the 1990s people were asked to estimate what percentages of people at different educational levels were against the war in 1971. They estimated that 90% of all those with a college education were against the war, and that just 60% of those with only an elementary educa­tion were opposed to it.14 An almost complete reversal of the facts.

The working class pays, the rich benefit

The American workers’ opposition to the war was based primarily on their own experiences. It was their children who were called on to do the dirty work in Vietnam. And it was their children who came home in a body bag, or maimed or mentally disturbed, because of a war that was not their own – a war that in no way benefited them. The children of the rich were often able to avoid being drafted as they were studying at university (students were exempted from the draft), or alternatively they were given comfortable jobs as officers far from the horrors of war. Also, it was the workers who paid for most of the war, via their taxes.

A total of 2 590 000 Americans took part in the war at one time or another. Inevitably, there was interaction between them and the working class back home. The soldiers influenced their thinking, and vice versa. Many return­ing soldiers could doubtless agree with the following description, published in June 1971, of how far resistance had developed within the US military.

“The morale, discipline and battle worthiness of the U.S. Armed Forces are, with a few salient exceptions, lower and worse than at anytime in this century and possibly in the history of the United States. By every conceivable indicator, our army that now remains in Vietnam is in a state approaching collapse, with individual units avoiding or having refused combat, murdering their officers and non commissioned officers, drug-ridden, and dispirited where not near mutinous… While no senior officer (especially one on active duty) can openly voice any such assess­ment, the foregoing conclusions find virtually unanimous sup­port in numerous non-attributable interviews with responsible senior and mid-level officer, as well as career non-commissioned officers and petty officers in all services.

(…)

- They have set up separate companies, writes an American sol­dier from Cu Chi, quoted in the New York Times, for men who refuse to go into the field. It is no big thing to refuse to go. If a man is ordered to go to such and such a place he no longer goes through the hassle of refusing; he just packs his shirt and goes to visit some buddies at another base camp. Operations have become incredibly ragtag. Many guys don’t even put on their uniforms any more… The American garrison on the larger bases are virtually disarmed. The lifers have taken our weapons from us and put them under lock and key…There have also been quite a few frag incidents in the battalion. …

‘Frag incidents’ or just ‘fragging’ is current soldier slang in Viet­nam for the murder or attempted murder of strict, unpopular, or just aggressive officers and NCOs….Word of the deaths of officers will bring cheers at troop movies or in bivouacs of cer­tain units…Bounties, raised by common subscription in amounts running anywhere from $50 to $1 000, have been widely re­ported put on the heads of leaders whom the privates and Sp4s want to rub out.

Shortly after the costly assault on Hamburger Hill in mid-1969, the GI underground newspaper in Vietnam, G.I. Says, publicly offered a $10 000 bounty on Lt. Col. Weldon Honeycutt, the of­ficer who ordered (and led) the attack.

(…)

The issue of ‘combat refusal’, an official euphemism for diso­bedience of orders to fight – the soldier’s gravest crime, has only recently been again precipitated on the frontier of Laos by Troop B, 1st Cavalry’s mass refusal to recapture their captain’s command vehicle containing communication gear, codes and other secret operation orders.

As early as mid-1969, however, an entire company of the 196th Light Infantry Brigade publicly sat down on the battlefield. Later that year, another rifle company, from the famed 1st Air Cav­alry Division, flatly refused – on CBS-TV – to advance down a dangerous trail…’Search and evade’ (meaning tacit avoidance of combat by units in the field) is now virtually a principle of war, vividly expressed by the GI phrase, ‘CYA (cover your ass) and get home!’

That ’search-and-evade’ has not gone unnoticed by the enemy is underscored by the Viet Cong delegation’s recent statement at the Paris Peace Talks that communist units in Indochina have been or­dered not to engage American units which do not molest them.”

This account was published just six months before the US began withdraw­ing its ground troops and Nixon initiated his Vietnamisation policy (meaning that American soldiers were no longer to be directly involved in the fighting). The quote is from the Armed Forces Journal, an official army publication, and is included in a book by the eminent military historian Colonel Robert D. Heinl Jr.15 Heinl is not alone in writing about the disintegration of the American military. Such accounts have almost become a genre in their own right.16

Another example: “During the years of 1969 down to 1973, we have the rise of fragging – that is, shooting or hand-grenading your NCO or your officer who orders you out into the field. (…) The US Army itself does not know exactly how many … officers were murdered. But they know at least 600 were murdered, and then they have another 1 400 that died mys­teriously. Consequently, by early 1970, the army [was] at war not with the enemy but with itself’.”17

It was not the brutality of war as such that led to the disintegration of the US Army. The important thing in war is for soldiers to believe in what they are doing. During the Second World War, many soldiers were willing to fight fascism and defend democracy. However much US propaganda sought to present the Vietnam War as a fight for a better world, it soon became clear to the soldiers involved that this was not what the war was about. At the end of the Second World War, too, American soldiers had reacted rebelliously to government efforts to re-deploy them to fight the Communists in Italy and elsewhere.

Back home in the US, ordinary workers were strongly influenced by what their sons and brothers had experienced in Vietnam. And they did not just sit back and await developments. As early as 1965, some 25 000 people gathered in Washington, 20 000 in New York and 15 000 in Berkeley, Cali­fornia, to protest against the war. In April 1967, as many as 300 000 people demonstrated in New York.

A series of ‘moratoriums’18 were organised throughout the US by the two largest anti-war organisations. The largest of these protests took place on 15 October 1969. An estimated five million people took part in it in one way or another. They joined demonstrations, sit-ins, teach-ins and other organised activities. Some people did only small things, like lighting a candle or leaving their headlights on. In New York, the mayor proclaimed a day of mourning and ordered public flags to be flown at half mast. Soldiers in Vietnam also demonstrated their support, by wearing black armbands.

The largest demonstrations took place on 24 April 1971. 300 000 people assembled in San Francisco, and in Washington between 500 000 and 700 000. This was probably the largest political demonstration in the history of the country – at least up until 15 February 2003 when a million people gathered in New York to protest against the war in Iraq.

Protests were also organised at universities. During the post-war economic upswing, US universities and colleges had increasingly opened up, and by the late 1960s the students included millions of young people from work­ing-class backgrounds. Many of the largest and most militant protests took place at universities that were not Ivy League and could hardly be described as the preserve of the rich: Kent State, San Francisco State, and the state-run universities in Michigan, Maryland and Wisconsin. In the early 1970s, however, these protests began to wane. Different left-wing sects came to dominate the student movement and tear it apart with fruitless arguments. The anti-war movement, by contrast, now began to attract a great deal of support from organised workers.

The position of the Labour Movement

In the 1930s, the US Labour Movement grew in strength and became radi­calised at an astonishing speed. In the 1950s, however, union bureaucrats dominated. Ordinary workers were showing less inclination to take part in union activities, partly because their situation had improved but also be­cause of the hysterical anti-Communist mood in the early years of the Cold War. In the 1960s, union activities picked up again. Although the workers were better off financially, they were still doing the same dirty jobs and were still being ordered around by dictatorial managers. Many strikes ensued, not least in heavy industry, and the labour unions launched recruiting drives among farm workers, hospital staff and white-collar workers. But the union bureaucracy was a millstone around the movement’s neck.

The bureaucracy was personified by George Meany, president of the AFL-CIO, the largest union confederation in the world. He made no bones about his opinion regarding the Vietnam War. In May 1965, he declared that the AFL-CIO would support the war “no matter what the academic do-gooders may say, no matter what the apostles of appeasement may say”.19 In August 1966, the Executive Council of the AFL-CIO issued the statement that: “Those who would deny our military forces unstinting support are, in effect, aiding the Communist enemy of our country – at the very moment when it is bearing the heaviest burdens in the defence of world peace and freedom”.20

It is not easy for an opposition to make its voice heard when it is openly harassed and persecuted. In 1967, a resolution opposing the war was brought before the AFL-CIO Congress. 2 000 delegates voted against the resolution, six in favour. But in June 1969 the United Auto Workers, UAW, quit the AFL-CIO and set up the Alliance for Labor Action together with the Teamsters (transport workers). The Alliance called for an immediate end to the war.

As time passed, a growing number of labour unions came out against the Vi­etnam War. Individual unions began openly supporting anti-war demonstra­tions, and new members flocked to join them. By 1972, unions representing 4 million of the country’s 21 million workers had officially declared their opposition to the war. At the 1972 presidential election, half of all ‘union households’ voted for the Democratic candidate, George McGovern, who was demanding an immediate troop withdrawal from Vietnam. They did so despite the fact that for the first time in the organisation’s history, Meany had refused to give AFL-CIO support to the Democratic candidate.

However, the ground had begun to shake beneath Meany’s feet. The number of strikes, including wildcat strikes, increased. Even the traditional­ly conservative construction workers did not behave the way in which they were usually presented in the media. In June 1970, a reporter accompanied a group of activists visiting building sites in Chicago to distribute anti-war leaflets. He saw that 90% of the workers the activists talked to were against the war, and almost all felt it was really stupid to assault students for their opposition to it.21

The logic of the anti-war movement was such that people began to feel sympathy for the Vietnamese. In July 1977, an opinion poll asked the ques­tion: “Assuming that the President recommended helping Vietnam, would you like your representative in Congress to approve a plan to send food and medicine there?” 60% said yes and only 29% no.22

In the United States, no parliaments were stormed, no barricades were built and no presidents were deposed (at least not until two years after the US military had been pulled out). Nor was the working class well organ­ised and consciously fighting for a new society, such as the Swedish work­ing class when they ended the attempt to go to war in 1905, or the Russian working class in 1917, or the German in 1918. But special circumstances that have existed neither before nor since meant that the Vietnam War was ended nonetheless.

The movement of the Vietnamese people was part of the anti-colonial struggle that had successfully swept through the world in previous decades. This gave the Vietnamese people self-confidence and moral support from all who had been through a similar experience. They were strengthened further because they were not only fighting to get rid of something, but were also struggling for a better society. A society that they could see had improved the lot of many poor countries throughout the world. They were prepared to fight to the bitter end. The Cold War meant that they got large supplies of weapons from the Soviet Union.

Although Vietnam was a good place for capitalist exploitation, it was not of vital economic importance to US imperialism. A section of the American capitalists therefore began to feel that it might be better to cut their losses, when the war dragged on. The resolve of the American establishment to continue the war was further sapped by international protests. Giant rallies against the US war effort in Vietnam attracted workers and young people throughout the world, not least in Sweden, where the anti-war movement united the left. Olof Palme, then a government minister, caused an interna­tional sensation by joining a demonstration alongside the North Vietnam­ese ambassador.

In military terms, American military power was far superior to the Viet­namese. The US controlled the air space and could go on bombing for as long as they wished. Although the war was expensive, and was beginning to affect the economy, they still could have gone on for years. But the war could not be financed if the working class refused to pay for it. Nor could it be maintained if the working class refused to fight.

The American Labour Movement is, in some respects, different to the Eu­ropean. It is less organised and not as strong, but that also means that the bureaucracy is relatively weak. There is no Labour Party. The Communist Party has hardly any influence. There is no tradition of reformism and Sta­linism. In Europe the reformist leadership within the movement has been the main hindrance to the anti-war movement ever since the outbreak of the First World War, and the Stalinist bureaucracies since the degeneration of the Soviet Union. The small bureaucracy in the US Labour Movement is openly pro-capitalist. When American workers began to question official truths, there was almost nobody with authority to get them ‘on track’ again, i.e. almost nobody who could play the role of an ‘honest broker’ between the demands of the workers and the wishes of the capitalists. Almost noth­ing can dampen class conflicts once they break out. Had the American Government sought to press ahead with the war, the US would have been on the brink of revolution.

In 1975, after 28 years of war, imperialism was finally forced to leave Viet­nam. Once again the independent movement of the working class was deci­sive for defeating imperialism. Given the heroic struggle of the Vietnamese (backed up by many national liberation struggles throughout the Third World), the protests of the Labour Movement internationally, the weakness of the Labour bureaucracy in the US, the fact that US imperialism could afford to let Vietnam go, meant that the American workers opposition to the war brought the troops home.

__________________________________

1 www.vietnamwar.net/quotations/quotations.htm

2 www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Common_Courage_Press/WhoControlsHeroes.html

3 The memoirs of President Eisenhower: Mandate for Change, 1963

4 Robert K. Brigham: Battlefield Vietnam: A brief history. http://www.pbs.org/

battlefieldvietnam/history/index.html

5 US News and World Report, 4 April 1954. www.plp.org/vietnam/vn6.html

6 20 April, 1963. Ibid.

7 Douglas Valentine: Fragging Bob, 2001

8 Steve Forrest: The Tet Offensive.

http://easyweb.easynet.co.uk/~socappeal/1968/vietnam.html

9 Jim Hensman: Vietnam 1945, 1986

10 Seymour Hirsch: My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and Its Aftermath, 1970

11 Christopher Hitchens: The Trial of Henry Kissinger, 2001

12 Steve Forrest: The Tet Offensive,

http://easyweb.easynet.co.uk/~socappeal/1968/vietnam.html

13 BBC: War and protest – the US in Vietnam (1971),

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A715051

14 James Loewen: Lies My Teacher Told Me, 1995

15 Robert D. Heinl J: The Collapse of the Armed Forces, 1971

16 See for instance GI Resistance: Soldiers and Veterans Against the Viet Nam War.

A Bibliography, 1991

17 http://home.mweb.co.za/re/redcap/vietcrim.htm, unofficial website of the US Army’s

military police

18 A moratorium is defined in the dictionary as an agreed suspension of activity.

19 http://lists.village.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/Texts/Reviews/Smetak_US_

Labor_01.html

20 http://lists.village.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/Texts/Reviews/Smetak_US_

Labor_02.html

21 Phillip Foner: US Labor and the Vietnam War, 1989

22 New York Times/CBS News

War and Resistance is a translation of the Swedish book Draksådd, originally published in 2004. It analyzes the most important wars of the past hundred years. It examines the role of UN, civil disobedience and many other failed attempts to stop war. And as a contrast explains why other forms of resistance to war have been successful. This is Chapter 9.

It takes a whole night

to make a day

Javed Shaheen

Pakistani poet

The Arab people have for centuries shared a common language, reli­gion, culture and history. They lived in a territory that extended from Iraq in the east to Mauritania in the west. During medieval times their ru­lers were strong rivals to many European powers. But after that they went into a period of decline and were occupied by the Ottoman Empire, cen­tred on Turkey, and later Britain, France, Italy and Spain. To stop a new po­werful Arab nation emerging has always been a top priority of imperialism. For a long time they have skilfully used the game of divide and rule as me­ans to this end.

Various leaders in the region have played along with this, hoping thereby to maintain themselves in power. This has lead to one war after the other. But despite this, every once in a while, unity has been forged between workers of different religions and nationalities.

Divide and rule

When Turkey allied itself with Germany in the First World War, the Bri­tish promised the Arabs independence as a means of gaining their support against Germany. In October 1915, Sir Henry McMahon, the British High Commissioner in Egypt, wrote to the Sherif (Emir) of Mecca, Husayn ibn Ali, declaring that “Great Britain is prepared to recognise and support the independence of the Arabs in the regions within the limits demanded by the Sherif of Mecca”.1

In June 1916, Husayn led an Arab uprising and, together with the British, marched north to throw the Ottoman forces out of Trans-Jordan, Palesti­ne and Syria. The British forces were led by T.E. Lawrence, better known as “Lawrence of Arabia”.

But the British had no intention of allowing a strong Arab nation to deve­lop. Even before Husayn’s rebellion, they had reached a secret understan­ding with France and Russia. The Sykes-Picot Agreement, as it was known as, was made public by the Soviet government after the Russian revolution.2 Drawing lines on a map, the three big powers divided up the Arab region into spheres of interest.

Areas roughly equivalent to present-day Lebanon and Syria were to be­long to France. Jordan and Iraq fell to Britain, and Palestine was to be jo­intly administered by the British, French and Russians. The Agreement also allowed a limited autonomy for Arabs in some parts of the region, but Husayn inb Ali’s plans for an independent Arab nation were never even considered.

The British also sought the support of Jewish leaders in the First World War. After the successful Arab uprising against the Ottoman rulers, Lord Balfour, the British home secretary, wrote a letter to Lord Rothschild, le­ader of the Jewish community in Britain. In this letter , the so called Balfo­ur Declaration, he wrote that Britain would do its best to facilitate the esta­blishment of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine.

Most Jews, however, were not interested in settling in Palestine at this time. In 1914, 660 000 of the 800 000 Palestinian population were Muslims, a tenth were Christians, and less than a tenth were Jews.3

After the First World War, the League of Nations implemented the Sykes-Picot Agreement in all but name, apart from giving Palestine entirely to the British in 1920. Arab uprisings against this continued more or less througho­ut the period between the two world wars, causing Britain and France to reli­nquish direct control of the region little by little, but not before they had fo­und dependable monarchs (often imported) in whose hands they could safe­ly place the reins of power. In 1922 they let Egypt go, in 1932 Iraq and Sau­di Arabia, in 1943 Lebanon, in 1946 Jordan and Syria, in 1967 South Yemen, and as recently as 1971, Bahrain, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. This enabled them to sow division between Arabs. In practice, the French and British continued to control most of the Middle East until the end of the Se­cond World War, when the US emerged as the leading power.

One of the conditions of the British mandate from the League of Nations was that a homeland was to be created for the Jews. Despite this and the Balfour Declaration the British government did little to honour this pledge. As early as 1921, Winston Churchill, then minister for colonial affairs, issu­ed a White Book which declared that Jews would never be allowed political supremacy in Palestine (nor Arabs, either, for that matter).

United struggle

Arab and Jewish leaders had conflicting national interests, yet Arab and Je­wish workers often joined together in their struggle to win better terms from the colonial administration and private employers. One example is the conflict at the Nesher quarry and cement factory in the mid-1920s. When the factory was being built in 1924-25, Jews working there were paid 20 pia­stras an hour and worked an eight-hour day. The 80 Egyptians employed at the site were paid only 10 piastras an hour and had to work for nine or ten hours a day. When the Jewish workers went on strike, demanding 25 pia­stras an hour, recognition of their trade union and other improvements, they asked for and received the support of the Egyptian workers. After a two-month strike, most of the Jewish workers’ demands were met, but the Jewish owner fired the Egyptians. The Jewish workers then voted 170 to 30 to stay out until the Egyptians had been reinstated.

However, the Jewish trade union confederation Histadrut (which denied Arabs full membership until 1959) pressured the Jewish workers into re­turning to work. The Egyptians were sent back to Egypt. Jewish leaders were not the only ones to oppose all forms of joint struggle. The Arab le­adership was equally anxious. Nonetheless, in the decades up until the par­tition of Palestine, joint actions were also staged by Jewish and Arab bake­ry workers, railway workers, bus and taxi drivers, dock workers, oil workers and others.4

In the 1920s, Communist parties often played a crucial part in bringing Jews and Arabs together. Leopold Trepper, himself a Jew, and later to become a Soviet master spy in Hitler’s Germany, describes how in his memoirs.5 The party, originally dominated by Jews, founded an organisation called Unity (Ichud in Hebrew, Itachat in Arabic). Its programme was very simple.

> Fight to open up Histadrut (the Israeli trade union confederation) to

Arab workers and create an international trade union.

> Create opportunities for contact between Jews and Arabs, especially b

means of cultural events.

Unity was an immediate success. Towards the end of 1925, it had branches in Jerusalem, Haifa and Tel Aviv and in farming villages where Arab and Je­wish labourers worked side by side. The branches multiplied in number. In late 1926, the movement held its first national conference, attended by over a hundred delegates, of which forty were Arabs. The influence that the mo­vement began to exert on the kibbutz’s worried the Histadrut leaders, who failed to understand how Jews and Arabs could wage a joint struggle.

Unity was persecuted by the British occupying power, and opposed by Zio­nist organisations and reactionary Arabs. Trepper himself was constantly in and out of prison. But it was Stalin, not domestic repression, that destroy­ed the movement. Everywhere, Stalinist bureaucrats were replacing Ma­rxist internationalism with their own narrow nationalist policies. The Co­mintern (the Communist International) adopted a resolution in 1928 cal­ling for the “Arabisation” of the Palestine Communist Party. This was in line with the theory of “socialism in one country”, which meant that each nation was to pursue its own struggle. Accordingly, Stalin dissolved the Co­mintern in 1943.

More British deception

In 1936, Arab opposition to the British occupation escalated, resulting in what has been described as the first Intifada. In April, a general strike deve­loped into a full-scale uprising. The Arab leadership just managed to bring the movement under control. In October the strike ended. The British go­vernment responded with brutal repression. Among its tactics was one that has become highly popular with the present Israeli government – the de­molition of Arab housing.

The British government then set up the Peel Commission to determine how to gain control of the situation in Palestine. In 1937, the commission proposed dividing the country into a Jewish part (involving the forced re­settlement of a quarter of a million Arabs), an Arab part, and an area that the British would continue to rule themselves. The Arabs refused to accept the Peel plan, and local uprisings continued until 1939.

In that year, the British government changed its mind once again about the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. In another White Book, it offered Pa­lestine the prospect of independence in ten years time. This was partly due to the mass struggle of the Arab people, but also because Britain once aga­in wanted the support of the Arabs in the fight against Hitler. Jewish sup­port in the war was taken for granted.

The British declared that they would retain power in Palestine until such time as the Arabs were ‘ripe’ for independence. The 1939 White Book was incompatible with the mandate issued to the British by the League of Na­tions, and was denounced by the League’s Permanent Mandates Commis­sion. But the big powers were now preparing to settle their differences with war, and the League of Nations had become an anachronism.

During the Second World War the British government stopped Jewish emi­gration to Palestine, sometimes with catastrophic results. The Struma, a scarcely seaworthy ship, overcrowded with approximately 790 Rumanian Jews fleeing from Nazi persecution, arrived in Istanbul in December 1941. The Turkish authorities did not allow the refugees ashore and asked the Bri­tish if the ship could be allowed to sail to Palestine. Churchill’s government refused. The pro-German authorities in Bulgaria would not let the ship re­turn to their country. A two-month stalemate was ended when the Turkish authorities towed the ship out to sea without a proper engine, a sail or an anchor. After a night adrift on the open sea, the Struma sank, following an explosion. A Soviet submarine may have torpedoed the ship by mistake. Only one person survived. 6

An upswing for Zionism

Despite such tactics, the British imperialists failed in their bid to stop the flow of Jews to Palestine. During the Great Depression of the 1930s the US imposed tougher restrictions to halt the flow of immigrants, and with the German Nazis trying to annihilate the Jewish people altogether, many Jews considered resettlement in Palestine the only safe alternative.

Some Zionists organised themselves into guerrilla groups such as Irgun and Stern, and in pursuit of a Jewish state launched a violent campaign against both the British and the Arabs. Under Menachim Begin, who later beca­me prime minister, Irgun was responsible for the bombing of the King Da­vid Hotel in Jerusalem, where the British military HQ was located. Some 90 people died. Nor did Irgun and Stern hesitate to use terror tactics aga­inst the Arab population. In November 1947, they began driving Arabs out of towns where the population was mainly Jewish. Five months later, Irgun terrorists entered the village of Deir Yassin west of Jerusalem and slaugh­tered at least 150 people, mostly women and children. The Stern group was responsible for the murder of Swedish Count Folke Bernadotte, the UN’s emissary in the region. One of the Stern leaders was Yitzhak Shamir, who later succeeded Begin as Israeli premier.

Many Jews in Palestine were against both the practices and the aims of the two gangs. The leftist Zionist organisation Hashomer Hatza’ir (and a number of liberal Zionists) wanted to establish an independent secular Palestine.

More workers unity

After the Second World War, people revolted throughout the world against tyranny and colonialism. In Palestine, too, the struggle exploded. In April 1946, a major strike was launched in Palestine that developed into the lar­gest manifestation of solidarity between Jewish and Arab workers ever seen in the country.

Jewish and Arab postal, telephone and telegraph workers initiated the stri­ke and rapidly extracted far-reaching concessions. However, against the re­commendations of the union leadership they overwhelmingly turned the offer down. Then Jewish and Arab railway workers also came out on strike. A united struggle of all railway and postal workers was unprecedented, even middle and lower level white-collar government employees took part in the strike. Less than a week after the first postal workers had come out, around 23 000 government employees were on strike. Tens of thousands of wor­kers employed at British military bases, along with the petroleum workers in and near Haifa, considered joining the strike.7

This could have been the final nail in the coffin of the colonial administra­tion. However, the movement was quashed through the joint efforts of the Histradut leadership, right-wing Zionists, Arab nationalists, and PAWS’ (Pa­lestinian Arab Workers Society) conservative wing. Consciously or uncon­sciously, their actions paved the way for the bloody partitioning of Palesti­ne. Immediately after the strike ended, there was an upsurge in violence be­tween Arabs and Jews.

Independence and Israel becomes the US’ most trusted ally in the Middle East

To escape the mess they had created, the British raised the Palestine qu­estion in the newly-formed United Nations. The UN’s Special Committee for Palestine voted 33 to 13 in favour of splitting Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab part. Ten countries abstained from voting, among them Britain. In practice, therefore, Israel was created against Britain’s will. On 14 May 1948, the state of Israel officially came into being.

Encouraged and armed by the British, Arab states around Israel launched a war against the embryonic Jewish state. The Jordanian army was equip­ped and trained by the British and was led by a British officer, John Bagot Glubb. British Royal Air Force planes took part in the war. On 7 January 1949, the Israelis shot down four RAF planes.8 The British refused to com­ply with UN recommendations and open the country’s ports to Jews. They maintained their blockade of the Mediterranean to prevent reinforcements from reaching Israel.

Initially, the American administration also backed British policy in the re­gion. The Americans imposed an arms embargo on the new Jewish state and maintained it throughout the early stages of the war between Israel and the Arab states. Saudi Arabia was the United States’ largest and most impor­tant ally in the Middle East. That was where the oil was, then as now. The Americans had strongly backed the al-Saud family when it seized power in Saudi Arabia and proclaimed independence in 1932.

The American elite, however, were split on the issue. Some sympathised with the Israelis, and they were backed by others who viewed support for the Jewish state as a way of reducing Britain’s influence in the Middle East and thereby strengthening America’s position in the region. When a truce was declared, the US lifted its embargo.

Despite British military assistance, the Arab states were soundly defeated in the war. Israel seized more territories than had been allotted to it in the 1947 UN resolution to divide Palestine. By way of revenge, Jews who had long been living in Arab countries were brutally driven out. Arab Jews be­came an underclass in Israel.

For many years it was claimed that the Soviet Union supported the Palesti­nian cause from the outset, but this is not true. The Soviet Union voted for the creation of the state of Israel. After the Second World War, the Stalinist regime found itself at odds with its former ‘allies’ and cast around for sup­port elsewhere. As Britain was against the establishment of Israel, the Sta­linist bureaucrats saw the creation of the Jewish state as a blow to British aspirations in the region. Accordingly, they sent weapons to Jews in Palesti­ne via Czechoslovakia.

Later, the roles were reversed. In the 1950s, Egypt seemed to be planning to abolish capitalism. When Egypt nationalised the Suez Canal in 1956, Bri­tain, France and Israel invaded Egypt. The Soviet Union supported Egypt against Israel.

The Americans were totally against the invasion of Egypt, as it risked dama­ging their oil dealings in the region. President Eisenhower threatened a boy­cott unless Israel withdrew its troops from Sinai. In the end Israel complied.

However, in the 60s the US shifted its stance more firmly in favour of Isra­el. In Syria, capitalism and feudalism were abolished following a military coup in 1963. Iraq also began to shift towards the Soviet sphere. Saudi Ara­bia was a highly unstable, despotic state in which slavery was not formal­ly abolished until the 1960s. Revolution threatened the whole region. The US concluded that Israel was the state that would be its most reliable ally in the Middle East.

Israel was granted special privileges. The US providing it with the largest per capita amount of aid for civilian purposes ever granted to any coun­try. Israel has received seventeen times as much money per head of popu­lation as other countries received under the Marshall Plan for post-war re­construction in Europe. In addition, Jews outside Israel donate huge amo­unts to the Israeli economy every year.

In contrast to most poor countries, Israel has been permitted substantial trade restrictions on imports. At the same time, it has benefited from favo­urable export terms, particularly for exports to the US, which was its princi­pal trading partner for many years. In contrast to most poor countries, Isra­el could therefore develop into an industrialized country.

Palestinian resistance begins

The PLO (Palestine Liberation Organisation) was founded in 1964 at the initiative of Egypt’s President Nasser. It is an umbrella body for a wide ran­ge of organisations. The largest of these is al-Fatah, which has links to the Socialist International. Some of the other groups used to call themselves Marxist. The PLO has never had a cohesive ideology, apart from its earlier objective of crushing the state of Israel. Prior to 1967, the PLO had little support among Palestinians. It was not until after the Six-Day War in 1967, when many Palestinians came under Israeli occupation, that the PLO ga­ined mass support.

The PLO began its struggle with a guerrilla war, inspired by Vietnam and Cuba. Their base were the refugee camps in Jordan and Lebanon that grew up when many Arabs were driven out of Israel in 1948 and 1967. But the si­tuation differed considerably from Vietnam or pre-revolutionary Cuba. The PLO attacked a state that enjoyed the support of most of the population. There were no mountains or jungles for the guerrillas to hide in. Only open ground lay between the refugee camps and the guerrillas’ targets in Israel. Guerrilla war had no chance of succeeding.

The PLO’s reliance on guerrilla warfare, and later diplomacy, also made it eco­nomically and militarily dependent on the Soviet Union and reactionary Arab states. All the dictatorial Arab governments in the countries surrounding Isra­el treated the Palestinians badly seeing them merely as a means of diverting the struggle against their own regimes into a struggle against Israel.

The PLO soon fell out with the Jordanian king. He found the presence of another armed force in his territory unacceptable. It represented a threat to his despotic rule. In September 1970, “Black September”, he launched his armed attack against the PLO. Many Palestinians died, all were disarmed, and the PLO was thrown out of Jordan.

The PLO headquarters ended up in Tunis. Driven out of Jordan, defeated by Israel in Lebanon, isolated from the Palestinian people, their leader Yas­ser Arafat survived on handouts.

The Intifada

This was not the end of the struggle. On the contrary, it was the beginning of the real struggle. In December 1987, the Intifada began. The PLO’s ter­rorist activities had caused most Palestinians to become passive. Why do anything when there were heroes doing things for you? It was enough to cheer them on. But once the PLO was defeated the majority of Palestinians began to take control over their own fate.

The Palestinians were spurred to action by the terrible situation they fo­und themselves in (and still find themselves in). All Palestinians in the occu­pied territories, apart from a small middle-class, lived in abject poverty. Mil­lions were stuck in giant refugee camps. Those who did not live in the refu­gee camps were not much better off, usually occupying tumbledown houses with no sanitation. Unemployment was very high and poverty appalling.

On top of all this, the Palestinians had no legal rights whatsoever and were brutally repressed by the Israeli army. They had to put up with confiscation of their land, the destruction of homes belonging to the families of suspec­ted terrorists, arrests without trial for up to twelve months (and subject to extension), and curfews of up to 40 days’ duration.

It was the Palestinians themselves who financed the oppression. Two and a half times more was sucked out of the occupied areas in the form of ta­xes than was returned in the form of public investments. The tax authori­ties collected tax under military escort.

The Intifada was very different from the guerrilla warfare that had prece­ded it. It mainly took the form of large demonstrations and throwing sto­nes at Israeli soldiers. Between 1968 and 1975 there was an average of 350 ‘violent incidents’ a year in Israel/Palestine. During the first six months of the Intifada, there were 42 355 such incidents. The Intifada was an uprising that involved the entire population and was organised from the bottom up, without any interference from the PLO. Neighbourhood committees were set up to organise the protests and began to develop along democratic lines. Women were brought into the struggle. When the Palestinian economy col­lapsed under pressure from the Israelis, the neighbourhood committees be­gan organising community services such as food supply, education and he­althcare. It was the start of a revolutionary movement.

Israel responded by raising the level of oppression. In 1988, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin (who was later awarded the Nobel peace prize) ordered Isra­eli troops to “break demonstrators’ bones”.9 Amnesty International repor­ted that medical staff in prisons often found themselves “in conflict with medical ethics”.10 Torture was even sanctioned under Israeli law, which is unique for a supposedly democratic country. Since 1987, Israelis are allo­wed to exert “physical and psychological pressure against Palestinian deta­inees”.11

The Israeli violence failed to deter the Palestinians. Instead, it strengthened their resolve, and cemented a Palestinian national consciousness. Previously Arabs living in Palestine had seen themselves more as a part of the Arab nation than as specifically Palestinians.

The Intifada created major problems for the Israeli regime. For the first time since the partition of Palestine after the Second World War, Palestinian protests found a big response among Jews. Three years (for men) or two years (for women) of military service in the occupied territories – during which the soldiers were exposed to the hatred of the entire population, stone-throwing young Palestinians, and having to regularly beat and shoot civilians – took its toll. During and after the Intifada, tens of thousands of Israelis left the country on completion of their military service to try and find peace of mind in countries such as Thailand, Japan and the US.

The Israeli peace movement experienced an upswing and organised mass demonstrations that drew crowds of between 50 000 and 100 000, in a country of little more than four million people. Senior military officers also expressed strong doubts about the possibility of a military solution to the conflicts on the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip. They saw how the whole army was being demoralised.

The ground was prepared for the two movements to link up. But it never happened. Because on what program should they have fused? Dividing the area into a Palestinian state and a Jewish state? Or creating a secular state in which Palestinians and Jews have equal rights? Neither were, or are, a realistic alternative.

Two states?

As a result of the Intifada an agreement was reached in 1993 providing for a transitional period of Palestinian self-rule on the West Bank and Gaza. This was an extremely limited form of autonomy, and there has been no transition to independence. In fact, since then the possibility of achieving Palestinian independence has receded. Israel did initially agree to provide a certain amount of weapons to a Palestinian police force in the autonomous areas, as long as the police was controlled by people that had allied themselves with Israel. However, they will never be prepared to accept the presence of anything that could be a threat. Consequently, the Israeli army intervenes time and again in Palestine.

Nor does Palestine stand a chance economically. There is scarcely a Palestinian economy worth speaking of. About a third comes from foreign sources (foreign aid, Palestinian guest workers in other countries, etc) and a third from exports to Israel. Palestine is an economic dwarf compared with Israel. Israel has a population almost twice the size of Palestine and a GDP almost forty times as large.12

To get their economy moving, the Palestinians need help. The US is not going to provide it, and nor are the other rich countries. Olive oil is not as attractive as crude oil. Also, capitalism is currently undergoing a phase of economic decline, mass unemployment and crisis in the rich countries as well. In the absence of economic progress, poverty will continue and with it popular revolt. And further Israeli interventions.

Then there is the crucial problem of water. Many of Israel’s freshwater re­serves are in Palestinian territory. Of the West Bank’s water, 86% goes to Israel, ten per cent to the Jewish settlers and just four per cent to the Pale­stinians. The water is already beginning to dry up. As a result, saltwater is entering the wells. On the West Bank, Palestinians are having to buy 70% of their water from the Israelis, at a high price. In the Gaza Strip, a million Palestinians have to share 55 million cubic meters of water while 7 000 Je­wish settlers have 20 million cubic metres at their disposal.13Israel would ne­ver accept an independent Palestinian state taking control over the water in Palestinian territories.

There is also the problem of the many Palestinian refugees. Jews are auto­matically entitled to settle in Israel, but Israel has always refused Palestinians the same right. The UN refugee organisation UNRWA has more than three and a half million Palestinian refugees on its books. A third of them are in UNRWA camps.14 Israel is not going to accept them coming to live in an independent Palestinian state as this would mean that Palestine had a larger population than Israel.

Finally, there are 1.4 million Palestinians living in Israel itself. On what side of the border should they live if two truly independent states were establi­shed? During the latest uprising many Palestinian Israelis begun to take a more active part in the protests. Not surprisingly, the Israeli government views Palestinians holding Israeli citizenship with suspicion. Many have lost their jobs and been denied access to higher education.

A Palestinian state would give the Israeli government an excuse and an op­portunity to throw them out. In all probability, the two-state solution would lead to a bloody wave of ethnic cleansing.

Secular state?

The PLO’s earlier call for a secular state with equal rights for Jews and Pa­lestinians is also doomed to failure. It is no surprise that the PLO has now abandoned the idea. Israel is even less likely to accept a state in which Jews are in a minority than to agree to a separate Palestinian state with a popula­tion larger than Israel’s own. Also, the Israelis had good reason to view the PLO’s ‘secular state’ with suspicion. A closer look at the proposal shows that it would mean a majority of the Jews being thrown out of Palestine.

The PLO Covenant from 1969 states: “The Palestinians are those Arab na­tionals who, until 1947, normally resided in Palestine regardless of whether they were evicted from it or have stayed there. Anyone born, after that date, of a Palestinian father – whether inside Palestine or outside it – is also a Pa­lestinian”. But in Article 6, it states: “The Jews who had normally resided in Palestine until the beginning of the Zionist invasion will be considered Pa­lestinians”. This means that the millions who arrived after 1947 could not become Palestinian citizens. Where would they go? And how would they be ‘convinced’ that they have to leave Palestine?

Jews and Palestinians cannot be brought together in a secular state unless the fundamental social and economic problems of the area are solved. Ten­sions are too great. That is why virtually everyone is seeking a way out by dividing the country. But a genuine two-state solution could cause a major disaster. There is no ‘practical’ solution to the problem – within the frame­work of the capitalist system.

The solution is a set-up that may appear ‘abstract’ or ‘theoretical’ today. The only kind of unity that is possible in the Middle East is working class unity across all national, ethnic and religious boundaries. Only the working clas­ses share a common interest. Beneath all the prejudice, disappointment and fear, this truth remains. Suspicion and hatred can be overcome through jo­int struggle against a common enemy and for a socialist future. There is no alternative if the goal is peace and prosperity. All tyrannical regimes in the region must be overthrown. Only the working class has the strength to ac­complish this, and its strength has grown in the half-century that has passed since the state of Israel came into being. Today, the majority of Jews and Palestinians in the region are no longer peasants and farmers but workers.

Marxists in the 1920s, convinced of the need for a joint struggle for so­cialism, found ways of uniting Jews and Arabs. They simply followed the example of the Russian Bolsheviks. Before 1917, Russia was a country wracked by anti-Jewish pogroms. But in October of that year the Russian working class massively supported the Bolsheviks, half of whose central committee members were of Jewish origin.

If the workers used their strength to establish a socialist federation thro­ughout the Middle East, with self-determination for all national and ethnic groups, the region’s economic problems could be solved. Turkey uses only a small part of its water reserves. In pursuit of a better society for all, pe­ople could share Turkey’s water, Israel’s technological expertise, the sheiks’ riches, the oil, and all the money that would otherwise be wasted on we­apons. The problem is not a lack of resources but who owns them and how they are used. A region torn apart by imperialism has to be reunited.

_____________________________

1 From Great Britain. Parliamentary Papers, 1939, Misc. No. 3

2 Ronald Stockton: Teaching the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1993

3 Justin McCarthy: Population of Palestine, 1990

4 Yossi Schwarz: Arab-Jewish Workers’ Joint Struggles Prior to the Partition of Palestine, June 2003.

See www.marxist.com/MiddleEast/arab_jewish_struggles1.html

5 The Great Game, 1975

6 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struma

7 www.marxist.com/MiddleEast/arab_jewish_struggles2.html

8 Mitchell Bard: The war of 1948, 2003

9 www.cnn.com/WORLD/9511/rabin/profile/

10 Amnesty International Country Report: Under Constant Medical Supervision, 1996

11 ibid

12 CIA World Fact Book

13 Evert Svensson: Vägen till Palestina, tvĺ folk och ett stycke jord, 2002

14 www.shaml.org/resources/facts/palestinian_refugees_fact_sheet.htm