THE WOMAN who personally ordered the death of 368 Argentinean sailors and then counselled the nation to rejoice!' surely has no right to brand anyone else an accomplice Te. what was checavely a cal trom Lady Thatcher for the West to make war on Serbia has found surprising resonance on the left.
'Margaret Thatcher is right", editori. alised Tribune, in a deliberate bid 10 make headlines. The Guardian and The New Statesman reiterated long-standing calls for United Nations military intervention in the former Yugoslavia.
Some 15 Labour MPs. stretching from Peter Mandelson to one or two of the Campaign Group, signed a statement arguing for the deployment of ground troops in the country. Even John Smith is now calline for air strikes.
Since the Gulf War, such old-school gunboat diplomacy has been retheorised ventionism'. Michael Meacher, Labour's development and co-operation spokesperson, and Martin Shaw, a former revolutionary socialist and peace activist, now an academic at Hull University have both this year set out their case in detail in the left press.
The basic idea is that in 'complex community", in the shape of the United Nations, has a duty to intervene militarily to sort the situation out.
The Somalis and the Kurds in Irag are the generally cited examples; Bosnians in the former Yugoslavia, we are told, should be next.
On this reading, those who put the traditional left case against imperialist up the shells that rained down on Srebrenica. But the record of 'humanitarian intervention" in practice has not been a good one.
It hardly needed a multi-national task force, complete with fighter-bombers, helicopter gunships, armoured vehicles and heavy artillery, to tackle gangs of AK-47-toting Somali teenagers in battered pick-up trucks. More money has been spent on media coverage of the mvasion than on the food sumolies that Operation Restore Hope is supposedly about ensuring.
Somalia's problems are rooted in British, French and Italian colonisation of the area and, more recently, US and Soviet powerplays in the Hom of Afsee taming back to crock to a alrecu military presence can scarcely be painted as 'doing God's work', whatever former president Bush may claim.
Saddam Hussein was no less barbarous towards the Kurds when he was systematically armed by the West as a regional counterbalance to ran. yet 1988's poison gas attack on Halabja. Kuang mousads, was no. seen as tea French paras - next stop Bosnia? son enough for British companies to stop supplying the technology that let it happen, let alone cause for military intervention. It took a threat to western oil supplies to necessitate that Some 200,000 lives perished as smart shelters and pilots went on "turkey shoots' of retreating troops on the Basra road. Yet rather than allow a Kurd/Shia insurrection to topple Saddam, "coalition' foroes deliherately held hack Would such 'humanitarian intervendon un ine former Tugoslave result ut a progressive outcome? Thatcher's position is the natural expression ber bourgeois enthusiasm for the "free market" Croatian government of Franjo Tudman asamst ne socialist sero gover ment of Slobodan Milosevic. In fact, the sell-off of state property is more advanced in the areas under the latter's jurisdiction.
The most likely effect of direct Westem combat involvement would be to would draw in Albania, and in Macedonia, which would draw in Grocce. The result would be a generalised conflagration in the Balkans. Even in the best case, military occupation would only replicate the effect of Tito's Stalinist dictatorship, putting the conflict into cold storage.
Hypocrisy
The fundamental question for socialcommunity so frequently wheeled out by the humanitarian interventionists? Dominic Lawson, editor of the rightwing magazine The Spectator, advanced an excellent workine definition in a rocent article backing Thatcher's stand: "Those who regularly and reliwhat exactly is this 'international community' interventionists? ably support the actions and utterances of the govemment of the US:' Thus the hypocrisy of our humaniLarians is readily apparent. By Lawson's ghts, Israel is patently part of the inte national community. et its territori expansionism in Gaza and the West Bank stands condemned by the selfsame UN invoked in the name of Somalia, Iraq and the former Yugoslavia.
Since the carly 1980s, combined annual US military and economic aid to Israel has been entirely in grant form, in effect lifting the burden of Israel's foreign debt. This has allowed the country to continue its bloody repression of the Palestinians through military spending which at times amounts to more than 20 per cent of gross domestic product.
UN cloak
In recent years, the US has preferred to cloak itself in the mantle of the United Nations, presented as a kind of super parliamentary democracy of the nation states, where the United States and Bangladesh both have one vote apiece. ane argument is as convicans as tic one that insists that British Steel boss Sir Alistair Frame has no-more political clout than an unemployed Ravenscraig The US systematically bribes, cajoles, bullies and horse-trades to ensure its political dominance of the UN, a task facilitated by the collapse of the USSR. Take the case of resolution 678, which mandated war on iraq, and look at what happened to the various members of the Tunne socurby coucu.
Only Cuba and Yemen, one of the world's poorest countries, against. Minutes later, a senior US dip lomat told the Yemeni ambassador: go frequently wheeled out by the humanitarian No humanitarian - but urging intervention "That was the most expensive "no" vote you cret cast.
Within three days, the US stopped its $70 million aid programme. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund suddenly raised problems, while Saudi Arabia expelled 800,000 Yemeni guestworkers.
Those who meekly towed the line were paid off handsomely. Turkey got $8000 million worth of military hardware, the US Export Import Bank underwrote the construction of Sikorski helicopter plant in the country, and at Washington's urging. received $1500 loans from the World Bank and IMP Egypt got "debt forgiveness' of $14,000 million, Syria was given the go-ahead to finished the bloodbath it had started in Lebanon, and China was offered areturn to diplomatic legitimacy in the wake of Tiananmen Square. And so on and so forth, all the way to the turkey shoot.
The socialist case has to be butter, not guns. As humanitarian interventionists are so keen on the UN. let us consider the United Nations Development Programme's Human Development Report 1992, which calls for a 50 percent cut in absolute poverty worldwide, primary health care and sale water for all, the versal basic education and 80 per cent access to family planning by the year 2000. ANALYSIS This could be achieved by a 3 per cent annual cut in global military spending. tax, debt write-offs to eliminate the hand over to industrialised countries every year, and the removal of tariff barriers against third world exports.
As conceived by their proposers. thece ideas are utonian. "he schi-same profit system which is so happy to throw its military weight about in the third world will never change its priorities to embrace production for human need. Nevertheless, the statistics serve toillustrate a mere fraction of the attainments that will be possible after the ecablishment a democratically planned global socialist economy.
Timex strikers join Burnsall's poket line by Bob Smith NOW IN its tenth month, the strike by 19 mainly Punjabi Burnsall workers in Birmingham is surviving brutal assaults.
Employer Jimmy O'Neil allegedly threatens pickets and supporters regularly. He has yet to be charged for two hosSOCIALIST OUTLOOK No.41. May 1, 1993. Page 14 cent assault led to the arrest of strikers! Only after a three hour picket of Smethwick police station were the latest victims released after being charged with Public Order offences.
GMB, the sinkers' union, is discouraging labour movement delegations invited to the picket line by the strikers. The cowardly bureaucrats argue that anti-union laws ureact the seizure of unions funds. The union also backtracked on mobilising solidarity from workers at factories that supPly Burnsalls. Solidarity groups have had successes: car firm Jaguar have stopped buying from Burnsalls and the London Support group raised £6,500.
Desailidonations write Bir. mingham Support Group. Shaheed Udam Singh Centre, 346 Soko Road, Birmingham B21, telephone (021) 551 2258.
failure of its official leadership.
socialism, to tackle this crisis.
war Tory high command. using the full powers of the state. capitalist rule. capitalism. survived only by repressing their own working class. tradition of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky unleash the power of the working class - the overwhelming majority establish its own class rule. o link and unite the various struggles of workers, the unemploved Facing mass unemployment, rampant employers equipped with savage anti-union laws, and a war on hard-won education, health and welfare services, the working class in Britain faces a real crisis - an avoidable crisis created by the historic Socialist Outlook exists to fight for a new type of working class leadership, based on the politics of class struggle and revolutionary The capitalist class, driven and politically united by its own crisis, its requirement to maximise profits at the expense of the workers. has been given determined, vanguard leadership by a brutal classThe Tory strategy has been to shackle the unions with legislation, and to fragment and weaken the resistance of the working class and oppressed, allowing them to pick off isolated sections one at a time.
In response, most TUC and Labour leaders have embraced the defeatist politics of 'new realism', effectively proclaiming total surrender on every front, while ditching any pretence that they offer a socialist alternative. Every retreat and concession they have made to the employers and the government has simply fuelled and encouraged the offensive against jobs, wages, conditions and union New realism is the latest form taken by the politics of reformism. seeking no more than improved conditions within the framework of Socialist Outlook rejects reformism, not because we are against fighting for reforms, but because we know that the needs of the working class - for full employment, decent living standards, a clean environment, peace and democracy - can never be achleved under Nor, as we argued long before the collapse of Stalinism, could these demands ever be achleved under the bureaucratically deformed workers states and degenerated USSR, whose regimes We are a marxist current, based not on the brutish totalitarian parodies of state marxism, nor on the tame, toothless version of "marxism' beloved by armchair academics, but the revolusonary Our socialist alternative is not based on parliamentary elections or illusions of peaceful legislative change. We fight to mobilise and of society - to topple the corrupt and reactionary rule of capital and We struggle against fragmentation by building solidarity, working