In the last three years a series of key liberation struggles have entered a phase of negotiations and even negotiated settlements - Palestine, South Africa, El Salvador and Ireland among others. These negotiations and peace deals have opened a widespread debate on the left internationally about whether this represents victory or defeat for the liberation forces, and even in some sections of the left about whether a new modus vivendi with imperialism is possible. Here PAUL CLARKE opens the discussion with a personal contribution to the debate.
Each situation has to be analysed individually, but it is hard to deny that a pattern is emerging. Sinn Fein in Ireland, for example, specifically refers to the peace processes in and Palestine as a model for what they are attempting. No analysis of specific peace deals is thus possible without reference to the problems about how to continue the process.
The outcome, as we know, was the defeat of the Sandinistas by the UNO coalition in the 1990 elections and the peace deal negotiated in 1992 in El Salvador.
The international context facing such struggles was a very different one to that which had existed in the 1959-60 period when the Cuban revolution was won and a workers state consolidated. Then, for its own reasons, and within a general framework of 'peaceful coexistence', the Soviet leadership had been prepared to underwrite Cuba and to militarily defend it. By the 1980s, and especially with the advent of Gorbachev, Soviet aid to liberation movements was radically curtailed. The advice given to Nicaragua was notto follow the Cuban example and make a radical break with capitalism.
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overall balance of class forces internationally. Indeed this is precisely the context in which I Even as late as the mid-1970s the Soviet leadership was prepared to act differently. In 1976, when southern Angola was invaded by South African troops, Russian pilots flew thousands of Cuban troops and Russian military advisors to the country to drive the South Africans out. The US, traumatised by the recent defeat in Vietnam, dared not intervene. But the militarisation offensive of Reagan and the rise of perestroika radically changed the international context in which such struggles were fought. South Africa and Palestine do not however fit easily into such a picture of the worsening international balance of forces for liberation movements. The mid-1980s township insurgency in South Africa, and the Intifadah in Palestine in the late Back issues available 1. The challenge of lesbian and gay liberation, by Socialist Outlook. 2. The surviral of the Irish national question by D. R. O'Connor 50 pence each from Socialist Outdick, POBos 1109, London, *รท2UL.
the leaderships of national liberation movements place their own strategy and tactics. 1980s, threw reaction in both regions onto the defensive. For both the apartheid regime and the Israeli leadership, a peace deal became urgent if the conditions for capitalist stability were to be maintained. In particular, the recession in the South African economy and the impatience of foreign investors represented an immense pressure on Pretoria to do a deal. And under Bush, Israel's Washington benefactor became increasingly politically embarrassed by perpetual crisis in a part of the world which it regards as crucial to its strategic interests. Nonetheless, in both these arenas the liberation movements had taken a heavy toll in terms of repression and were themselves faced with great problems about how to continue the struggle.
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