'Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is the touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism is to be tested. V.I.Lenin
Economic & Philosophic Science Review                       Subscriptions (£20 p a ) & circulation:0786 799 6074    [P&P Bulletin Publications PO BOX 50, London SW 17 9NL] [Post Office Regd]                    
No 1098 July 17 2001                                                                                                                                              25p 

Ignoring the crisis of the imperialist system which is crying out for revolutionary movement, and tinkering instead with pointless re-juggling of too-scarce resources within a relentlessly alienating culture, will only condemn the working class to far fouler race-divided circumstances than any yet met or envisaged. Workers only have a solution to capitalism's dog-eat-dog dictates by ending the domination of society by bourgeois class rule, exploitation, and chauvinist one-upmanship, which inevitably leaves its all-pervasive influence on the entirety of human relationships throughout the system, right down the line. No-one surviving under market forces can escape the stain of capitalist cut-throat competitiveness, envy, frustration, and fear. The racist tensions in Britain's cities as the economic crisis deepens are the inevitable result. Facing the facts about endemic racism is no welcome for worsening conditions, 1933 German-CP style, but the only way to ensure that Revisionist delusions about 'democracy' or 'good imperialism' being an answer to 'fascism' or 'bad imperialism', - a disastrous Stalinist mistake of the 1930s and even worse subsequently, - do not survive. The supposed distinction between fascism and all other colonial imperialist brutality is utterly false history, and more dangerous today than ever before. The fake-"left" philistine fear of Marxist science is the BNP's best ally, courtesy of bankrupt PC reformist moralising, and nervousness about the Crash.

A world without race prejudice is a utopian daydream for as long as capitalism continues. And worse than useless in Britain, for example, - due to 'reformism', - is the political and civil chaos of attempted 'solutions' to racism.

Various 'left' agitation to expose police institutional racism; or employment discrimination; or de-facto housing and schooling segregation by local councils; or multicultural self-isolationism; or fascist infiltration; etc, etc, always leaves minds fixed on 'reforming' a way forward towards better race-relations.

But this is the worst trap of all. Racist backwardness must certainly never stop being identified and denounced. 'Moral' persuasion, however, is doomed to failure for the duration of the capitalist-system deepening crisis; and much of the self-righteous opportunism of Political Correctness could end up driving the white proletariat into the arms of the BNP.

Allegations of 'concealed sympathy for racism' miss the point entirely. Increased support for the BNP would be no joke. Every scrap of every variety of 'Britain First' social chauvinism represents a potential complete political disaster for the people of Britain, and is setting off in the wrong direction entirely. And a fascist Britain would guarantee total catastrophe for everyone from civil war and foreign military adventures. It is to get round the reality of race-prejudice towards a realistic political path forward that the uselessness of various delusions of 'reformist moral pressure and example' is being challenged.

The segregated self-defensive touchiness of Bradford and other cities is already the 'reformist' reality. The 'race-relations' industry has already had its massively long innings, but prejudice still rules because, quite simply, capitalism still rules. The notion that the EPSR 'welcomes' the race disturbances because its Marxist science has constantly explained that imperialist divide-and-rule tactics would inevitably be initially successful once the world capitalist crisis starts to bite is simply sick sour grapes. It is a question of facing facts. Either race prejudice will cloud white proletarian political judgement or it won't. And that it is already demonstrably doing so is hardly surprising when the influence of 500 years of 'triumphant British imperialism' is factored into the majority cultural make-up of the country.

Equally daft is the attempt to slur the EPSR with "after Hitler our turn" Stalinist strategic backwardness. It is precisely the EPSR which alone has ever fully dissected the really treacherous Revisionist catastrophe of Stalinism in disarming whole generations of would-be communists internationally with 'Popular Front' class-collaborative complacency which eventually betrayed everything, including the world's first workers state itself, in the imbecile belief in a 'good imperialism' which could be trusted to help defeat the 'really evil imperialism' (i.e. fascism).

It is precisely the PC 'moral persuaders' of the present racist crisis (who want to believe that determined 'anti-fascist action' can remove sick prejudice from the scene) who are prolonging the class-collaborative delusions of "after Hitler our turn', or more exactly the delusion that 'anti-fascist democracy' in Spain could halt Franco. 

'Anti-fascist democracy' is as close to a contradiction in terms as it is possible to get. Illusions in 'democracy' will either be let down by its treacherousness (Italy 1921, Germany 1933) or its feebleness (Spain 1936-39). 

The full fatalness of British Stalinist idiocy in deluding itself that 'democratic protest on the streets', etc, prevented a fascist takeover of Britain in the late 1930s (imperialism's anti-slump and anti-communist strategies in fact decided that the Axis Powers provided sufficient warmongering aggression to suit their purposes) finally became clear when the CPGB liquidated itself into the reformist 'Democratic Left' in the 1990s.

All 'democratic anti-fascism' needs treating like the plague for as long as capitalism survives. The sheer folly of regarding 'democratic' imperialism as 'preferable' to 'fascist' imperialism is clear from the historical record.

Hitler-German imperialism was egged on all the way by monopoly-finance capital, both inside Germany and beyond, as a classic 'bulwark against communism'; and Western political appeasement gave fascist aggression a virtual open door all the way to Munich 1938 and beyond, selling out Ethiopia, Spain, Austria, Saarland, Sudetenland, Albania, etc, so as to deliberately set up a German imperialist invasion of the Soviet workers state; a monstrous warmongering stunt which blew up in the West's faces when the Nazis shrewdly decided in 1939 that West European degenerate state leaderships (full of Quislings, Vichyites, appeasers, and pro-fascists of every description) were easier pickings than the USSR.

Throughout the 1930s, the overwhelming 'democratic' choice within Western world domination was for appeasement and collaboration with German, Japanese, and Italian imperialist aggression. Only with later propaganda hindsight did the 'evils of fascism' start to get massive publicity, but in reality for doing no differently in Manchuria, Ethiopia, Albania, Russia, from what Western colonial barbarism had already been perpetrating for generations on every continent to suppress local resistance to imperialist domination, including concentration camps, hostage taking and shooting, collective punishment massacres, etc, etc, etc, - all of which had long been perfected by British and French colonialism, for example, prior to Germany, Italy, and Japan muscling their way belatedly onto the world imperialist-domination scene.

To pretend now that any capitalist-imperialist regime that has ever existed, or will ever exist, has the slightest interest in suppressing completely all so-called 'fascist' methods of political agitation and control is just suicidally naïve, and treacherous to the working class in the extreme.

It is the imperialist SYSTEM itself which will play the race card when it suits any crisis strategy, as it has always done in the past, either directly through governmental regular parties, or indirectly via discreetly-encouraged or tolerated specialist 'fascist' movements whose national-chauvinism could be more easily deniable if things go wrong.

To rely on well-meaning single-issue 'anti-racism' movements to 'shame governments into anti-fascism by democratic action', etc, will be even more suicidal.

This middle-class spirit of 'left' pressure will correctly denounce racism in Oldham, but effectively turn a blind eye to the constant total murderous genocide which is daily driving the 6 million Palestinian nation off their homeland with the full connivance of the whole Western world behind Zion colonialism. 

This 'anti-fascist' petty-bourgeois self-righteousness swallowed refuse-tip amounts of pure Goebbels-style propaganda (pure fascism) to allow Western imperialism to demonise the Serbs as 'uniquely guilty' for the all-round civil-war mayhem perpetrated by all the squabbling national minorities (as the Yugoslav patchwork federation was deliberately broken up by Western capitalist intervention) so that the NATO powers themselves could do the blitzkrieg bombing of Serbia to break its national resistance to imperialist domination.

As the NATO bombers and missiles roared in to wreck defenceless Serb cities and its entire economic structure, was this blitzkrieg in any danger at all of anti-Nazi league-type protests stopping it?

What was so different about Serbia being blitzkrieged into submission by US imperialism, to Czechoslovakia being blitzkrieged into submission by German imperialism for "maltreatment of ethnic Germans in Bohemia and Sudetenland", or Poland for "maltreatment of ethnic Germans in Silesia"??? 

The viciously anti-communist Guardian has just published a journalistic gem by Pilger (equally philosophically distant from the remotest Marxist sympathies) usefully spelling out the West's exact military and trade connivance, and deliberate propaganda support, for Suharto's 30-year-reign of barbaric fascist terror in Indonesia:

Last year, the International Monetary Fund offered the post-Suharto government a "rescue package" of multi-million-dollar loans. The conditions included the elimination of tariffs on staple foods. "Trade in all qualities of rice has been opened to general importers and exporters," decreed the IMF’s letter of intent. Fertilisers and pesticides also lost their 70% subsidy. This means that farmers such as Sarkom are likely to go bankrupt and their children forced to find work in the cities. Moreover, it gives the green light to the giant US food grains corporations to move into Indonesia.

The double standard embodied in these conditions is breathtaking. Agri-business in the west, especially in the US and Europe, has been able to produce its infamous surpluses and develop its export power only because of high tariff walls and massive domestic subsidies. The result has been the soaring power of the west over humanity's staples. The chief executive of the Cargill Corporation, which dominates the world trade in food grains, once boasted, "When we get up from the breakfast table each morning, much of what we have eaten cereals, bread, coffee, sugar and so on -  has passed through the hands of my company." Cargill's goal is to double in size every five to seven years. This is known as "free trade".

"I went to prison for 14 years so that this would not happen," said Sarkom. "All my friends, those who were not killed, went to prison so that the power of big money would not take us over. I don't care what they call it now -  global this or that. It's the same force, the same threat to our lives."

That remark refers to a chapter in Indonesia's recent past that western politicians and businessmen would prefer to forget, although they have been among the chief beneficiaries. Sarkom was one of tens of thousands imprisoned when General Suharto seized power in Indonesia in 1965-66   - the "year of living dangerously" - deposing the nationalist president Sukarno, who had led Indonesia since the end of Dutch colonial rule. Scholars now estimate that as many as a million people died in a pogrom that was directed primarily at Indonesia's communist party, the PKI. Sarkom was 19 when he was taken away. He is trying to write down in an exercise book his memories of the horrors he experienced. He was for many years on Buru island, where thousands were dumped, at first without housing, food and water. On the day I went to see him, he had gathered a group of friends for me to meet, men in their 60s and 70s, who had also been tapols - political prisoners released since the fall of Suharto in 1998. Two were teachers, one a civil servant, another a member of parliament. One man was imprisoned because he refused to vote for Suharto's front party, Golkar. Several were PKI members. Adon Sutrisna, a teacher, told me, "We are the people, the nation, that the world forgot. If you know the truth about what happened in Indonesia, you can understand clearly where the world is being led today."

A few miles from Sarkom's farm is a hump of earth overgrown with mustard flowers. It is a mass grave, but it has no markings - 35 years after the murders, the families of the victims, believed to be a dozen, are still too frightened to place a headstone. However, in the post-Suharto era, many Indonesians are slowly overcoming the fear that has blighted a generation; throughout the countryside, families have begun to excavate the remains of their loved ones. They are furtive figures of the night, occasionally glimpsed on the rim of a paddy or a riverbank. The older witnesses recall rivers "jammed with bodies like logs"; in village after village, young men were slaughtered for no reason, their murder marked by rows of severed penises.

I have a friend in Jakarta whose name is Roy. Others call him Daniel. These are just two of many aliases that have helped keep him alive since 1965. He is one of a group of remarkable revolutionaries who went underground during the long years of Suharto's repression, the years when the World Bank was tutoring its "model pupil" - emerging at critical moments to lead spears of a clandestine opposition movement. On several occasions, this led to his arrest and torture. "I survived because they never knew it was me," he said. "Once, a torturer yelled at me, 'Tell us where Daniel is!" "  

In 1998, he helped bring on to the streets the students whose courageous confrontations with troops using British supplied anti-riot vehicles played a critical role in finally bringing down the dictator.

Roy took me back to his primary school where, for him, the nightmare of Suharto's rule began. As we sat in an empty classroom, he recalled the day in October 1965 when he watched a gang burst in, drag the headmaster into the playground, and beat him to death. "He was a wonderful man: gentle and kind," Roy said. "He would sing to the class, and read to me. He was the person that I, as a boy, looked up to...I can hear his screams now, but for a long time, years in fact, all I could remember was running from the classroom, and running and running through the streets, not stopping. When they found me that evening, I was dumbstruck. For a whole year I couldn't speak."

The headmaster was suspected of being a communist, and his murder that day was typical of the systematic executions of teachers, students, civil servants, peasant farmers. "In terms of the numbers killed," reported the Central Intelligence Agency, "the massacres rank as one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century". The historian Gabriel Kolko wrote that "the 'final solution' to the communist problem in Indonesia ranks as a crime of the same type as the Nazis perpetrated". According to the Asia specialist Peter Dale Scott, western politicians, diplomats, journalists and scholars, some with prominent western intelligence connections, propagated the myth that Suharto and the military had saved the nation's honour from an attempted coup by the Indonesian communist party, the PKI. Until then, Sukarno had relied on the communists as a counterweight to the army. When six army generals were murdered on September 30,1965, Suharto blamed the PKI. Since the dictator's fall in 1998, witnesses have spoken for the first time and documents have come to light strongly suggesting that Suharto, who had military control of Jakarta, opportunistically exploited an internecine struggle within the army in order to seize power.

What is also no longer in doubt is the collaboration of western governments and the subsequent role of western big business. Indeed, globalisation in Asia was conceived in this bloodbath. For Britain, the goal at the time was to protect its post-colonial interests in Malaysia, then threatened by "confrontation" with an "unstable" Sukarno - a 1964 Foreign Office file called for the "defence" of western interests in Southeast Asia, a major producer of essential commodities. The region produces nearly 85% of the world's natural rubber, over 45% of the tin, 65% of the copra and 23% of the chromium ore. Of Indonesia, Richard Nixon wrote, "With its 100 million people and its 300-mile arc of islands containing the region's richest hoard of natural resources, Indonesia is the greatest prize in Southeast Asia."

Sukarno was a populist as well as a nationalist, the founder of modern Indonesia and of the non-aligned movement of developing countries, which he hoped would forge a genuine "third way" between the spheres of the two superpowers. He could be a democrat and a demagogue. He encouraged mass trade unions and peasant, women's and cultural movements. Between 1959 and 1965, more than 15 million joined political parties or affiliated mass organisations that were encouraged to challenge British and US influence in the region. With three million members, the PKI was the largest communist party in the world outside the Soviet Union and China. According to the Australian historian Harold Crouch, 'the PKI had won widespread support not as a revolutionary party but as an organisation defending the interests of the poor within the existing system'. It was this popularity, rather than any armed insurgency, that alarmed the Americans. Indonesia, like Vietnam to the north, could "go communist":

In 1990, the American investigative-journalist Kathy Kadane revealed the extent of secret US collaboration in the massacres of 1965/66 that toppled Sukarno and brought to power Suharto, who at the time was little known outside western intelligence circles. In a series of interviews with former US officials, she concluded, "They systematically compiled comprehensive lists of communist operatives. As many as 5,000 names were furnished to the Indonesian army, and the Americans later checked off the names of those who had been killed or captured."

In 1966, the US ambassador in Jakarta assured Suharto that the "US is generally sympathetic with and admiring of what the army is doing". The British ambassador, Sir Andrew Gilchrist, reported to the Foreign Office: "I have never concealed from you my belief that a little shooting in Indonesia would be an essential preliminary to effective change." Having already armed and equipped much of the army, Washington secretly supplied Suharto's troops with a field communications network. Flown in at night by US Air Force planes from the Philippines, this was state-of-the-art equipment, whose high frequencies were known to the CIA and the National Security Agency. Not only did this technology allow Suharto's generals to coordinate the killings, it also meant that the highest echelons of the US administration were listening in. Suharto was able to seal off large areas of the country. Archive film of people being herded into trucks and driven away exists; but that is all. To my knowledge, the fuzzy photograph published here (see cover) is the only pictorial record of the actual killings in this Asian holocaust.

It ought to be salutary for journalists these days to heed the important role that western propaganda played then, as it does now. British intelligence manipulated the press so expertly that Norman Reddaway, head of the Foreign Office's Information Research Department (IRD), boasted to Ambassador Gilchrist, in a letter marked "secret and personal", that the spin he and his colleagues had orchestrated - that Sukarno's continued rule would lead to a communist takeover - "went all over the world and back again". He describes an experienced Fleet Street journalist agreeing "to give your angle on events in his article...i.e., that this was a kid-glove coup without butchery". Roland Challis, who was the BBC's Southeast Asia correspondent at the time, believes that the cover-up of the massacres was a triumph for western propaganda. "My British sources purported not to know what was going on," he told me, "but they knew what the American plan was. There were bodies being washed up on the lawns of the British consulate in Surabayo, and British warships escorted a ship full of Indonesian troops down the Malacca Straits, so that they could take part in this terrible holocaust. It was only much later that we learned the American embassy was supplying names and ticking them off as they were killed. There was a deal, you see. In establishing the Suharto regime, the involvement of the IMF and the World Bank was part of it. Sukarno had kicked them out; now Suharto would bring them back. That was the deal.'

With an ailing Sukarno powerless and Suharto about to appoint himself president, the US press reported the Washington backed coup not as a great human catastrophe but in terms of the new economic advantages. The military takeover, notwithstanding the massacres, was described by Time magazine as "The West's Best News in Asia". A headline in US News and World Report read: "Indonesia: Hope...where there was once none." The renowned New York Times columnist James Reston celebrated "A gleam of light in Asia" and wrote a kid-glove version he had clearly been given. The Australian prime minister, Harold Holt, who was visiting the US, offered a striking example of his sense of humour: "With 500,000 to a million communist sympathisers knocked off," he said, "I think it's safe to assume a reorientation has taken place."

Ralph McGehee, a senior CIA operations officer at the time, whom I first interviewed almost 20 years ago, described the ousting of Sukarno in Indonesia as a "model operation" for the US-run coup that got rid of Salvador Allende in Chile seven years later. "The CIA forged a document purporting to reveal a leftist plot to murder Chilean military leaders" he wrote, "just like what happened in Indonesia in 1965." He says the Indonesian massacres were also the model for Operation Phoenix in Vietnam, where US-directed death squads assassinated up to 50,000 people.

In November 1967, following the capture of the "greatest prize", the booty was handed out. The Time-Life Corporation sponsored an extraordinary conference in Geneva which, in the course of a week, designed the corporate takeover of Indonesia. It was attended by the most important businessmen in the world, the likes of David Rockefeller, and all the giants of western capitalism were represented. They included the major oil companies and banks, General Motors, Imperial Chemical Industries, British Leyland, British-American Tobacco, American Express, Siemens, Goodyear, the International Paper Corporation, US Steel. Across the table were Suharto's men, whom Rockefeller called "Indonesia's top economic team". Several were economists trained at the University of California in Berkeley. All sang for their supper, offering the principal selling points of their country and their people: "Abundance of cheap labour...a treasure house of resources...a captive market." Recently, I asked one of them, Dr Emile Salim, if anyone at the conference had even mentioned that a million people had died in bringing this new business friendly government to power. "No, that was not on the agenda," he replied. "I didn't know about it till later. Remember, we didn't have television and the telephones were not working well."

The Indonesian economy was carved up, sector by sector, at the conference. In one room, forests; in another, minerals. The Freeport Company got a mountain of copper in West Papua (Henry Kissinger is currently on the board). A US/European consortium got West Papua's nickel. The giant Alcoa company got the biggest slice of Indonesia's bauxite. A group of US, Japanese and French got the tropical forests of Sumatra, West Papua and Kalimantan.

A Foreign Investment Law, hurried on to the statutes by Suharto, made this plunder tax-free for at least five years. Real, and secret, control of the Indonesian economy passed to the IMF and the World Bank through the Inter-Governmental Group on Indonesia (IGGI), whose principal members were the US, Canada, Europe and Australia. Under Sukarno, Indonesia had few debts. Now the really big loans rolled in, often straight into pockets, as the treasure house of resources rolled out. Shortly before the Asian financial crash in 1997, the IGGI godfathers congratulated their favourite mass murderer for having "created a miracle economy".

Flying into Jakarta, it is not difficult to imagine the city below fitting the World Bank's description of Indonesia.  A "model pupil of globalisation" was the last of many laurels the bank bestowed. That was almost four years ago, in the summer of 1997. Within weeks, short-term global capital had fled the country; the stock market and currency had crashed, and the number of people living in absolute poverty had reached almost 70 million. The next year, General Suharto was forced to resign after 30 years as dictator, taking with him severance pay estimated at $15billion, the equivalent of almost 13% of his country's foreign debt, much of it owed to the World Bank.

From the air it is the industrial design of the model pupil that is striking. Jakarta is ringed by vast compounds, known as economic processing zones. These enclose hundreds of factories that make products for foreign companies: the clothes you buy on the high street, from the cool khakis of Gap to the Nike, Adidas and Reebok trainers that sell in the UK for up to £100 a pair. In these factories are thousands of 	mostly young women working for the equivalent of 72 pence per day. At current exchange rates, this is the official minimum wage in Indonesia. which, says the government, is about half the living wage: and here, that means subsistence. Nike workers get about 4% of the retail price of the shoes they make - not enough to buy the laces. Still, they count themselves lucky: they have jobs. The "booming, dynamic economic success" (another World Bank accolade) has left more than 36 million without work. At a factory I saw, making the famous brands, the young women work, battery-style, in temperatures that climb to 40 degrees centigrade. Most have no choice about the hours they must work, including a notorious "long shift": 36 hours without going home.

Clinging to the factories, like the debris of a great storm, are the labour camps: Hobbesian communities living in long dormitories made from breeze blocks, ply-wood packing cases and corrugated iron. Like the majority of humanity who are not touched by the delights of McDonald's and Starbucks, the internet and mobile phones, who cannot afford to eat enough protein, these are globalisation's unpeople. They live with open, overflowing sewers and unsafe water; for many, up to half their wages go on drinkable water. Through their homes run stinking canals dug by the former colonial masters, the Dutch, in the usual vainglorious attempt to recreate Europe in Asia. The result is an urban environmental disaster that breeds mosquitoes; today, a plague of them in the camps has brought a virulent form of dengue fever, known as "break-back fever". After several visits here, I was bitten and took two months to recover. For the undernourished young children in the camps, however, dengue often means death. It is a disease of globalisation; the mosquitoes domesticated as the camps grew and as the sweatshop workers migrated from rural areas, having been impoverished largely by World Bank programmes that promote export cash crops over self-sustaining agriculture.

They live in cell-like rooms, mostly without windows or ventilation, in which eating and sleeping are tuned to the ruthless rhythm of shiftwork in the factories. During the monsoon season, the canals rise and flood, and more plastic materialises to protect possessions: a precious tape player, posters of the Spice Girls and Che Guevara. I almost tipped over a frying pan of sizzling tofu. There are open paraffin fires and children darting perilously close. I watched a family of five perched on a patch of green, gazing at the sunset through a polluted yellow haze; tiny bats circled overhead; in the distance were the skeletal silhouettes of unfinished skyscrapers. It was an apocalyptic glimpse of a "globalised"  world that Blair and Bush say is irreversible.

A code of conduct issued by the American company Gap says: "Dormitory facilities [must] meet all applicable laws and regulations related to health and safety, including fire safety, sanitation, risk protection and electrical, mechanical and structural safety." Because these dormitories are not on the factory site, however, Gap and the companies they contract to make their products are not liable. Consumers humming into Gap's numerous stores in Britain might reflect on this non-liability - as they pay for smart shirts made by people who, on the wages they are paid, cannot afford even the buttons, let alone a decent place to live.

Ten miles from the camps, along the toll road owned by Suharto's daughter (he distributed the national power grid among his children; banks and vast tracts of forest were tossed to generals and other cronies), lies downtown Jakarta. This is the approved face of the global "model pupil". Here you can find McDonald's with sugar-plump children on Ronald's knee, and shopping malls with Versace leather coats at £2,000, and a showroom of Jaguar cars. One of the smartest hotels is the Shangri-la. There are four wedding receptions here every Sunday night. Last December, I attended one that cost $120,000. It was held in the grand ballroom, which is a version of the ballroom of the Waldorf Astoria in New York, complete with chandeliers and gold-leaf arches. The guests wore Armani, Versace and real diamonds, and dropped cheques in a large box. There was an eight-tier cake with the initials of the couple embossed in icing; and the holiday snaps of them on a world tour were projected cinema-size. The guests included former cronies of the deposed Suharto and the chief representative of the World Bank in Indonesia, Mark Baird, a New Zealander, who looked troubled when I asked him if he was enjoying himself. The World Bank says its mission in Indonesia is "poverty reduction" and "reaching out to the poor". The Bank set up the $86 million loan that built the Shangri-la, which, shortly after the wedding attended by Baird, sacked most of its workers when they went on strike for decent pay.

The Gotham City skyline of downtown Jakarta is mostly banks, many of them empty, and unfinished buildings. Before 1997, there were more banks here than in any city on earth, but half of them have gone bust since the "dynamic" economy collapsed beneath the weight of its corruption. During Suharto's 30-year dictatorship, a cataract of "global" capital poured into Indonesia. The World Bank lavished more than $30 billion. Some of this went to worthwhile programmes, such as literacy; billions went elsewhere - $630 million was spent on a notorious "transmigration" programme that allowed Suharto to colonise the archipelago. Migrants from all over Indonesia were sent to occupied East Timor, where they controlled the economy. The recent blood-letting in Kalimantan (Borneo) was directed against Madura islanders who had been shipped in to "develop" the territory. In August 1997, an internal World Bank report, written in Jakarta, confirmed arguably the greatest scandal in the history of "development" -  that "at least 20 to 30%" of the bank's loans "are diverted through informal payments to GOI [Government of Indonesia] staff and politicians".

Seldom a month would pass when Suharto was not being congratulated by western politicians for bringing "stability" to the world's fourth most populous nation. British politicians were especially appreciative, beginning with Harold Wilson's foreign secretary, Michael Stewart, who in 1966 lauded the dictator's "sensible economic policies". Margaret Thatcher called Suharto "one of our very best and most valuable friends". John Major's foreign secretary, Douglas Hurd, championed the Suharto regime's "Asian values" (the unctuous code for lack of democracy and abuse of human rights). In 1997, Robin Cook's first trip abroad included Indonesia, where he shook hands warmly with Suharto - so warmly that a colour photograph of the pair of them was chosen, bizarrely, to illustrate the Foreign Office's report on human rights in the world.

They all knew, of course. Amnesty filled cabinets with evidence of Suharto's grisly record. Milosevic and Saddam Hussein were wimps by comparison. Shortly before Cook flew in, an exhaustive investigation by the foreign affairs committee of the Australian parliament concluded that Suharto's troops had caused the deaths of "at least" 200,000 East Timorese, a third of the population. In New Labour's first year in office, Britain was the biggest weapons supplier to Indonesia.

This made sense - the arms trade is one of globalisation's great successes and Indonesia, the model pupil, has played a vital role. When the "global economy'' (i.e., unfettered capitalism) took hold in Britain in the early 80s, Margaret Thatcher set about dismantling much of Britain's manufacturing, while restoring the country's arms industry to a world leader, second only to the US. This was done with veiled subsidies, of the kind that underwrite and rig the "free market" in the west. Almost half of all research and development funds went on "defence"; and the export credit guarantee department (ECGD) of the Department of Trade and Industry offered "soft loans" to third world regimes shopping for hi-tech sabres to rattle. That many had appalling human rights records and internal conflicts and/or were on the verge of war with a neighbour (India, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Israel) was not a barrier. Indonesia was a major recipient of these virtual giveaways. During one 12-month period, almost £1 billion of ECGD money financed the sale of Hawk fighter-bombers to Indonesia. The British taxpayer paid up; the arms industry reaped its profits. The Hawks were used to bomb villages in the mountains of East Timor -  and the Foreign Office lied about for years, until Cook was forced to admit it. Since then, the Hawks have bombed the West Papuans as they have struggled to free themselves.    

Pic:Jakarta's 'economic processing zones' are appalling - open sewers and unsafe water are commonplace.

This total joke of relying on the West's "anti-fascist traditions" for challenging capitalist society's racist breakdown in Bradford, Oldham, etc, could be further exemplified by emphasising US imperialism's complete controlling responsibility for installing Pinochet's fascist regime in Chile for more than 20 years, drowning working-class resistance in blood which foolishly trusted the Revisionist contaminated "no military-dictatorship traditions in Chile" delusions of the Allende 'Socialist Unity' government.

The message is clear: Where imperialism wants a bit of hardline 'fascist' rule to cow the working class with, then all the "opposition democratic protest" in the world will not prevent it.

The only answer to capitalism's deliberate and inevitable success in being able to get the working class divided along racial lines, and to the imperialist state's undoubted potential to install an openly 'fascist' regime at some future stage of the economic crisis when control of the working class becomes more and more difficult, - is to start openly fighting for the dictatorship of the proletariat now. Without the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist system, nothing will stop the imperialist epoch from dragging the whole world back into total warmongering and fascist catastrophe once again.

Emergency schemes now to try to reverse the potential racist effect of de-facto segregated housing and schooling in Britain’s multi-racial cities are worthy enough but doomed to total sterile uselessness as far as 're-integrating' the working class is concerned, to 'prevent any future racist divisions'.

The very fabric of capitalist society is endlessly divisive. The hire-and-fire exploitation system of cut-throat commercial competitiveness inevitably means one multinational corporation’s employees versus another multi-national corporation's employees for survival when markets start to turn down; or one company-town in shipbuilding versus another company-town, one of them to be left with nothing; or some of the factories of one company versus other factories of the same company when orders start to dry up and closures are needed, etc, etc, etc.

Inside a single factory or one-centre firm, individual employees are thrown into competition with each other for job survival.

And even when a slump is not on the cards, then the same bitter rivalry, envy, and suspicions of unfairness are at work all the time over promotions, or overtime bonuses, or labour conditions, or tea-breaks, or whatever.

And outside the factories, exactly the same competition is always going on under capitalism's individualist 'morality' of self-interest to secure the best school places against other claimants, or the best place on the council-house waiting list, or the best tactics for making the best progress in the private housing market, etc, etc, etc.

Everything about life under capitalism is geared to competition, conflict, and envy, - especially when a slump starts looming.

In such a challenging society, it is 100% guaranteed that self-protective clannishness will be one of the obvious reactions among the 'hands' and their families facing the hire-and-fire system, clinging together via affinities of family, place of origin, nationality, ethnicity, race, or religion.

As long as capitalism rules via hire-and-fire in the marketplace, etc, this self-protective clannishness, suspicious or fearful of all others, will hold sway. And the moment that serious economic difficulties return, the sheer chaotic unevenness and anarchic unfairness (or deliberate injustice) with which the axe falls, guarantees that envy and resentment will start to dominate all capitalism's other natural rivalry emotions.

And it hardly requires any organised deliberate racist agitation to start to play on these frustrations to turn the slightest provocation or accident into blazing hate-filled anger. It will continually recur spontaneously anyway, such is the cultural meanness or small-mindedness with which the capitalist rat-race scars everybody, shrivelling much of the natural generosity of the human spirit which will often be commendably anti-racist in small doses in a localised setting but which doesn't stand a chance of rising to the universal "black and white unite and fight" utopian reformist delusions of petty- bourgeois PC 'morality'. Even 'liberal' papers recognise this:

As the simmering racial tensions of England's northern towns have boiled over into riots, the reality of segregated schools and neighbourhoods has become apparent even to children.

'Some of them had parents who sat on their doorsteps all night worrying that rioters were going to come down the street and invade their homes,' says St Hilda's headteacher, Howard Buckley.

Ofsted acknowledged 'high levels' of racial tension in Oldham and pointed to 'tensions in the supply of places relating primarily to the desire of ethnic minority families to send children to specific schools very close to where they live'. Poor families without cars are not keen for their children to walk to school through white areas.

But there are different understandings of the race divide. 'Segregation is an unhelpful word. Perhaps clusters is a better term to describe what has happened here,' says Richard Gore, the council's ethnic minorities officer.

'It's a phenomenon common not just in Oldham, but in other cities you will find communities keen to stay together.'

It is easy to appreciate why the Asian population feels safer living together but the original reason was economic.

'When the first people came over here they did not qualify for council housing and faced racism in trying to find private accommodation,' says local Councillor Abdul Jabbar. 'So people clubbed together and bought the cheapest, most run-down housing because it was all they could afford.'

St Hilda's is a Victorian Church of England primary with not a single Christian pupil and no Asian teachers. Outside identical red-brick terraced houses march down windswept streets, typical northern working-class housing.

The inhabitants are all of either Bangladeshi or Pakistani origin. White families generally live a little further away from the city centre.

'There is the feeling that schools have to repair the damage done where the housing situation has developed into exclusively white or Asian areas,' says Buckley.  'The only way forward is far pupils to interact before the racial stereotypes are entrenched.'

Janet McLaren, head of Littlemoor primary, has brought 30 pupils with her today. For many it will be the only time they mix with ethnic minority children before they go to secondary school.

This lunch is part of efforts by teachers and Oldham education authority to stem racial stereotypes developing in these children.

'We know each other because our classes have done things together. But we're not friends because we don't see them after school; they live far away,' says Slima, pointing at the white girls.

TEN-YEAR-OLD Sarah is ripping a vegetable samosa apart with suspicion. 'It's too spicy, ah don't like it,' she says, refusing an onion bhajhi from Slima, aged nine.

The Observer has discovered that Gurbux Singh, head of the Commission for Racial Equality, visited Oldham early in May and was horrified. He urged Ministers to investigate discrimination weeks before the riots broke out. Reports into racism in Burnley and Rochdale, obtained by this newspaper show that local councils across the Pennines knew their communities were in crisis.

'IN TOWNS ACROSS the Pennines it is possible to talk about an "Asian quarter", where degrees of segregation are significantly higher than in other parts of the country,' says Tariq Madood of Bristol University's Ethnicity Research Centre. 'Bangladeshis and Pakistanis are the two most segregated groups in the country, and in these Pennine towns it is even more pronounced.' 

Now everyone is paying the price of those years of neglect - the police, who have felt the full force of local Asian fury; local and national politicians, shamed by their own inaction; and, most of all, the ordinary people (black and white) in Oldham, Burnley, Bradford and a host of other northern towns who live with the daily reality of ethnic hatred.

Gripped by poverty and unemployment, pushed into segregated, failing schools and fearful of a police force they see as hostile, many British Asians live in the same cities as their white counterparts, but inhabit very different worlds.

Now a new generation is pushing through, throwing off the more subservient attitudes of their elders and demanding radical change. For many the only surprise is that the outbreak of unrest has not happened earlier.

Now northern councils are finding it nearly impossible to break the cycle of segregation that is reinforced by the education system and the attitudes of local white people, who view British Asian quarters as little more than ghettos.

Gareth Swarbrick, a senior housing officer at Rochdale Council, said: 'Over the past decade there has been a concerted effort to encourage the British Asian community to move out of their traditional areas, but it is very difficult.' One group of Bangladeshi families has been persuaded to move to a new canalside development, but it is a rare success.

Mohammad Pasha has spent 35 years in Rochdale helping to run the local Pakistan Welfare Association. It was only recently that the council gave him a grant to help run a drop-in centre for the elderly. But the money barely covers the utility bills. Rochdale's British Asians, mostly huddled in a tight network of dilapidated terraces near the railway station, have been ignored for years, he said.

'Asians are concentrated and ignored. Their properties are ignored, their welfare is ignored. There are no grants; no improvements.'

The picture is similar just across the Pennines in west central Halifax. An Irish club and a Ukrainian church pay testament to previous waves of immigration, drawn by the textile mills. The Asians were the last to come, but they have stayed. As the mills collapsed and the jobs dried up, segregation and alienation began. White families moved up the hill on to sprawling white working-class estates. Now contact between the races is rare. It is likely to be rarer after the riots last weekend just down the road in Bradford.

'About 80 per cent of whites have no contact with ethnic minorities. Now, after what has happened, they will have seen their stereotypes confirmed,' said Naj Hussain, a community worker with the British Muslim Association just across the Pennines in Halifax.

Tension is running so high that the slightest rumour could set alight a whole neighbourhood. Unknown to the vast majority of its citizens, it could have happened in Halifax last week. Last Wednesday the rumour mill about a National Front attack was churning so fast that local British Asian shops closed. Some parents took children home early from school.

At the heart of their problem is an appalling relationship with the police. Many British Asian youths distrust traditional authority and complain of a constant, low level of harassment that they believe is racially motivated.

Certainly last week's violence in Bradford, while being sparked by the presence of a handful. of National Front agitators, rapidly turned into a full-on battle against the police.

Project leader Hafiz Abdul Malik said: 'Children who have grown up in the last 10 years have grown up on the streets. They have learnt what the streets taught them.' 

There is no doubt that whites also believe they are under attack from the British Asian community, and it is here that the BNP is seeking to exploit this issue to win support. Rhona Norton, 42, was threatened with a gun by several British Asian youths in a car. During the recent violence she was so terrified that she sent her youngest daughter to Manchester to stay with a relative. She has just removed another daughter from a predominately British Asian school. The chasm between the two communities appears to be growing wider.

'I think what has happened in Oldham so far was the tip of the iceberg,' she said.

Mick Treacy, head of Oldham's BNP branch, is determined to take full advantage of white fears. The far-right party, polled 11.2 per cent in the Oldham seat where Treacy stood in the general election. 

The BNP insists that it condemns violence and that it is the NF and far-right terrorist groups such as Combat 18 which have targeted Asian communities in an attempt to provoke the riots.

The town's riot scars have not even begun to heal, and sporadic racist attacks have continued. Treacy's sights are now firmly set on winning council seats in next year's local elections.

So far his party has been the only real winner in this year's violent summer.

In a revolutionary situation, however, class interest would be able to cut across all the petty religious, racial, national and ethnic divisions within the proletariat, - but in revolutionary conditions alone, where the clear threat to everyone's survival from international fascist warmongering (i.e. the normal imperialist-system crisis situation) forces a response to a party of Marxist-Leninist conscious leadership. 

Only chronic continuing Trot and Revisionist theoretical confusion prolongs this delay in building a party of deliberate proletarian-dictatorship communist revolution in the workers movement, - every conceivable variety of doubt or muddle holding back from the necessary conclusion, hoping for example to advance crabwise into a Bolshevik position via "starting with firm left demands at first, plus a declaration that socialism is the aim, plus occasional favourable references to Marxism in the hope that this can't do much harm", etc, etc, etc. With this cowardly total paralysis of leadership, the wretched opportunists of the 'Socialist Alliance' and the SLP creep tentatively forward into reformist-doomed 'anti-fascist action'.

Their careerist philistine fears to openly enthrone Marxist-Leninist science as the only proven guide to anti-imperialist struggle and understanding international economic crisis, particularly stumbles on Kautskyite doubts and fears that 'super-imperialism' will ever again 'allow' the free market to collapse into a worldwide slump.

There is even broader caution, beyond Keynesian voodoo, over any commitment about how imminent a major imperialist crash might be, quite obviously due to the sheer brain-cracking and computer-cracking difficulty of working out an equation with, in some senses, literally billions of variables; but possibly partly also due to a political hesitancy to be too adamant about the shape, dimensions, and timing of the crisis to come in view of the shocking setback to accepted absolute assumptions when the Soviet workers state self-liquidated.

But outline explanations for that startling phenomenon have been put forward by the EPSR (see Perspectives 2001) and have begun to be elaborated and argued for as not only not inconsistent with an overall attempted Marxist analysis of the phenomenon of the world’s first workers states, but as actually providing more insight into that history than ever before.

The question of imperialist crisis and collapse is a separate area of Marxist science. The classical economic and revolutionary analyses made frequent and full propaganda use of attempting to rouse workers to ever-sharper levels of awareness and determination about impending capitalist economic disasters, reasonably enough.

Especially when based on collected evidence from capitalism's own sources and admissions, it would seem scarcely a favour to workers to forego drawing their attention to bourgeois economic panic, even if it does sail close to a description of imminent disaster.

Blairite economic guru and former Observer editor Will Hutton is currently blurting out: 

"We're hurtling into recession. The world economy is on a knife-edge."

He goes on:

We have had a lucky 10 years, but our luck is running out. The mid Seventies, early Eighties and early Nineties were disfigured by nasty recessions. At various times in between, since we began the era of floating exchange rates and exponential growth of capital flows, there have been terrifying moments when it seemed that the world economic system was built on sand. But it has proved much more resilient than we had any reason to expect. There was a regional recession in Latin America for most of the 1980s and Asia did not look too bright after the financial crisis in 1997, but despite some bank collapses the industrialised West has carried on regardless. There may be interruptions but the basic movement is always upwards.

Except this time. Events that, until now, have occurred in a manageable sequence are happening simultaneously, when world institutions are at their feeblest and American economic leadership at is the best empty-headed and self-seeking. Latin America and Asia, which have had their financial crises and economic slumps separately, are now having them together, just as Japan stagnates and the US has hit the buffers.

The Clinton administration had the wit not just to carry on opening up the globe to US financial capital and corporate interests but to organise massive bailouts when an individual country's difficulties menaced the functioning of the system. Mexico in 1994, Asia in 1997, Russia and Brazil in 1998 and, latterly, Argentina and Turkey have all been the recipients of large IMF and US Treasury support measures, with the IMF working to US instructions.

In essence, stricken governments have had to accept the necessary dollars to stave off speculative pressure, but at the price of massive austerity and promising to keep their economic and financial systems open to US multinationals and investment banks.

In 1972, Richard Nixon signalled American intent when he declared that the US needed 80 per cent of the industrialised West's trade surplus as a matter of right in order to finance its military ambitions and a trade deficit it was unwilling or unable to correct. The object of US financial diplomacy, he openly acknowledged, was to ensure that the dollar remained the overwhelmingly important unit of account for international business, even though the US only comprised one-fifth of world GDP. Hence a system of floating exchange rates based on the dollar. Thus the US could pay for its massive network of overseas base complexes and its phenomenal trade deficit in its own currency without any check; it could regard the rest of the world, as long as it opened up its trade and financial systems to US business, as the new American frontier.

For the last 30 years, the world has lived with this Faustian pact. The profits of US multinationals have risen at 10 per cent per annum, twice the rate of domestic profits growth, for most of this time. Massive inflows of European and Japanese savings have supported American living standards despite a trade deficit that is now 4 per cent of GDP. In return, the world has had the right freely to export to an American economy growing without constraint because that is how the system has been set up.

The system was already creaking in the last years of the Clinton presidency; Americans had ceased to save and the US economy's ability to meet its side of the bargain - underwriting the rest of the world's prosperity - was reaching its limits. Now the limit is reached. Worse, 30 years of deregulation and rolling back the welfare state have left the US with feeble automatic stabilisers. The US is about to plunge into recession, necessarily taking the rest of the world with it, and with no internationally agreed mechanisms to manage the consequences or get us out of the mess. The Bush administration has said it is against bailouts and economic co-operation as a matter of philosophic principle. The world stands on the abyss.

The US economy is no longer big enough to justify our acceptance of American rule on US terms.

But Europe is not united and Bush has no intention or interest in engaging with the issue. As a result, the world's leaders will issue a final communiqué saying everything is all right because they cannot say anything else - and the anti-capitalist protesters will damn them all while having nothing to suggest as an alternative. Those who the gods wish to destroy they first make mad.

Simultaneously as this week began, the markets-crash threat of national default was still swirling around Argentina:

Financial markets were gripped by fears of a full-blown emerging country crisis last night amid mounting expectations that Argentina could be forced to default on its $128bn (£90bn) debt burden.

With the country's stock market plunging and overnight interest rates soaring, Argentina's finance minister, Domingo Cavallo, sought to boost investor confidence by pledging draconian cuts in spending and a crackdown on the black economy to bring the country's budget back into balance.

But economists were sceptical about the chances of success. "Argentina has a solvency crisis, not a liquidity crisis," said one analyst. Another added: "All of Wall Street is like the townspeople who are afraid to tell the emperor he is not wearing any clothes, because they are hoping to get a buck from Argentina."

Other leading Latin American countries were infected by the contagion from Buenos Aires, with Brazil's currency hitting new lows against the US dollar. In Mexico, share prices and the peso were also down on fears that Argentina could trigger another Latin American debt crisis.

The Federal Reserve in Washington refused to comment on rumours that it had met secretly to discuss the financial and political woes of Latin America's third largest economy, where recent problems came to a head this week when the government was forced to pay dearly to refinance a small part of its debts.

Analysts at the Washington think tank, G7 Group, said: "Argentina managed to place $850m in short-term debt, allowing it to meet debt obligations due at the end of this week. But the cost was high and the government cannot afford to continue rolling over debt at these rates:'

Fears that Argentina may be forced to restructure its debt prompted a mass exit from emerging countries, such as Mexico and Russia, which had recently been star performers.

On the foreign exchanges, Latin America's woes coupled with a fresh wave of profits warnings from the hi-tech sector led to a hefty fall in the value of the dollar.

The IMF and the White House rejected any prospect of additional backing. "I don't expect anything along those lines," said Thomas Dawson, the IMF's chief spokesman.

Leading experts remained gloomy over Argentina's chances of staving off a debt default. Rudi Dornbusch, a, renowned US economist, said 'The non-payment of debt will happen."

Meanwhile, the carnage of profitability and jobs in the world's No 1 growth industry, - telecommunications, swept on internationally through Marconi, Nortel, Ericsson, Philips, Siemens, and finally Nokia, adding to the already dismal downturn news from Compaq, Motorola, and Yahoo, in the crucial US technology sector, recording either huge losses, massive job cuts, or crippling profits forecasts.

The scene is being set for worldwide revolutionary anti-imperialist struggle. This is the most vital issue to take into the anti-racist agitation in Britain's cities. On the perspective of the necessary revolutionary overthrow of the collapsing capitalist system, all workers not only can unite, but must and will unite eventually.

The sooner this conscious revolutionary understanding is taken into the anti-racist struggle, the better. Build Leninism.

EPSR supporters.

World Revolutionary Socialist Review 
(edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles.)

SECTARIAN THUGS: The Irish national-liberation struggle fought to end precisely this sort of police-state thuggery. The Good Friday Agreement accepts the possibility of eventual voluntary IRA disarmament once this "Northern Ireland" police state has been completely reformed: The national-liberation struggle is still waiting. The decommissioning demands by Trimble &,Co are an obscene propaganda stunt backed by Establishment extremists (BBC etc).

UNIONISM historically has had no problem with northern nationalists, as long as they have been prepared to go by the back door, accept their status as second class and all the accompanying deprivation and discrimination without raising so much as a word of complaint. It's only when nationalists start demanding to be treated as equals, knocking at the front door to full citizenship, that unionists have seen red, or more specifically, orange.

In the late 1960s Irish nationalists, Inspired by the Civil Rights Movement of black Americans, demanded the right to vote, the right to work and decent housing for all. Unionists was outraged and soon loyalist mobs were burning families out in North Belfast and the Lower Falls and the RUC were bringing their particular brand of law and Orange order to the Bogside in Derry.

Last week, children in Ardoyne were prevented from going to Holy Cross Primary School by loyalists who could no longer tolerate a couple of hundred Catholic five-to-eleven-year-old girls accompanied by their parents passing their front doors on the way to school.

On the afternoon of Tuesday 20 July, as parents came to collect their children from school, they were pelted with stones by loyalists who had been challenged while erecting sectarian flags outside the Catholic primary school. One parent, who had to abandon an attempt to collect his child, was attacked and the windows of his car were smashed by loyalists armed with baseball bats.

The board of governors, who were holding a meeting in the school at the time, helped evacuate frightened and tearful children who could not be safely re-united with their parents. The children were escorted through the rear entrance and into the grounds of St Gabriel's College and made their way home via the Crumlin Road.

The following morning on their way to school, parents and pupils were confronted by a crowd of protesting loyalists who were blockading the Ardoyne Road. A fine of heavily-armed RUC officers in full riot gear "advised" parents that they could not proceed and the children were turned away.

"We are sick of them coming into our area, wearing Celtic shirts and blasting republican music out of their cars," a resident of the loyalist Glenbryn Estate told the Newsletter. The children, of course, all wear red and grey school uniforms and the majority walk to school.

The sectarian stereotype the Glenbryn resident had evoked, by way of retrospective justification, was reported unchallenged by the media, as was her solution. "They can go into the school from the Crumlin Road through Saint Gabriel's and stop trying to create more tension here," said the resident.

Instead of walking the short distance from their Ardoyne homes along Alliance Avenue and onto the Ardoyne Road, Catholic girls attending their local primary school should walk twice the distance, through the grounds of another school, cross a large football pitch and gain access to Holy Cross School by the back door.

"It is very sad when you think that young children were unable to get home from their school yesterday," said Holy Cross Principle Anne Tanney. "Over the years we have kept things calm here and we have a good relationship with the local Protestant schools. The important thing is that the children should not be frightened or live in fear." The school stayed closed for the day.

Parents, anxious to enable their children to return to school unmolested and hopeful of a resolution through dialogue, asked for mediation with a spokesperson from Glenbryn. Loyalists agreed to allow Catholic parents to escort their children to school but only if they all walked on the left hand side.

Nationalists agreed to consider the proposal if their safety and the safety of their children could be guaranteed. It was suggested that such an assurance would be given by a telephone call to the local community centre. Parents waited and waited but no call came.

Meanwhile, known loyalists from other areas were seen arriving in Glenbryn by the car load. Soon it became clear that behind the promise of dialogue, the UDA had reinforced their control of the Glenbryn area. As a BBC reporter was informed by loyalists, they were now "in no mood for talks".

The UDA's response to nationalist parents' request for re-assurance came around tea time when a pipe bomb thrown at Catholic homes exploded in a garden shed. No one was injured but the message couldn't have been clearer. By early evening crowds of loyalists were gathering at the edge of nationalist Ardoyne.

Fearing that their homes and families were about to be attacked and having no faith in the RUC's willingness to protect them, nationalist residents gathered at the adjacent corner. For several hours, nationalist residents resisted persistent provocation.

Their patience finally broke when three local republicans who had been urging restraint were singled out by the RUC and attacked. In the ensuing rioting, the RUC fired eight plastic bullets. The newly-deployed L21AI had claimed its first victims and all four of them were nationalists. No plastic bullets were fired at loyalists.

On Thursday morning at 8.30am parents, accompanied by their children dressed in school uniforms, assembled outside a local grocery store. Amidst the debris of confrontation parents walked their children towards the line of RUC vehicles and personnel barring their way to school. Further off, a loyalist crowd maintained the blockade.

Television crews captured film of distressed, often tearful and obviously frightened young children clinging onto mothers as their parents remonstrated with the RUC while the loyalist mob taunted and shouted sectarian abuse. One loyalist shouted "Fenian scum" another chanted, "Bye bye," someone shouted, "you'll never be able to use this school again". After a token protest, parents and pupils dispersed.

"The naked terror on the face of little Laura Hallam graphically showed the true cost of last week's sectarian violence in North Belfast," wrote Stephanie Bell of the Sunday Life... "confronted by an RUC barricade of officers in full riot gear, blocking her way to school the child's usual carefree walk to class suddenly turned into a nightmare journey."

But for Bell, loyalist violence, RUC intimidation and a Catholic mother trying to walk her child to school were all dumped into the same blame category. "While leaders on both sides squabble like playground children over who started the trouble in Ardoyne, innocents like Laura are the real losers," she wrote.

Bell's colleague Lynda Gilby went even further. "Mothers lose my sympathy" trumpeted the 'straight talking' headline. "Of course it is absolutely outrageous that small children should be stoned, intimidated and prevented from getting to their primary school," admitted Gilby. "But a few of those wronged mothers at Holy Cross school lost my sympathy last week, when I looked at press photographs and TV footage of their terrified and sobbing kids" she continued.

"This was the handful of mums who, when told by police that they could nip round the back way and get their children into school out of reach of the trouble, insisted upon the principle of the thing."

The media was matching the loyalist agenda and the message was increasingly the same. Catholic children and their mothers should neither be seen nor heard. Never mind the rights and wrongs of the situation, everything would be all right if only Catholics would keep using the back door.

A few children did make it into school on Thursday via Crumlin Road and through St Gabriel's, but no one was sure if they would be allowed to return home safely by either route. Mindful of their children's safety, a number of mothers stayed in the school throughout the day. Sinn Féin Assembly member Gerry Kelly described children being forced to use a rear entrance as "like something out of Alabama in the 1960s".

At 3pm, Holy Cross parents and children joined Catholic pupils leaving St Gabriel's College to return home via Crumlin Road only to be forced to run the gauntlet of more loyalist crowds and heavily armed RUC riot squads. The myth that there was an alternative 'safe' route was exposed as a lie but that didn't deter Bell and Gilby peddling it three days later.

Back in Ardoyne and the loyalist onslaught continued. A second pipe bomb thrown at Catholic homes within two days exploded, throwing a young boy against a fence and blasting a brick wall. It was 4pm and rumours of a second device cleared the street. "Everybody is shaken up and terrified," said the mother of the child caught in the blast. "It's only a matter of time before someone is seriously injured or killed."

In Ardoyne, republicans were determined that no one from the nationalist estate would become caught up in rioting for a second night. Denied their quarry, loyalists vented their anger by attacking the RUC and setting fire to a Catholic school on the Ballysillan Road.

Friday morning and children attending Holy Cross had now been unable to go to and from school unmolested for almost a week. Acting as spokesperson for other parents, Elaine Burns and her seven-year-old daughter Leona approached the RUC cordon blocking their way to school. "We just want to ask, are you going to let us take our children to school?" Elaine asked the RUC officer in charge.

There were less than 20 loyalists blocking the way, but the RUC refused to move them. Instead, a scheduled sports day and annual prize giving at Holy Cross was cancelled as parents and pupils were prevented from attending.

Catholic children and their mothers should neither be seen nor heard. Never mind the rights and wrongs of the situation, everything would be all right if only Catholics would keep using the back door.  

By the weekend, the fact that members of the UDA, more specifically close associates of jailed UDA leader Johnny Adair, were clearly orchestrating loyalist violence in North Belfast could no longer be ignored by either the media or the authorities. On Friday night, reports of shots being fired from Hopewell Avenue in the Lower Shankill were believed to be a part of a UDA show of strength.

Less than a week earlier, Johnny Adair had offered to 'help' avert loyalist violence in the run up to Drumcree but only if he was released from jail. Days later, Adair's associates were identified as central to sectarian violence in the north of the city. Even the British cram forces had to admit a coincidence was extremely unlikely.

"There is clear evidence that the UDA is orchestrating the violence and members of C Company are heavily involved," said a 'security source'. "Those units don't do anything without Johnny Adair's approval."

With Holy Cross school closed for the weekend, loyalists turned their attention towards vulnerable Catholic residential areas in North Belfast. On Sunday evening, a loyalist mob broke through security fencing dividing Tiger's Bay from nationalists living in Duncaim Gardens.

A mob of around 20 men attacked Catholic-owned cars and homes, smashing windows with bricks before hurling paint and blast bombs into the front living rooms of three houses, wrecking two vehicles, destroying property and shattering nerves. "I don't know why these people are doing this," said a resident whose home had been attacked. "People here don't bother anyone. We were just an easy target.' In another incident, a loyalist bomb alert near Carnmoney Cemetery targeted a Catholic religious ceremony due to take place on Sunday afternoon.

But by Monday morning, the focus had returned to Holy Cross Primary School and a device found strapped to the school railings. In Ardoyne, the nationalist community woke to the news of a bomb alert at their local school. The device was later declared as a hoax but many parents and pupils had already been deterred. Parents seeking to walk their children to school along Ardoyne Road were again prevented by the RUC and loyalist protectors.

The pattern was repeated on Tuesday, when parents and pupils carrying placards calling for the right to education stood in the pouring rain for over an hour, and again on Wednesday. There seems little hope of a resolution before the end of the week, when the school is scheduled to close for the summer vacation. "It will hang over us like a dark cloud all summer;" says one parent.