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 

No 1119  Jan 15 2002

Subscriptions (£25 p.a.) and circulation 0786 799 6074 P&P Bulletin Publications PO Box 50, London SW 17 9NL [Post Office Registered.)

www.epsr-marx-lenin.co.uk                           25p Weekly

The imperialist warmongering aggression way of trying to get out of crisis without provoking anti-capitalist revolution, which failed in Nazi Germany's hands in the 1930s,  is becoming a total farce now in American hands. The blitzkrieg on Afghanistan has produced disastrous results; economic chaos is spreading fast; the Bush regime is itself wallowing in Enron corporate corruption; and the animal-cage torture of the USA' s prisoners makes the SS PoW camps (as in 'Great Escape' look like a holiday-home.

As a revolutionary crisis continues to bubble up in Argentina, even more spectacular economic and political chaos is looming worldwide for the hopelessly anarchic and doomed capitalist system.

Imminent all-out trade war between US imperialism and the European Union sets the catastrophic tone and best conveys the insoluble nature of the contradictions steadily condemning the hideously unjust, exploitative, domineering, and disaster-ridden 'free market' to be universally abandoned as historically degenerate.

Ford Motor USA's announcement of 35,000 employees to be sacked, five plants to be closed, and reduced production at a further 11 factories spells out the details.

The ruling international system of 'private' enterprise has once again, by its obviously uncontrollable empire-building and insane antagonistic rivalry, piled up such vast 'surplus' investment-mountains of profiteering capital via monopoly acquisitions, market rigging, political graft, and imperialist warmongering, etc, etc. that 'over-production' is now poised to paralyse every trade on earth.

Because of the bourgeois class dictatorship ruling everywhere, the world's investment needs have remained totally dominated by uncoordinated 'free enterprise' speculation at the same time as the working-class masses have had their share of global income restrained as harshly as hire-and-fire 'market disciplines', union-crushing, profiteering, and hidden taxes can manage while the rich keep getting richer.

As a result there is now a grotesque imbalance between what the world's factories are geared to produce and what the world's masses are able or want to buy.

The already-existing cut-throat competition in motor car sales, agricultural produce, steel, textiles, aircraft, computer products, etc, etc, will now start being expressed in consciously damaging quotas, tariff barriers, and trade boycotts, etc. Political war is inseparable from such deliberately-harmful trade measures, and it is a historically short step from chauvinistic xenophobic rampaging to the start of physical blockades and embargoes, collective security agreements and then renewed inter-imperialist shooting war.

That was the unstoppable pattern of capitalism's last two great 'over-production' crises of big-power economic rivalry which only ended with World War I and World War II.

The only difference this coming next time of global sort-out will be the far vaster scale of economic and political disruption, and the far vaster scale of 'surplus' productive capacity worldwide which will be insanely earmarked for destruction before 'profitable' international commerce can be resumed (in the sick understanding of the 'free market' bourgeois dictatorship).

And even if the current threat of a World Trade Organisation ban on $4billions-worth of 'illegal' subsidies (which Washington is alleged by the EU to have greased American exports' path to Europe with) gets postponed yet again shortly due to 'further negotiations', the drastic cutbacks by Ford USA and similar slump-plans by General Motors and Chrysler are the grim reality, and all-out international trade war will soon follow inevitably.

Just as big job losses will eventually hit every country's car industry as the sick capitalist system's world slump strikes every nation in turn.

And motor manufacturing may not even be the worst-hit industry. Aircraft production jobs are under threat everywhere to an even more worrying degree, and the same in all the major basic industries.

The threat of bankruptcy, such as at Marconi, is the shape of things to come.

The Engineering Employers Federation expects further recession 'officially' in 2002. The US Federal Reserve Board chairman Greenspan has formally announced that there is "no end in sight', to America's economic slump.

Even British imperialism's famed 'invisible exports' financial industry is staring disaster in the face:

Financial services companies have suffered their sharpest fall in profits for almost a decade under pressure from the global downturn, the Confederation of British Industry said yesterday.

Robust consumer spending was insulating the economy from the worst, but business volumes had been falling at their fastest pace in nine years at 129 banks, building societies, securities traders and fund managers surveyed during the three months to December.

"These worrying findings show the normally resilient financial services sector counting the cost of the global slowdown," said Ian McCafferty, the CBI's chief economic adviser.

"Firms are seeing profit margins squeezed and they are responding by seeking ways to reduce their cost base." City firms have cut staff and investment, particularly in marketing and technology, in an attempt to restore profitability.

Argentina threatens more of the same, only globally,  ‑  and much worse:

The first signs are that the new regime, headed by Eduardo Duhalde, has a patchwork of economic policies aimed at mitigating the chaos on the average Argentine by laying the burden on foreign-owned multinationals and banks. After Friday's 41 per cent fall in the floating peso, some analysts fear a major banking crisis.

Its cornerstone is devaluation and abandonment of the decade-long currency board that fixed the value of the peso at one dollar. Everything else seeks to massage the burden of the costs.

Now the l0-day-old government has to sell its package to a sceptical audience in Washington and on Wall Street. A number of foreign investors that stand to get burnt from the devaluation are waiting for the IMF's verdict before deciding their own response The IMF's deputy managing director; Anne Krueger, arrives tomorrow on a technical mission to the country.

Duhalde's government is seeking to reschedule all its debts and wants further loans of up to $20 billion from institutions including the IMF But the IMF precipitated the crisis by withholding an arranged $1.3bn tranche of funding last month after Argentina failed to limit its budget deficit.

That move marked the first test of the 'tough love' regime favoured by George Bush's presidency, a reflection of his regime's distaste for bailouts At first this strategy received the thumbs-up from markets, because the Argentine situation was thought to be highly localised. But the financial fallout is already troubling countries from Spain to Brazil as the Argentine banking system crumbles under the burden of new measures

And, say economists, the IMF's confidence that there is no contagion is itself masking a systemic collapse in private investment in developing and low-income markets.

Last weekend the Argentine government passed emergency laws to give sweeping economic powers to the new President. The programme includes devaluation, the establishment of transitional two-tier exchange rate, and the conversion of domestic loans at the old dollar-peso parity rate.

'Failure is almost guaranteed,' says Joaquin Cottani, an economist at Lehman Brothers in New York.

But Duhalde believes that devaluation and boosting export industries are the only way to kick-start a contracting economy, despite the risks to the banking sector.

'We're not even in the world of second- or third-best policies here  ‑  it is more like ninth-best,' says Stephany Griffith-Jones of the Institute of Development Studies.

South Africa, where the rand has fallen by around 35 per cent, is in a similar boat. There the government has ordered an investigation into the collapse of the currency.

'Argentina and South Africa were seen as icons of virtue in macro-economic policy-making just 18 months ago,' says Avinash Persaud, head of research at State Street Bank.

'Macro-economic stability and market liberalisation did not prove to be the catalysts of growth nor the beacons for foreign investment in the long run. The absence of growth makes any policy unsustainable,' says Persaud.

The IMF's approach is changing, but it may not have been fully thought through. Some economists fault its timing, saying that the IMF should have worked on an alternative before pulling the plug. 'Argentina is caught in an IMF vacuum that is in some ways worse than before, because there are no disbursements but also very little inclination to get involved,' says Griffith-Jones. 

The feeling is that the financial contagion that plagued emerging markets after the 'Tequila crisis' in Mexico in 1995 and the Russian crisis of 1998, has been conquered. Persaud says that there has not been immediate contagion because the default came as very little surprise.

But Griffith-Jones points to other ways in which the crisis could be transmitted: 'Political contagion is a risk, too. If the banking system collapses, and there's anarchy, instability could spread.'

Both point to a dangerous complacency about the calamitous collapse in investment flows to two‑thirds of emerging and low-income economies. They suggest that the lack of a crisis could be because net investment in developing countries has been practically zero since the Asian crisis. What little exists is in just five countries. 'Only 20 per cent of countries received equity inflows in 2000, compared with 90 per cent in 1996,' says Persaud.

Cross-border equity flows total $1 trillion. If developing countries received inflows commensurate with the size of their economies, they would get about $200bn, but they get just $40bn in total.

In other words, these comments suggest that Argentina, and most other 'developing' countries, were already suffering the 'contagion' even before state bankruptcy was threatened by Buenos Aires, the contagion of paralysis as far as 'viability' in the idiotic international 'free market' is concerned. Which means that state bankruptcy lies in store,  ‑ and revolutionary situations, everywhere else.

But far, far more serious for the world bourgeois dictatorship is the paralysis which has gripped the mighty Japanese economy in panic, teetering on the edge of state bankruptcy for the past 11 years, and continues to steadily worsen, despite all the massive Keynesian reflation measures attempted, such as not just charging 0% on all money borrowed from the banks or the government treasury, but actually PAYING the companies and the consumers if they will take out more loans in a weird Alice-in-Wonderland attempt to get the economy growing again and to stop shrinking,  ‑  all to no avail:

Frustrated Japan-watchers fear the country's post-bubble economy will have to spend another decade stagnating before it returns to its old strength with its own 'coming of age day'.

Markets seem comforted by the words but unimpressed by the scale of efforts to tackle bad loans, the growing national debt and inflexible economic structures.

'There are two main problems- ‑ the government is being timid on the bad loan problem, and the Bank of Japan is being timid on fighting deflation,' says Paul Sheard, chief economist at Lehman Brothers in Tokyo.

'The markets were expecting a major banking package. They came up with nothing that will solve the fundamental problem of very high level of non-performing [bad] loans,' says Sheard.

This reflects the view that Junichiro Koizumi, the wildly popular Prime Minister, did not cash in his post-electoral political capital to push through painful measures. Now Japan is in its worst recession since the Second World War, with unemployment at more than 6 per cent.

The rapid descent of the yen to three-year lows against the US dollar could help exporters marginally. The dollar rate has fallen by nearly 14 yen, or 10 per cent, since mid-November, after Japanese authorities appeared to endorse the market's perception that the country wants a weaker currency to spring its economy out of stagnation.

Theoretically, a weak yen should also help reflate the economy by pushing up import prices. But doubts have arisen about the efficacy of a yen devaluation, tacit or otherwise. Governor Hayami of the Bank of Japan is understood to have serious reservations. Any tacit plan to weaken the yen would bring diplomatic difficulties in Asia. Already, Malaysia, China and Korea are concerned.

'Though the Japanese authorities have a programme of clearing up bad loans, more new ones are created by the deflationary economy.' says Lehman's Sheard. The number of bad loans has crept up over the past five years. They now total more than over Y30 trillion, and are particularly focused in real estate, construction, and retail.

The FSA has stepped up inspections to ensure transparency of bank loan books, and is trying to create a secondary market in bad loans.

Sheard believes that the moves fall short of the mammoth task required. 'The scale of the problem has always been bigger than the response. The situation is worse than in 1998.'

He wants the government to buy up bad loans at just above market price; and to stabilise the banking system with a massive Injection of public funds, partly through nationalisation.

But Koizumi's hands are tied by a national debt of some. 120 per cent of national income. The big bang hasn't come yet. Undercapitalised banks are muddling through, and may well be bailed out. But Sheard believes that the Prime Minister is waiting for a crisis to excuse the breaching of budgetary limits.

Such a crisis may be only weeks away, he says. At the end of March, the government guarantee on bank deposits expires. They have been fully guaranteed since the 1996 financial crisis.

About a third of all deposits will lose the guarantee. The measure was postponed last year because the ruling coalition feared it could trigger a crisis.

'The government has only got three months to start fixing the banking system, not six years. The removal of the guarantee will provoke either bank runs or bank share collapses,' says Sheard.

Huge propaganda efforts have been made to try to blame the all-powerful Japanese mafia, the Yakuza, for the difficulty in getting the economy's chronic 'bad debt problem cleared up,  ‑  the gangsters being impossible to coerce into paying up, allegedly.

Undoubtedly a minor factor, possibly, but ridiculous as an 'excuse' for capitalism's failure overall to get out of its chronic worst contradiction of global 'overproduction'.

All that the mafia do is express more brutally on the domestic scene everything that the imperialist major powers inflict on weaker rivals in the global market.

The world's biggest debtor is the USA.

Japan is simply living proof of the iron Marxist laws on capitalist economic anarchy: inevitable monopoly accumulation in the 'free market' always ultimately leads to unprofitable 'surpluses' of capital-investment everywhere.

Japan 'won' quickest on the world market, and so stagnated quickest. The rest will now follow Japan's lead into total stagnation.

But it is US imperialism's monstrous new crooked scandal which provides the really telling symbolism in this world imperialist crisis,  ‑  the Enron racket in which the biggest corporate bankruptcy in history has been found-out swindling all its employees of their pension funds, and which has mired the entire Bush administration in graft and corruption.

Once again, let the capitalist press tell its own story:

Secret stock sales, shredded documents, high-level political contacts  ‑  and tens of thousands of innocent victims robbed of their savings and retirement funds while the company's lop brass lined their pockets.

Enron was just the kind of scandal a war would hide. The company plunged from a stock rating worth $80 billion seventh on the Fortune list of US companies  ‑  into the biggest bankruptcy filing in US history, registered on 2 December.

The ethical  ‑  maybe criminal  ‑  core of the scandal is that Enron trapped its employees into a 'stock-lock', whereby they were not allowed to sell share options bought by way of savings. When the company collapsed, they lost everything. Meanwhile, Enron's executives blessed by inside information and foresight  ‑ made a killing by scrambling to sell shares before the price collapsed.

	The victims of Enron's rise and fall were regular employees who opted to join a savings plan by investing in their employer. It is one of the biggest firms of its kind in the world, a standing it owes in no small part to Bush's governorship in Texas.

Texas's 1992 Energy Policy Act opened a regulatory black hole into which Enron moved and thrived, forcing established utility companies to buy energy from it. Meanwhile, in Washington, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, under the presidency of Bush's father, allowed for an exemption in trading energy subsidiaries.

The 1992 trading commission was chaired by Wendy Gramm, wife of Texas Senator Phil Gramm, close friend of the Bush family and recipient of $97,350 in political donations from Enron.

Once the exemption was accomplished, Mrs Gramm resigned to join the Enron board. As a member of its current audit committee, she is expected to play a key role in the forthcoming lawsuits and criminal investigation into bankruptcy and document destruction. Gramm is also mentioned in a bank lawsuit alleging insider trading as having sold $276,912 in Enron stock in 1998, and directs the influential 'Regulatory Studies' programme at George Mason University, funded with $50,000 from Enron.

IN 1997, ENRON was anxious to break into Pennsylvania, one of America's biggest energy markets, with its huge consumers in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. The company was having difficulty, and Kenneth Lay asked Bush (who liked to call him 'Kenny boy') to help.

Bush called the then state governor, Tom Ridge, to pitch for Enron, whose bid duly succeeded. 'I called George W to kind of tell him what was going on,' said Lay at the time, 'and I said it would be very helpful to Enron if he could just call the governor and tell him Enron is a serious company.' Ridge was made Secretary of Homeland Security  ‑  Bush's new White House office  ‑  after 11 September.

Lay and Enron have been bountiful contributors to George Bush Jnr. Since 1993, company executives have donated almost $2 million to him personally. Lay also donated $326,000 in soft money to the Republican Party in the three years before Bush's presidential bid and his wife added $100,000 for the inauguration festivities. Lay was among the inner sanctum of 'pioneers' convened by Bush's closest political strategist, Karl Rove, and his father, George Senior, that persuaded Bush to run for president at a conclave in 1998.

The administration is littered with senior officials who own Enron stock. Economic adviser Larry Lindsay and Trade Representative Robert Zoellick went straight from Enron's payroll into office.

The biggest holding is that of Army Secretary Thomas White, a former Enron executive who holds stock and options worth between $50m and $l00m. Rove holds as much as $250,000 in stock. Other holders include Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, his assistant William Winkenwerder, Assistant Treasury Secretary Mark Weinberger, Economic Undersecretary Kathleen Cooper, Education Undersecretary Eugene Hickock, the ambassadors to Russia, Ireland and the Arab Emirates, and officials in the energy department, including its chief financial officer Bruce Carnes.

It is not known which, if any, of these privileged stockholders sold their shares along with the Enron bosses, or suffered the same loss as everyone else. Such details will appear when they make this year's filings  ‑ leaving any that did so open to ethical, if not criminal, inquiry.

Bush has pursued the aggressive deregulation policies preferred by Enron and its kind, including legislation that exempts key elements of Enron's energy business from oversight by the federal government  ‑ pushed by none other than Senator Phil Gramm.

Lay's hand, meanwhile, can be found behind such episodes as the sudden replacement of Curtis Hebert as chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission by Texan Pat Wood, a friend of Lay. According to one source, the sacking, which came after only weeks in the job, followed  'an unsettling telephone conversation with Kenneth Lay' in which Hebert was 'prodded to back a faster pace in opening up access to the electricity transmission grid'.

FOR ALL ITS troubles, Enron continued to benefit from Bush policies   ‑   markedly a refusal to help California during the energy crisis last year, leaving consumers to pay the price ... to Enron.

Enron was so close to the bosom of the administration that Lay and other executives were called to the White House for six meetings with Cheney and his staff,  the last one only a week before the company made the staggering announcement that it was slashing shareholder equity by $1.2bn.

Enron was playing a double game. In the run-up to the announcement, its president, Greg Whalley, was frantically lobbying another wing of the administration for help in arranging loans. His point man was Undersecretary Peter Fisher, with whom Whalley spoke six times

Lay discussed the upcoming bankruptcy twice with Commerce Secretary Don Evans  ‑  one of the Texan 'Iron Triangle' that propelled Bush to power. Later, he also twice pleaded Enron's case to Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill.

But the Republicans were not the only political heavyweights to benefit from Enron's greed. The company has made donations to many Democrats, too about 27 per cent of its political contributions; according to the Centre for Responsive Politics in Washington.

And among Enron's top point men in Washington during the bankruptcy saga was Bill Clinton's former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, who was revealed by the Washington Post yesterday as having made a representation last November to the current Treasury on behalf of the company. Rubin is now chairman of the executive committee of the Citigroup bank, one of Enron's principal backers, trying, with the JP Morgan bank, to raise $1.51m in an effort to see the company through the bankruptcy crisis.

As both parties and the White House scramble to minimise their cosiness with Enron, six Congressional committees are preparing to investigate the firm. But they will have to wait for the two criminal investigations launched last week: one into Enron's bankruptcy, the other into the admission by the company's auditor, Arthur Andersen,, that it destroyed thousands of documents concerning the bankruptcy.

Andersen had good reason to destroy the papers. The reasons for Enron's destruction, when all the winds seemed to blow behind the company's fortunes, are associated with the labyrinth of subsidiaries built up by the chief finance officer, Andrew Fastow, who was fired on 24 October, and other executives. .

Fastow created partnerships with what were described as outside, independently run companies with names such as 'Chewco' or 'Jedi'  ‑ after characters in Star Wars ‑ that were owned by him or others with Enron backing.

As a result, hundreds of millions of dollars were slushing overseas to tax havens as Fastow and other executives  ‑  so they said  ‑  sought to shore up the company against a possible fall in energy prices. What they were allegedly doing was amassing personal fortunes.

The ensuing gaps in the balance sheet became a gaping abyss which could not be hidden and into which the company finally fell. Enron admitted that it had overstated profits by $400m in reports issued since. However, Chewco alone enabled Enron to be able to keep about $600m of debt off its books.

THE CRUCIAL CRIMINAL issue is whether Enron executives misled investors by inflating revenues and minimising debts. The political issue is how closely entwined is the Washington elite  ‑  and the immediate circle around Bush.

Seven months of Bush's oil-friendly presidency was driven out of the spotlight by 11 September. It had pleased the industry for its isolationism and determination to withdraw from world affairs  ‑  the Kyoto Accords on global warming or arms reduction with Russia.

Domestically, Bush's cause was an articulate one: a tax cut worth at least $1.3 trillion, of which nine‑tenths went to the 1 per cent of wealthiest Americans, as well as ambitions to drill for oil across the Alaskan wilderness and deregulate controls over the oil and energy industries.

By the afternoon of 11 September, Bush had become the vanishing president during his people's hour of need, cowering underground beneath an Air Force base in remote Nebraska.

These crooks sum up the essence of capitalism, - arrogant irresponsibility, coupled with a bullying viciousness which will lay all the burdens of eventual (free markets anarchic disasters on anyone but the bourgeois fatcats who caused it, and especially onto the weakest and most vulnerable 'if it can be got away with.

The whole world imperialist order is exactly like that, as the outrageous Western tyranny in Afghanistan is daily proving.

Correctly fearing that Sept 11 symbolised a growing challenge to the imperialist bourgeoisie's exploitation-domination of the planet, caused by the global economic crisis as it unfolds,  the US-led Western guns resolved to crush & torture Afghanistan as a warning to the entire Third World to not even think about trying to challenge the American 'new world order'.

The Revisionist fake 'left' (Trots and Stalinists) have opened the door to this colonial-fascist tyranny now being inflicted on Afghanistan by helping bourgeois propaganda to 'condemn' the Sept 11 guerrilla-war attack on America direct, and pretending that the West could act positively by agreeing that "something has to be done" , etc.

The most viciously brainwashed fake-'left' (CPGB, etc) almost purred with delight at the Taleban come-uppance as "Islamic reactionaries", and even included the Hamas and Islamic Jihad heroes of the Palestinian national-liberation war against Zionist colonisation in the 'condemnation' of guerrilla-war terrorism (which gave fascist-imperialist blitzkrieg a 'left' cover).

But the hypocritical fraud and the futile wretchedness of the entire ' free world' military onslaught is now trickling out to universal imperialist and fake-'left' humiliation.

The blitzkrieg on terrorism has only succeeded in massacring innocent Afghan villagers.

The savage attempt to annihilate al-Qaeda has failed and only bred millions of new terrorist guerrilla-war volunteers everywhere in the Third World.

And the pretence of building 'a new Afghanistan' has already fallen flat on its face,  --leaving the people there wishing the Taleban would come back,  ‑  as the capitalist press itself admits:

IT WAS a gruelling 48 hours for police captain Mohamed Sabber Abbasi ‑ a kidnapping, burglary, attempted car jacking and a double shooting. And that was just his immediate family.

But what galled Abbasi most as he lay in hospital with a bullet hole in his side was that the criminals were the militiamen who claim to have liberated Kabul from the Taliban.

'The policemen from before are all gone and these people are looting and plundering the city,' he said. 'They are all bad people. They have no human sentiment and no mercy  ‑  from the highest commander to the very lowest ranks.'

In Kabul, the Kalashnikov rules. Two months after the capital fell to the troops of the Northern Alliance, men in combat gear loiter on street corners with rocket launchers and assault rifles, or screech around the capital in pick-up trucks with blacked-out windows.

The troops were supposed to have left the city by yesterday afternoon ‑ the deadline for the disarming and evacuation of the militias set by the interim leader of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai. There is little sign that will happen, suggesting that the government will have to move cautiously to avoid a head-on confrontation with the thousands of armed men roaming the streets.

But the delay  ‑  and the rising popular resentment at a wave of armed robberies, car jackings and murders by the militiamen  ‑  is compromising the interim government's standing in the eyes of its own people.

The paras began joint patrols with Afghan police last week, but British officials say they will not be actively involved in disbanding the militias.

'It is not for us to disarm,' said Major Guy Richardson. 'It is up to us to assist, but we have not been called on to assist as yet.'

That caution has come as a disappointment to the people of Kabul, who are looking to the international forces to bring the order they crave. There are no reliable figures for the crime wave, but that hardly seems to matter. '

Loathed though they were for their repressive regime of religious zealotry, the Taliban earned the grudging respect of Afghans for their success in maintaining law and order, and guaranteeing security on the streets.

The murder of a wealthy trader last week, bludgeoned to death on his morning walk to work, and several much discussed armed robberies have sharpened fears of a descent into the lawlessness that defined the era of the early 1990s  ‑  the last time the Northern Alliance was in charge of Kabul.

'The militias are robbing people and cars, and breaking into houses,' said Amir Mohammed, who lives in the southern neighbourhood of Karte Nau.

'We were expecting peace, but we were much happier before.

Others were targeted because they looked as if they might be wealthy.

'The day before yesterday, five gunmen flagged me down and asked me to take them somewhere,' said Amir Mohammed. 'When I refused, they asked how much money I had and if I had a satellite phone.'

Abbasi was wounded on Wednesday night, about the time Karzai ordered the militias out of the city, when his car was flagged down at a roadblock. As the vehicle slowed, he noticed the checkpoint was manned by hooded gunmen who opened fire, hitting the off-duty policeman in the side and his brother in the stomach.

The terrifying encounter came barely two days after another Abbasi brother was hauled out of his car and kidnapped for ransom at the same roadblock.

In both instances, Abbasi turned to uniformed police: He said the police ‑ who were recruited from the same militias ‑ refused to act.

NOW that Taleban rule is over in Mullah Muhammad Omar's former southern stronghold, it is not only televisions, kites and razors which have begun to emerge.

Visible again, too, are men with their ashna, or beloveds: young boys they have groomed for sex, particularly their fondness for naive young boys. Before the Taleban arrived in 1994, the streets were filled with teenagers and their sugar daddies, flaunting their relationship.

	It is called the homosexual capital of South Asia. Such is the obsession with sodomy -- locals tell you that birds fly over the city using only one wing, the other covering their posterior ‑ that the rape of young boys by warlords was one of the key factors in Mullah Omar mobilising the Taleban.

In the summer of 1994, a few months before the Taleban took control of the city, two commanders confronted each other over a young boy whom they both wanted to have.

In the ensuing fight civilians were killed. Mullah Omar's group freed the boy and appeals began flooding in for him to help in other disputes. By November, Mullah Omar and his Taleban were Kandahar's new rulers.

Mullah Omar immediately suppressed homosexuality.

Men accused of sodomy faced the punishment of having a wall toppled on to them; usually resulting in death.

"In the days of the Mujahidin, there were men with their ashna everywhere, at every corner, in shops, on the streets, in hotels: it was completely open, a part of life," said Torjan, 38, one of the soldiers loyal to Kandahar's new governor, Gul Agha Sherzai.

"But in the later Mujahidin years, more and more soldiers would take boys by force, and keep them for as long as they wished. But when the Taleban came, they were very strict about the ban. Of course, it still happened  ‑ the Taleban could not enter every house but one could not see it."

But for the first time since the Taleban fled, in the past three days, one can see the pairs returning: usually a heavily bearded man, seated next to, or walking with, a clean-shaven, fresh-faced youth.

"They are just emerging again," Torjan said. "Me fighters too now have the boys in their barracks.

"In a short time, and certainly within a year, it will be like pre-Taleban: they will be everywhere."

But it is usually a terrible fate for the boys concerned. It is practised at all levels of Pashtun society, but for the poorer men, having an ashna can raise their status.

"When a man sees a boy he likes  ‑ the age they like is 15 or 16  ‑  he will approach him in the street and start talking to him, offering him tea," Muhammad Shah, a shopowner, said. "Sometimes they go looking in the football stadium, or in the cinema [which has yet to reopen].

"He then starts to give him presents, hashish or a watch, a ring, or even a motorbike. One of the most valued presents is a fighting pigeon, which can be worth up to $400 (£277). These boys are nearly always innocent, but such is the poverty here, they cannot refuse:"

Once the boy falls into the man's clutches  ‑  nearly always men with a wife and family  ‑  he is marked for life, although the Kandaharis accept these relationships as part of their culture.

When driven around, an ashna sits in the front passenger seat. The back seat is simply for his friends. Even the parents of the boys know in their hearts the nature of the relationship, but will say that their son is working for the man.

They, like everyone else, will know this is a lie. '"They say birds flew with both wings with the Taleban," Muhammad said. "But not any more."

Just the sort of decadence of a dying social system (tribal warlord society) that fake 'lefts' can be expected to champion.

The re-enthroned backwardness in Afghanistan is surpassed only by the open torture and treatment like animals by the West on its prisoners taken in the blitzkrieg on Afghanistan, a boastfully vindictive plan which makes German and Japanese concentration-camp cruelty during imperialism's last great warmongering crisis seem mild by comparison.

Where they are not "shot while escaping" as at Mazar-i-Sharif, the manacled and hooded prisoners (for maximum disorientation and suffering) are being shipped like cattle to languish in tiny barbed-wire cages open to the elements in Cuba, there to await continuous 'interrogation' in which torture has been openly called for by US authorities as "providing the best intelligence".

And to do what with it? Inflict more pointless insane blitzkriegs on other poor countries???

And gathered by such methods, information about as useless as the wretched nonsense with which American shallow cynicism justified its latest monstrous massacre of innocent villagers in Afghanistan:

The war on terrorism came no cleaner and Commander Matthew Klee, a spokesman at the US central command, in Tampa, Florida, had reassuring news: "Follow-on reporting indicates that there was no collateral damage:' 

Some of the things .his follow-on-reporters missed: bloodied children's shoes and skirts, bloodied school books, the scalp of a woman with braided grey hair, butter toffees in red wrappers, wedding decorations.

The charred flesh sticking to rubble in black lumps could have been Osama bin Laden's henchmen but survivors said it was the remains of farmers, their wives and children, and wedding guests.

They said more than 100 civilians died at this village in eastern Afghanistan.

Survivors lacked the bewilderment common to those who have been bombed, because they had an explanation: a tribal rival had manipulated the Americans into attacking Waye Niazi to further his political ambitions in Paktia province.

The bombs set off secondary explosions consistent with stockpiled ammunition

The Pentagon has produced no evidence that missiles were fired at the planes but there was a stockpile. From the ruins of two houses yesterday spilled boxes of Russian, Chinese and Iranian rockets.

But survivors say they stored the ammunition six weeks ago on the orders of retreating Taliban troops. When the regime fell they notified authorities but no one came to collect the ammunition. "We left it What else were we supposed to do with it?" said Taj Mohammad, the village elder.

It was stored in two unfinished houses in a five-house complex six miles north of the collection of mud-brick compounds which passes for Waye Niazi's centre. The complex housed 10 families who grew wheat, apples and grapes, said Mr Mohammad.

About two dozen guests had crammed into the three occupied houses for a wedding, raising the number of occupants to more than 100, said the elder. The bombers came early in the morning.

Precision-guided bombs vapourised all five buildings and a second wave an hour later hit people digging in the rubble and, judging from hair and flesh on the edge of three 40ft holes some distance from the complex, those trying to flee.

Two days later villagers with shovels and tractors extracted the remains: a hand, an ankle, a bit of skull, sometimes an entire torso. They buried some of them in 11 graves, each said to contain the remains of several people, and relatives from Khost took others for burial in the mountains.

Yesterday there were just human scraps and the carcasses of sheep, dogs and a cow, circled overhead by two crows.

One villager said 32 died. The United Nations said 52, including 10 women and 25 children. Mr Mohammad said at least 80. Other villagers said 92. Staff at the hospital in Gardez said 107.

Innumeracy, rapid burial, damage to bodies, propaganda, remoteness, they all conspire to shred certainty in this and other bombings. It is no one's job to count the dead.

The UN said its envoy to Afghanistan, Lakhdar Brahimi, would discuss Qalaye Niazi with US diplomats. The Pentagon has shifted slightly from its initial certitude and promised to investigate the raid, which Donald Anderson, chairman of the Commons foreign affairs committee, denounced as a massive failure of intelligence.

That civilians were present there can be little doubt. Taliban and al-Qaida too? Survivors swear not. Yet there is .little venom for the US. "They were given bad information by bad Afghans;" said Hinzer Gul, echoing neighbours.

Haji Saifullah, head of Paktia's shura (tribal council), said: "Our local enemies are delivering this information to the Americans that Taliban or al-Qaida people are here and Americans just bomb without any search."

The finger was collectively pointed at Aghi Badshah Khan Zadran, 58, an anti-Taliban commander who controls Khost province and is lobbying the interim government to add Paktia and Paktika provinces to his fief.

Some tribal elders said he threatened to call in US planes against them if they did not back him and that Qalaye Niazi was a warning. Mr Zadran, also known as Pacha Khan Zadran, was also accused of wiping out rivals by triggering the US blitz of a convoy of elders on December 20, which killed up to 65 people.

Mr Zadran's officials were spotted with US special forces who relied on him because of his impeccable anti-Taliban credentials, said aides of his rival, Mr Saifullah.

By his own account Mr Zadran is the most powerful commander in south-east Afghanistan. He hails the bombing as accurate and necessary to purge terrorists

The allegations have rattled the prime minister, Hamid Karzai, who last week summoned Mr Zaddan to Kabul to discuss Qalaye Niazi. But supporters were confident Mr Zadran would return home this week with his fief expanded to include Paktia and Paktika.

"These allegations against him are nonsense. He is a democrat and pro-west. The government will confirm his appointment by Tuesday or Wednesday," said Amanullah Zadran, the minister for frontier and tribal affairs, and Mr Zadran's younger brother.

Tribal politics tend to confuse even Afghans and one US official in Kabul admitted it was impenetrable to outsiders, no matter how well briefed. "So sure, mistakes happen."

The Nazi SS would have been lost in admiration.   EPSR

World Revolutionary Socialist Review

(edited extracts from a variety of anti-imperialist struggles).

The British media and various other agencies attempted to redefine what was happening. We were called upon to empathise with the ‘grievances’ of the Glenbryn protestors while distancing ourselves from the trauma of the children by vilifying their parents

In North Belfast, the geography of 'cheek by jowl' nationalist and loyalist housing estates leaves many pupils particularly vulnerable. As a former pupil of Holy Cross, the current Irish President, Mary McAleese, recalls often taking a hurl to school to afford a measure of self‑preservation.

Indeed, the present Holy Cross school is only situated in a predominantly loyalist area because the original Catholic primary school was destroyed in a sectarian arson attack. At the time, the local Protestant clergy condemned the attack and offered land to rebuild Holy Cross in Glenbryn.

However, two factors distinguished this year's intimidation of Holy Cross children from the more general sporadic sectarianism encountered in journeys to and from school. The duration of sustained intimidation reminiscent of Harryville, where loyalists harassed worshipers outside a Catholic chapel for months, was one factor.

Orchestration was the second. Internecine loyalist feuding in the Shankill had brought displaced LIDA members into the formally UVF-controlled Glenbryn.

Amidst the ensuing paramilitary, rivalry, a campaign of anti-Catholic sectarianism, including the blockade of Holy Cross, acted as recruiting sergeant for the LIDA.

By mid-summer in North Belfast, 2001 had already been a year of unrelenting loyalist intimidation, with almost nightly sectarian attacks, including hundreds of pipe and petrol bombings of Catholic homes.

In June, with the Orange marching season already well under way, there was an incident in which a parent collecting a pupil objected to UDA flags being erected outside Holy Cross school. Glenbryn protestors would later cite this as initiating the blockade.

Parents and children arrived to walk the short distance along Ardoyne Avenue to Holy Cross to find their way barred by the RUC. In a response reminiscent of RUC tactics during Drumcree roadway blockades, at the behest of a handful of loyalist protestors the RUC cordoned off the area. The children were unable to go to school for over a week.

The beginning of the blockade coincided with the ending of the school term and the summer eight-week break, during which parents were hopeful of reaching an accommodation with local Glenbryn residents that would allow the children to return to school after the holiday unmolested.

But by September, the only change lay in the tactics of the RUC. Under pressure not to appear to act as loyalist blockaders by proxy, the RUC decided to grant passage to parents and pupils walking to Holy Cross but remained ambiguous about guaranteeing safety.

Rather than hold loyalist blockaders at a distance, the RUC allowed the protestors literally within spitting distance of the children and their parents. The rest is history.

'Running the Gauntlet' described the first day of the new school year. It was a day in which children, many as young as four and five, had wept and screamed in bewilderment and fear as loyalists hurled their particular brand of hate. "Scum, scum, scum, " the mob had chanted. Catholic parents had been told to "get that Fenian bastard out of here".

Petted with stones, bottles and fireworks, the children arrived at Holy Cross hysterical and too afraid to stay. A teacher described a child cowering in a comer and others hiding under desks as the mob outside continued to lay siege at the school gates.

Parish priest Fr Aidan Troy, who. had accompanied parents and children on the route to the school, described the journey as "beyond my worst nightmare. 1 have been in many troubled areas in the world," said Fr Troy. "In 30 years of being a priest I have never seen anything like this."

By the second day, crown forces' tactics changed, with hundreds of heavily armed, mostly masked, RUC officers in full riot gear joined by British soldiers carrying semi-automatic rifles and prepared for combat lining the route.

For nationalists, given the history of the state and the role of state forces, relying on crown forces' 'protection' can afford little in the way of reassurance. Holy Cross pupils and parents faced a double burden of walking the gauntlet of loyalist hatred through a corridor of British military hardware.

To add to the anguish, the RUC and British Army decided that only parents and pupils would be allowed to walk the 300-yard stretch along the Ardoyne Road to Holy Cross school.

The ordeal was not only being faced by some of the most vulnerable and defenceless members of the nationalist community; they were also forced into facing it alone.

Cut off from their own neighbourhood, parents and pupils became totally dependent for their protection upon the discredited RUC and a hostile army of occupation. And then the situation deteriorated even further.

As parents and children made their way along the Ardoyne Road on the third day of term, loyalists gathered at a junction within the Glenbryn estate threw a pipe bomb, packed with shrapnel.

Falling just a few feet short of its intended target, the bomb exploded, injuring four RUC officers. A mother screamed, "Oh God! Oh God!" and ran, dragging her terrified child away from the junction. Other mothers and their children cried out and ran for their lives.

Fr Troy, placing himself between the loyalist mob and the children's pathway, tried to calm traumatised parents now terrified for the safety of their children. The scene was one of hysteria and panic. "This is carnage," said Fr Troy. "It is beyond belief."

In the weeks that followed, Glenbryn protestors subjected parents and pupils of Holy Cross to vile verbal abuse, both sexual and sectarian, physical assault, including bombardment with bottles, bricks, fireworks and balloons filled with urine or dog excrement.

Holy Cross children and parents also endured humiliation and ridicule, with loyalists cavorting in carnival masks and other tomfoolery. Loyalist mockery, which included wearing facemasks of the British queen and USA President George Bush, took an even more sinister turn when protestors sported home made masks of loyalist killer Johnny Adair.

On other occasions loyalists carried placards making lewd sexual accusations targeting Catholic priest Fr Troy. On another occasion, loyalists taunted mothers walking their children to school with cries of "this is what Fenian whores get up to", while  brandishing pornographic posters.

Set against this very real exercise in sectarian persecution, loyalist protestors, some unionist politicians, the British media and various other agencies attempted to redefine what was happening.

On the first morning of the new term, as Catholic mothers escorted their children through a barrage of stones, bottles, fireworks and sectarian hatred, loyalists had labelled them "whores" because "only sluts would drag their children through this". 

The overt abuse was discarded but the theme was adopted with enthusiasm by the media. Repeatedly, the mothers of pupils walking to Holy Cross School were hauled up before the cameras for their status as 'fit' parents to be questioned.

Even the undoubted trauma inflicted by loyalists upon children. some little more than babies, was utilised as a stick to beat their parents with.

"Keep the kids out of the frontline," insisted 'straight talking' Lynda Gilby of the Sunday Life. "Will you ever forget them? Those flower like faces, pale and frozen in fear. Or contorted with terror as they walked, were dragged or half carried through a corridor of vile, spitting venom.

"Understandable, perhaps, to take your little girl through that on day one, when you didn't know what quite to expect: But to put her through the horror a second, a third and a fourth time?" Gilby continued.

"How could anyone subject their precious, vulnerable child to the likes of that just to prove a point? In my book they have been subjected to child abuse from both sides."

In her column, Gilby merely repeated the less sophisticated but similar analysis offered by imprisoned loyalist killer Johnny Adair, who was afforded headline news on the front page.

But never mind; on one point at least the interview was consistent with the newspaper's line. "I have to say the parents are responsible," said Adair. "1 wouldn't bring my four- or five-year-old children up through a gauntlet of hate. As much as people would lay the blame on the loyalists, the parents were responsible." Adair's words were left unchallenged.

Another myth designed to discredit parents as wilful architects of their own misfortune was that simple rerouting could solve the problem of getting Holy Cross children to school. Despite the fact that there was no viable or safe alternative route, the media spent hours discussing it.

In the words of Belfast's Newsletter, "it is natural that parents should be offended by the idea that they cannot take their children to school by their 'traditional route' but as people in other situations have discovered, traditional routes count for very little in Northern Ireland":

Having evoked their grievances over Drumcree, the editorial continued: 'There is a means by which the children could attend the school without having to endure scenes for which no young mind could be properly prepared. Surely their peace of mind is more important than any point of principle?"

The final myth peddled by loyalists and repeated by the media was that, despite the fact that they were being targeted, this was not a protest against Catholic schoolchildren. We had all misunderstood.

The blockade had taken place "because residents in a loyalist enclave could find no other way of attracting attention", suggested the Newsletter. "It is a shame that they felt compelled to use such objectionable tactics," to highlight "their plight as an isolated, victimised and forgotten community".

We were being instructed to ignore the evidence of our own eyes and refocus our understanding into accepting the baying loyalist mob as the real victims. In this looking glass vision, the despicable behaviour of the Glenbryn protestors was just a measure of their desperation.

But while the British media could be relied upon to reiterate such nonsense, film footage of the Holy Cross blockade had captured a much wider audience and the international media attached quite a different meaning to the images.

British journalists continued to evoke the classic 'two. tribes' model within whose well-worn tracks both sides were at least equally blameworthy, but once exposed to an international audience, the story inevitably careered off the rails.

And the scenes had been heartbreaking. As news broadcasters flashed the images across the world, they were watched by hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of people. The display of naked hatred they witnessed onscreen exposed a power relation just as it had in Alabama decades ago.

This temporary fracture within the dominant victim discourse did not just represent an ideological breakthrough. There were immediate consequences within the concrete world, not least the dispatch of a US government envoy to the north of Ireland

International pressure to resolve the situation was also accompanied by individual support from high profile political figures,

But perhaps for northern nationalists, most significant was the recognition of their plight by Elizabeth Eckford, Photographed in 1957 as a young black student walking to a school through protesting white segregationists, the image became one of the defining icons of Black America's struggle for civil rights.

The blockade was lifted not because the loyalists of Glenbryn came to realise the sectarian persecution of school children was wrong. It did not end because condemnation by the British (or indeed Irish) establishment forced loyalists to concede. It was merely a temporary resolution on condition that Glenbryn 'grievances' would be addressed.

The right for Catholic children and their parents to walk to school free from sectarian harassment remains the gift . of loyalist paramilitaries, to be withdrawn as they see fit.'

At the beginning of the suspension, loyalist spokesperson Jim Potts warped that the blockade might be reinstated. "If the government does not fulfil its obligations we will go back to protest," he warned. 

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

Dog-in-the-manger loyalists hide the losing of their sectarian dictatorship with their final colonial-supremacist show of force

ANY HOPES of a reprieve, however temporary, from loyalist violence over the Christmas and' New Year period were dashed as Catholic families in the North of Ireland continued to be targeted in a sustained campaign of sectarian attack.

Loyalist violence not only continued throughout December and into January, but also included some of the most serious attacks witnessed this year.

According to recently released official statistics, 2001 witnessed a 200% increase compared to the previous year in the number of shootings and bomb attacks. In the year 2000, just over 130 shooting incidents were recorded, compared to just over 330 for last year.

Bomb attacks also increased three fold,  with almost a 180 recorded incidents compare to over 60 in 2000. The number of injured recorded by the statistics rose from almost 900 in the previous year to over 1,100 in 2001. The majority of those injured were civilians.

What the statistics don't explicitly reveal,  but nevertheless reflect experience on the ground, is .that the sustained increase in violence over the last two years has been loyalist. The figures add weight to the northern nationalist community's experience of a sustained loyalist campaign of anti-Catholic violence.

The impact of loyalist violence has also been reflected in housing figures released by the Housing Executive. In 1994 to 1996, around 3,000 people moved into housing within areas dominated by the other religion. In the years that followed, 1996 to 2001, over 6,000 families fled their homes because of sectarian intimidation and moved back among their co-religionists.

The overwhelming majority of those who fled their homes have been Catholics. In the early days of the peace process and in the wake of the Good Friday Agreement's promise of freedom from sectarian harassment, thousands of Catholic families ventured outside the ghetto and sought housing in predominantly Protestant areas. But in the five years since the first Drumcree riots thousands of Catholic families have been forced to flee by loyalist mobs.

In an article last summer, Robin Livingstone of the Andersonstown News referred to 'the truth that dare not speak its name'. Sectarian violence is overwhelmingly loyalist and anti-Catholic, but that simple fact is routinely fudged and obscured, by mainstream journalists, broadcasters, politicians and academics.

This collective conspiracy of denial may be more casual than organised but it still represents a framework of interpretation dominated by a British pro-Union agenda. Within the imperative of defending the Union, the suffering of northern nationalists must be continually marginalised and anti-Catholic violence and discrimination obscured.

And there are powerful mechanisms in place to achieve this end. The RUC, now revamped as the PSNI, routinely redefines sectarian loyalist attacks on Catholic homes as trouble between rival groups and reclassifies loyalist pipe bomb attacks as "just fireworks".

The Housing Executive obscures loyalist violence as a key mechanism by insisting that overcrowding and homelessness in Catholic housing estates are underpinned by "choice".

Catholics seeking accommodation "choose" "popular" areas and therefore must tolerate lengthy waiting lists, poor repair and overcrowding.

A recent study based on early census returns and conducted by University of Ulster lecturer Dr Peter Shirlow identifies a greater polarisation between the Catholic and Protestant communities in the north. According to the study, an estimated 66% of people now live in an area where the resident population is either 90% Protestant or 90% Catholic.

A survey of six areas segregated by a 'peace wall' found that 62% of the residents consider relations to have deteriorated since the peace process started. 68% of people aged 18 to 25 have never had a meaningful conversation with anyone of the other denomination and 62% have been victims of sectarian abuse. Only 5% of Catholics and 8% of Protestants actually work in an area dominated by the other community.

Tire majority of both communities refuse to shop, attend health and job centres in the 'wrong' area even when the facilities are more convenient. The picture of segregation exposed by Dr Shirlow is shocking in itself and should send alarm bell ringing.

But without exposing of the role of loyalist violence, more specifically the UDA's current campaign of anti-Catholic violence, the study will feed rather than dispel prevailing myths of sectarianism as reciprocal unpleasantness. Meanwhile; thousands of Catholic families continue to live under the constant threat of imminent loyalist attack.