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 1196  August 05 2003

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EPSR publication times uncertain during the rest of August.

The continuing international dimensions of Revisionist philistinism only serve to emphasise Stalin's theoretical bankruptcy which, in spite of China's stubborn spontaneous revolutionary determination, nevertheless successfully corrupted the ENTIRE world communist movement into ultimate anti-Leninist confusion. Stalinist anti-revolutionary muddle over united-front tactics for confronting imperialism's reactionary coup dangers STILL continues to paralyse workers with "democratic" delusions, and to fail to grasp where the real  warmongering fascist threats are now coming from, - straight out of the mythical "non-aggressive imperialism" stable. The British, French, and US historical record of colonial-war brutality, concentration camps, hostage shooting, torture treatment, and mass famine/plague/defoliation punishments, etc, etc, FAR exceeds German imperialism's brief record, and that universal Western fascist mentality now DOMINATES the planet disguised as a "war on terrorism".

The relevance of the EPSR's attack (on SLP/ Lalkar Revisionist brainrot) to the current imperialist world crisis could not have been made clearer than by the reported stance of the Iraqi Communist Party in condemning "acts of sabotage targeting public services and installations", and in insisting that the "struggle for democracy," in Iraq,  against the remnants of the old regime, should take precedence over "the anti-imperialist struggle".

Lalkar/SLP are not identifiable with the Iraqi CP, but the "condemn terrorism" opportunism, which presumably won membership of the US stooge "governing council" for these muddleheads, certainly rings a bell.

Revisionists can "condemn terrorism" all they like, but the only possible result will be the strengthening of the appeal of the Islamic Resistance (of various brands), - and of other such anarcho/idealist theoretical confusion, - until Marxist-Leninist REVOLUTIONARY grasp of anti-imperialist struggle can spread its revival around the globe.

This universal, thoroughly reactionary, "condemn terrorism" stance comes about from being mesmerised by the crap of "democracy".

To the applause from an Athens conference in June from 61 international communist parties, the Iraqi CP delegate declared that "the question of democracy is the central question".

Condemning sabotage "carried out by remnants of the ousted regime", and effectively welcoming the US imperialist occupation (as the means of ending the Saddam tyranny) by now joining its tame "governing council of Iraqis", reveals the Stalin-era, "peaceful road" depths of this grotesque Revisionist confusion.

Harpal Brar's "theoretical" approval, along with Stalin, of the designation "non-aggressive imperialist states" remains a rotten, ancient business, and still has a lot to answer for.

The only reality of the wartime "alliance" of the USSR with the USA, Britain, and France against the "aggressive imperialist states" of Germany, Italy, Japan and other Axis powers, was that the warmongering fallout from the insoluble inter-imperialist global economic crisis had pitched the longer established colonial world powers against the later-developing industrial giants who could only find room for their ever-accumulating monopoly-imperialist expansion capital AT THE EXPENSE OF the already-entrenched giant colonial empires, - Britain, USA, France, and the rest of West Europe.

The incidental attack on the USSR was the idea of ALL the imperialist powers, feeding the Soviet workers state to insatiable German monopoly imperialist expansionism as a way of killing two birds with one stone, - painlessly giving Germany more 'lebensraum', but simultaneously wiping-out the increasingly attractive influence (on a world devastated by 10 years Depression) of the Soviet socialist 'experiment'.

The purely historical, geographic, and idiosyncratic "differences" between "allied" imperialism and "axis" imperialism was recognised by the Soviet state itself in smartly signing a nonaggression pact with Germany in 1939 after five fruitless years of proposing mutual defence treaties with the "allies" (following Hitler's election as Chancellor and the speeded-up German rearmament plan).

This pact registered that war was coming anyway, - because of imperialist crisis, not because of German imperialist crisis, - and that the Western "allies" were DELIBERATELY trying to incite an invasion of the USSR, - the whole point of the 1938 Munich sell-out to Hitler by Chamberlain.

But because of the carelessness and inaccuracy of the anti-fascist bias in Soviet and world communist propaganda up until 1939, even many CPs (the more anti-theory and "democracy" bemused ones) were staggered by the Hitler-Stalin pact, and hostile to it.

Yet it was, of course, a diplomatic masterstroke, and made perfectly good sense.

Inter-IMPERIALIST war was inevitable anyway.

 But if Germany had attacked Russia FIRST, then the "allies" would have initially sat back in "non-intervention" mode, exactly as they had done when German and Italian intervention in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) had swung things Franco's way.

By splitting the imperialist powers, Stalin had made sure that the full united force of monopoly-capitalist crisis-warmongering was not first solely concentrated on the Soviet socialist republic as it had recently been on the Spanish Republic with its weak reformist/Revisionist "socialist" daydreams.

It meant that Germany would attack the weak West European states first, before the USSR (with its vast land resources and raw materials) was repositioned into German expansionism's sights.

And this is exactly what happened, finally FORCING Britain, France, and the USA to become "allies" with the USSR in mutual defence against Germanys "axis powers" offensives.

But it was this mere APPEARANCE of Germany, Italy, and Japan, etc, as the "aggressor" imperialist powers which began to dominate Stalin's weak theoretical grasp of world perspectives.

Every communist international statement after 1945 was biased against the fear and prospect of "German and Japanese revanchist militarism", hopelessly out of touch with the real perspectives which had arisen out of World War II as a result of the crushing of Germany and Japan, and the absolutely dominant enthronement of US imperialism as the world's first, and greatest, "superpower".

The EMPIRE, - with the whole world forced to dance to, or to guard against America's tune, was born, and fully constituted via the 1944 Bretton Woods acceptance, effectively, of the dollar as the world currency; the USA's effective dominance of the IMF (International Monetary Fund) and World Bank via its overwhelming financial power; and its effective ownership of the United Nations via the same mechanism of being every small country's effective banker-of-last-resort.

Stalinist Revisionism totally undermined the entire international working class by persisting with the delusion that this US-British-French set-up was "non-aggressive imperialism".

More than 400 horrific wars, reactionary coups, and brutal interventions by the West since 1945, - some of them (like in Vietnam) dropping more bombs and explosive destruction than was dropped in the WHOLE of WWII in BOTH theatres of war, Europe and the Far East, have STILL failed to convince Stalinist Revisionism that it is an utterly BANKRUPT attempt at understanding the world.

And it is from this sick and cowardly Revisionist hangover, - incapable of any serious polemical self-justification, - that the Iraqi CP to this day is still suffering from the illusion that American imperialism is only in Iraq for benign (or "non-aggressive") reasons.

And the 61 communist parties meeting in Athens in June also all passed a motion approving the Iraqi CP's stance, whose delegate had spoken chiding the international anti-war movement for "not condemning energetically the regime of Saddam Hussein".

In February of this year, the Iraqi CP had effectively called for an American imperialist invasion and occupation by its joint declaration with the CPs of France, Greece, Germany, and Switzerland demanding "effective reinforcement of the process of inspection of Weapons of Mass Destruction by the UN in Iraq, based on Resolution 1441 of the Security Council", - the same interfering imperialist garbage eventually used as "justification" for the blitzkrieg when it did finally get unleashed.

Regardless of the equally-barmy SLP/Lalkar nonsense recently of urging world solidarity with Saddam Hussein's leadership "at the forefront of anti-imperialist resistance in the Middle East", (the theoretical weakness of Stalinism can leave its disciples all  over the place) -, this Iraqi CP deludedness does follow the Revisionist trail all the way back to the original 1930s Stalinist Third International confusion.

The chaotic misunderstandings over "fascism" from Germany and Spain onwards, embracing the catastrophic mistake of categorising America s world-rule emergence as "nonaggressive imperialism" (with Stalin even more disastrously adding to the helplessness by pronouncing it an imperialism which "COULD NOT expand"),- has still not been cleared up. In fact it is more damaging and muddled than ever.

So-called "fascist power" is still imperialist state power, and it is arguing pointlessly about how much extra racism, repressiveness, dictatorialness, or warmongering chauvinism a vicious regime needs to have so as to qualify as "fascist" nastiness (rather than straightforward "colonial-imperialist" nastiness) which has helped the international workers movement make so many theoretical and practical errors in fighting monopoly capitalist reactionary surges since Lenin's death.

Whatever the label put on imperialist savagery, - and however long delusions last that a "non-aggressive" interlude has descended on world imperialist misrule, etc, etc, - the working class only ever has one programme for surely ending FOR GOOD the inevitability of never-ceasing threats of war and tyranny and that is by REVOLUTION.

With a given programme of "revolution as the only solution"; with an armed-coup imperialist regime being a so-obviously-more-formidable-threat to the working class than a dithering, crisis ridden, "parliamentary" imperialist regime, - why did the Stalinist-led mighty German Communist Party watch the NAZIs takeover reach conclusion in 1933,- (building up from their first putsch attempts in the early 1920s),- without going into one last revolutionary battle itself before this huge militant organisation CP (which had started out many, many times larger than the NAZI party) disappeared without trace into the concentration camps??????

Why did the Stalinist-led Spanish Communist Party never offer the working class any more ambitious and hopeful a fight to prevent Franco's civil-war-takeover than trailing behind the worse-than-useless petty bourgeois parliament, which was always doomed to defeat at fascism's hands??????

Pursuing "united front" tactics against the Francoist danger may well have been a useful strategy so as to be able to concentrate the communist forces, but the only CERTAIN proletarian class inspiration would have been if the aim of socialist revolution, BEYOND the feeble parliamentary civil-war troubles, had remained loud and clear.

Confusing revolutionary "united front" tactics with "support-for-democracy-against-fascism" class-collaborating delusions, could only have condemned and muddled the Spanish working class to certain defeat, Lalkar's Stalinist Revisionist deception has made a huge issue of Chinese Revolutionary solidarity with Stalinist leadership in order to prove what a great, consistent REVOLUTIONARY Stalin had remained, all life long.

To unravel this utterly fraudulent posture, two of the possibilities which need examining are that the actual historical facts tell a completely different story, - namely, that Stalin did NOT support "revolution all the way" in China; and that the Chinese CP's grasp of the Revisionist problem internationally, and how to deal with it, was self-evidently (from 2003's anti-revolutionary Beijing standpoint, e.g.) always a nonsense.

First the facts. Just one will do, - the immediate postwar "peace" policy of the Stalinist International after 1945 which urged "peaceful road democracy" as the way forward for the working class, not revolution.

The CPC's own official history reports developments as follows:

 
The various agreements reached at the Political Consultative Conference did not represent new-democracy, but they did help break up Chiang Kai-shek's dictatorship and promote democracy, and they advanced the cause of peace and national reconstruction. In varying degrees, therefore, they were beneficial to the people and were welcomed by them. These agreements aroused in the hearts of hundreds of millions of the Chinese people the fervent hope for nationwide peace, democracy, unity and unification. Because the agreements embodied many of the opinions of the middle-of-the-roaders, their response was particularly enthusiastic. As a result, for quite a long time in the KMT areas the agreements served as the criterion by which people judged right and wrong: those who upheld the line of the Political Consultative Conference had the support of the people, while those who abrogated it were in clear opposition to them.

The CPC was prepared to implement these agreements. When issuing the cease-fire orders, Chairman Mao Zedong had said that a new stage of peace and democracy in China was about to begin and that the entire Party should strive to consolidate domestic peace, carry out democratic reform and build an independent, free, prosperous and powerful new China.

It was largely because Chiang could count on the support and assistance of the U.S. government that he dared tear up the agreements of the Political Consultative Conference and prepare for civil war.

In the meantime, the U.S. government increased its aid to the KMT. In March 1946 the United States successively organised army and navy advisory teams. On June 17 the two governments signed the Sino-American Lend-Lease Agreement, which transferred U.S.$51.7 million worth of military equipment to the KMT. Secretary of State Acheson later admitted the importance of the U.S. role. In a letter to President Truman on July 30, 1949, he noted: "Indeed during that period, thanks very largely to our aid in transporting, arming and supplying their forces, they extended their control over a large part of North China and Manchuria." These facts shattered the myth of U.S. "mediation."

As soon as they had completed their preparations for war, the KMT authorities revealed their true nature - their contempt for the truce agreement and for the agreements of the Political Consultative Conference - by launching a full-scale attack on the Liberated Areas. On June 26, 1946, two hundred and twenty thousand KMT troops began the assault by besieging the Central Plains Liberated Area in the border region between Hubei and Henan provinces.

At the beginning of the war, some middle-of-the-roaders were misled by the outward strength of the reactionaries and overcome by pessimism and fear. Some people even went so far as to advocate that soldiers and civilians in the Liberated Areas, faced with attack, should compromise and make concessions. Internationally, the U.S. was escalating the "cold war."

The Soviet leaders took a pessimistic view of the situation: they believed that if civil war broke out in China, the United States and the Soviet Union might be drawn into the conflict.

For this reason, they proposed that the CPC ought to join with Chiang Kaishek's government and disband its own army. 

Despite all this, the CPC remained calm and was determined to fight back. After the outbreak of the civil war, all of the Communist-led people's armed forces were  compelled to fight in self-defence. The Party believed that Chiang's offensive not only must but could be defeated.

The Chinese Revolution got there by simply ignoring Stalin's weak-minded international class-collaboration delusions with "non-aggressive imperialism" and his readiness to capitulate to rotten Western warmongering provocations (which saw the postwar Greek revolutionary government, e.g., abandoned to US-armed and inspired counter-revolution).

But the same passage records the disastrous theoretical influence of Stalinism on Maoism which eventually saw Beijing degenerate towards a totally class-collaborative Revisionist world view, with Mao launching his notorious nonsense about the imperialists being "paper tigers".

April 1946 Mao Zedong wrote an essay, "Some Points in Appraisal of the Present International Situation." He declared that while there was a danger of world war, the democratic forces of the people of the world were forging ahead and that they must and could avert that danger.

In August of the same year, not long after the civil war broke out, when talking with the American correspondent Anna Louise Strong, Mao Zedong put forward his famous thesis, "All reactionaries are paper tigers." 

"In appearance," he said, "the reactionaries are terrifying, but in reality they are not so powerful. From a long-term point of view, it is not the reactionaries but the people who are really powerful."

The joke would soon be lost on 2 million North Korean dead; 4 million Vietnamese dead; and 30 million extra in more than 400 wars and coups, etc, of imperialist aggression from 1945 onwards, not least the entire 1 million membership of the Indonesian Communist Party who were all slaughtered in their beds in 1965 while stupidly patiently still waiting for "peace and democracy" to deliver "an independent, free, prosperous, and powerful, new" future, to adapt the CPC's original postwar quote in Stalinist-Revisionist nonsense style, which Maoism nor the CPC have EVER had the grasp of Marxist-Leninist science to correct.

And STILL the overwhelming theoretical pressure in 2003 CONTINUES to come from the Western imperialist "democracy" fraud, and Marxist-Leninist revolutionary understanding continues to take a back seat.

Among those parties at the Athens conference, cheering on the Iraqi CP's class-collaborationist approach to occupation by "non-aggressive" US-imperialism, were the Chinese and Cuban Communist Party delegations.

And how well it chimes in with a renewed bourgeois ideological offensive proclaiming that a "new Iraq" really is slowly being rebuilt, - a "positive, democratic, and creative new influence for the Middle East and for the whole world", etc, etc, etc,

And the biggest tragedy is that there is hardly a soul throughout the entire fake-'left' around the world who is not partially taken-in by this utterly pointless gibber.

What if it is "true" (in the limited sense) that obviously, if the world Empire should concentrate massive financial, administrative, and military firepower on one small country from its vast global resources, it could achieve a certain effect???????

Well, all it would succeed in doing is raising more, and more, and more questions.

How can such a one-off "special effort", even then only achieved (if it is) with the greatest difficulty, be of any real relevance to 190 other countries in the world who are ALL suffering in one way or another from the effects of world capitalist economic  CRISIS which is what put reactionary imperialist stooge Iraq at loggerheads with the US imperialist master-race in the first place)?????????????

How come that such a "capable, can-do, clever" imperialist system allowed this long-drawn-out Iraqi mess to boil over and fester in the first place, nearly 20 years ago? (or even longer)??

And allowed 190 other countries to sink towards similar upheaval, revolt, and difficulties, coming up the line soon??????????

And what "solution" is thought to be in the offing from this utterly artificial "nation-building" demonstration/stunt by the US imperialist "superpower" which is adding $5 billion a month to the already CATASTROPHIC American budget and foreign payments deficits which lie at the root of the global "over-production" crisis which is plunging the world towards its greatest crash, slump, trade-war, and inter-imperialist shooting war (for supremacy and survival) IN ALL HISTORY????????????????

What would be the meaning of a US master-race "triumph" ultimately in Iraq which had only pushed the world closer towards its first global currency collapse (the dollar) ever, with absolutely unpredictably cataclysmic consequences in economic and political devastation and upheaval???????? 

And in addition, on a more detailed note, has one single Revisionist fake-'left' of any of the many hundreds of varieties (Trot and Stalinist) given any really serious thought to how similar this US imperialist blitzkrieging (Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and the "evil axis" list of "rogue  states" to follow) is beginning to look to the NAZI warmongering which the imperialist system DELIBERATELY plunged the world into in the 1930s the last time it had an insoluble capitalist crisis on its hands and was threatened by revolt all around????????????

The capitalist press's own admissions are not quite up, yet, to likening the US imperialist onslaught via blitzkrieg destruction (by air, land, and sea); mass detentions without trial; selective assassination squads; collective punishment routines where individual resisters cannot be found; and total economic, political, propaganda and police-military dictatorship; etc, etc, - to the exact NAZI German-imperialist concentration-camp and Gestapo equivalents.

But the parallels in cynical tyranny draw ever closer,- in their own descriptions:

The first hint that something might be up came at 1.30pm on Sunday afternoon. A car full of westerners in civilian clothes with cropped military-style haircuts pulled up outside the Al-Sa'ah restaurant, two blocks from Prince Rabiah Muhamedal-Habib's house in the wealthy Mansur district of Baghdad.

According to Ra'fet Saad, 38, a local businessman, the car loitered in the area for two hours. Moments after it pulled away there was a loud explosion from the direction of Mr al-Habib's house. Mr Saad ran to the corner, where he saw special forces descending on the building from every direction. Wearing gas masks, body armour and black T-shirts with brightly coloured identification lettering on the sleeves, they blasted their way into the house.

Within two hours soldiers attached to this so-called elite unit had shot and killed at least five people. Their actions have provoked anger towards the coalition in this previously peaceful and prosperous neighbourhood that is likely to simmer for some time to come.

 Fifty yards up the street six Humvees had created a partial roadblock at a crossroads. Other troops, some dressed in civilian clothes, fanned out to block the main roads around the house, but crucially not the quieter side streets.

The first vehicle to get unlucky was a Chevrolet Malibu. For some reason, the driver did not stop as he approached the roadblock and the soldiers opened fire. Mr Saad had taken cover behind a wall. When he dared to look up, the soldiers were dragging two men away from the car. "I think they were dead," he said.

Fifteen minutes later, a Toyota Corona being driven by a man called Mazin, who was disabled and walked with the aid of a frame, arrived in the area. His wife was in the passenger seat and his teenage son in the back. If he had turned left out of the small lane that led to their house, they might all still be alive.

Instead, Mazin made the mistake of turning right towards the roadblock. A bullet from the volley of shots fired at the car passed through the windscreen and blew off the right half his head, according to Ahmed Ibrahim, who runs an optician's shop opposite the A1 Sa'ah restaurant.

Nobody on the street yesterday seemed to know what had happened to his wife or teenage son, only that they had been injured and taken away by the Americans.

According to Mr Ibrahim, the soldiers were by now firing indiscriminately. A bullet struck the door-frame of his shop, while two others hit a generator belonging to the restaurant on the other side of the street. Another round hit the fuel tank of his Mercedes. It exploded in flames, setting alight the car parked next to it.

The next victim, who was in a red Mitsubishi Pajero  landcruiser, was not even driving towards the roadblock. Instead, he had been travelling on a main road more than 150 yards away when he slowed down to see what the commotion was. Two bullets hit him in the chest.

Dressed in flowing robes and a black and white headdress, Prince Rabiah was taking the raid on his house calmly yesterday morning. "My people," he said, "want to demonstrate in all Iraq. But we want peace, so I tell them No, we do not want to make a big thing of this." He had spent Sunday in Kut, 50 miles south east of Baghdad, and was not at home when the special forces arrived. The only people in the building when the raid started had been two of his bodyguards, and the Americans had taken them away. But a neighbour told him that when the force arrived they had thrown bombs and there had been a lot of shooting.

"When we entered the house everything was upside down," he said, walking into the sitting room where a video recorder and satellite receiver had been pulled from a cabinet. "A lot of things were missing - money, two fax machines, a video camera and cassettes." In another room, two bullets had made holes and spider web patterns in the window. On the floor next to an ornate sideboard were two shotgun cartridges, which had been used to blow the locks off the door. 

"What do they think? That Saddam Hussein is going to be able to hide in here?" he said pointing at the cabinet.

Although the prince admits having known Saddam Hussein - "He respected me very much" - he said he had not seen the former president for many months. "I have no idea why they came here. But if they want to find anybody in this house they just have to knock on the door."

 But while the prince was taking the raid calmly, elsewhere in Mansur it provoked a reaction that was anything but. "We consider the Americans now as war criminals," said Mahmoud al-Baghdadi, a 32year-old baker. "They claim to be fighting terrorism, but they cannot defend freedom by killing disabled people".

Yaqdan Kadhem, a waiter, said that before he had felt sympathy for the Americans, but now he supported the attacks on US troops. "Until now I was against Saddam Hussein, but now I hate the Americans for what they did yesterday."

The coalition refused to comment on events in Mansur, except to say the raid had been carried out by Task Force 20.

Britain's Brief rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, recently praised the Israeli military as the most humanitarian in the world because it claims to risk its soldiers' lives to avoid killing innocent Palestinians. Its a belief echoed by most Israelis, who revere the army as an institution of national salvation. Yet among the most shocking aspects of [the intifada - added by ed] has been the killing of children by the Israeli army.

The numbers are staggering; one in five Palestinian dead is a child. The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) says at least 408 Palestinian children have been killed since the beginning of the intifada in September 2000. Nearly half were killed in the Gaza strip, and most of those died in two refugee camps in the south, Khan Yunis and Rafah. The PCHR saw they were victims of "indiscriminate shooting, excessive force, a shoot-to-kill policy and the deliberate targeting of children".

And children continue to die, even after the ceasefire declared by Hamas and other groups at the end of June. On Friday, a soldier at a West Bank checkpoint shot dead a four-year-old boy, Ghassan Kabaha, and wounded his two young sisters after "accidentally" letting loose at a car with a burst of machinegun fire from his armoured vehicle. The rate of killing since the beginning of the ceasefire has dropped sharply, but almost every day the army has continued to fire heavy machineguns into Khan Yunis or Rafah. Among the latest victims of apparently indiscriminate shooting were three teenagers and an eight-year-old, Yousef Abu Jaza, hit in the knee when soldiers shot at a group of children playing football in Khan Yunis.

Weeks passed and another Israeli bullet shattered the life of another young Palestinian girl. Huda Darwish was sitting at her school desk when a cluster of shots ripped through the top of a tree outside her classroom and buried themselves in the wall. But one ricocheted off the window frame, smashed through the glass and lodged in the 12-year-old girl's brain. Huda's teacher, Said Sinwar, was standing in front of the blackboard. "It was a normal lesson when suddenly there was this shooting without any warning. The children were terrified and turning to run. I was shouting at them to get under their desks. Suddenly the bullet hit the little girl and she slumped to the floor with a sigh, not even screaming," he says.

The military says it is difficult to distinguish between youths and men who might be Palestinian fighters, but the statistics show that nearly a quarter of the children killed were under 12. Last year alone 50 children under the age of eight were shot dead or blown up by the Israeli army in Gaza: eight, one of whom was two months old, were slaughtered when a one-tonne bomb was dropped on a block of flats to kill a lone Hamas leader, Sheikh Salah Mustafa Shehada. But Rahman, Huda and Haneen were not "collateral damage" in the assassination of Ham as 'terrorists", or caught in crossfire. There was  no combat when they were shot. There was nothing more than a single burst of fire, sometimes a single bullet, from an Israeli soldier's gun.

It was the same when seven-year-old Ali Ghureiz was shot in the head on the street outside his house in Rafah. And when Haneen Abu Sitta, 12, was killed while walking home after school near the fence with a Jewish settlement in southern Gaza. And when Nada Madhi, also 12, was shot in the stomach and died as she leaned out of her bedroom window in Rafah to watch the funeral procession for another child killed earlier.

The army offered a senior officer of its southern command to discuss the shooting of these six children over a period of just 10 weeks earlier this year. The military told me I could not name him, even though his identity is no secret to the Israeli public or his enemies; it was this officer who explained to the nation how an army bulldozer came to crush to death the young American peace activist, Rachel Currie.

"I want you to know we are not a bunch of crazies down here, "he says. At his headquarters in the Gush Khatif Jewish settlement in Gaza, the commander rattles through the army's version of the shootings: either the military knew nothing of them, or the children had been caught in crossfire - a justification used so frequently, and so often disproved, that it is rarely believed. But three hours later, after poring over maps and military logs, timings and regulations, he concedes that his soldiers were responsible - even culpable - in several of the killings.

The Israeli army's instinctive response is to muddy the waters when confronted with a controversial killing. At first, it questioned whether Huda was even shot. I described for the soldiers the scene in the classroom with blood rippling up the wall behind the child's desk.

"I don't know how this happened," says the commander. "I take responsibility for this. It could have been one of ours. I think it probably was."

The killing of Haneen is clearer in the commander's mind. "We checked it and we know that on the same day there was shooting of a mortar," he says. "The troops from the post shot back at the area where the mortar was launched, the area where the girl was killed. We didn't see if we hit someone. I assume that a stray bullet hit Haneen. Unfortunately." Doesn't he think that simply shooting back in the general direction of a mortar attack is irresponsible at best? He says not. "You cannot have soldiers sitting and doing nothing when they are shot at," he says.

Haneen's mother, Mrs Selmi, believes her daughter was shot from "the container". The metal box dangling from a crane evokes more constant fear in Khan Yunis than the helicopter rocket attacks and tank incursions. Nestled inside is an Israeli sniper shielded by camouflage netting and hoisted high enough to see deep into the refugee camp. From inside, it is striking how much the box moves around in the wind, leaving little hope of an accurate shot. Peering from behind the camouflage, the view is mostly of Palestinian houses riddled with bullet holes, a testament to the scale of incoming Israeli fire. Haneen's home sits a few metres from the security fence separating Khan Yunis from the Jewish settlement. But, because the house is inhabited, the damage is mostly limited to the upper floor, with 27 bullet holes around the windows. "In this area, we shoot at the houses," says the Israeli commander. "We don't want people on the second floor. I gave the order: shoot at the windows."

Fences usually mark defined limits but, as with so much in the occupied territories, the rules are deliberately vague. There is an ill-defined ban on "approaching" the security fences separating Gaza from Israel or the Jewish settlements. "We have a danger zone 100 to 200m from the fence around Gush Katif [settlement]. They [the Palestinians] know where the danger zone is," the commander says. But many houses in Rafah and  Khan Yunis are within the "danger zone". Children play in its shadow, and many adults fear walking to their own front doors.

The military's critics say the vast majority of soldiers do not commit such crimes but those that do are rarely called to account. The result is an atmosphere of impunity. Israel's army chief-of-staff, Lieutenant General Moshe Yaalon, claims that every shooting of a civilian is investigated. "Harming innocent civilians is firstly a matter of morals and values, and we cannot permit ourselves to let this happen. I deal with it personally," he told the Israeli press. But Yaalon has not dealt personally with any of the killings of the six children reported on here.

The army's indifferent handling of the shootings of civilians has even drawn stinging criticism from a member of Ariel Sharon's Likud party in the Israeli parliament, Michael Fitan. "I am not certain that the responsible officials are aware of the fact that there are gross violations of human rights in the field, despite army regulations," he said.

The case of Khalil al-Mughrabi is telling. The 11-year-old was shot dead in Rafah by the Israeli army two years ago as he played football with a group of friends near the security fence. One of Israel's most respected human rights organisations, B'Tselem, wrote to the judge advocate general's office, responsible for prosecuting soldiers, demanding an inquiry. Months later, the office wrote back saying that Khalil was shot by soldiers who acted with "restraint and control" to disperse a riot in the area. However, the judge advocate general's office made the mistake of attaching a copy of its own, supposedly secret, investigation which came to a quite different conclusion - that the riot had been much earlier in the day and the soldiers who shot the child should not have opened fire. The report says a "serious deviation from obligatory norms of behaviour" took place.

In the report, the chief military prosecutor, Colonel Einat Ron, then spelled out alternative false scenarios that should be offered to B'Tselem. B'Tselem said the internal report confirmed that the army has a policy of covering up its crimes. "The message that the judge advocate general's office transmits to soldiers is clear: soldier who violate the 'Open Fire Regulations', even if their breach results in death, will not be investigated and will not be prosecuted."

Towards the end of the interview, the commander in Gaza finally concedes that his soldiers were at fault to some degree or other in the killing of most - but not all - of the children we discussed. They include a 12-year-old girl, Haneen Abu Sitta, shot dead in Rafah as she walked home from school near a security fence around one of the fortified Jewish settlements. The army moved swiftly to cover it up. It leaked a false story to more compliant parts of the Israeli media, claiming Haneen was shot during a gun battle between troops and "terrorists" in an area known for weapons smuggling across the border from Egypt. But the army commander concedes that there was no battle. "Every name of a child here, it makes me feel bad because it's the fault of my soldiers. I need to learn and see the mistakes of my troops," he says. But by the end of the interview, he is combative again. "I remember the Holocaust. We have a choice, to fight the terrorists or to face being consumed by the flames again," he says. The Israeli army insists that interviews with its commanders about controversial issues are off the record. Depending on what the officer says, that bar is sometimes lifted. I ask to be able to name the commander in Gaza. The army refuses. "He has admitted his soldiers were responsible for at least some of those killings," says an army spokesman who sat in on the interview. "In this day and age that raises the prospect of war crimes, not here but if he travels abroad he could be arrested some time in the future. Some people might think there is something wrong here."

 

Diehard defenders of military intervention in Iraq argue that it's too soon to carp, that time is required to restore order and prosperity to a country ravaged by every type of misfortune.

Time, certainly, is needed, but is time enough? If the example of Afghanistan is anything to go by, time makes things worse rather than better. More than 18 months after the collapse of the Taliban regime, there is a remarkable consensus among aid workers, NGOs and UN officials that the situation is deteriorating. 

There is a further point of consensus: that the deterioration is a direct consequence of "coalition" policy. Some 60 aid agencies have issued a joint statement pleading with the international community to deploy forces across Afghanistan to bring some order. While waiting for the elusive international cavalry, they have been forced to reduce operations in the north, where the warlords fight each other, and in the south, where the "coalition" forces try to fight the Taliban. 

Privately, many aid workers fear that it is too late. Even if the political will existed, foreign troops may no longer be in a position to restore order. To do so would require going to war with the warlords themselves. The warlords, of course, as friends of the "coalition", are also part of the government. They have private armies, raise private funds, pursue private interests and control private treasuries. None of these do they wish to give up. All of them threaten the long-term future of Afghanistan, the short-term prospects of holding elections, the immediate possibilities of reconstruction and the threadbare credibility of Hamid Kauai's government. Northern Alliance commanders - and figures like the Tajik defence minister Mohammed Fahim - hold the real power.

In the country that is fantasy Afghanistan - or the Afghanistan of western promise - a national army is being created which represents all ethnic groups, and elections next year will produce a representative, democratic government. In real Afghanistan, Fahim does not want to admit other ethnic groups to his army which could create the conditions for a future civil war.

The new national army is supposed to be 70,000 strong. Last year, only 4,000 men were trained. The new recruits were vetted for Taliban connections and drug trafficking, but not for past human rights abuses. The defence ministry is a Tajik fiefdom; arms and cash, including British taxpayers' money, continue to be funnelled to the warlords; and senior UN officials have publicly doubted whether the elections will happen at all. The funds offered to Afghanistan for reconstruction have been slow to arrive and less  than promised, but aid agencies argue that the most urgent problems are not primarily a question of money. The bad news is that they are, therefore, not problems money will solve. What is needed is a fundamental change in the power structure. But this continues to be supported, on grounds of security, by both the British and the US governments. There is money in Afghanistan, but it is in the wrong hands. Local warlords control local roads and exact crippling tolls that impede trade. Karzai is not able to exact the remittance of this money to Kabul. The government therefore, depends on funds from outside, part of which it uses, in turn, to buy off the warlords. At no stage of this dismal process do funds trickle down to the people of Afghanistan. The only dependable source of revenue for many returned farmers is the opium poppy.

Two million refugees have returned to Afghanistan, encouraged by the UNHCR and their weary host countries. For many this has been a tale of woe. There are few jobs; poverty and hunger continue.

The Pentagon prefers to pay the warlords to run the country outside Kabul, dressing up the exercise with a loya jirga in which 80% of those "elected" were warlords. Washington sources report that when Kauai appealed to Rumsfeld for support to confront one of the most notorious warlords, Rumsfeld declined to give it. The result has been that reconstruction is crippled, political progress is nonexistent and human rights abuses are piling up.

Even straightforward reconstruction projects fail to bring maximum benefit to the Afghan people. To give only one example: road repair could be an opportunity to spend money usefully and to provide employment. But on the key road from Kandahar to Iran, which had not been repaired for 30 years, the central government failed to gain the cooperation of local powers. The stalemate was resolved when the repair contract was awarded to a US firm that brought in heavy machinery instead of using local labour.

What progress there has been is now threatened. The proportion of girls in school - never more than half - has begun to decline again: girls' schools have been attacked, and girls threatened and harassed on their way to classes.

A Human Rights Watch report published on Tuesday documents crimes of kidnapping, rape, intimidation, robbery, extortion and murder, committed not in spite of the government but by its forces - by the warlords and their police and soldiers, who are paid, directly and indirectly, by US and British taxpayers.

The British have been shipping cash to Hazrat Ali, the head of Afghanistan's eastern military command and the warlord of Nangahar, who worked with the US at Tom Bora. His men specialise in arresting people on the pretext that they  are Taliban supporters and torturing them until their families pay up.

If paying warlords had been an emergency measure, there would be room to hope that it would no longer be necessary once elections were held and a legitimate government in place. But this is a policy the consequence of which is that there is unlikely to be long-term peace or a democratic government. 

It is interesting to note that for all its superpower blitzkrieg brutality for getting the imperialist system out of its devastating 1930s crisis, - initially "appeased" or just grumbled at by the remaining imperialist powers, - the German NAZI master-race onslaught ended up in TOTAL FAILURE.

The "thousand-year Reich" survived only 12 years, and brought even greater humiliation and devastation down on imperialism's head than was coming anyway, and led to a huge expansion of revolutionary anti-imperialism all round the world.

The 1930s warmongering "solution" to the global monopoly capitalist system crisis had effectively self-destructed.

The West's demented "war on terrorism", in spite of the scabby propaganda-backing it is getting from Stalinist Revisionist degenerates of all kinds from the SLP to the Iraqi CP in their "condemn terrorism" ignorance of Leninism and cowardice, - could be heading in the same self-destruction direction.

The West's joke erection of its "stop terrorism" Aunt Sally (as cause for unleashing generalised mayhem and warmongering against (potentially) an entire planet in revolt very soon),- has already plumbed the depths of its own cynical self-ridicule, - - as the gob-smacked bourgeois press itself has revealed:

EMBARRASSED Pentagon officials were yesterday forced to scrap a scheme that invited speculators to make money out of terrorist attacks, coups and assassinations.

News of the Policy Analysis Market had sparked disbelief, derision and disgust. Investors would have been encouraged to bet anonymously on the likelihood of unrest around the world. Areas that the Pentagon wanted internet gamblers to focus on included the possible assassination of Yassir Arafat, the deposing of King Abudullah II of Jordan and a bio-terrorist attack on Israel.

Senators said that the idea was so outlandish and in such poor taste that most people would assume that it was a hoax Mr Wolfowitz confirmed otherwise. He said that Pentagon officials were supposed to be imaginative, but it sounds like maybe they got too imaginative.

 Before the U-turn, US officials had defended the initiative vigorously, saying that it could help Washington to predict pivotal events, particularly in the Middle East. The theory was that analysts should follow the money if they wanted the best forecast of events.

"Research indicates that markets are extremely efficient, effective and timely aggregators of dispersed and even hidden information," a Pentagon statement, issued after initial criticism, said. "Futures markets have proven themselves to be good at predicting such things as elections results. They are often better than expert opinion."

Such thinking depended on market forces being driven by expert opinion. Employees of US government agencies, including the CIA and the Pentagon's Defence Intelligence Agency, would have been barred from taking part, but it is debatable how highly senior officials regard their analysis anyway, given their desire to set up the initiative.

The scheme was dreamt up by the Pentagon's Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, whose Information Awareness Office is led by John Poindexter, Ronald Reagan's National Security Adviser in the 1980s, when the Administration sold arms to Iran in exchange for the release of US hostages in Lebanon.

With Oliver North, Mr Poindexter oversaw the illegal diversion of those funds to the Contra guerrillas fighting Nicaragua's elected communist Government His conviction of lying to Congress was later overturned.

Senator Byron Dorgan, a North Dakota Democrat, said: "Can you imagine if another country set up a betting parlour sponsored by the government so that people could go in and bet on the assassination of an American political figure?" Spending taxpayers' money to create terrorism betting rings was "as wasteful as it is repugnant".

In PAM anyone who felt they had geopolitical insight, insider knowledge, or who just felt lucky could bet on a certain event happening by a buying a futures contract tied to that event.

So, according to an example on the its website, policyanalysismarket.org, a punter who believed the Jordanian monarchy would be overthrown could buy a futures contract in "Jordanian overthrow". Its price would go up and down, like the price of pork belly or oil futures, according to how many contracts are bought.

Critics also questioned the logic of the scheme. While it could allow terrorists to make money from their outrages, it also offered them the chance to mislead US intelligence.

Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Defence Secretary, said that the online initiative was being cancelled a few days before its launch on Friday. He also promised an investigation into how  $500,000 (£308,000) of public money had been spent and why the projected $8 million scheme had been allowed to come so close to fruition. "We will find out exactly how this happened," he said.

The new US master-race also failed to work out why punters would continue to bet/invest on forthcoming "terrorist certainties" (so as to sell at a profit as it became a more and more popular gamble, thereby pushing its price up), - -- if the CIA repeatedly used such pointers to intervene early to make sure that this was one "terrorist certainty" that was NEVER going to happen, - thus ensuring that no long-shot, low-price, invest-bets ever WOULD become a popular gamble pushing the price (and the profit) up,- because EVERYONE would know that as soon as the price even STARTED to rise, the CIA would take action immediately, thereby guaranteeing that NOTHING would EVER grow to "popular gamble"-level "information" under such an insane scheme.

And what does all of this say about the American imperialists' famed "intelligence" global network, blanketing the Earth, anyway???????

Somehow, market punters' instincts, surely supplied with less than 10% of the "intelligence" that is at the CIA and Pentagon's disposal,  -  turn out to be a far better guide to what is going to be happening in the international class struggle, than the CIA and Pentagon's 100% "intelligence" input.

Can self-ridicule stretch any further???

Well, yes it can, actually, to the Lalkar fake-'lefts' who still refused to publicly denounce the SLP's infamous and reactionary "condemnation" of anti-imperialist spontaneous terrorism, still polluting working-class understanding of the civil war struggles breaking out everywhere within the rotting capitalist system; - or who alternatively refuse to polemicise against Lenin's 1906 science about "Guerrilla Warfare", explaining why that too is "no longer a correct understanding of the world" in typical Stalinist-Revisionist imbecility. Build Leninism. EPSR supporters.

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

Western intelligence reactionaries behind stitch-up of Sinn Fein Three.

NIALL CONNOLLY, Martin McCauley and James Monaghan were arrested on 11 August 2001 and have been charged with training the FARC and travelling on false documentation. Since their arrest, they have been held in six different jails and detention centres. They are currently being held in one of the most dangerous jails in Colombia, El Modelo in Bogota.

Their trial began on 4 October 2002 and has stopped and started on six different occasions since that date.

 Serious questions need to be asked here of the Colombian State - is the Colombian Prosecution 'schooling' witnesses to give false evidence who are in military custody in return for reduction of sentence or freedom from prosecution? All the evidence indicates that they are. Meanwhile, three Irishmen remain in one of the most dangerous jails in Latin America."

A team of international observers made up of human rights lawyers, politicians and human rights defenders from Europe, the United States and Australia have travelled to each stage of the trial. Each time they go they do detailed reports of the proceedings. The international team will travel with Bring Them Home co-ordinator Caitriona Ruane.

Caitriona Ruane said: "At the last hearing in April, the defence presented three videos (dated 7 February, 21 February and 22 February 2001) taken in Dublin and Belfast, with Jim Monaghan in each one. These videos categorically show that the witness Edwin Geovanny Rodriguez perjured himself on the stand. Mr Rodriguez said that he saw the three men training the FARC from 5 to 25 February 2001.

In the last phase of the trial, back in April, evidence was heard from the defence witnesses including Ros O'Sullivan, Mike Ritchis, Keith Borer, Sile Maguire and Sean O'Domhnaill.

The cross examination of each of the alibi witnesses was without exception concentrated on matters that were not in the evidence or on matters that were entirely irrelevant.

There was one notable exception to this and that was the evidence of Keith Borer, who is a chartered chemist and forensic science expert. The main thrust of his evidence was that the technologies of the FARC and IRA were entirely different and that the FARC technology was generally superior. The evidence was that there is no indication that any IRA methods have been employed by the FARC.

Natalie Kabasakalian, a practising human rights lawyer in the US - who served as the Amnesty International (USA) country specialist for Ireland and Britain from 1999-2002 - has travelled on two occasions to observe the trial and will be returning next week to Colombia.

In her report following her last visit as an international observer, Kabasakalian wrote:

"Not only has the prosecution failed to meet its burden of proof in establishing the charges against the defendants, but the untruth of every material fact and conclusion attested to by prosecution witnesses has been definitely established by credible defence evidence.

"Forensic testimony offered by an expert of international standing impugns the reliability and credibility of the sole piece of evidence purporting to link the defendants with illicit explosives. The same expert testified that the mortars used by the IRA differ from those used by the FARC in every design and functional detail, including size, contouring, mobility, length and accuracy of trajectory and detonation mechanisms.

"The credible testimony presented by defence witnesses establishes conclusively that prosecution witnesses lied, and that the prosecutor subomed the perjurious testimony and knowingly submitted unreliable documents into evidence."

"The prosecutor and the in-court representative of the Procuraduria (solicitor general's office) both receive instructions from superiors during trial, and clearly act as members of a team; the Procuraduria does not even maintain a pretense of independence.

"While the pre-trial detention of the accused appears never to have been justified, the continuing deprivation of their liberty, in light of the protracted length of the proceedings and the total refutation of all substantive allegations, is now a cause for heightened concern."

She concluded: "Even if the veneer of this trial's legitimacy had not been torn off during the last phase of testimony, the defendants may be entitled to release from custody based on the sheer length of this process. However, now that the utter absence of incriminating evidence has been confirmed in open court, this observer concludes that the continued deprivation of the defendants' liberty constitutes a serious violation of their fundamental rights."

Steven McCabe, President of the Brehon Law Society and a practising lawyer in the US, said in his report:

"Based upon the uncontroverted testimony set forth above, it is quite clear to this observer that the three accused were not in Colombia during the times they were alleged to have been. If not present, they could not possibly have conducted the acts they are accused of. The evidence is persuasive, clear and convincing."

"Whether the standard of proof is full absolute certainty or beyond a reasonable doubt, the case against them should fall. A verdict of guilty on the charges of training in illegal activities would be totally without foundation and a miscarriage of justice in any civilised modern system of jurisprudence. The verdict would clearly be suspect on the grounds of being politically motivated and would not withstand even the most superficial judicial scrutinisation."

 In his report following the last session of the trial, Sinn Fein TD Sean Crowe noted the outside influences that may yet affect the outcome of this highly politicised trial: "The high profile nature of this trial and the escalation of the conflict in Colombia must be putting Judge Acosta under extreme pressure at this stage of proceedings. The regular and almost daily references to guilt of the three accused by senior politicians, military and the local and international media has continued unabated. This insidious pressure has to be acknowledged in any objective report.

PROSECUTION WITNESSES

1. Edwin Geovanny Rodriquez

A 25-year-old Colombian, currently in jail in Villa Vicencio, Rodriguez gave evidence in February 2003 and claimed that he was outside the door of the room where he claims Niall Connolly, Martin McCauley and James Monaghan were training the FARC from 5 to 25 February 2001.

The Defence provided the court with three original DVD tapes and NSTC (American) VHS copies of videos

Video No 1 February 7, 2001 Coiste no níarchimí offices in Dublin 

Jim Monaghan introduced the speakers, Becky Garcia, whose son was killed by the FARC, and Mary Kelly. More than ten people were present at the talk. Jim Monaghan thanked the speakers on tape and was visibly present throughout the entire discussion. The Defence has provided authenticated sworn A
affidavits from people in the video and the person who filmed the discussion.

Defence will present to the court

•	A copy of the Irish Times of 7 February 2001 which has an article on Colombia and was mentioned by Jim Monaghan on the tape.

An authenticated transcript of the Irish Foreign Affairs Committee meeting, mentioned on the Tape by the speakers, which took place one month prior to 7 February 2001.

Video No 2, February 21, 2001 Coiste no níarchimí Offices in Dublin

Sean Kinsella, an ex-prisoner from England, gave a presentation to a group of people about his experiences in English jails. Jim Monaghan was visibly present throughout

The Defence has provided authenticated sworn affidavits from people in the video and the person who filmed the discussion.

Video No 3, February 22, 2001 Coiste no níarchimí Offices in Belfast

Catherine Murphy was commissioned by Coiste to carry out a series of training sessions on presentation skills. At the end of the training, each of the participants had to make a five-minute presentation on camera on peace and reconciliation in front of the other participants and Catherine Murphy. Jim Monaghan appeared on the video making his presentation. After his presentation, there was a discussion. Robert Russell referred to an article written by Irish News Columnist Brian Feeney and talked about its content. When RTE contacted Brian Feeney to enquire about the content of his article on the date mentioned in the video, it was verified and RTE showed clips of the video with an interview with Catherine Murphy.

The Defence has presented the court with sworn authenticated affidavits from Catherine Murphy, Michelle Devlin (the person who filmed the video) and all the participants in the video. Invoices and receipts paid to Catherine Murphy were presented to the court. These invoices were verified and stamped by the Belfast European Partnership Board, part of the European Peace and Reconcilation Funds.

The Defence brought Catherine Murphy and Michelle Devlin out to Colombia in April and on two occasions requested that the ,lodge call both these witnesses to give evidence. Both these requests were denied by Judge Acosta.

The Defence will be providing the court with a copy of the Irish News with Brian Feeney's article.

2. John Alexander Caviedes

Currently in a witness protection programme, the Prosecution is claiming that he is a civilian witness, though in court in Medellin he admitted that he was living in a military barracks prior to giving evidence and that he met with Colombian Military Intelligence officer Captain Pulido (who arrested the three Irishmen). Caviedes claims that he saw the men training the FARC in 1998, 1999, 2000 and 2001. He gave evidence on three different occasions and each time it was riddled with inconsistencies.
 
The Defence provided three alibi witnesses to refute the allegations given by Caviedes.

a) Site Maguire - First secretary in the Embassy of Ireland in Mexico. The 26-County Government waived Ms Maguire's diplomatic immunity to allow her give evidence. Ms Maguire verified that she and Irish parliamentarians Jim O'Keeffe, Madeleine Taylor Quinn and Ben Briscoe had dinner with Niall Connolly on 17 January 2001. She also verified that she spoke to Niall Connolly in Cuba four weeks prior to 17 January 2001.

b) Seán Ó Domhnaill provided credible alibi testimony placing Martin McCauley in Ireland for the period beginning February 1999 to early June 2001.

c) Ros O'Sullivan, an aid worker with Concern Worldwide, gave evidence that he spent Christmas 2000 (from December 23 until 5 January 2001) with Niall Connolly.

The Defence has provided the court with work records for Jim Monaghan for these periods.

The Defence will present further authenticated affidavits from employers, colleagues and alibi witnesses to the court.

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

They march where they are not wanted, by threat of violence if necessary.

And they do it to remind Catholics that they can.

And so another 'Glorious 12th' has passed us by, with both unionists and the media falling over themselves to point out that it was "peaceful".

Was it? Why?

Because no one died?

While this may have been a relatively "quiet" 12th in terms of violence, it was so only in comparison to past experience. The reality remains that Orange marches were once again permitted into nationalist neighbourhoods without the consent of Catholic residents.

While the BBC was happily televising families eating ice cream and old men lounging barefoot in the sunshine, nationalists were either out of town to avoid trouble, staying close to home for fear of accidentally coming across a march, or firmly cordoned off in their areas anxiously awaiting the outcome of the return marches.

They had not been invited to the big celebration, nor would many have trusted the invitation had they received one. For the reality of the marching season is still far removed from the media whitewash of smiley, happy people.

The BBC continued to exercise its usual political bias by ignoring the controversy surrounding the parades and using public money to promote and broadcast the marches, billing them as "fun for the whole family". As long as your family isn't Catholic, of course.

 Just a day earlier, on 11 July, several Catholic residents of Ardoyne, North Belfast, who had failed in their attempt to obtain a court order preventing an Orange march from passing their area, were informed by the PSNI that their lives were being threatened by the Red Hand Defenders - aka the UDA.

A memorial erected in memory of the five Catholic shooting victims of a UFF gun attack on Sean Graham bookmakers in 1992 was vandalised. The memorial, located on Hatfield Street just off the Lower Ormeau Road, was covered in yellow paint, obscuring the names of the dead completely.

Meanwhile, back in North Belfast, more than 150 vehicles and thousands of riot-geared state forces blocked the Crumlin Road as Orangemen and their supporters returned home from the main Belfast march.

The PSNI and British Army had moved in to seal off the Ardoyne area around 4.30pm, even though the return march was not due until 7.30pm that evening. Land Rovers, jeeps and British Saxon armoured vehicles lined both sides of the road, with an 18-foothigh metal fence in the middle, designed to partially separate marchers from the nationalist residents they chose to impose upon.

There were British Army snipers on the roofs, and a mob of unionist supporters behind glass on Twadell Avenue - just across the street waving loyalist flags and shouting sectarian abuse. There were helicopters and spotter planes, police dogs barking, CCTV cameras and plastic bullet guns.

While nervous residents awaited the beating of Orange drums and the stomping of Orange feet, a number of Catholics were stopped by British troops as they made their way to mass at Holy Cross Chapel. Some were even turned back. After mass, Father Gary Donegan escorted several worried pensioners past the gathering crowds, fearing for their safety.

Another pensioner had come to watch the march with a copy of the North Belfast News in hand. The headline on the front page screamed "Shankill Butcher in March Shocker" and detailed the fact that an ex-UDR man, who had also been one of the Shankill Butchers, had been spotted during an Orange parade on the Springfield Road two weeks ago, carrying a banner paying homage to UVF killer Brian Robinson.

The pensioner leaned heavily on his walker as he waved the paper furiously at the stone-faced PSNI men. "This is what we are up against," he yelled angrily. "How can you say we aren't second-class citizens when you see something like this? Butchers then and butchers now!"

According to the determinations of the Parades Commission, the return march should have been over and done with by 8pm, but when the Orangemen finally appeared on the scene, it was 8.45pm.

Unionist supporters were allowed through the barricades and down the road long before any bands appeared.

They were mostly male, and many carried off-sale bags or open tins of beer. Some were waving UDA and UFF flags. They shouted "UFF" and "Up the UDA" as they danced down the road, while the grim-faced nationalist crowd stood watching nearby. 

Several actually had time to stop in the middle of the road and climb onto a concrete traffic island. They then taunted their Catholic neighbours from their new vantage point, giving several salutes which involved one or two fingers or Nazi salutes. Finally British soldiers decided to pull them down and gently encourage them to move on.

Bottles flew overhead from both sides, golf balls came rocketing over from the unionist Twaddel Avenue, but eventually, most of the Orangemen and their supporters disappeared into the night and residents breathed a deep sigh of relief.

The British Army and PSNI began to dismantle the ring of steel they had erected. The metal wall was gone in minutes, but not before many nationalists wondered aloud why the same degree of shielded protection had not been afforded to Catholic schoolgirls at Holy Cross.

The BBC did not show any of this in their coverage of the "12th celebrations". Nor did they show the vast array of unionist paramilitary regalia on sale or display during this "day out for the family".

Also not shown were the "ten reasons why it's better to be a Prod than a Taig" keyrings. Not heard were the sectarian taunts of "Fenian bastards", "Fuck the Pope" and "Taig whores". Not mentioned were the UVF flags, the UDA banners, the UFF T-shirts, or even the tiny balaclava-wearing Orange sashed doll, sitting atop one unionist bandsman's bass drum.

In fact, if a paramilitary flag or band appeared on camera, the BBC's commentators suddenly turned their attention to other facts, detailing "the history" of each lodge, while their directors scrambled to cut away to another, more peace-loving image in a visual slight of hand that fooled no one.

 "Orange Lodge No 404 has more than 150 members and their band won a competition in Scotland recently..."

"Is that right? Well, they sure do sound great here today..."

See no evil, speak no evil. If you don't acknowledge it, maybe it's not there. The entire spectacle brought to mind the children's story of the Emperor's New Clothes.

But it is there.

The tension and danger, the fear and violence, empty streets, closed shops. It is there, in spite of what the press might show, what unionist state spindoctors might tell us, and the state might want us to think.

The marchers in Ardoyne were not participating in a "dignified display" of their traditions and culture. They were drunken thugs, itching to lord their supremacy over their Catholic neighbours.

It's high time that the BBC and other media took their heads out of the sand and conceded that there is nothing legitimate about sectarian displays.

Despite the decline in violence, the offensive nature of Orange marches remains because they ignore one basic fact - they march where they are not wanted, by threat of violence if necessary.

And they do it to remind Catholics that they can.