Only he is a Marxist who extends the recognition of the class struggle to the recognition of the dictatorship of the proletariat. This is the touchstone on which the real understanding and recognition of Marxism is to be tested. 
-V. I. Lenin 
Economic & Philosophic Science Review 
Subscriptions (£20 p a.) & circulation:  078679 96074     [P&P Bulletin Publications PO 80X 50, London SW 17 9NL] [ Post Office Regd.]                    
No 1115   December 4 2001                                                                                                                   25p
Seminar Sat. 2 pm. Please bring recpts.

The West's universal politically-correct assumption of Zionism's right to exist (i.e. turfing the Palestinian people out of their homeland in order to create a national state for the world’s Jews) is now edging the British fake-'left' towards rampant pro-imperialism. As the relentless march of crisis events was bound to do, it takes 'left' anti-communism into clearly reactionary territory, following on the monstrous 'condemnation' treachery already to the Middle East's Sept 11 attempt to fight back against imperialist humiliation, domination, and tyranny. Lenin's contempt for such fair-weather 'anti-imperialist' posturing of his day could almost have been written to describe the current 57 varieties of Trot and Revisionist cowardice from the Socialist Alliance to the SLP and Lalkar, who in stupid awe of the imperialist big stick have condemned "pointless violent provocations" by spontaneous disorganised backwardness, the political equivalent to "degraded drunken riff-raff" or "unemployed thieves" in Lenin's words. But despite the fake-'left' PC smears about 'anti-semitism', the Middle East's in-fact anti-imperialist struggles can only grow relentlessly, and 'superpower' imperialist 'invincibility' whose warmongering is just a vast stunt for preparing to survive worldwide capitalist economic collapse, will soon start running into defeats and revolutions in all directions. The pitiless massacre of Afghanistan is a sign of fascist-imperialist weakness, not strength.

The 'anti-terror' moralists of the fake-'left' (Socialist Alliance, SLP, etc) who "condemn" Sept 11 have had the philosophical noose tightened around their necks by the spectacular Palestinian terrorist onslaught.

Some of the "democracy" dupes have already accepted the sick 'logic' of their social-pacifist cringing (CPGB, etc) by denouncing the Hamas and Islamic Jihad activities too.

Instantly, all of the specious 'arguments' why Sept 11 has to be declared a "bad thing" in fake-'left' eyes, are placed under a harsh different glare, exposing their fallacies.

As events move on, this servile and treacherous "condemnation"-'morality', siding with stinking bourgeois-imperialist hypocrisy, will unavoidably become more and more obviously the measure of class-collaborating rottenness, petty bourgeois stupidity, and total untrustworthiness as far as the working class is concerned.

Depending on how events develop, this filthy betrayal of the impoverished and tortured Third World's obvious incapacity or perspective-limitation to start fighting back against colonial-imperialist humiliation and totally-repressive domination in any other way, could rank alongside the 1914 voting of war credits by the Second International as the greatest fake-'left' treachery in history.

Endless revolutionary-sounding arguments were aggressively put forward in 1914 by the Second International leaders of the Revisionist retreat from Marxist-Leninist science then, just as now, - but in practice all were just a cover for class-collaborating chauvinism.

No different today. To condemn Sept 11 as only a "barbaric atrocity" by "fascist anti-imperialists" is to concede the field of argument completely to the bourgeois-reformist imbecility which thinks that the poverty causes of terrorism should be eradicated soon, but that the 'indiscriminate slaughter of innocents', cannot be tolerated, and has to be stopped immediately.

To agree with bourgeois hypocrisy that "something must be done about barbaric terrorist atrocities", which helped put Bush and Blair in total charge of world opinion (superficially and temporarily), but to then protest the blitzkrieg outcome with pacifist 'No to war' objections, is the cynical absolute in self-delusion by the fake-'left'.

The Second International similarly pretended that each party voting for war credits within their 'own' parliament would only provide for each country's "own" defence, but not for any colonial-imperialist war aggrandisement, conquests, reparations, or other booty.

But warmongering chauvinism quickly won the propaganda battle in every country, as was bound to happen as soon as the fake-'left' conceded any justification whatever in voting war credits.

The same now. As soon as the phoney 'morality' of reformist imbecility is conceded that "something must be done about barbaric terrorist atrocities", then blitzkrieg repression ad infinitum has been conceded.

As in the 1914-18 War and as in all warmongering, the only way for halting the butchering chauvinism henceforth (Iraq, Somalia, and the Palestinians are already being lined up for the next blitzkrieg slaughters) is by taking advantage of ANY defeat or setback whatsoever for the imperialists to wage war on the warmongers themselves. (See EPSR 1109 for the quotations from Leninist science which explained its epoch making practical development of strategically setting-up the October Revolution).

But having effectively abandoned the field to bourgeois propaganda's claimed right to "wage a war on terrorist atrocities", then there is no way possible for the fake-'left' to now encourage the world to look forward to imperialist defeats in these bloodthirsty brutalities and triumphalism. It would make no sense for these Trots and Revisionists to do so.

And in practice in this case, "condemnation" is indeed the language of reformist punishment, the entire fraudulent basis of all bourgeois-imperialist "law" everywhere.

You may not wish to emulate a poor old lady stealing a pack of bacon from a supermarket, but as soon as you publicly condemn her, it is tantamount to accepting all the hypocrisy of bourgeois 'justice' including the crap that her 'punishment' will henceforth make society a better place, less crime, etc.

Publicly "condemn" Sept 11 and its 'punishment' will arrive inexorably. Pointless to say 'No to war' at that stage. Equally unbelievable to then hope for an imperialist defeat at the hands of what you have already publicly "condemned".

In other words, to have joined the hypocrisy of bourgeois-imperialist propaganda to "condemn" Sept 11 is effectively a social-chauvinist declaration of pro-imperialism (i.e. pro-'reformism' which in practice can never get rid of the imperialist bourgeoisie, and therefore amounts to a permanent acceptance of imperialism, and is thereby 'pro-imperialism'.)

Another bogus 'argument' by fake-'lefts' is that "ineffective terrorist desperation" has "strengthened imperialism".

Lenin wrote interestingly on whether inadequate terror-assaults disorganised or demoralised the working-class or not, - and what to do about it, in his Sept 1906 article Guerrilla Warfare:

Marxism demands an absolutely historical examination of the question of the forms of struggle. To treat this question apart from the concrete historical situation betrays a failure to understand the rudiments of dialectical materialism. At different stages of economic evolution, depending on differences in political, national-cultural, living and other conditions, different forms of struggle come to the fore and become the principal forms of struggle; and in connection with this, the secondary, auxiliary forms of struggle undergo change in their turn. To attempt to answer yes or no to the question whether any particular means of struggle should be used, without making a detailed examination of the concrete situation of the given movement at the given stage of its development, means completely to abandon the Marxist position.

The phenomenon in which we are interested is the armed struggle. It is conducted by individuals and by small groups. Some belong to revolutionary organisations, while others (the majority in certain parts of Russia) do not belong to any revolutionary organisation.

The usual appraisal of the struggle we are describing is that it is anarchism, Blanquism, the old terrorism, the acts of individuals isolated from the masses, which demoralise the workers, repel wide strata of the population, disorganise the movement and injure the revolution. Examples in support of this appraisal can easily be found in the events reported every day in the newspapers. 

But are such examples convincing?

The fact that "guerrilla" warfare became widespread precisely after December, and its connection with the accentuation not only of the economic crisis but also of the political crisis is beyond dispute. The old Russian terrorism was an affair of the intellectual conspirator; today as a general rule guerrilla warfare is waged by the worker combatant, or simply by the unemployed worker. Blanquism and anarchism easily occur to the minds of people who have a weakness for stereotype; but under the circumstances of an uprising, which are so apparent in the Lettish Territory, the inappropriateness of such trite labels is only too obvious.

The example of the Letts clearly demonstrates how incorrect, unscientific and unhistorical is the practice so very common among us of analysing guerrilla warfare without reference to the circumstances of an uprising. These circumstances must be borne in mind, we must reflect on the peculiar features of an intermediate period between big acts of insurrection, we must realise what forms of struggle inevitably arise under such circumstances, and not try to shirk the issue by a collection of words learned by rote, such as are used equally by the Cadets and the Novoye Vremya-ites: anarchism, robbery, hooliganism!

It is said that guerrilla acts disorganise our work.

It is not guerrilla actions which disorganise the movement, but the weakness of a party which is incapable of taking such actions under its control. Being incapable of understanding what historical conditions give rise to this struggle, we are incapable of  neutralising its deleterious aspects. Yet the struggle is going on. It is engendered by powerful economic and political causes. It is not in our power to eliminate these causes or to eliminate this struggle. Our complaints against guerrilla warfare are complaints against our Party weakness in the matter of an uprising.

What we have said about disorganisation also applies to demoralisation. 

 …..condemnation and curses are absolutely incapable of putting a stop to a phenomenon which has been engendered by profound economic and political causes: It may be objected that if we are incapable of putting a stop to an abnormal and demoralising phenomenon,  this is no reason why the Party should adopt abnormal and demoralising methods of struggle. But such an objection would be a purely bourgeois-liberal and not a Marxist objection, because a Marxist cannot regard civil war, or guerrilla warfare, which is one of its forms, as abnormal and demoralising in general. A Marxist bases himself on the class struggle, and not social peace. In certain periods of acute economic and political crises the class struggle ripens into a direct civil war, i.e., into an armed struggle between two sections of the people. In such periods a Marxist is obliged to take the stand of civil war. Any moral condemnation of civil war would be absolutely impermissible from the standpoint of Marxism.

We fully admit criticism of diverse forms of civil war from the standpoint of military expediency and absolutely agree that in this question it is the Social-Democratic practical workers in each particular locality who must have the final say. But we absolutely demand in the name of the principles of Marxism that an analysis of the conditions of civil war should not be evaded by hackneyed and stereotyped talk about anarchism, Blanquism and terrorism, and that senseless methods of guerrilla activity adopted by some organisation or other of the Polish Socialist Party at some moment or other should not be used as a bogey when discussing the question of the participation of the Social-Democratic Party as such in guerrilla warfare in general.

The argument that guerrilla warfare disorganises the movement must be regarded critically. Every new form of struggle, accompanied as it is by new dangers and new sacrifices, inevitably "disorganises" organisations which are unprepared for this new form of struggle. Our old propagandist circles were disorganised by recourse to methods of agitation. Our committees were subsequently disorganised by recourse to demonstrations. Every military action in any war to a certain extent disorganises the ranks of the fighters. But this does not mean that one must not fight. It means that one must learn to fight. That is all. 

When I see Social-Democrats proudly and smugly declaring "we are not anarchists, thieves, robbers, we are superior to all this, we reject guerrilla warfare", - I ask myself: Do these people realise what they are saying? Armed clashes and conflicts between the Black-Hundred government and the population are taking place all over the country. This is an absolutely inevitable phenomenon at the present stage of development of the revolution. The population is spontaneously and in an unorganised way - and for that very reason often in unfortunate and undesirable forms - reacting to this phenomenon also by armed conflicts and attacks. I can understand us refraining from Party leadership of this spontaneous struggle in a particular place or at a particular time because of the weakness and unpreparedness of our organisation. I realise that this question must be settled by the local practical workers, and that the remoulding of weak and unprepared organisations is no easy matter. But when I see a Social-Democratic theoretician or publicist not displaying regret over this unpreparedness, but rather a proud smugness and a self-exalted tendency to repeat phrases learned by rote in early youth about anarchism, Blanquism and terrorism, I am hurt by this degradation of the most revolutionary doctrine in the world. 

It is said that guerrilla warfare brings the class-conscious proletarians into close association with degraded, drunken riff-raff. That is true. But it only means that the party of the proletariat can never regard guerrilla warfare as the only, or even as the chief, method of struggle; it means that this method must be subordinated to other methods, that it must be commensurate with the chief methods of warfare, and must be ennobled by the enlightening and organising influence of socialism. And without this latter condition, all, positively all, methods of struggle in bourgeois society bring the proletariat into close association with the various non-proletarian strata above and below it and, if left to the spontaneous course of events, become frayed, corrupted and prostituted. Strikes, if left to the spontaneous course of events, become corrupted into "alliances" - agreements between the workers and the masters against the consumers. Parliament becomes corrupted into a brothel, where a gang of bourgeois politicians barter wholesale and retail "national freedom", "liberalism", "democracy", republicanism, anti-clericalism, socialism and all other wares in demand. A newspaper becomes corrupted into a public pimp, into a means of corrupting the masses, of pandering to the low instincts of the mob, and so on and so forth. Social-Democracy knows of no universal methods of struggle, such as would shut off the proletariat by a Chinese wall from the strata standing slightly above or slightly below it.

That being so - and it is undoubtedly so - the Social-Democrats must absolutely make it their duty to create organisations best adapted to lead the masses in these big engagements and, as far as possible, in these small encounters as well. In a period when the class struggle has become accentuated to the point of civil war, Social-Democrats must make it their duty not only to participate but also to play the leading role in this civil war. The Social-Democrats must train and prepare their organisations to be really able to act as a belligerent side which does not miss a single opportunity of inflicting damage on the enemy's forces. 

This is a difficult task, there is no denying. It cannot be accomplished at once. Just as the whole people are being re-trained and are learning to fight in the course of the civil war, so our organisations must be trained, must be reconstructed in conformity with the lessons of experience to be equal to this task. 

We have not the slightest intention of foisting on practical workers any artificial form of struggle, or even of deciding from our armchair what part any particular form of guerrilla warfare should play in the general course of the civil war in Russia. We are far from the thought of regarding a concrete assessment of particular, guerrilla actions as indicative of a trend in Social-Democracy. But we do regard it as our duty to help as far as possible to arrive at a correct theoretical assessment of the new forms of struggle engendered by practical life. We do regard it as our duty relentlessly to combat stereotypes and prejudices which hamper the class-conscious workers in correctly presenting a new and difficult problem and in correctly approaching its solution.

***
*The Bolshevik Social-Democrats are often accused of a frivolous passion for guerrilla actions. It would therefore not be amiss to recall that in the draft resolution on guerrilla actions (Partiiniye Izvestia, No.2, and Lenin's report on the Congress) the section of the Bolsheviks who defend guerrilla actions suggested the following conditions for their recognition: "expropriations" of private property were not to be permitted under any circumstances; "expropriations" of government property were not to be recommended but only allowed, provided that they were controlled by the Party and their proceeds used for the needs of an uprising. Guerrilla acts in the form of terrorism were to be recommended against brutal government officials and active members of the Black Hundreds, but on condition that 1) the sentiments of the masses be taken into account; 2) the conditions of the working-class movement in the given locality be reckoned with, and 3) care be taken that the forces of the proletariat should not be frittered away.

	GUERRILLA WARFARE Proletary, No. 5, September 30, 1900

As the EPSR has explained from Sept 11 onwards, people will struggle like this anyway, whether bourgeois-imperialist hypocrisy, fascist-blitzkrieg retaliation, or petty-bourgeois 'left' denunciation has 'condemned' the suicide guerrillas or not.

Lenin clearly explains here that the organised socialist revolution cannot stand back from such anti-imperialist war but should try to provide proper leadership and perspective to all such struggles.

The fake-'lefts' have shamefully tried to wriggle out of this Marxist-Leninist scientific exposure of their reactionary 'moralising' by pretending that these unbelievably heroic guerrilla-war sacrifices by the Palestinian suicide-bombers and their Sept 11 counterparts are "reactionaries trying to bring back feudalism" or new "fascism".

The Goebbels-like propaganda scabbiness of this disinformation by the CPGB and others, plus the essential pro-imperialism of their opportunist position on Third World terrorist fight-backs, is beginning to mark out these Socialist Alliance careerists as one of the most despicable sects in the whole rotten history of fake-'left' "Marxism".

And the other part of Lenin's message is equally relevant. If Sept 11 is indeed a "bad tactical move", then even greater is the guilt of the whole history of Revisionism (which spawned these new CPGB clones) for causing the international proletariat on merit to abandon any support for the old Third International traditions, which have now degenerated into complete counter-revolution in many countries.

If the clearly inadequate terrorist conspiracies are doing it wrong, or doing it at all when they shouldn't be, then do more to clarify the appeal of Marxist-Leninist science, and win back the world proletarian leadership, Lenin is saying.

Nowhere is this stinging rebuke more appropriate than in Occupied Palestine where the fight against the Zionist colonisation of the Arab nations homeland was sold out from the start by Stalinist Revisionism's United Nations agreement to let Zionist imperialism begin "legally" imposing genocide on the Palestinian people by stealing their land from 1947 onwards.

Now the CPGB successors of that Revisionist treachery have the insane gall to charge as "racists" all who refuse to accept the colonisation of Palestine by the Zionists as a fait accompli.

And once having got the 'politically correct' slander going, the related provocation is to sneer "racist" at the argument (see Lenin above) that depending on historical, cultural, or regional backwardness or unfavourable conditions, the blind rage of a terrorist outburst might well be accepted as unsurprising considering the wretched conditions of total degradation and humiliation that the hopelessly repressed refugee camps might breed in the persecuted Palestinian people.

"That is racist patronising" declare the CPGB. "Of course they could fight back with a Federal-Republican Constitution dedicated to socialist democracy: Saying that terrorism is all that the repressive conditions allow, or the best answer they can think of, is a racist slur on the Palestinians".

Self-righteous moralising humbug of this extreme nastiness and barminess is undoubtedly stuck emotionally 100% in the camp of imperialism prevailing.

A large part of this cringing wail that "the terrorists are making imperialism stronger" is just the snivelling petty-bourgeois servility in the face of what 'lefts' think (or fear) is "super-imperialist" (Kautsky) invincibility.

(And Lenin’s Guerrilla Warfare could almost have been wholly written to expose Lalkar's silly snivelling retreat from Marxism into pompous posturing in impotently 'denouncing' the Genoa Black Bloc anarchists for fighting back against police brutality at the globalisation summit).

Such Revisionist capitulationism is completely missing the historical context, as Lenin explains above. In fact it shows no awareness of dialectical historical development at all.

So, "now they will really give these terrorist sources what for", will they???

But Zionist colonisation has been promising and threatening exactly this same brutality, non-stop, every year for nearly 50 years.

And Zionist imperialism has virtually unchallenged power to precisely continue inflicting genocide 'punishment' with virtual impunity.

The result? The Intifada is wrecking the 'peace' of all the Zionist 'conquests' more devastatingly today than ever before.

And the guerrilla-war skills and ruthless determination are more awe-inspiring and more universally lionised by more young Palestinians than ever before.

And all of this came about predictably too (see EPSRs for 22 past years) because this most genocidal and brutal of all colonisations has taken place in basically the historical epoch when such direct colonisation was crumbling in every corner of the earth, the irresistible forces of national-liberation and Third World awakening driving out the no-longer-tenable humiliation of imperialist domination and exploitation. And no nation has suffered more greatly or more brutally than Palestine, yet no major cultural tradition in human history has more catching-up to do, or a greater sense of grievance at having been wronged and scorned by the West, than the Arab Muslim civilisation which was at one stage so advanced that for centuries it made Europe look backward. The stealing from them of their Palestinian homeland has made this 7-million strong most cultured and capable section of the mighty Arab nation an obvious historical explosion just waiting to happen.

It is inevitable that single nationhood must be restored to the entire land of Palestine, and all stolen properties returned to their rightful owners.

Consistent with the outcome of war crime/colonisation trials against the most rapacious Zionist-imperialist criminals, any Jewish-immigrant workers who want to live on (and have no property stealing crimes against them) will have to put up with living as a minority in a majority Arab country.

The undoubted and criminal RACISM in this whole equation resides within the ignorant, arrogant, sentimental Western 'political correctness' (shared by Revisionism's rotten class-collaborationist tradition) which unthinkingly and unhistorically insists that "of course Israel is here to stay".

And out of this routine failure to apply an absolutely objective historical examination to the Palestinian question as Lenin recommended, routine non-Marxist fake-'left posturing invents the ultimate prejudice against terrorist methods and declares the Palestinian guerrilla-war "condemnable" because […?] they are deluded it is "doomed".

This standard petty-bourgeois undialectical prejudice that the 'sole super-power' imperialist 'New World Order' is bound to win any international political-military conflict whenever it wants to, only continues Revisionism's anti-communist thinking that a shattering crisis for the 'free-world system' such as produced the inter-imperialist catastrophes of World Wars I and II, is no longer possible.

The ignorant prejudice also continues, shared by bourgeois and Revisionist anti-Marxism alike, that 'fascism' is just violent aggressiveness attached to any backward beliefs. Hence, the sneer from the pro-imperialist 'lefts', - who are opportunistically desperate to dissociate themselves from Sept 11 but who are embarrassed at the worldwide proletarian satisfaction at America's humiliation, - are so keen to dismiss the al-Qaeda guerrilla-war operation as 'fascism'.

But the only fascism around, of course, is the historically-established aggressive imperialist warmongering as the chauvinist 'solution' to international capitalist economic crisis.

It is what US imperialist warmongering aggression is actually DOING now which could earn the additional description of 'fascism' (for what it is worth), whipping up chauvinist belligerence as hysterically as possible as the notion of a 'solution' to worldwide problems, 'pacifying' everything in sight as the only way forward.

The treacherous 'left' collapse into its "condemn terrorism" stupor is the other side of its anti-communist inability to accept that the whole imperialist international 'free-market' system is soon to crash in a worldwide revolutionary crisis which will even dwarf the turmoil of 1917 and its aftermath.

The Enron 'greatest bankruptcy in history' is signal enough, but the far more conclusive evidence still revolves around Japan's fate where the world's second most powerful imperialist economy ever has remained paralysed for 11 years in a classic surplus capital crisis, and simply cannot get out of it despite the repeated massive use of every reflationary trick in the Keynesian book.

And until World War III destroys enough 'surplus capital' (and 'surplus labour', etc, etc) worldwide, no economies will avoid the relentlessly oncoming slump any more successfully than Japan, whose latest failed efforts to escape paralysis are quietly admitted by the capitalist press itself:

The Japanese cabinet approved a third budget in less than a year yesterday as fears of a deflationary spiral were exacerbated by major banks saying they will cut thousands more jobs and write-off  trillions of yen in bad loans.

In a sign of Tokyo's growing desperation, the latest government spending-package, -- worth Y(en) 2.5 trillion (£14.3bn), comes only two months after the last emergency budget.

The political response to the world's second largest economy's growing problems of deflation,   recession and ballooning public debt underlined fresh criticism from international credit agencies that policy makers in Tokyo are merely "muddling through". 

Prime minister Junichiro Koizumi insisted the government had no choice but to make up for a fall in demand caused by global slowdown. "The main goal is to prevent a deflationary spiral," said Mr Koizumi, whose promise to restore the health of public finances appears increasingly hollow. To fund the spending package, the government will sell part of its holding in telecoms giant NTT;  this will allow Mr Koizumi to keep his pledge to cap public debt to the Y30 trillion already issued.

But the spirit of his campaign agenda has been broken by the fact that more than half of the new budget will be spent on public works  -  which he had promised to cut. 

The downturn also forced financial institutions to make sharp downward revisions to their forecasts for the year and to  put aside £19bn -  three times more than they expected at the start of  the year  - to clear bad loans. 

Mizuho, the world's biggest bank, doubled the size of its write-off provision to Y2 trillion - an indication of how its loan portfolio has deteriorated as a result of the recession.

Bank executives said they would resign at the end of March to take responsibility for a forecast loss of Y720bn this year. To claw its way back into the black, Mizuho said it would cut 7,300 jobs, or 23% of its workforce.

Other banking groups made equally grim forecasts. Sumitomo Mitsui expects a Y150bn loss this year after doubling its loan write-off to Y1trillion, and Mitsubishi Tokyo posted a half-year loss of Y96.8bn as it prepares to make provision for Y480bn in irrecoverable loans.

Shoji Mori, commissioner of the financial services agency, said the increased provisions reflected the severe outlook in the second half of the year. But he warned the write-offs might not be enough: "This does not mean that the problem has been resolved, because the banks are not only dealing with bad loans from the past but with loans that are becoming non-performing," he said. 

With the government's strategy based on pain-killing rather than overdue surgery, the ratings agency Fitch downgraded Japan's sovereign credit status, making it the lowest in the G7, apart from Italy. 

"Japan's credit fundamentals continue to deteriorate. The recession has robbed the economy of its only bright spots in recent years - exports and hi-tech investment," Fitch said.

Hardly surprising, therefore, how noticeably quick Japan was to offer active-service military units for the anti-Afghanistan warmongering bonanza, again re-writing its 'peace' constitution in the process.

Germany, where economic stagnation has now lasted two years, was equally quick to do likewise, and get in on the international warmongering 'solution' to problems as rapidly as possible.

The self-deluding myth of 'super-imperialist invincibility' is just the rationalisation of the petty-bourgeois class-collaborative instinct but it shallowly looks to these undoubted 'facts' of imperialist warmongering build-up to "prove" how this 'desperate terrorist atrocity' has only 'made imperialism stronger'.

In workers movement history, the periodic annihilation of all ability to think dialectically never ceases to astonish. 

Firstly, when has a breaking-out of generalised imperialist warmongering ever led to anything but revolutionary disaster ultimately for the degenerate 'free-world'  system??? 

Secondly, if cut-throat inter-imperialist trade-war is already virtually strangling to death such major economies as Japan, then how can the spread of inter-imperialist rivalry in warlike posturing and threatening (as around the Gulf War earlier, then around the Balkans emergencies, and now around the anti-Afghanistan blitzkrieg) not RAISE expectations that the degenerate warmongering system is heading yet again in the same catastrophic direction as marked the 'free world's' two previous great economic crises by World Wars I and II???

Thirdly, - what does an initial run of easy US imperialist 'victories' (Panama, Grenada, Nicaragua, Gulf War, Kosovo, Afghanistan, etc) most resemble in modern history?? The 'triumph' for imperialist aggression as a promised world-slump 'solution' which preceded the most disastrous inter-imperialist degeneracy so far in history, - namely, World War II.

Prior to it, the world turned a satisfied peace-in-our-times blind eye to the 'justified' triumphs for self-righteous 'civilising' warmongering imperialist aggression against Manchuria, Ethiopia, Spain, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Albania, etc, etc.

And then when World War II's declaration was forced onto the bogus 'democratic' world by the shame of its own degenerate connivance in all the warmongering imperialist aggression, there was yet another run of seemingly unstoppable imperialist-war 'triumphs' across Europe, the Near East, and the Far East.

But all the time these 'victories' were only dialectically building the imperialist system up for its most devastating fall yet in the aftermath of world War II when a whole string of new states ousted capitalism and imposed the dictatorship of the proletariat; and then the whole colonial world rose up in arms to wipe out one great 'invincible' Western empire after another.

History is clear. The imperialist system goes to war, and sooner or later, the imperialist system itself must also suffer some defeats. Most of the revolutionary overthrows of the murderous and destructive capitalist system so far in history have come out of imperialist defeats in the warmongering aggression it inflicts so "unstoppably" onto society. And while heavyweight inter-imperialist war some way down the line will undoubtedly produce comparable defeats at some stage or other, revolutionary upheavals are not ruled out before that because a combination of circumstances can at any time create a humiliating defeat or setback for almost any imperialist power.

The greatest obstacle to understanding and preparing for this essentially revolutionary direction of history is the philistine influence of fake-'left' sects on the British workers movement, all pretending to be 'revolutionary' this, and 'Marxist' that, and 'real socialist' something else, but all in reality being nothing but the sterile clones of failed old Labour 'leftism', utterly deluded by the fraud of 'reformist pressure' eventually producing a 'socialist majority' in parliament.

In their relentless pursuit of organisational manoeuvres and one-upmanship with which to posture their own notoriety, some of these fake-'left' sects, for example, completely ignored in their last 7 days' propaganda such world-shattering disasters as the Mazar-I-Sharif massacre, the Enron collapse, and the Palestinian explosion.

It is by their philistine ignorance of what is actually happening in the world that the fake-'lefts' manage to keep their wretched sectarian loyalists safely in tow.

And the existence of this 'collective' left-sectarian 'strength' overall serves to give the impression of a 57-variety 'genuine revolutionary-socialist movement', thereby slowing down the turn to serious Marxist Leninist science even more.

It may not slow imperialist warmongering down yet, but this appallingly barbaric massacre in the name of the Western Alliance in Afghanistan will undoubtedly take a heavy toll in time in shattered petty-bourgeois 'democratic' illusions throughout the West, and beyond.

It was a catastrophic imperialist blunder, worth putting on record as much as possible (see also last week’s EPSR):

Mullah Faizal, the Taliban's commander at Kunduz, had told the foreign fighters to give up their weapons - but failed to tell them that they would then be taken into custody, it emerged from Amir Jan's account: "The foreigners thought that after surrendering to the Northern Alliance they would be free," he said. "They didn't think they would be put in jail."

While US soldiers dressed in desert khaki set up satellite links, soldiers loyal to the alliance warlord Rashid Dostam took up attack positions. After three to four hours' negotiation, the Taliban fighters agreed to surrender again - but only to Amir Jan, whom they trusted because of his Pashtun roots and Taliban history. General Dostam's militia then began disarming the Taliban fighters and piling their weapons into a green lorry.

Gen Dostam had arranged to take the prisoners to Mazar-I-Sharif's large Soviet-built airfield, but American special forces vetoed the plan, saying that the runway could be needed for military operations, Amir Jan revealed. 

	Heavy weaponry 

Instead, Gen Dostam would take the prisoners to his personal fortress on the muddy outskirts of Mazar - the Qala-I-Jhangi.  [...]  "We agreed it would be better to tie up their hands and put them in the basement."

Next morning the guards prepared to implement this new order. At the same time Simon Brooks, head of the International Committee for the Red Cross in northern Afghanistan, swept into the Qala-I-Jhangi in his white Red Cross vehicle. He was looking for assurances from Said Kamal, the Dostam security chief, that the prisoners would be treated humanely. The Red Cross also wanted to register the prisoners' names and get messages for their families. Mr Brooks was not the only person interested in the Arab, Pakistan and Chechen detainees.

Two CIA agents, Johnny "Mike" Spans and "Dave" had also been instructed to screen the Taliban fighters for possible links with Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda organisation. From a distance Dave looked Afghan. He even spoke Uzbek, the language of Gen Dostam's soldiers, and wore a salwar kameez beneath a long coat. But his square-cropped haircut gave the game away, indicating he was American.

Two television crews - from Reuters and the German station ARD -  had also turned up at the fort. They were in the prisoners' compound, together with Dave and Mike, who had begun interviewing suspects.

At 11.25am the Taliban fighters were marched to the central grassy compound of their mini-citadel. The guards tied up the first eight prisoners, Amir Jan said. "The prisoners suspected they were about to be shot. They attacked one of the guards and grabbed his gun," he added. The foreign fighters also assumed that the television journalists were American soldiers who had come to film their execution.

WHETHER it was incompetence, overconfidence or duty that prompted two CIA operatives to interrogate dozens of Taleban on their own will perhaps remain a mystery.

But their decision triggered a revolt that became the single bloodiest engagement since the Afghan war began.

The siege of Kala-i Janghi, the ancient mudbrick fortress near Mazar-i Sharif, ended yesterday when the last foreign Taleban of Konduz were wiped out.

It began on Sunday morning, when the estimated 800 foreign fighters - Arabs, Pakistanis, Chechens and terrorists of the al-Qaeda network - imprisoned in the old fort suddenly turned.

A witness said: "The  fighting started when the Taleban were being questioned by two men from the CIA. They wanted to know where they had come from and whether they might be al-Qaeda." .

Both CIA operatives were dressed in Afghan robes, had grey beards and spoke Persian. One of them was known as Michael, the other as David. 

Michael asked one Taleb why he had come to Afghanistan. He replied: "We're here to kill you'', and jumped at Michael, who killed him and three others with his pistol before being wrestled to the ground.

Another prisoner grabbed Mike and set off a grenade, blowing him up. This conflicts with the CIA account of his death which says that he was shot.

The witness said: "The Taleban beat, kicked and bit him to death." 

David also killed at least one Taleban, but was then forced to flee. He said later: "There was no way of stopping them. They ran straight into gunfire."

David sprinted out of the building where the prisoners were being interrogated and across a courtyard into the main building to call for help. He told his commander over a satellite phone: "I think Michael is dead."

Now, after three days of US airstrikes, desperate resistance and continuous assault, the death-toll includes scores of Northern Alliance fighters and every one of the resisting prisoners.

In the swiftly minted military euphemism, this was an "uprising"; but it was in the end, a slaughter by Afghans, of "foreigners", directed by Britons and Americans.

Yesterday the twisted bodies of the dead were littered around the gardens of Kala-i Janghi on the outskirts of Mazar-i Sharif, but just a week ago the Uzbek Northern Alliance leader General Abdul Rashid Dostum, the king of this castle, drank green tea under the trees with Mullah Faizal, the Taleban commander in Konduz. The two warlords discussed what to do about the Taleban's fanatical "foreign legion", trapped in Konduz.

It was agreed that the mullah and his Afghan Taleban fighters would be given safe passage after surrender, but the foreign fighters would be handed over to General Dostum. It is not clear whether Mullah Faizal had any idea what the notorious general intended to do with the Taleban's foreign fanatics.

General Dostum had allegedly given assurances that the prisoners would be not be mistreated, but there is no evidence that the captured Taleban expected to be treated in accordance with the Geneva Convention, or had a clue any such thing existed. Warfare in Afghanistan has its own, bloodier conventions.

But the main explosion did not take place until the CIA intervention on Sunday morning. Rebellion may also have been sparked by efforts to tie up the Taleban prisoners, many of whom apparently believed they were about to be killed. About 250 had been bound, according to one report, before the rest rebelled.

After killing Michael whose body is still inside the camp, despite efforts by US special forces to retrieve it the Taleban prisoners then overwhelmed the 20 Northern Alliance guards, killing them too; the skull of one was crushed with a rock.

Dave managed to escape only by shooting dead at least one Taliban prisoner with his pistol. A firelight blew up between the prisoners, now in charge of their own fortified area, and soldiers sitting in Gen Dostam's headquarters building 300 metres away, down a line of trees. "Dave managed to reach the rooftop [of Dostam's HQ] about 15 minutes after fighting broke out," Simon Brooks of the Red Cross said yesterday.

"I met Dave in the building. He was absolutely completely shocked and really quite scared. I can now understand why: he witnessed his friend being blown up. He had managed to shoot his way out and run 150 metres out of the building:'

From the rooftop, Dave borrowed a satellite phone from the German TV crew and phoned the American embassy in Uzbekistan.

"We have lost control of the situation. Send in helicopters and troops," he said. The call appeared to work. As the Red Cross vehicle blazed in the car park, and Mr Brooks slithered down the mud battlements to safely, the Pentagon prepared to send in the air force. Most of the eight prisoners who had been tied up when the battle broke out were shot dead in the early minutes; the others were able to take cover.

At 3.30pm the jets sent by the Pentagon fired nine or 10 missiles directly into the Taliban's positions. All of them hit their target - apart from the last one, which sank into a field more than 1krn away. In the confusion, a small group of at least 10 prisoners escaped. 

Within three hours of the "uprising" US and British special forces arrived in Jeeps, some in uniform and some in civilian clothes, and the battle to retake Kala-i Janghi began in earnest. Witnesses said it was quickly apparent that trained soldiers, were taking part in the assault, as the ragged bursts of Alliance machine-gun fire were replaced by the steady single-shooting of marksmen.

The fight for control quickly enveloped most of the 19th-century castle. The Taleban were able to capture the south side, helped by the fact that only about 100 deeply nervous Northern Alliance soldiers were guarding the Taleban.  

The witness said: "David kept saying we have to get out of here before it gets dark or we will all die. We couldn't look over the wall where the Taleban were. It was too dangerous to look. It was a very uncomfortable run, but we made it." 

The Northern Alliance gave no quarter. A few of the fainter-hearted Taleban managed to get out, and were swiftly put to death, according to witnesses. A pair of Taleban corpses could be seen propped in a gateway, each killed by a single bullet to the head.

That night an Alliance spokesman claimed that the fortress was under its control; nothing could have been further from the truth.

On Monday, the US intensified its bombardment and the Northern Alliance did not hide its intentions. "Those who are left over will be dead," Alim Razim, General Dostum's  adviser, said.

But so far from the hightech precision battle by highly trained special forces, the battle for the fort at times resembled something far more ancient, confused and inefficient. One "smart bomb" went astray, seriously wounding five US soldiers and killing and wounding a number of Northern Alliance troops.

By nightfall on Monday the Taleban, their numbers whittled down to perhaps 100 men were still holding out. That night the smell of roasting meat wafted across the compound. The Taleban had killed a horse, for what would be, for all of them, a last meal.

Early yesterday, lorries carrying 200 Northern Alliance fighters and an anti-aircraft gun arrived at the fortress, as desert-camouflage-clad special forces troops moved in and United States warplanes circled above.

After a night of continuous bombardment by US gunships, the number of surviving Taleban was still further reduced, and by mid-morning the Northern Alliance had pushed the Taleban back into a large compound inside the PoW camp. One US special forces soldier called the bombing "fireworks you'll never forget". AC130 Spectre attack helicopters flew overhead, five times, hovering and firing at close range.

The night-time raids left many bodies half-buried in the ground. Limbs and torsos rose out of the disturbed ground like tree trunks after a forest fire. The compound where the Taleban made their last stand was divided into two halves by a group of low buildings.

A tank attacked the western half of the compound, an exercise-ground that now saw more vicious fighting than any young recruit could ever have imagined. By noon the ground was littered with countless mangled bodies.

B-52 bombers flew repeatedly overhead. Alarmed by the resilience of the Taliban fighters, further special forces arrived at the base on Tuesday. They reportedly advised the alliance to flush out the remaining Taliban by pouring oil into the basement and setting fire to it. It took a tank and an intensification of bombings from the air to finish off them off.

They rolled grenades down the stairs. They fired shots every few minutes as a reminder, just in case they had forgotten, that death was very near indeed. Finally at 12.30pm a genial commander, Din Mohammed, manoeuvred a 6ft rocket into a drainage chute that led directly to the subterranean hideout. The rocket fizzed orange. Then it exploded, sending a furious back-blast of dust into the trees. There was a tomb-like silence.

"We are certain that they are dead. But we will explode a few more rockets just to be sure," Din Mohammed said. "I've seen far worse battles than this," he added calmly.

Surprisingly slowly for such an overwhelming force, the Alliance soldiers combed the greenery pockmarked with bodies.

They took no chances, or prisoners. One soldier fired a rocket-propelled grenade at a dead Taleban at close range.

One Taleban fighter, most likely Chechen, was still breathing as he lay in a ditch, his chest rising and falling.  Junior Northern Alliance soldiers threw stones at his head.

When they saw dead Taleban, the Alliance soldiers would stop to take their shoes.

The soldiers would sit on the ground in the middle of a gunbattle casually unlacing a pair of boots or olive green trainers. When a commander saw them, he lashed them with a horse whip.

Alim Razim, General Dostum's adviser, finally declared: "The situation is completely under control. All of them were killed".  

To clear the last pockets of Taleban resistance in the afternoon, Alliance soldiers approached the houses in the middle of the compound and fired at random, into basement windows. Some 20-litre petrol canisters were thrown in, then grenades.

After a few hours it was hard to take it all in.

The dead turned up everywhere: in dense thickets of willows and autumnal poplars; in waterlogged ditches, and in storage rooms piled with ammunition boxes. Some had been crushed by tanks; others, covered in dust, had their hands flung up as if in astonishment. It was a death scene that Dante or Bosch might have conjured up.

Gen Dostam toured the fortress where the full horror of the siege was on display. An Associated Press photographer saw the bodies of up to 50 Taliban fighters whose hands had been bound by scarves, laid out in a field in the southern part of the fort. The photographer watched as alliance fighters cut the scarves from the hands of some of the corpses; at least one picked gold fillings from a corpse: 

There was no sign yesterday of the British SAS and American Special Forces, for whom this operation can scarcely be counted a triumph. Before the revolt began, the theory was that all the prisoners would be treated according to international law.

It didn't turn out like that: there was no trial and no jury; merely instead there was an avalanche of death from the sky. Walking away from the compound, the smell of death mixed with dust hung in the air. The minah birds were swooping among the pine trees. I washed my hands with a bottle of water, but the smell lingered. 

As Washington tried to wash its hands of the episode, saying that the alliance was responsible for the prisoners, human rights lawyers warned that the Geneva convention may have been breached on two counts: the degrading treatment of the Taliban, when they were tied up, and the huge firepower directed at them by US warplanes.

On the first count, article 13 of the convention says: "Prisoners of war must at all times be humanely treated": On the second count, the convention permits the use of force against prisoners. But it says that this must be proportionate. Christopher Greenwood, professor of international relations at the London School of Economics and joint editor of International Law Reports, said that killing people with hands tied behind their backs was illegal. "If it was heavy-handed over-reaction, it was illegal", he said.

There were also questions about the conduct of the two CIA officers. Adam Roberts, professor of international relations at Oxford University and an authority on the laws of war, described their conduct as "incredibly stupid and unprofessional".

Angered by the death of Spann - the first American known to have died in the conflict - the director of the CIA, George Tenet, accused the Taliban of premeditated murder.

"Their prison uprising - which has murder as its goal - claimed many lives, among them that of a very brave American," he said of Spann, who worked in the directorate of operations, which analysts says is involved in "paramilitary" activities. 

As the final bodies are cleared, the battle has now moved to Britain and America, whose governments have rejected calls by Amnesty International for an inquiry. Amnesty said yesterday that this raised questions about their commitment  to the rule of law.

A head of steam is unlikely to build up around this issue, however. At his weekly appearance in the Commons this week,  Tony Blair faced only one question about Afghanistan and that was about Marjan, the one-eyed lion at Kabul zoo. But while Kunduz and Mazar-I-Sharif have fallen, we cannot forget their names just yet.

For those places have witnessed scenes so brutal, they should not be notched up as mere successes and filed away. In Mazar just over a fortnight ago 520 Taliban fighters, most of them Pakistanis, were either shot or crushed to death by Northern Alliance tanks,  not on a battlefield, but in a school. The Taliban had been holed up in there as they mounted their last, defiant stand. A week later the Red Cross were still pulling bodies from the wreckage.

The Northern Alliance insist this was no massacre; they offered the Taliban the chance to surrender and the Taliban refused. Of course, no one feels much sympathy for Afghanistan's former rulers, least of all for the foreign volunteers who tend to be the movement's most zealous fighters. So no one wanted to look too closely at how those 520 men met their deaths.

Nor did we allow ourselves to be too troubled by those TV pictures of victorious Northern Alliance troops beating Taliban prisoners with rifle butts before shooting them at point-blank range. The liberators' happiness to perform his ritual in front of witnesses and cameras might have given us pause, but mainly we contented ourselves with a string of clichés - we always knew the Taliban's opponents were not choirboys; Afghanistan is a tough neighbourhood; war makes for unholy alliances; my enemy's enemy is my friend.

But the latest events in Mazar cannot be soothed away nearly so easily. The fall yesterday of Qala-I-Jhangi, a 19th century fortress on the edge of town, will require more explanation than that. For now the details of what happened there are wreathed in that greatest of clichés - the fog of war - and the British and American militaries may well want to keep it that way.

The official version is that perhaps 800, mainly foreign, Taliban fighters were brought there from Kunduz, to be held as prisoners of war. Some of them resisted and launched a prison revolt, eventually seizing weapons from the fort's armoury. The Northern Alliance moved to quell the uprising with British and American help, and in the process every last one of those Taliban fighters was killed. Depending on how many prisoners were there in the first place, the death toll could be anything from 400 to 800.

Once again, many will baulk at calling this a massacre because the Taliban seemed to bring their fate upon themselves by rebelling, thereby forfeiting their right to Geneva convention protection as prisoners of war. But there are some awkward questions. Was this a revolt of all the captives or just some, and if it was the latter then why was it necessary to kill all of them? Did the dozen or so British and American special forces reportedly directing the entire operation, including the bombing of the fort from the sky, want merely to quash the revolt, or were they seizing the opportunity to do away with the hated foreign Taliban, whom few want to keep alive as inconvenient prisoners? What do we make of Time magazine's Alex Perry, on the spot throughout the battle, who said, "The mission by the Americans and Northern Alliance is to kill every single one of them now"? How does that square with international law on PoWs?

The snivelling impotent fake-'left' sentiment will be that like on Genoa's streets or in Gaza or on the West Bank, 'violent provocations' like Sept 11 will 'play into strengthening imperialism's hands', etc.

Social pacifism comes out of the same roots of "you can’t fight against impossible odds, so just stop the juggernaut with moral shaming".

But far from impossible, Leninism explains that the victims of the imperialist world order will never stop fighting in any way they can. It is the task of Marxist science to give the anti-imperialist struggle a convincing unifying world-revolutionary perspective.

The entire fake-'left' is held back from even starting the task by its sectarian backwardness of being crippled by unresolved theoretical skeletons in the cupboard.

A self-regarding petty-bourgeois small-minded inability to face up to past mistakes of a Trotskyite anti-communist anti-Soviet nature, or a museum-Stalinist Revisionist nature of "no mistakes here" in best cultist-monolith tradition (although grotesque errors clearly started creeping in from the 1920s and 1930s onwards, ending in total catastrophe by 1990), - has paralysed all competence for genuine, open, all-round objective polemics.

As is already happening, the development of events themselves will increasingly expose this reactionary theoretical backwardness of the fake-'left'. EPSR

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

The SDLP are wrong and have made a mistake by nominating representatives to the Board at this time. Up until the SDLP did this, the British Government was under considerable pressure

THE recent unprecedented move by the IRA leadership on the issue of arms liberated the Peace Process in Ireland. It freed it from the real threat of imminent collapse that had hung over it in recent months.  

However the Peace Process continues to be faced by many difficulties and there are those, especially within the British system and on the unionist side who deeply resent the change, which they view as a threat to their interests, that the Peace Process presents..

By and large these interests have been grounded in a system of privilege, or the perception of privilege, structured discrimination and political exclusion which the Good Friday Agreement aims to eradicate.

In recent years Sinn Féin has worked closely with the British and Irish Governments, and with the other pro-Agreement parties to ensure the maximum implementation of the Agreement. It was this constructive working relationship that helped create the context in which the IRA move on weapons became possible.

The issue of weapons now needs to be left to the IICD. Politicians should not interfere in the business of that body. Those rejectionist unionists who harp on about, and try to bring the process down on, the issue of IRA weapons are really not concerned about the issue of weapons at all. Their silence or lack of consistent focus on the loyalist weapons now in daily use or their support for British re-militarisation is proof of that.  

So the process will continue to be a difficult one. The various moves, spins and manoeuvres in advance of the latest round of UUP meetings may even produce a more problems. The furtherance of the equality and human rights agenda, the reform of the criminal justice system, the obligation of the British Government to demilitarise will also cause problems in the time ahead.

The creation of a new policing service is one which will cause particular difficulties.

Representative and accountable policing, free from partisan political control, must lie at the heart of any democratic society. These are the terms of reference set for the new beginning to policing by the Good Friday Agreement. This issue is of critical importance. It is vital that we get policing right. It is crucial that nationalists and republicans are part of the collective ownership of a new policing service.

Regrettably, the British Government turned the policing element of the Good Friday Agreement into a political battleground.

London should have implemented the recommendations of the Patten Report into policing. Specifically, it could have established a threshold for the democratic accountability of policing, with the Policing Board having the authority to hold the Chief Constable and Police Service to account. These and other crucial proposals were undermined by the British Government's legislation last year. The work to get Downing Street to amend this is incomplete and despite all the efforts to correct Peter Mandelson's hatchet job; the current legislation retains partisan political control. 

Instead of ending partisan control the current, legislation ensures its retention!

These and other issues remain significant matters of contention that have to be resolved. For these reasons Sinn Féin has refused to join the new Policing Board.

Regrettably, some politicians and commentators have suggested that it's only a matter of time before Sinn Féin joins the Policing Board and accepts the arrangements.  Let us be clear on this. Sinn Féin is opposed to the current policing structures.

The SDLP are wrong and have made a mistake by nominating representatives to the Board at this time. Up until the SDLP did this, the British Government was under considerable pressure to row back from its inadequate position and to properly embrace and implement fully the Patten recommendations.

Until then those in the political leadership of the British establishment were having to face up to the need to go against their own securocrats, who wished to retain as much control over policing as possible and who are against civic and democratic control of policing as a public service. The SDLP's move has taken them all off the hook.  

In place of the strategic push to get the British Government to bring about a genuinely new beginning to policing there is now going to be diversionary and distracting Policing Board debates around issues, like symbols and emblems, and other such matters around which agreement is unlikely at that level.

It is also unnecessary. These issues should never have been the business of the Board. The British Government should have implemented the Patten recommendations on these matters and made them part of its legislation.

At the same time as the Policing Board wastes time with these matters it has no power to remove past, current or future abusers of human rights, including those who have colluded in murder and torture. How valid now are the SDLP's protestations to the British Government over the issue of collusion, especially over this week's court decision on Pat Finucane's killing?

The Policing Board cannot hold to account the secret police, that is, the Special Branch, described by Patten as a 'force within a force' and which has been condemned even by rank and file RUC men.

The Policing Board does not have the power to stop the use of plastic bullets which have been responsible for 17 deaths and countless multiple serious injuries.

In fact, the outgoing Police Authority, boycotted by the SDLP, bought a stockpile of these lethal projectiles to last at least ten years as one of its last decisions. And the new Police Board, including the SDLP can do nothing about it.

The Good Friday Agreement was about establishing a genuinely new beginning to policing. To achieve this a new policing service must include republicans and nationalists. But republicans and nationalists wilt not be part of anything that is second hand or which is less than our entitlement.  

Sinn Féin is not going to give up on achieving the goal of a genuine new beginning to policing. We are not giving up on this issue. We are determined to get it right.

Towards this end Sinn Féin has held more private and public meetings with the British Government on this issue, and produced more detailed assessments and proposals on policing than anyone else.

We have done this, and we continue our engagement because if the Peace Process is to be successful, there must be a policing service which young Irish nationalists and republicans can join and encourage others to join.

This takes on an even greater imperative in a situation in which Catholic families are nightly targeted by pipe bombers.

Sinn Féin is committed to bridging the gap between the proposed policing structures and what is required.

And what is required is a new civic policing service which is democratically accountable, and which works in partnership with all citizens: It has to uphold international standards of human rights. At this point for instance there is no plan, no goals and timetables for achieving the required community representation.

I believe we can succeed in achieving all of this.

At times the search for a new beginning to policing has been bogged down through a necessary concentration on the minutiae of the Patten recommendations, British legislation and amendments, implementation plans, or rules and regulations.

In our involvement in this work, Sinn Féin has sought at all times to address these matters in the broader context, at the political, institutional, judicial, administrative, security and legislative levels in which policing has to be sited. 

Others have failed to do this. They have failed to place the detail in the wider framework which is required to ensure that all related areas are free from partisan political control. But it is not too late. Because, of course, while a skewed half-baked slightly reformed policing structure may emerge from the premature move  to embrace the British Government's policing propositions, unless there is republican and nationalist support this cannot succeed in either the spirit or the terms of the Good Friday Agreement.

So the terms have to be got right. Freedom from partisan political control is not optional. It is a necessity.

Breaking the logjam on these issues and dealing with the totality that this involves will also require addressing the context and the safeguards for the transfer of power at some future date on both policing and justice, from London and Dublin. 

With appropriate safeguards and in the context of the correct institutional architecture and the Good Friday Agreement, the transition of powers and the establishment of a Justice Ministry is something which the political parties and the two governments will have to face up to.