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 1117 December 18 2001                                                                                                                          25p

Major news developments made this regular EPSR necessary as the last publication in 2001. The planned-for Perspectives 2002 will now be published in the New Year. 

Blairite 'politically correct' opportunism on race, - first siding with black middle-class school separatism but now playing the BNP's 'make them conform' card, - ends in predictable chaos. But capitalism's unalterable class-divisiveness can never cease being an endless source of grievance and prejudices. All shades of 'reformism' seeking to 'ban' envy and prejudice by moral or legal means or overcome it by artificial 'community building', are just letting capitalism off the hook, which will inevitably create insecurity, unfairness, and jealous-tensions of all kinds in society for as long as its unavoidable system of exploitation, unequal rewards, and grotesque corruption rules on.

The conflicting and unresolvable arguments about how to improve race relations in Britain are themselves exactly a reflection of what caused the flight into ghettoisation, separate-faith schools isolation, and northern city riots in the first place.

The 'problems' about which no one can find a cure or agree, lie in the dissatisfaction with life itself under the inevitable class hierarchy tensions of the winners v losers capitalist system.

On top of the jeering resentment of the very rich by the relatively poor majority because of the injustice, unfairness, and exploitation by which the extremes of wealth are accumulated and then preserved, there must be added the unavoidable sense in the non-white population that a lot of their difficulties come from discrimination.

And the racial prejudice is very real, too, and colossally hurtful, - clearly the overwhelmingly dominant issue as far as most non-whites are concerned.

But the black nationalist response to the outrage of race discrimination, - trying to fight it as a single issue with a 'reform' solution based on putting 'moral' pressure on racists to get them to behave differently, or legal curbs to stop them acting prejudiced is not only doomed to frustration for as long as capitalism lasts (which automatically endlessly breeds bitterness, envy, and tribalism in all races), but will be used by racists to further justify their resentment of 'difference'.

All 'reformist' 'solutions' to ALL Britain's social(and 'racial') problems will only have this aggravating effect in the end precisely because there can be NO 'solutions' under capitalism, the preservation of which is the sole real purpose for the very existence of 'reformism' in the first place, - the never ending pretence that the unstoppable monopoly-imperialist accumulation pattern of the 'free market' can be legislated towards ever-increasing 'fairness' and 'justice' via (democratic government'.

The silliest deception of all rests in the universal make-believe that the plain sad reality that capitalist society has presented the world with in 2001, - race-riots in cities, ghetto-isolation of ethnic minorities, withdrawal into single-faith schools in despair of social justice any other way, retreat into black-nationalist cultural postures out of self-protection instincts, etc, etc, are all the result of 'mistakes in policy' which can now be put right by 'capitalist democracy'.

But quite obviously, envy, prejudice and fear, plus serious communal conflicts when things go seriously wrong in the economy; are exactly what capitalist society is capable of, and all that capitalism is capable of.

An even bleaker picture is presented by the historical record of 'capitalist democracy', and by its current 'world leadership' preoccupations.

The Western-backed genocide of the Palestinian nation in order to complete the handing over of the Palestinian homeland to the Western Zionist-imperialist leadership of world Jewry to build a 'national home' for the faith-linked freemasonry of some of the Western world's most powerful monopoly-capitalist banking and commercial dynasties is one of the most monstrous, sustained acts of official racism in all world history.

So great is the shame and unease in the 'free world' at this continuous brainwashing international propaganda that has allowed US imperialist interests to get away with this fascist-terrorist outrage by its Zionist stooges for 50, years, that even Western capitalist newspapers publish the occasional criticism: 

The disparity in power is so vast that it makes you cry. Equipped with the latest in American-built air power, helicopter gunships, uncountable tanks and missiles, and a superb navy as well as a state of the art intelligence service, Israel is a nuclear power abusing a people without any armour or artillery, no air force - (its one pathetic airfield in Gaza is controlled by Israel) -  or navy, or army air defences; none of the institutions of a modern state.

The appallingly unbroken history of Israel's 31-year-old military occupation (the second longest in modern history) of illegally conquered Palestinian land has been obliterated from public memory, as has been the destruction of Palestinian society in 1948 and the expulsion of 68 per cent of its native people, of whom 4.5 million remain refugees today. Behind the reams of newspeak,  the stark outlines of Israel's decades-long daily pressure on a people whose main sin is that they happened to be there, in Israel's way, is staggeringly perceptible in its inhuman sadism. The cruel confinement of 1.3 million people jammed into the Gaza strip, plus the plight of the nearly two million Palestinian residents of the West Bank have no parallels in the annals of apartheid or colonialism.

F-16 warplanes never bombed South African homelands. They are used against Palestinian towns and villages. All entrances and exits to the territories are controlled by Israel (Gaza is completely surrounded by barbed wire), which also controls the water supply. Divided into about 63 cantons. completely encircled and besieged by Israeli troops, punctuated by 140 settlements with their own road network banned to 'non-Jews', Palestinians under occupation have now been reduced to 60 per cent unemployment and a poverty rate of 50 per cent.

They must endure long queues at Israeli checkpoints which detain and humiliate the elderly, the sick, the student and the cleric for hours on end; 150,000 of their olive and citrus trees have been punitively uprooted;  2,000 of their houses have been demolished and acres of their land destroyed or seized.

Since the latest intifada began late last September, 609 Palestinians have been killed -  four times the number of Israelis  -  and 15,000 wounded, a dozen times more than on the other side. Regular Israeli army assassinations have picked off alleged terrorists at will, mostly killing innocent people like so many flies. Last week 14 Palestinians were murdered openly by Israeli forces, and thus 'prevented' from killing Israelis, although at least two children and five innocents were also murdered. Nameless and faceless. Israel's daily Palestinian victims barely rate a mention on America's news.

Nor is this all. Israel's plan is to make life impossible for Palestinians so that they will leave or give up, or do something crazy like blow themselves up. Since 1967 leaders have been jailed and deported by the Israeli occupation regime, small businesses and farms made unviable by confiscation and sheer destruction. students prevented from studying, universities closed.

After eight fruitless years of the Oslo negotiations, the occupation has merely been packaged more efficiently and the phrase 'peace process' given a consecrated halo that allowed more abuses, more settlements, more imprisonments, more Palestinian suffering than before. Israel has implanted no less than 400,000 settlers on Palestinian land.

Ariel Sharon was swept to power essentially to 'subdue' the Palestinians, teach them a lesson, get rid of them. His record as an Arab killer goes back 30 years before the Sabra and Shatila massacres, that his forces supervised in 1982, and for which he has now been indicted in a Belgian court.

But he isn't a fool. With every Palestinian act of resistance, his forces ratchet up the pressure higher, tightening the siege more. taking more land, cutting off more supplies, openly assassinating Palestinian leaders, making life more intolerable.

Pity not the inept, clumsy, pathetic Arab governments which can and will do nothing to stop Israel: pity the people who bear the wounds in their flesh and the emaciated bodies of their children, some of whom believe that martyrdom is the only way out for them.

The West's 'liberals', 'democrats', and 'reformists', can swear hostility to 'racism' in society for all they are worth, but the very existence of the Western way of life is based on its world economic domination, which in turn is totally dependent on the USA's international military-control system for propping up armed stooges like the Zionists, and putting down any local Third World regimes which might challenge the Washington 'New World Order'.

This planet-wide network of ruthless blitzkrieg repression is unashamedly 100% racist, by the very definitions of the First World dominating the Third World, and by the utterly merciless brutality with which the master-races put down the Earth's unter-mensch:

This is a war against the children of Iraq on two fronts: bombing, which in the last year cost the British taxpayer £60million. And the most ruthless embargo in modern history. According to Unicef, the United Nations Children's Fund, the death rate of children under five is more than 4,000 a month - that is 4,000 more than would have died before sanctions. That is half a million children dead in eight years. If this statistic is difficult to grasp, consider, on the day you read this, up to 200 Iraqi children may die needlessly. "Even if not all the suffering in Iraq can be imputed to external factors" says Unicef, "the Iraqi people would not be undergoing such deprivation in the absence of the prolonged measures imposed by the Security Council and the effects of war."

Through the glass doors of the Unicef offices in Baghdad, you can read the following mission statement: "Above all, survival, hope, development, respect, dignity, equality and justice for women and children." A black sense of irony will be useful if you are a young Iraqi. As it is, the children hawking in the street outside, with their pencil limbs and eyes too big for their long thin faces, cannot read English, and perhaps cannot read at all.

"The change in 10 years is unparalleled, in my experience" Anupama Rao Singh, Unicef's senior representative in Iraq, told me. "In 1989, the literacy rate was 95%; and 93% of the population had free access to modern health facilities. Parents were fined for failing to send their children to school. The phenomenon of street children or child begging was unheard of. Iraq had the stage where the basic indicators we use to measure the overall well-being of human beings, including children, were some of the best in the world. Now it is among the bottom 20%. In 10 years, child mortality has gone from one of the lowest in the world to the highest."

Anupama Rao Singh, originally a teacher in India, has spent most of her working life with Unicef. Helping children is her vocation, but now, in charge of a humanitarian programme that can never succeed, she says, "I am grieving." 

She took me to a typical primary school in Saddam City, where Baghdad's poorest live. We approached along a flooded street: the city's drainage and water distribution system have collapsed. The head, Ali Hassoon, wore the melancholia that marks Iraqi teachers and doctors and other carers: those who know they can do little "until you, in the outside world, decide". Guiding us around the puddles of raw sewage in the playground, he pointed to the high water mark on a wall. "In the winter it comes up to here. That's when we evacuate.

"We stay as long as possible, but without desks, the children have to sit on bricks. I am worried about the buildings coming down." The school is on the edge of a vast industrial cemetery. The pumps in the sewage treatment plants and the reservoirs of water are silent, save for a few wheezing at a fraction of their capacity. Many were targets in the American-led blitz in January 1991; most have since disintegrated without spare parts from their British, French and German builders. These are mostly delayed by the Security Council's Sanctions Committee; the term used is "placed on hold". Ten years ago, 92% of the population had safe water, according to Unicef. Today, drawn untreated from the Tigris, it is lethal. Touching two brothers on the head, the head said, "These children are recovering from dysentery, but it will attack them again, and again, until they are too weak." Chlorine, that universal guardian of safe water, has been blocked by the Sanctions Committee. In 1990, an Iraqi infant with dysentery stood a one in, 600 chance of dying. This is now one in 50.

Just before Christmas, the department of trade and industry in London blocked a shipment of vaccines meant to protect Iraqi children against diphtheria and yellow fever. Dr Kim Howells told parliament why. His title of under secretary of state for competition and consumer affairs, eminently suited its Orwellian reply. The children's vaccines were banned, he said, "because they are capable of being used in weapons of mass destruction". That his finger was on the trigger of a proven weapon of mass destruction - sanctions - seemed not to occur to him. 

I sat in a clinic as doctors received parents and their children, some of them dying. After every other examination, Dr Lekaa Fasseh Ozeer, the oncologist, wrote in English: "No drugs available." I asked her to jot down in my notebook a list of the drugs the hospital had ordered, but rarely saw. In London, I showed this to Professor Karol Sikora who, as chief of the cancer programme of the World Health Organisation (WHO), wrote in the British Medical Journal last year: "Requested radiotherapy equipment, chemotherapy drugs and analgesics are consistently blocked by United States and British advisers [to the Sanctions Committee in New York]. There seems to be a rather ludicrous notion that such agents could be converted into chemical or other weapons." 

He told me, "Nearly all these drugs are available in every British hospital. They're very standard. When I came back from Iraq last year, with a group of experts I drew up a list of 17 drugs that are deemed essential for cancer treatment. We informed the UN that there was no possibility of converting these drugs into chemical warfare agents. We heard nothing more. The saddest thing I saw in Iraq was children dying because there was no chemotherapy and no pain control. It seemed crazy they couldn't have morphine, because for everybody with cancer pain, it is the best drug. When I was there, they had a little bottle of aspirin pills to go round 200 patients in pain. They would receive a particular anti-cancer drug, but then get only little bits of drugs here and there, and so you can't have any planning. It is bizarre."

In January last year, George Robertson, then defence secretary, said, "Saddam Hussein has in warehouses $275 million worth of medicines and medical supplies which he refuses to distribute." The British government knew this was false, because UN humanitarian officials had made clear the problem of drugs and equipment coming sporadically into Iraq such as machines without a crucial part, IV fluids and syringes arriving separately - as well as the difficulties of transport and the need for a substantial buffer stock. "The goods that come into this country are distributed to where they belong," said Hans yon Sponeck. "Our most recent stock analysis shows that 88.8% of all humanitarian supplies have been distributed." 

The representatives of Unicef, the World Food Programme and the Food and Agricultural Organisation confirmed this. If Saddam Hussein believed he could draw an advantage from obstructing humanitarian aid, he would no doubt do so. However, according to a FAO study:   "The government of Iraq introduced a public food rationing system with effect from within a month of the imposition of the embargo. It provides basic foods at 1990 prices, which means they are now virtually free. This has a life-saving nutritional benefit... and has prevented catastrophe for the Iraqi people."

Wherever you go in Iraq's southern city of Basra, there is dust. It gets in your eyes and nose and throat. It swirls in school playgrounds and consumes children kicking a plastic ball. "It carries death; said Dr Jawad Al-Ali, a cancer specialist and member of Britain's Royal College of Physicians. "Our own studies indicate that more than 40 per cent of the population in this area will get cancer: in five years' time to begin with, then long afterwards. Most of my own family now have cancer, and we have no history of the disease. It has spread to the medical staff of this hospital. We don't know the precise source of the contamination, because we are not allowed to get the equipment to  conduct a proper scientific survey, or even to test the excess level of radiation in our bodies. We suspect Depleted Uranium, which was used by the Americans and British in the Gulf War right across the southern battlefields:"

Under economic sanctions imposed by the United Nations Security Council almost 10 years ago, Iraq is denied equipment and expertise to clean up its contaminated battlefields, as Kuwait was cleaned up. At the same tame, the Sanctions Committee in New York, dominated by the Americans and British, has blocked or delayed a range of vital equipment, chemotherapy drugs and even painkillers. "For us doctors; said Dr Al-Ali, "it is like torture. We see children die from the kind of cancers from which, given the right treatment, there is a good recovery rate:" Three children died while I was there.

Six other children died not far away on January 25, last year. An American missile hit Al Jumohria, a street in a poor residential area. Sixty-three people were injured, a number of them badly burned. "Collateral damage," said the Department of Defence in Washington. Britain and the United States are still bombing Iraq almost everyday: it is the longest Anglo-American bombing campaign since the second world war, yet, with honourable exceptions, very little appears about it in the British media. Conducted under the cover of “no fly zones", which have no basis in international law, the aircraft, according to Tony Blair, are "performing vital humanitarian tasks". The ministry of defence in London has a line about "taking robust action to protect pilots" from Iraqi attacks - yet an internal UN Security Sector report says that, in one five-month period, 41 per cent of the victims were civilians in civilian targets:  villages, fishing jetties, farmland and vast, treeless valleys where sheep graze. A shepherd, his father, his four children and his sheep were killed by a British or American aircraft, which made two passes at them. I stood in the cemetery where the children are buried and their mother shouted:  "I want to speak to the pilot who did this."

A courtly, eloquent Irishman, Denis Halliday resigned as co-ordinator of humanitarian relief to Iraq in 1998, after 34 years with the UN; he was then Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations, one of the elite of senior officials. He had made his career in development, "attempting to help people, not harm them". His was the first public expression of an unprecedented rebellion within the UN bureaucracy: "I am resigning", he wrote, "because the policy of economic sanctions is totally bankrupt. We are in the process of destroying an entire society. It is as simple and terrifying as that...Five thousand children are dying every month. I don't want to administer a programme that results in figures like these."

When I first met Halliday, I was struck by the care with which he chose uncompromising words. "I had been instructed," he said, "to implement a policy that satisfies the definition of genocide: a deliberate policy that has effectively killed well over a million individuals, children and adults. We all know that the regime, Saddam Hussein, is not paying the price for economic sanctions; on the contrary, he has been strengthened by them. It is the little people who are losing their children or their parents for lack of untreated water. What is clear is that the Security Council is now out of control, for its actions here undermine its own Charter, and the Declaration of Human Rights and the Geneva Convention. History will slaughter those responsible."

Inside the UN, Halliday broke a long collective silence. Then on February 13 this year, Hans von Sponeck, who had succeeded him as humanitarian co-ordinator in Iraq, resigned. "How long," he asked, "should the civilian population of Iraq be exposed to such punishment for something they have never done?' Two days later, Jutta Burghardt, head of the World Food Programme in Iraq, resigned, saying privately she, too, could not tolerate what was being done to the Iraqi people. Another resignation is expected.

Growing up for 7 generations or more with such a regular routine race-superiority/race-inferiority background to all history, how can the people of the Western imperialist countries not be steeped in prejudices, and assumptions, and hypocrisy of all kinds, concerning what real 'justice' there is on earth for the overwhelming majority (non-white) of mankind????

These fascist tyrannies against the Palestinian and Iraqi nations are happening in the West's name right now, as criminally murderous as any racist-atrocity injustices in all history.

How can there be anything other than complete disbelief, suspicion, and mistrust in all dealings between the majority ethnic populations of the world and the minority White master race,?????

But just as bad as the petty-bourgeois white 'reformist' delusions that the capitalist world can be changed to one which perfect equality and justice, are the 'reformist' delusions of the black-nationalist middle-class who basically just want to climb on the bandwagon of Labour or other 'parliamentary' opportunism, and ape their 'party democracy' careerist colleagues in pretending that just one more inquiry, or just one more complete 'new legislative change', etc, etc, will "transform race-relations in Britain", etc.

Under capitalism, and especially facing a long period of deepening world economic crisis which will see xenophobic warmongering-chauvinism become the main policy platform for every Western power to divert the unemployed masses at home from revolution (blaming 'abroad' for the slump economic difficulties and trade-war disasters), the lives of most of the population will never be far from turmoil, dire insecurity, or real suffering and a vengeful sense of grievance of one kind or another.

Brought up and educated in total brainwashed political and historical ignorance, how can all Western populations possibly avoid being whipped up by racist diversions thrown into the domestic bargain.???

The whole 'immigration' racket is a capitalist exploitation fraud to start with, and has been for hundreds of years, shipping vast numbers of people back and forth around the globe all for the sake of economic domination and exploitation. Slave trade & anti-Third World genocide (America, Australia, etc) were the tragic human suffering at the start of this bourgeois-imperialist racket; race-riots in slump-terrified Western lands will mark its conclusion.

The USA points the way. It has experienced more dramatic 'civil rights' and anti-slavery struggles and victories, and has had more outstanding integration triumphs at the top of public life, backed by as much 'political correctness' as can be imagined, as any country on earth.

But the racial tensions in parts of America, and the expectations of future racial strife, are more violent and bleak than at any time in US history, - driven into that volatile condition by the insanely unrealistic propaganda for the American capitalist way of life which pretends that a fabulous life for all US citizens is guaranteed now for all time by the American 'New World Order'.

That lying hypocritical dream will not fall apart in the most appalling civil-war bloodshed (at some time in the future) just because US global domination is based on racist-fascist tyranny, as seen above, but much more because in the international economic collapse, the imperialist bourgeoisie can only try to pass-off the burdens of slump and collapse onto the working class everywhere.

Tragically, class prejudices are likely to be indistinguishable from racist prejudices for a while for many of the victims of the world slump, and it will require a massive rebuilding of an international Marxist-communist revolutionary movement to rally all spontaneous outbursts and struggles into a class war to take power to build a workers state, universally.

'Reformists' of all kinds, - New Labour, Black Nationalist, Lib/Dems, BNP, and dozens more to come, will be the main obstacle, - still all trying to sell to the working class the idiotic dream that the totally unstable, divisive, unfair, and unjust capitalist exploitation system can somehow be 'reformed' into a much happier society by this or that series of changes, major or minor.

It is garbage. If a capitalist country's entire population was totally cloned like peas in a pod, they would still be bamboozled into taking it out on each other when things went wrong if they had been brought up in the brainwashed ignorance such as rules Western 'democracy' today, living a totally false economic existence based on worldwide racist exploitation and tyranny (see above).

All American and other Western history once again proves it. Since the 19th century, every new wave of exploited immigrant labour has been systematically vilified with officially condoned racism, always ready to divide and rule the working class in case of slump, and revolutionary necessity, - anti-Irish, anti-Jewish, anti-Polak, anti-Spic, anti-Spade, anti-Paki, anti-anything-that-goes.

Get rid of capitalism, and all need for such backward, lunatic, racist filth disappears.

The 'race-reform' lobby is not especially bad or stupid, but it is as misleading a fraud and diversion to the working class as any other reformist delusions. It disarms the working class from the crucial understanding that its historical destiny is to make the greatest revolutionary advance in the entire record of civilisation, to rid the world of class domination, by building the true democracy of workers states under the dictatorship of the proletariat. All idea of race prejudice, - and all economic and social basis for it, - will steadily disappear thereafter.   EPSR supporters.

Colonialism's rotten chickens coming home to roost in Ireland.  

Not much needs adding to the Ombudsman's scathing criticism of the politically-degenerate RUC or to the capitalist press's own revealing reports on the simultaneous scandal of Stobie's assassination, silenced for what he knew about RUC-Loyalist criminal corruption to murder Irish opponents of the bankrupt 'Northern Ireland' colony.

As last EPSR explained, the powerful importance of the Good Friday Agreement in accepting the triumph of the Sinn Féin and IRA struggle and the justice of their national-liberation revolutionary aims, is beginning to be revealed, exactly as the Review alone has long analysed.

The Ombudsman's strong position is one of the many GFA provisions which effectively dictate the dismantling of the lawless colonial dictatorship imposed by Orange bigotry and RUC repressive discrimination on the Irish since Ireland was foully Partitioned at bayonet-point in 1921 to provide the pro-imperialist settlers with their own fortress tyranny over six of Ulster's nine counties.

But the GFA's belated British acceptance of its Partition crime against the Irish nation only begrudgingly allowed the 'possibility' of reunification to heal Ireland’s wounds (inevitable, in fact, and the only possible cure to the Troubles) in order to fudge imperialism's responsibility for Ireland's long tragedy, and to conceal the colossal revolutionary triumph of the Sinn Féin/IRA national liberation struggle.

And so the lingering horror of the totally discredited colonial dictatorship still is allowed to limp on to a lingering death, in the hope that clear historical lessons of the anti-imperialist struggle are never seen, and in expectation that offering a confused and chaotic slow way out for the old Orange dictatorship will avoid too many painful recriminations, which could damagingly implicate Britain in serious wrongdoing.

Hence the paralysed nervousness of the British Northern Ireland Office (in its twilight years) over the latest events and revelations of routine fascist degeneracy, corruption, and cynical incompetence by a colonial society which was born in vile hatred and revenge, and is now dying in it:

Members of the loyalist paramilitary Ulster Defence Association yesterday exacted final retribution on one of their former comrades, Billy Stobie, the self-confessed police informer at the centre of the Pat Finucane murder case.

He had been accused of aiding and abetting the killing of Mr Finucane in 1989 but walked free from court a fortnight ago when his trial collapsed. 

The former UDA quartermaster admitted he had supplied the weapons to shoot the high profile Catholic solicitor but insisted he had informed his RUC handlers that a top republican was to be killed. He always maintained he did not know who the target was.

Stobie's claims heightened allegations that security forces colluded with the loyalist paramilitaries who murdered Mr Finucane and other Catholics. But the case against him folded before the trial began when the chief prosecution witness, a former journalist to whom Stobie had told his story, was deemed mentally unfit is give evidence.

Within hours of yesterday's murder, the Red Hand Defenders, a cover name used by the UDA, said they killed Stobie for "crimes against the loyalist community".

His death will reignite the controversy surrounding the murder of Mr Finucane, who had represented several IRA terror suspects successfully, and intensify the Finucane family's calls for a public inquiry as the only way to get at the truth.

Yesterday, the Finucanes, who always believed Stobie was a pawn in a bigger conspiracy, said they were sorry he had been killed and believed he might still be alive if a public inquiry had been set up and he had been allowed to retain his anonymity.

The human rights group, British Irish Rights Watch, also reiterated its call for an independent inquiry into the Finucane killing and said the Police Service of Northern Ireland and special branch should play no part in investigating Stobie's death.

Gerry Kelly, the Sinn Féin spokesman, said that while loyalists might have pulled the trigger, special branch and British military intelligence had most to gain from Stobie's death.

He said suspicion would be compounded by the timing of the shooting on the day the police ombudsman, Nuala O'Loan, released her report into the Omagh bombing, which is highly critical of the special branch.

The Irish foreign minister, Brian Cowen, said the killing of Stobie "may have been an attempt to stifle the search for the truth into the circumstances surrounding the murder of Pat Finucane. It must not and will not be allowed to halt or hinder that search".

Stobie, a former Ulster Defence Regiment soldier who joined the UDA and became a police informer in the late 1980s, was shot and badly wounded by loyalists in 1994. Last year, however, he had been given assurances by Johnny Adair's notorious UDA Shankill Road C company that he was safe.

But police warned him on December 2 that his life was under threat from loyalists.

John Reid, the secretary of state, declared in October that the UDA's 1994 ceasefire had broken down because of continuing involvement in sectarian violence and the organisation has become increasingly disjointed in recent years. Many leading members, however, would have had reasons to want Stobie dead.

A senior UDA source said he was not surprised by the murder and could not believe Stobie had never moved away from the hardline loyalist Forthriver Road area where he had lived for years.

"There would have been a queue to get at him and after what he did it was only a matter of time," he said. "Once you betray someone, you can never be trusted again. There is no doubt he told the police who was involved in Finucane's murder and those people are always looking over their shoulders."

Stobie was the only person charged with the Finucane murder, after a fresh investigation led by Sir John Stevens, the Metropolitan police commissioner, who is due to report on his findings into alleged security force collusion in the new year.

But he and the Finucane family both claimed he was being made a scapegoat.

He was originally questioned about the murder in 1990 but was not charged until a former journalist, Neil Mulholland, made a statement to the Stevens team in 1999.

That summer another reporter, Ed Moloney, the northern editor of the Dublin-based Sunday Tribune, who refused to hand over his notes to police, published the story Stobie had told him nine years previously. Stobie said he had tipped off his handlers when his north Belfast UDA commander asked him to get guns for a "job" on a "top Provie" almost a week before the Finucane murder, and he was amazed when police did nothing either then or just before the murder when he again alerted them. 

He also gave police information which he believed should have led to arrests when the principal murder weapon, a Browning pistol, was moved.

Stobie later alleged special branch tried to set him up by tampering with UDA guns so he would be blamed, and framed him by planting guns in his home.

But during his trial for arms possession in 1990, he instructed his solicitor to tell the crown lawyer privately he would tell all he knew about the Finucane case if he was convicted. Minutes later, a policeman made a mistake in the witness box, by referring to previous convictions, and the judge declared a mistrial.

In 1991, the charges were dropped and a not guilty verdict was recorded.

Stobie first appeared in court on the Finucane murder charge in June 1999 but a catalogue of delays ensued.

The case collapsed on November 27, when the director of public prosecutions decided not to call Mr Mulholland, who has been suffering severe psychiatric problems, as a witness.

POLICE in Northern Ireland failed to respond to warnings about an imminent terrorist attack in the days before the Omagh bomb in August 1998, bungled the murder inquiry and withheld key intelligence from the Province's independent police watchdog, according to a devastating report into the atrocity.

The report by Northern Ireland's Police Ombudsman singles out for criticism Sir Ronnie Flanagan, the Chief Constable, his senior officers and, above all, the Special Branch, whose role, it says, should be reviewed.

Critically, the Ombudsman said that it had identified some 360 intelligence documents in Special Branch files which could have been used in the murder inquiry, just 22 per cent of which had actually been handed to the Omagh bomb investigation team.

The report accuses the Police Service of Northern Ireland, formerly the Royal Ulster Constabulary, of failing the 29 victims who died in the Real IRA blast as well as their families by "defective leadership, poor judgement and a lack of urgency".

The report also says that the police forced a temporary shutdown in the Ombudsman's inquiry after refusing to reveal intelligence and claimed that police witnesses had "inexplicably varied their accounts to the Police Ombudsman's investigators".

Although the report concluded that "it will never be known whether or not the bombing of Omagh could have been prevented if the RUC had taken more actions after receiving warnings from two sources", it reveals for the first time the full extent of those tip-offs.

Above all, it criticises the Special Branch for failing to pass on to police in Omagh information received during an anonymous telephone warning 11 days before the blast.

It attacks Sir Ronnie Flanagan for dismissing this information as not relevant to the eventual bomb attack in Omagh on August 15, 1998, which caused the single worst loss of life during the Troubles. "The Chief Constable has said it was acceptable that Special Branch did not pass on the information received on August 4, 1998. He is wrong," declares the report.

According to the report, at 10am on August 4, 1998, an officer at Omagh police station received an anonymous ten-minute telephone call warning of an "unspecified" attack on police in the town on August 15, 1998, the day of the bombing. 

Special Branch, which dismissed the suspects as "smugglers", failed to issue a warning to the RUC’s subdivisional commander in Omagh, apparently in contravention of police procedure.  

The report also blames Special Branch for failing to pass on information received from a reliable informer, code-named Kevin Fulton, about a bomb-maker referred to as “A”. 

It describes how between June 6 and June 1998, Fulton told his handler about a Real IRA member who was seeking bombmaking equipment. On July 23,1998, he told his handler that this man smelt of fertiliser, and on August 12, he told his handler that "the Real IRA was about to move something north over the next few days".  He named the suspected bomb-maker and an accomplice.

The ombudsman discovered that this information was passed to special branch. But these documents now cannot be found and the unit has denied ever having received them, a claim the ombudsman dismisses in her report.

All available intelligence should have been given by special branch to the murder squad, yet this did not happen, the report concludes.

Conduct of the police 

The report says it is of "considerable concern that some critical information was not provided to ombudsman investigators", and that "at senior management level the response to the inquiry has been defensive and at times uncooperative".

Special branch and the then chief constable were reluctant to grant access to computer records, forcing a four-week hiatus in the inquiry, while some police witnesses "inexplicably varied their accounts" to the ombudsman's team.  

The ombudsman's six recommendations include a review of special branch and the appointment of an officer from another police force to continue the Omagh investigation.

The murder investigation, launched after the Omagh bomb which was nearly closed in August 1999 although little progress had been made, contained a number of "significant and fundamental errors", according to an internal police review seen by the Ombudsman's office. 

The internal police review, which made a total of 274 recommendations, raised a number of crucial concerns,  many of which were not acted upon, according to the Ombudsman's report. When finally located by the team of 11 officers conducting the review, the bomb car used by the terrorists at Omagh, was found rusting in a car park with only a tarpaulin sheet over it. 

The review identified delays of a year before the murder investigation team  followed-up statements.  

The review seriously criticised the Omagh bomb investigation, and identified that, shortly after the inquiry began, neither the senior investigating officer nor his deputy were on it full time.

Since the bombing attitudes have changed and yesterday the town centre was evacuated in a bomb alert. A coded warning of a bomb having been left in the town centre was telephoned in anonymously. 

Police immediately evacuated business premises, shops, bars and cafés in Market Street where the 1998 bomb shattered so many live. Other streets were also cleared and the town centre was effectively brought to a standstill. 

In such a depraved corrupt entity as the 'Northern Ireland' dictatorship, still in resentful 'No Surrender' posturing in 1998, there could be any number of sick or bizarre or sinister explanations as to why a 36-minute warning of an already tipped-off bombing then led to nothing being done and 29 people, out shopping, blasted to death, whereas a mere hoax this last week cleared the main shopping street of Omagh in minutes.

But that the people of Ireland will be well rid of this degenerate colony memory once it is finally dismantled, is beyond doubt.

And such scandalous revelations will further help bury the sick imperialist chauvinism polluting British working class thinking for centuries from association with the cruel domination of Ireland.

The fake-'left' in Britain, of course, is still in total denial over the whole IRA/Sinn Féin triumph. (See details of every sect’s backwardness, Trot and Revisionist, on this issue over the past 22 years in the EPSR’s analyses.) Build Leninism. EPSR

Imperialism's warmongering fascist blitzkrieg takes on increasingly Goebbelsian features.   

The peculiar contrived propaganda onslaught on Osama Bin Laden over an alleged home-video showing him gloating about the success of the guerrilla-war terror attack on the USA, has had a mixed reception.

One obvious problem was the fatuous thug logic which claimed "Now we have proof of Bin Laden's guilt" more than two months after unleashing a sustained ferocious blitzkrieg on defenceless Afghanistan to reduce the world's poorest country to total rubble, killing 3,000 innocent men, women, and children into the bargain, on the basis of "undisclosable proof" already that the terror HQ was situated there.

Why the nervously-presented extra 'proof' so late in the day???

The obvious humbug of this '1ega1' farce possibly helped critics from all corners of the world to doubt the purported 'meaning' of the tape, and even to doubt whether the supposed sound transcript was genuine at all.

But much more certainly undermining of the Western brainwashing crusade is the already horrifying reality that overthrowing the Taleban regime, as crude and backward as it was, has astonishingly only left Afghanistan prey to an even far worse plight.

These admissions come from the Western capitalist press itself:

IT IS A HIDDEN war that the world has ignored. But the chaos, rape, murder and pillaging that have swept southern Afghanistan are writ large on the faces of the fortunate few who escape.

Abdul Abdullah was lucky. As an ethnic Pashtun living in a village near Herat, be fled the approach of the Tajik and Hazara forces which captured the city. He headed for the barbed-wire border with Pakistan. His cousin, Aziz Khan, was not so lucky. He and his wife Fatma went west toward Iran but did not make it. They and 20 other Pashtun families were stopped at a checkpoint, one of hundreds appearing across southern Afghanistan. The men, including Khan, were herded up into the mountains and shot. The young women were taken away.  

Abdullah will not say what he thinks happened to Fatma. But the truth seems obvious. 'I know they let most of the women go, but they kept the young and pretty ones like Fatma,' he said.

The landscape Abdullah crossed on his trek south is a land of warring anarchy. In many areas Taliban forces are still in control, but in others local Pashtun warlords rule by rape, robbery and murder. Armed gangs rob and kill lorry drivers who are the economic lifeblood of the region. In the skies above US bombers seek targets to destroy.

Noor Mohamed saw the effects of one of those missions. As a wheat trader plying between the Pakistani border town of Chaman and the Afghan city of Ghaznilast week, he witnessed a terrible sight. Lying in a burnt-out, twisted mess just north of Kandahar were the smoking remains of a 15-lorry fuel convoy.

The charred remains of the drivers and dozens of unfortunate souls who had bargained a lift from them was a sight Mohamed will not forget. 

'I saw all the dead burnt people', he said. 'How can you be a man if you don't feel something when you see that?'

Into the void have flooded warlords, based over the border in the Pakistani city of Quetta, who ruled before the Taliban came.

In the villages around Kandahar there is a name that provokes horror and fear. It is not Mullah Omar, nor is it Osama bin Laden. It is Gul Agha, the former mujahideen governor of Kandahar, whose tribal militia is backed and advised by the US.

Ghlume Walli fled from Agha's men near his hometown of Khalat, to a makeshift tent at the border. "Gul Agha's men would have robbed me even of these water bottles,''  he said, holding up two dirty plastic cartons filled with brown water. 

His friend Mohamed Sami agreed. He had been herding his cattle near Khalat when Agha's militia stopped him at gunpoint and slaughtered his herd. 

He draws his finger across his throat.  'They are looters. Everyone is afraid. They killed every last one of the cattle,' he said.

Agha and several thousand fighters crossed into Afghanistan a day after Kabul fell. Police sources in Pakistan believe he is heavily involved in the lucrative opium trade. His followers are drawn mainly from the poor and destitute of the refugee camps. When he governed in Kandahar the city was ruled by warlords who stripped it of everything of value. Rape and robbery were commonplace.

It is the prospect of such men returning that has many in the refugee camps longing for the Taliban to rule as long as possible. They fled along routes controlled by the Taliban. Many say they owe the religious militia their lives.

For the Pashtuns of the south the Taliban did not mean oppression and taking away women's rights. They had never known anything different. However, the Taliban did bring freedom from thugs and the rule of the gun.

'In the time of the Taliban I could walk down the street with 30,000 rupees and no one would touch me. But the men of Gul Agha will kill you even if you have nothing,' said Walli. 

Such feelings have seen the Taliban win back some ground. Khalat fell for three days to local tribal forces. The bazaar was looted while residents cowered in their houses. Then the Taliban returned and the residents cheered.

The town had endured several days of rule by Agha's men, when one of his commanders boasted of executing 160 Taliban prisoners.

'They were made to stand in a long line and five or six of our fighters used light machine guns to kill them,' the commander told a French news agency, adding that US special forces attached to Agha had tried and failed to stop the shootings. The US has denied the massacre happened, but after the slaughter of hundreds of Taliban in Mazar-e-Sharif, the Takhteh Pol killings sounded all too plausible.

The collapse of Taliban rule over much of Afghanistan has laid bare the country's ethnic bones, exposing old hatreds. Hundreds of refugees in the crowded camps near Chaman are from Mazar-e-Sharif. They are all Pashtuns, who have fled rather than live under the rule of the Uzbek soldiers of Northern Alliance General Rashid Dostum.

They tell of ethnic cleansing of Pashtuns in the north and say they had no choice but to flee south to the Pashtun - and Taliban - heartland.

Haji Khira Ghol left behind his vineyard and market stall when he fled a day before Mazar-e-Sharif fell. 'The mercy of an Uzbek is worse than the greatest cruelty of the Pashtuns,' he shouted angrily.

He said 5,000 Pashtuns from his region had fled their homes. Relatives arriving after him near Chaman told him how his abandoned house had been destroyed by Dostum's men and his stall looted of all its stock.

'I can never go back. Not with the Uzbeks there. There is no place for the Pashtun in the north,' he said.

Other stories recounted by Pashtun refugees from Mazar-e-Sharif are similar. Mohamed Aslan fled his farm 10 days ago. He is terrified of the Northern Alliance and their men. He could not stay in the city of his birth. 'They know only war. If they want to they can just kill you and go unpunished,' he said.

Just over 60 miles away from the refugee camps at Chaman, the US flag flies over the Marines' captured airstrip. But the attention of those forces is firmly focused on hunting bin Laden. The ravages going on around them are ignored. Among the refugees fleeing the anarchy, the US has few friends. 'If the Americans had brought peace, that would have been a good thing. But instead they have just brought us war and looting and the men of Gul Agha,' said Aslan. Above him in the bright blue sky the jet trail of a B-52 headed north. Its target was Kandahar. This hidden war goes on.

"Welcome to Kandahar,'' he boomed, shaking my hand in his giant hand. Gul Agha Sharzai had a reason to be happy. Seven years after the Taleban had chased him from office and into exile in the Pakistan border town of Quetta, he was back in residence at the high-domed governor's mansion, receiving hundreds of wellwishers seeking his patronage.

The aerial assault may have halted, but the countryside around Kandahar is far from being at peace. Truckloads of fighters armed with rocket propelled grenade-launchers and machineguns raced along the dusty road in the direction of the border, where a tribal dispute is festering over control of the town of Spin Boldak. 

It was along this route that Mr Sherzai's forces had advanced on Kandahar, calling on American air support every time that they encountered resistance. 

At the town of Taktehpul, the scene of the fiercest fighting, we stopped to break the Ramadan fast. Out of nowhere a ragtag group of Mr Sherzai's fighters appeared in a pungent cloud of hashish smoke. "Please," one glassy-eyed soldier said, proffering a joint while resting his Kalashnikov against his knee. 'There is no ban any more." He giggled. 

What law and order has existed since the Taleban's departure lies in the hands of men such as these. It is no wonder that the people of Kandahar are nervous. 

Late last night the streets of the city were almost deserted after the imposition of a curfew that was designed to keep Mr Sherzai's forces off the streets.

"Armed groups are roaming around and we want to control that," he said. "They are not disciplined forces."

Mr Sherzai's former tenure during the Mujahidin years is not remembered as a time of peace and stability and many fear a return to the warlordism of old.
	
Rumours of potential violence have spread like wildfire through the city since fighting broke out at the weekend between rival factions vying for control.

As Ahmed Rashid's excellent book on the Taliban makes abundantly clear,  Mullah Mohammed Omar is no Saddam Hussein or Slobodan Milosevic.

He did not run a "war machine" or a "police state". Afghanistan was an impoverished and destroyed society with minimal infrastructure, in which the concept of governance meant nothing more than the use of a few satellite telephones to issue social edicts which the so-called religious police enforced.

Almost every urban service, from education to health to food, was provided by outside aid agencies or privately by Afghans on their own. Villages had to fend for themselves. 

To imagine that in such a vacuum of government the Taliban could arrest Bin Laden was laughable, although Mullah Omar did, of course, ask a shura of religious leaders to consider the problem and they did recommend Bin Laden leave Afghanistan and be tried before an Islamic court elsewhere. If toppling the Taliban arrived late as a war aim (Tony Blair only stated it unequivocally on October 30, three weeks into the bombing campaign), it seems to have emerged through desperation and cynicism. Realising that finding Bin Laden might prove impossible, the war leaders turned their sights  on the Taliban instead.

Politically, they were easy meat. Few in the western world, women or men would grieve to see them go. Commie-bashing was never as simple as this.

I hold no brief for the Taliban, but I also hold no brief for an approach to politics which consists of demonising your opponents, over-personalising issues and evading nuanced judgements. The Taliban were not monsters. They were a wild mixture of religious fundamentalism, puritan ideology, Pashtun nationalism and the social norms of the Afghan village, common to every Afghan ethnic group. Go to the Afghan districts of Quetta in Pakistan, or watch the TV pictures of "liberated" Kabul, and you will see the burka everywhere. The total veiling of women did not begin with the Taliban, and has not ended with their demise.

In an earlier war western governments and compliant journalists demonised Afghanistan's communists, ignoring the fact that their social and gender policies throughout the 1980s were enlightened. In those days the west armed and aided the fundamentalists and those who wanted to deny women's rights. So demonising the Taliban came naturally. Yet, as aid agencies have testified, the Taliban produced order in place of civil war. "With the Taliban there was a certain amount of security in the areas they controlled. I wouldn't say the Taliban were supportive, but a lot of aid went in - there was acceptance," says John Fairhurst, Oxfam's programme director for Afghanistan.

"Now we have local commanders looking to take advantage of the collapse. You also have bandits thinking they have more freedom to operate".

Legally, it is doubtful whether the two UN resolutions which preceded the military strikes permitted as attack on the Taliban, as opposed to al-Qaida.  What of the costs of the bombing? Perhaps around 1,500 innocent people have been killed, if one assumes an accident rate of about 150 a week. (America's anti-Taliban allies in Jalalabad reported as many as 300 civilian victims in that one area last week.) The air strikes have driven at least. 600,000 people from their homes.

The US launched its Afghan assault in winter, in a situation where neighbouring countries would only grudgingly open their gates.

Half the population of Kandahar, a third of Kabul, and thousands more from the north, fled the terror and were left wandering inside Afghanistan in cold and hunger. Not much of this has reached the world's attention. Two years ago the remote town of Kukes in Albania was host to hundreds of reporters and film crews sending daily interviews with refugees to eager editors. In this was the comparable town of Chaman in Pakistan produced few such dispatches, barely one a week per paper - the refrain became: "My desk just glazes over if I suggest another refugee story". 

Finally, there is the time lost in delivering food, blankets and medicine to the hundreds of thousands people displaced by drought before the bombing started. For three months very little aid has been going in. "The politics have changed dramatically but the humanitarian situation remains dire," says Tim Pitt of Médecins sans Frontières. "Before September 11 we were reaching upwards of one million people. Now it's less than that'."

Dozens of Taliban prisoners died after surrendering to Northern Alliance forces, asphyxiated in the shipping containers used to transport them to prison, witnesses say. The deaths occurred as the prisoners, many of them foreign fighters for the Taliban, were brought from the town of Kunduz to a prison in Shibarghan, north-west Afghanistan, a journey that took two or three days for some. 

General Jurabek, the commander in charge of some 3,000 prisoners being held in the jail said that 43 prisoners had died in half a dozen containers on the way, either from injuries or asphyxiation.

But the number of deaths may be much higher. Several Pakistani prisoners interviewed in the prison have said that dozens of people died in their containers during the journey. 

Omar, a pale and slight Pakistani youth who clutched a blanket round his head and shoulders, said through the bars of his prison wing that all but seven people in his container had died from lack of air.  He estimated that more than 100 had died. 

Another Pakistani said that 13 had died in his container, and that the survivors had taken turns to breathe through a hole in the metal wall. 

One prisoner, Ibrahim, a 30year-old Pakistani mechanic interviewed in the presence of Gen Jurabek, said he thought that about 35 people had died in his container. "No oxygen, no oxygen" he said urgently in English.

The fake-'lefts' in Britain who universally condemned the Sept 11 attempt by the imperialist-dominated Middle East to fight back against the region's endless humiliation and persecution as a result of Western world-rule, have increasingly more to answer for as the fascist slaughter, which US imperialism has unleashed on the strength of gaining world opinion's approval that "something must be done", gathers pace.

Universal warmongering barbarism is the imperialist system's long-term intention if the deepening economic crisis threatens the West's international domination.

Support for Islamic voodoo is out of the question, but to condemn Sept 11 means willy-nilly, to side with US blitzkrieg. Build Leninism. EPSR

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

Where real and sustained fascist terror not only suits US imperialist interests but is armed, trained, and advised by Washington.

Colombia is the most dangerous country in the world for trade unionists, where mere membership of a union can serve as an instant death warrant. The country's cycle of violence has become a war against trade unionism and the fundamental principles of the Labour Movement. Colombian trade union, Workers Unitary Central (CUT), had already recorded the assassination of 129 trade union leaders, members and activists by mid-November this year. Another 68 trade unionists were disappeared, 24 suffered attempts on their lives, while the number of those threatened and forced to leave their homes is unknown. Last year, in its annual report, the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, ICFTU recorded no less than 153 assassinations of trade unionists in Colombia, out of a worldwide total of 209.

IN 1998, Domingo Tovar, director of Colombian trade union Workers Unitary Central's (CUT) organising department, and Jorge Ortega, the union's vice president, were forced to flee Colombia when their lives were threatened. In September 1998, when they returned, Tovar and Ortega were threatened again. On Tuesday 20 October 1998, Jorge Ortega was assassinated by an unidentified gunman, shot in the head in front of his house. The threats, and Ortega's death, appeared to be directly linked to a strike by public service employees (who wanted the government. to negotiate with them on tax reform) which was entering its third week at the time of the killing.

"Sixth Division" is the title of the latest Human Rights Watch report on Colombia, as this is the phrase used in Colombia to refer to the death squads. "The Colombian Army has five divisions, but many Colombians feel that the paramilitaries are so fully integrated into the military's battle strategy and linked to government units via intelligence, supplies, radios, weapons, cash and common purpose that they effectively constitute a sixth division of the army."

The report finds that some government officials have taken action against paramilitaries but "their actions have been consistently and effectively undermined, cancelled out, or in some cases wholly reversed by actions promoted by the military-paramilitary alliance...Hundreds of arrest warrants against paramilitary leaders remain unenforced because the military has chosen not to execute them. Important Colombian Government offices - the Vice Presidency, the Interior Ministry, the Defence Ministry, and especially the Armed Forces themselves - have failed to take the decisive action necessary to address this serious situation."

Part of the report is dedicated to readdressing US policy in Colombia. HRW worries how US law - the Leahy Provision, which prohibits military aid from going to security force units engaged in abusive behaviour - has been ignored and the rest of the human rights conditions imposed by the US Congress were lifted by President Clinton. "With one signature, the White House sent a direct message to Colombia military leaders... that as long as the Colombian military co-operated with the US anti-drug strategy, American officials would waive human rights conditions and skirt their own human rights laws. Judged by the Colombian military behaviour in the field - not by rhetoric and public relation pamphlets -  its leaders understood this message clearly," says HRW.

In a report in 1996, Human Rights Watch had described Colombia's military-paramilitary partnership as "a sophisticated mechanism, in part supported by years of advice, training, weaponry and official silence by the United States, that allows Colombian military to fight a dirty war and Colombian officialdom to deny it".

US Senator Paul Wellstone (Democrat), addressing the United States Senate on 6 September, said: "As another Labour Day passes l could not in good conscience neglect to mention the plight of our brothers and sisters in the Colombian Labour Movement.

"For the past 15 years, Colombia has been in the midst of an undeclared war on union leaders. Colombia has long been the most dangerous country in the world for union members, with nearly 4,000 murdered in that period. Today, three out of five trade unionists killed in the world are Colombian.

"The right-wing AUC has been especially brutal, killing hundreds simply because they view union organisers as subversives.".

	COCA COLA WORKERS

Senator Wellstone went on: "One of the most recent killings occurred on 21 June, when the leader of Sinaltrainal (Colombia's Food and Beverage Union) the union that represents Colombian Coca-Cola workers, Oscar Dario Soto, was gunned down. His murder brings to seven the number of unionists who worked for Coca-Cola and were targeted and killed by paramilitaries."

This summer, the International Labour Rights Fund and the United Steelworkers of America brought a suit against the Coca-Cola company alleging that the Colombian managers had colluded with paramilitary security forces to murder, torture and silence union leaders.

Sinaltrainal, Colombia's Food and Beverage workers Union, has long maintained that Coke is among the most notorious employers in Colombia and the company maintains open relations with death squads as part of a programme to intimidate trade union leaders. On 20 July, ironically Colombian Independence Day, Sinaltrainal filed suit in the US District Court against Coca-Cola and PanAmerican Beverages, Inc.

Daniel Kovalik, Assistant General Counsel of the Steelworkers of America says: "While the offences detailed in the Complaint occurred in an industry outside the Steelworkers' core jurisdiction, we are filing this case to show our solidarity with the embattled trade unions of Colombia. We absolutely must stand up. together to stop such criminal activity against our union brothers and sisters, regardless of where or in what industry it occurs."

	KILLINGS

Other plaintiffs include the Estate of Isidro Segundo Gil, a trade union leader assassinated while working at a Coke bottling plant in Carepa, Colombia. The manager of the plant his been accused by the United Steel Workers International Labour Rights Fund of ordering Gil's murder. Five other leaders of the union, while employed by Coke, were subjected to torture, kidnapping and/or unlawful detention in order to encourage them to cease their trade union activities".

In just one year, 1996, 20 union workers of Coca Cola were either disappeared or assassinated.

In fact, since the formation of the CUT (Unified Central of Columbian workers, equivalent of the ICTU here) in 1986, General Secretary Hector Fajardo says some 3,800 trade unionists have been assassinated in Colombia.

	DRUMMOND COAL COMPANY

On 12 March, Valmore Locarno, president of the mineworkers' union and Victor Oracita, the union's vice president, were just finishing up negotiations with the Drummond Coal Company, a US-based firm, over a longstanding labour dispute. Dan Korvalik, in his special report to the US Labour Committee, takes up the account. "Mr Locarno asked the Drummond management if they could stay overnight at the worksite because he and Mr Oracita had received death threats. This request was denied. Instead, both Mr Oracita and Mr Locarno were taken away in a Drummond-owned bus. En route to their homes the bus was stopped by armed paramilitaries, the paramilitaries forcibly removed Mr Locarno and Mr Oracita from the bus. They murdered Mr Locarno on the stop and took Mr Oracita away. The remains of Mr Oracita  were found the next day."

	TEACHERS

The report goes on to say that the hardest hit by the violence are teachers. Since 1986, 418 teachers have been murdered. Tariscio Rivera Munoz, vice president of the teachers' union (FECODE), explains "we have teachers who are political prisoners in the country's jails when their only crime .has been to interpret the needs of students and people'.

Dan Korvalik reports that he met several teachers at the FECODE office who were on the run because they are on a hit list kept by the paramilitaries. One of these teachers related that she was on the hit list because three years ago she had denounced the massacre of 12 people, some of them children, by the paramilitaries.

	AGENTS OF THE STATE

Roberto Molino of the well respected human rights organisation Committee of Colombian Jurists (CCJ) says Colombia is experiencing a grave deterioration of human rights. In 1988, the CCJ reported that there were ten victims of politically motivated killings per day. This figure is now double that. Last year alone, 6,000 Colombians were killed as a result of social and political violence.

Molino explains that violence against trade unionists is a central item in these overall figures, which he believes principally flows from institutional opposition to the exercise of labour rights in Colombia. "Trade union activity is Colombia is considered by the government and private employers to be 'subversive activity'.' he says.

The special report goes on to cite the ILO's (International Labour Organisation) conclusion that agents of the state have been directly involved in the violence against trade unionists and have in fact created paramilitary groups that have carried out this violence. "While thousands of trade unionists have been murdered, the government has never found even one person guilty of such assassinations."

PARAMILITARIES BLAMED 

In a press release from the CUT, blame for the assassinations is firmly placed with the "paramilitary group of the extreme right led by Carlos Castano". However, Amnesty reports how an arrest warrant for Castano and eleven other paramilitary members was never acted on. This despite a three-day attack in February last year by 200 paramilitary gunmen who raided the village of El Salado, killing 36 people, including a six-year-old child. The charges were dropped, in a system of military justice which claims to have jurisdiction over human rights cases.

In this attack, according to the Amnesty International Report of 2001, many victims were tied to a table in the village sports field and subjected to torture, including rape, before being stabbed or shot dead. Others were killed in the village church.

	WHY KILL TRADES UNIONISTS?

A report in Focus, the journal of the Public Services International, the organisation of public service trade unions, including Irish union IMPACT, quotes Carlos Castano's answer to the question of why paramilitary groups kill civilians. 'Indiscriminate attacks? Us? Never! There is always a reason. Trade unionists, for example. They keep people from working! That's precisely why we kill them!"

On 19 October of this year, 16 oil workers' union leaders were detained in an operation by the National Attorney General, charging the USO (the oil workers' union) members with the crime of rebellion, which carries many years in prison.

These latest detentions arose in the context of a work stoppage at Ecopetrol, where workers demanded that the national government provide guarantees for union activity. They are living under continuous threat of killings and persecution by the paramilitaries.

And then there are protests about the level of wages, which are as low as 56 cents an hour in factories producing for export to the US. They are about the policies imposed by the IMF, the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank, as these agencies prepare Colombia for the `Free Market' trade block, stretching from Canada to Argentina, which aims to plunder the rich natural resources of Colombia, including minerals, oil, coal and gold.

IMF AUSTERITY POLICIES

In the summer, there was a strike which lasted for over a month, of health care and education workers, actively supported by parents and students: They were protesting the austerity policies of the Transfer Law.

The strike denounced the cuts in education of $US 4.3 million, and the transfer of costs of health care and education to the municipalities, many of which are almost bankrupt. The President of the public service union Sinalserpub, German Garcia, stressed that these measures are taken by the national government directly as a result of the conditions imposed by the IMF and IDB. 

The US Congress has approved $1.3 billion for the Colombia Plan, thinly disguised as a plan to wipe out coca production, but in fact a military aid package, and President Bush is now looking for a further $567 million on top in additional military aid for next year.

Amnesty International USA (AIUSA), called on the US Ambassador, Thomas Pickering, a year ago, on 27 November 2000, to address allegations that the US Government had ties to the notorious Colombian military leaders, Fidel and Carlos Castano.

Acting Director of Government Relations Carlos Salinas is reported in this Amnesty International document, as saying that 'recent news reports point to an extremely suspect relationship between US Government and the Castano family - at a time when the US government was welt aware of that family's involvement in paramilitary violence and narcotics trafficking".  AIUSA called on Ambassador Pickering to address these allegations 'which if proven true, further erode the US Government's already abysmal record of tacitly supporting forces in Latin American that have committed grave human -rights violations".

	IN BREACH OF US LAW

For many Colombians, the 'marriage' between Colombian military units, particularly the army and the right-wing death squads, now estimated to number over 8,000 members, translates into a daily terror. Witnesses brave enough to testify about the sixth division and is links to security forces are threatened or murdered with numbing precision.

Yet US law, known as the Leahy Provision, prohibits military aid to security force units engaged in abusive behaviour until effective steps are taken to bring the perpetrators to justice. Human Rights Watch contends the US has violated the spirit of its own laws and in some case downplayed or ignored evidence of continuing ties between the Colombian military and paramilitary groups.

On 22 August 2000, President Bill Clinton, citing 'interests of US national security', signed a waiver that lifted the human rights conditions imposed by the US Congress, in essence allowing security assistance to be provided to the Colombian military even as the State Department reported that some of its units continued to be implicated in support for paramiltary groups.

'With one signature, the White House sent a direct message to Colombian military leaders that as long as the Colombian military cooperated with the US anti-drug strategy, American officials would waive human rights conditions and skirt their own human rights laws. Judged by the Colombian military behaviour in the field not by rhetoric and public relation pamphlets - its leaders understood this message clearly,' says Human Rights Watch.

COURAGEOUS STAND

Against this background of terror, the nation's unions have been very vocal in their calls to participate in the peace talks between government and the left-wing guerrillas and to expand the talks to cover important social and economic issues that are opposed vehemently by the far right.

As AFL-CIO President John Sweeney says: 'Colombian trade union leaders have been the leading advocates for peace, human rights and economic justice in a nation afflicted by internal violence and external economic pressure. And they have paid a heavy price for their advocacy.'