AGAINST WAR, AGAINST TERROR

It needed ten years to be sure that we were at war. Every now and then, it is true, something happened, some "emergency" broke out. At first we couldn’t believe it, we were stunned: we had thought that war had finally been got rid of. It was 1991, the USA was intervening in order to repristine "international legality" in the Persian Gulf. Then it was the (endless) turn of Yugoslavia, which rapidly became ex-Yugoslavia, all of whose republics spelled out a never-ending rosary of deaths and horrors.

NATO, which has been formally modified into a rapid intervention force captained by the USA, has over the years intervened in order to prepare the territory in thise places which have not yet been reached by the neo-liberalist hand of the IMF, WB and WTO. In the meantime, the UN has been relegated to looking after local conflicts like Somalia, Rwanda, East Timor. What a tragic joke the new Nobel Peace Prizewinner Kofi Annan seems these days! Against the US and European offensive of neo-liberalism, tragic and bloody, for control of those areas liberated from Soviet influence and crucial for all the political forces, an offensive which has been able to efficiently utilize and finance regional tensions thanks to a handy rediscovery of categories we had thought forgotten such as ethnicity and nationalism, with, at the same time, an ever-useful increase in the arms and technology market, the solution for a different, better world was being reached by the workers and civil society, by an anti-globalization movement which was also consolidating itself into nothing less than a supranational "globalized" force.

But against this self-same neoliberal offensive there has also been the organization of a slow and violent answer within the system, one which is reactionary in nature, and which hopes to establish itself in the battle for economic control, military control and political control of the areas from the Middle East to South-East Asia - it is the reply of the warring strategy of the International Islamic Front which commands a powerful "cupola". Gathering economic castes, clandestine organizations, military bands and groups of militants and martyrs in the name of Allah and of millions of Marks for every military action, the Front instrumentalizes hunger and the Arab proletariat’s desperation in order to agitate for jihad against the western invaders and corrupt Arab regimes and for liberation under the command of a new dominating caste.

That this is a well-recognized threat is also demonstrated by the setting up in June 2001 of the so-called Shanghai Group, which includes China, Russia, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Kirghizstan, in order to counter the threat of international terrorism.

This "enemy" in fact has been replying in no uncertain terms to the economic war even since 1993 (anyone remember the car bomb in the garage of the Twin Towers?), through a presence among the Bosnian militias and amongst the ranks of the Albanian UCK, not forgetting the US Embassy bombs and the bombing of an American warship in the port of Aden. The attack of 11 September is the culmination - having been struck a deadly blow on home soil the United States has reacted like a scorpion and so the war passes from being a hidden, economic war to being more obvious and propagandized. The whole Western world has been conscripted into the new crusade, the holy war, in which (for the sake of development and security) we will have to be ready to renounce the right to information, to dissent and a good part of the freedom which we had won hitherto.

But never before has the old saying "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" been more untrue.

Islamic fundamentalism, which fights in equal measures both the Western Satan and the corrupt regimes of the Middle East, not to mention the slow, difficult secularization of Islamic countries, does not raise one word against the exploitation of the Arab proletariat by the Arab bourgeoisie. It does not invest one dollar to improve education and health care, in fact it systematically preaches, applies and extends the oppression of women. And how could it be otherwise? The already tricky question of religion, is used in purely instrumental way by caste interests. This time too the enemies of class war are on both sides of the barricades.

The victims of this war are the women, men and children, as happens on an ever-increasing scale in modern wars. Its victims are the freedom of movement, of the right to strike, of the freedom of speech, the right to the self-management of the workers, the right of self-determination for for women and the emancipation from all religions which are used as an instrument of domination. 

But it is also true that for both sides, the real enemy is us - the exploited women and men of the North and the South, East and West, who continue to fight for the end of exploitation, for better pay, for the removal of the barriers of nationality, sex and religion, for the abolition of borders, for peace and the end of all armies, be they technologically advanced or not. And let us continue to do so, from every corner of the globe, without being taken in by the siren song of nationalism, patriotism and fear.

STOP THE BOMBINGS!
DEMILITARIZE THE WHOLE AREA!
MULTILATERAL DISARMAMENT!
AID AND SOLIDARITY FOR THE WAR REFUGEES!
FREEDOM FOR AFGHAN WOMEN!

FEDERAZIONE dei COMUNISTI ANARCHICI

November 2001