STOP THE BOMBINGS!
BUILD THE RESISTANCE TO BUSH
AND BLAIR'S IMPERIALIST WAR!
A Statement by
South Asia Solidarity Group
20th September 2001
We
condemn the US attacks on the people of Afghanistan. Men, women, and children
are dying as villages are razed to the ground, towns attacked with...missiles
and cluster bombs dropped on rural areas. While the US and British media are
spreading panic about potential anthrax attacks, the people of Afghanistan face
an enemy which has not hesitated to use
Depleted Uranium as a matter of course in attacks on Iraq and the Balkans -
leading to the deaths of leukemia of thousands of children. We in South Asia
Solidarity Group express our continuing sympathies with the families and
friends of all those who have died and been injured as a result of the attacks
on the World Trade Centre on 11th September.
But we must recognise that these deaths are now being cynically used to
justify an open-ended war against all those the U.S. government considers may
pose a threat to its interests. Bush and Blair's war, which is now threatening
to extend not only to Afghanistan but to the people in a wide variety of
countries in East Asia, the Middle East and Africa, is an attempt to
consolidate America's economic and political stranglehold over these regions.
American foreign policy - spreading terror
The
reality is that the policies of the U.S. government in the both the Middle East
and Central Asia - as elsewhere in the world - have had nothing to do with
democracy and everything to do with furthering its own economic and strategic
interests. These have always been determined by two guiding principles:
maintaining control over oil and the dollar reserves based on it; and closely
linked to this its support for Israel. To these ends, the U.S. has installed,
backed and sustained a whole range of repressive and anti-democratic rulers
(including, for many years, Saddam Hussein). In Afghanistan, it was the U. S.
which deliberately created Osama Bin Laden (who is allegedly responsible for
the September 11 attacks) and the fundamentalist Taliban itself, after the
Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, with the CIA pumping in billions of
dollars worth of arms and ammunition via Pakistan to the mujahideen fighting
the Soviet Army. The former US
Secretary of State, Zbigniew Brezinski asks contemptuously, 'What was more
important in the world view of history? The Taliban or the fall of the Soviet
Empire? A few stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the
end of the Cold War?' Television footage shows Brezinski visiting Afghanistan
in this period and with chilling cynicism, shouting slogans of 'God is great'
to urge on the Islamic fighters.
Now the US is playing
the same game with the Northern Alliance - hypocritically proclaiming them to
be a 'democratic opposition' to the Taliban when in reality for the people of
Afghanistan there is little to choose between the two - the Northern Alliance
are only marginally less repressively religious than the Taliban, and have over
the last year taken over the marketing of heroin on a large scale, making a mockery
of Blair's claim that this is also a war on drugs.
This war is not about a
clash of civilisations . It is not about the West vs Islam although that how it
is being portrayed. Liberals who plead for more tolerance of 'non-western values' are missing the point.
Bin Laden and the Taliban are not being targetted because they are Islamic
fundamentalists or because they don't believe in democratic values or even
because they are believed to have committed or supported terrorist acts. Beyond
the immediate US imperative to show that it is retaliating for the September 11
attacks, they are being attacked because they are seen as threats to the
consolidation of US power at a time when capitalism is in crisis. This is also
why countries as diverse as Egypt and the Phillipines and Malaysia are being
labelled as part of the 'Islamic' world and threatened that the war may spread
to targets within them.
Anti-Muslim racism
The
ideology of a clash of civilisations which has been used to justify US foreign
policy since the early 1990s has also affected our lives in Britain. It has fed
into the racism experienced by people in working class Asian communities in
Britain, with Muslims increasingly demonised as fanatical and violent over the
last decade. In the wake of the attacks, Home Secretary David Blunkett has
promised to tighten further the draconian asylum laws which have already
destroyed so many refugees' lives. Once again the British state is further
fuelling and legitmising racist attacks, branding refugees who have come to
Britain fleeing torture and persecution as terrorists and criminals. The
proposed introduction of ID cards would further erode basic civil liberties in
Britain and give the police a new pretext for continuing racist harassment.
As a
result, as people of Asian and other Third World origin we are all today under
threat more than ever. Already in the wake of September 11th an Afghan taxi
driver has been left paralysed from the neck down in West London while a 19
year old Asian woman was hit repeatedly on the head with a baseball bat in
Swindon. Many more such racist attacks have gone unreported. We cannot remain
silent - we must come together to resist these attacks.
A war on the people, a war on democracy
Bush's
'war on terrorism' is terrifyingly open-ended - aimed at no one country, state
or organisation. Far from defending democracy, such a war will spell the death
of democracy for all those resisting repressive regimes, state forces or the
interests of global capital. All resistance to state power will be potentially
labelled as 'terrorist' and a legitimate target for repression and violence.
The
war will have a devastating impact on people's lives across the entire region
of South Asia,in particular in Pakistan, Kashmir and India.
America's
arm-twisting of the authoritarian Pakistani government to join the U.S.-led
'alliance' in the face of massive popular opposition in Pakistan is likely to
plunge the country into an even deeper crisis which may well lead to civil war
or the Talibanisation of Pakistan itself.
Pakistan, whose economy has already been brought to its knees by the IMF
and World Bank, is now being made an offer of aid and debt rescheduling it
can't refuse. This is a stark illustration of how, in a so-called 'free market'
world, the institutions of global capital are used to coerce Third World states
into supporting Western strategic and military goals, at a huge cost to their
own people.
Meanwhile
the pro-U.S, pro-globalisation Hindu fascist parties leading India's government
are competing with Pakistan to offer all possible help to Bush's project of
destruction. At the same time the government is intensifying communal attacks
on India's own Muslim and Christian minorities and using the 'war on terrorism'
to legitimise even greater repression in Kashmir and elsewhere. In Delhi at a
demonstration like this one, people have been arrested for carrying anti-war
leaflets and charged with sedition.
Oppose imperialism and state
racism
fight racist attacks
Say no to war!
South Asia Solidarity Group, c/o Londec, 299
Kentish Town Road, London NW5 2TJ.
Tel. :
020 7424 9535 email : southasia@hotmail.com
