SOCIALIST UNITY

Progress report from South America
by Dan Morgan in Santiago

As we approach the constitutional referendum in Venezuela on February 15th, it is time to take stock of recent developments on the continent. South America is emerging from a long period in which democracy was undermined or abolished by the threat or reality of US-instigated military coups, natural resources and industries were stolen by the transnational companies, the rights of the indigenous populations were denied, and the masses of the people were mired in increasing poverty and inequality; opposition to this process in several countries taking the form of guerrilla struggles.

In recent years a new pattern has arisen, as exemplified by Bolivia, Ecuador and of course Venezuela: the rejection of US political domination and the neo-liberal economic model; advances in healthcare and education; the possibilities opening up for democracy and the state to be vehicles for the interests of the poor and working class majority, enhanced by constitutional changes, and endorsed by the people in elections and referendums.

This pattern, though it has become entrenched since 2007, is far from even or universal, and is being bitterly resisted by the local elites with US support. Nevertheless, the process of regional integration, giving the nations and people of South America more control of their resources and potential for joint development, has gained momentum even in the countries in which there have been no radical reforms; the four-part summit in Brazil in December clearly showed this. Especially notable was Cuba becoming a full member of the Group of Río, which now includes all of Latin America. (more…)

By George Galloway MP

Some might call it a lesson in the law of unintended consequences. For others, however, the bitter aftertaste of Tony Blair’s saccharine-coated “doctrine of the international community” was all too obvious when he outlined it nearly a decade ago.

The reheated cold warriors who’ve fulminated over events in the Caucasus this month would do well to go back to that speech at the Chicago Economics Club in 1999.

Nato bombs were raining on Belgrade, eviscerating TV make-up women and destroying civilian infrastructure. Shamelessly, Blair posed as the stoic British prime minister who had voyaged across the Atlantic to remind America of its world historic role at the hour of Europe’s need.

“On its 50th birthday Nato must prevail,” he said, “Success is the only exit strategy I am prepared to consider.”

He went on to locate the Kosovo war in the context of the then fashionable cliches of globalising capitalism and the changing roles of states and international alliances. The war’s salience lay in recognising that the advance of the global free market depended on the preparedness of an undefined “international community” to, as he would put it two years later, “reorder this world” by force when necessary.

Thus, according to Blair in his address to Chicago neo-liberals, “The most pressing foreign policy problem we face is to identify the circumstances in which we should get actively involved in other people’s conflicts”.

That meant riding roughshod over the doctrine of the sovereignty of nation states dating from the peace of Westphalia – clearly his urge to modernise outdated notions had burst beyond such trifles as the welfare state and the Labour party.

Those of us who protested were castigated and calumniated against as the real dyed in the wool conservatives who had not understood that the world had moved on. In fact, our concern was that the Kosovo intervention and its justification were taking the world back. The sovereignty of nations was never an inviolable and faultless principle – and none of us on the left had said otherwise. But Blair’s humanitarian interventionism, his 21st century civilising mission, was no advance on it.

It was a throwback to the Gladstonian liberal imperialism of the 1880s, which also was born with ballyhoo about Balkan atrocities, at that time Bulgarian. Two consequences flowed at the end of the 19th century.

First, peoples across the globe rapidly came to suffer murder and mayhem far worse and more extensive than any visited by one Balkan nationality upon another. The carnage in Africa, Asia, the Americas and Australasia still evades the North American and European imaginations because, quite simply, the victims were not white and the perpetrators were.

Second, as other states decided that they too had a duty to civilise, the scramble for Africa, China and elsewhere brought the European powers first into diplomatic conflict and skirmish, and then, when conquests in neither the east nor the west had filled their maw, into a cataclysmic clash on their own continent.

It’s worth recalling the scorn heaped on those of us who raised these points nine years ago, warning of the vicious circle interventionist wars would unleash, and then turning to events today in the Black Sea’s own Balkans.

Perhaps the mandarins of King Charles Street have a manual on how to hold a straight face and keep talking when all around are gasping incredulously. Maybe there’s an homage to Kipling along those lines. Or maybe it’s just the way our current foreign secretary is eerily adopting the tics and mannerisms of our former prime minister. Either way, David Miliband’s performance over Georgia has been a spectacle to behold.

There was the bluster about the territorial integrity of small nations – this from a government that had only months previously proclaimed its support for ripping out Kosovo from what is left of Yugoslavia. The recognition by Washington and London of Kosovo’s secession prompted a warning from Moscow, which, thanks to many years of Russian weakness and US triumphalism, was predictably ignored.

There are other nations besides Kosovo that might want to secede elsewhere and with greater claim, said the Kremlin, and if you recognise Kosovo against our wishes, don’t be surprised if we end up recognising other secessionists against yours.

The frothing from Miliband and Condoleezza Rice when Russia did just that exposes the hypocrisy at the heart of western policy as outlined by Blair. When it comes down to it, for all the talk of universal moral objectives in international affairs, the right to pursue them turns out not to be universal, but to be vested in particular powers, and, it seems, some nations’ rights are more inviolable than others.

They call it the international community, but it is not even the community of the permanent members of the UN Security Council, still less the UN General Assembly. It is, as with Kosovo, a community that is coterminous with the biggest military alliance on the planet, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, which has strayed very far indeed from the Atlantic.

For more than a decade, successive British and US governments could get away with this sleight of hand. Russia was enfeebled, robbed blind by foreign-domiciled billionaires. China was just a manufactured-in stamp piled high in the pound shop.

Not now. The unipolar future turns out to have been a moment in the past. And that makes the hubris that led from Kosovo through Iraq to today’s missile shields and Cold War rhetoric all the more dangerous. One of the “collateral casualties” of the Kosovo war was the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. The result of a similar air strike in “rogue” capitals today doesn’t bear thinking about. Nor do the consequences that would have flowed had Georgia been a member of Nato with its mutual military obligations.

The Russian action in Georgia has underscored the limits of US power, but Anglo-US arrogance is unabated. For the US – despite the dying days of the Bush administration – there is a logic. It is a global power, still the only true global power. However dangerous the game, it’s not difficult to see why the US establishment, and not merely the Bush regime, plays it.

But why should Britain? Maybe it was the gap between western bombast and Russian facts on the ground, but there was something truly ridiculous about Miliband travelling to Ukraine to shake his fist at the east. He preached extending Nato membership to a country where two thirds of the people are not in favour of it and which is already ruptured by east/west tensions and internal conflicts that make Georgia look like Switzerland.

The Labour government in London again managed to outflank to the right Nicolas Sarkozy, Angela Merkel and even Silvio Berlusconi – but for what? To share this time not in foolish, short-lived triumph in the Middle East, but in Bush’s humiliation.

The world is at that most dangerous of places: where one way of ordering states and systems is giving way to another. That usually doesn’t happen without some major rupture and frequently with attendant violence. The worst place to be in such circumstances is as some ersatz power, an imperial hangover not of yesterday, but of the last century, busy threatening rising or renewing powers with the armies belonging to an ailing one.

Georgia’s hapless president, the New York lawyer Mikheil Saakashvili, has just learnt what it means to plunge into dangerous waters on the ebb tide. It’s a lesson that Britain’s political elite would do well to heed.

Tension in Tibet: Political dialogue only key to lasting solution
By Kavita Krishnan

In the wake of the anniversary of the 1959 Tibet movement (March 10) and ahead of the Beijing Olympics, Tibet has once again emerged as a hot spot of ethnic tension. There are reports of violence against and killing of protesting Tibetan monks by Chinese forces; and also of ethnic targeting of Han Chinese and Hui Muslims by Tibetan protesters. Chinese authorities have straightaway blamed the Dalai Lama for provoking the violent protests. The [Chinese] Army has been deployed after more than a week of escalating tension. While there is little “independent” information to judge the actual nature and scale of the turbulence within Tibet and attempts by the Chinese state to suppress it, solidarity protests are being witnessed in many centres across the world and Tibetan refugees based in India are particularly vocal against the recent turn of events in Tibet.

The turmoil in Tibet has been greeted by die-hard anti-China hawks with demands of boycott of the Beijing Olympics. In India,  BJP [the Hindu chauvinist party] and the likes of George Fernandes [a maverick Indian leftist politician, and former defence minister] have raised an uproar in Parliament with their shrill anti-China hate campaign over Tibet.

The US has always used the Tibet question as part of its overall strategy of containing China and in the present instance too, it is entirely possible that Washington is looking for ways to embarrass China with a disruption of the Beijing Olympics.

The US Speaker Nancy Pelosi, appearing at a public gathering with the Dalai Lama in India, has recently said that people who failed to speak out against China and “Chinese oppression” would “lose all moral authority to speak on human rights”. The storming of the Chinese Embassy in Delhi by Tibetan protesters on the same day as Pelosi’s speech was surely no coincidence. For the US, in the month of March that marks five years of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq (years that have seen the public horror and shame of Abu Gharib), to claim “moral authority” on human rights is brazenly outrageous. Those who support the occupation of Palestine and continue to occupy Afghanistan and Iraq surely have no right to accuse other regimes of “oppression” or “occupation”! Nationality struggles are faultlines that the US has exploited time and again to further its imperialist interests, Kosovo being a glaring example. Be it Tibet or Kashmir, the US is eager to manipulate the situation in order to strengthen its strategic foothold in Asia.

Also on the anvil is a visit by British premier Gordon Brown to the Dalai Lama in India. It is one thing for Tibetan refugees in India to have the right to protest; but it is highly reprehensible for India to allow its soil to be used to facilitate gross interference and proclamations by the imperialist US and its allies on internal matters of China.

India’s response to the Tibet question too is marked by glaring double standards. The right-wing brigade led by the BJP has used the Tibet plank for their virulent anti-communist, anti-China hysteria. But the Indian State’s own treatment of nationality struggles in Kashmir and the North East has been marked by arrogant and brutal military suppression. “Special Powers” have been conferred on the Armed Forces giving them a licence to freely indulge in summary execution, rape and repression in both these regions. In spite of popular struggles demanding scrapping of the AFSPA, the Indian State continues to justify and impose the AFSPA in the name of anti-insurgency. The BJP has led the jingoistic cries for even harsher and more bloody military suppression of the aspirations of the people of Kashmir and the North East, decrying every demand for autonomy as a threat to *Akhand Bharat* (undivided India). The reports of Tibetan protests outside Tibet, even in Beijing, certainly point to a greater degree of integration of Tibet with China than that of, say, Kashmir with the rest of India: how many times have we seen a Kashmiri Muslim protesting on the streets of Delhi?

The Tibet situation must be viewed in the context of the many shifts and phases in China’s Tibet policy and in the Tibetan movement’s own priorities between 1959 and 2008. Tibet has been touched by significant economic development and by the late ’70s, China had allowed for greater accommodation of Tibetan culture, language and religion. In the wake of the Soviet collapse, however, there was a change of mood. The Dalai Lama, spurning an offer to visit China, elected instead for greater closeness with the US. With descriptions by the US Congress of Tibet as an “occupied” territory coinciding with renewed outbursts in Tibet, China once more tightened its grip.

The Tibetan movement, in the course of time, has come to focus mainly on issues of autonomy rather than that of secession. The protesters may raise shouts of “Free Tibet”, but this slogan does not seem to find wide acceptance in the Tibetan mainstream today. Even the Dalai Lama, the internationally recognised icon of Tibet, has reiterated in the wake of the current turmoil that genuine autonomy is what the Tibetan people want.

In such circumstances China would do well to address the aspirations for autonomy through political dialogue rather than by repression and martial law. The spectacle of protesting Buddhist monks being brutalised by armed forces can hardly evade comparisons with similar scenes in military-ruled Burma and the tragic stigma of Tiananmen.

One hopes that China will take proper lessons from the Soviet experience, where bruised national sentiments played no small part in the great shipwreck. Democratic and peace-loving people of the world are deeply concerned over the situation in Tibet, and expect China to handle the agitations and the ethnic tensions with greater sensitivity and maturity. China’s stance on economic questions has been one of pragmatic flexibility: in the case of Hong Kong, China has shown its willingness to experiment with a policy of “one country, two systems”, where the Central People’s Government is responsible for the territory’s defence and foreign affairs, while the Government of Hong Kong is responsible for its own legal system, police force, monetary system, customs policy, immigration policy and so on. Can’t we, then, expect greater accommodation on China’s part of Tibetan aspirations for autonomy?

While resolutely resisting every attempt to fan an anti-communist and anti-China frenzy over Tibet, we do hold that state repression can only be counterproductive, providing grist to the imperialist mill and allowing greater room for US interference in the region. A lasting solution can be reached only through political dialogue in a democratic atmosphere.

[Kavita Krishnan is a member of the central committee of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) (Liberation) and an editor of Liberation, organ of the CPI(ML).]

It is also worth reading Madam Miaow’s interesting take on recent events.

And for more background, read Michael Parenti’s well researched article on Tibetan feudalism.

There is a first class discussion of the problematic nature of Kosovan independence published over at the Splintered Sunrise blog, which argues: “There is a strong case in the abstract for Kosovo Albanians having the right to self-determination. In the here and now, I’m opposed to independence for Kosovo because the place is run by a bunch of mafiosi, its economy is based on the trafficking of drugs, arms and women, and giving this basket case the attributes of statehood will make a bad situation worse.”

As I have argued before the break up of Jugoslavia has been orchestrated by the Great Powers, serving their own grubby agenda.

Strangely the British leftists who swallowed exagerated  NATO propaganda  in support of an independent Kosovo are rather silent about the brutal reality Of Kosovo today. Not only is the province now a wild west haven of gangster capitalism, domiated by prostitution and drug trafficking, but as I have written before, NATO ruled Kosovo has also seen a systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing.

In March 2004, up to 50000 ethnic Albanian rioters launched a pogrom against their Serb and Roma (Gypsy) neighbours. The pogrom followed delibertely inflammatory and untruthful broadcasts that the tragic drowning of three Albanian boys at the village of Cabra was due to them being driven into a river by a mob of Serbs. An account that the well respected agency Human Rights Watch concluded was completely untrue.The account of the following pogrom in 2004 by Human Rights Watch is truly shocking. As they report “Once the violence began, it swept throughout Kosovo with almost clinical precision: after two days of rioting, every single Serb, Roma, or Askaeli home had been burned in most of the communities affected by the violence, but neighboring ethnic Albanian homes were left untouched.”

NATO troops took 6 hours to respond to calls for help by Serbs in Pristina, despite elderly defenceless and disabled people being attacked in their homes by the mob of Albanian extremists.It is important to note that according to HRW the ethnic cleansing of minorities by the NATO backed KLA/UCK started immediately after the Serbs withdrew: “Before the 1999 war, some 350 Ashkali families lived in Vucitrn, many of them engaged in the butcher trade. After the war, many of the Ashkali were attacked by ethnic Albanians. At least five Ashkalis from the town were abducted and “disappeared” and more than a hundred Ashkali homes burned. Almost the entire Ashkali community of Vucitrn fled, with only ten to fifteen families deciding to stay.”In 2004 the Albanian supremacists came to finish the job, watched and not hindered by NATO troops: “the Ashkali recalled the terror they felt when their homes were set on fire with their families inside and no-one came to help them. Nejib Cizmolli, a thirty-seven-year-old Ashkali [man], recalled being trapped on the second floor of his burning home with eleven people, including children aged three, eight, fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen”

 It amazes me that some on the left support this Albanian fascism, due to an utterely mechanical understanding of the politics of nationality.

In the current issue of Scottish Left Review Gregor Gall argues that it is time the left began to think about how it can work together again. To find ways forward he looks at examples from across Europe which he argues provide hope that progress is possible. Scottish Left Review is quite a success story of practical cooperation, as it is an non-aligned publication that manages to have input from nearly all shades of progressive opinion in Scotland. It is worth taking out a subscription for a print copy.

The radical left unity projects in Scotland (the SSP) and England (Respect) made small but significant electoral breakthroughs between 2003 and 2005. However, their implosion in the last two years as result of internal disputes and splits has cast doubt on whether the radical left can ever move away from its Life of Brian depiction of incessant hair-splitting on questions of political purity, much less exercise any influence on the political process. However, the objective conditions of hegemonic neo-liberalism, continuing imperialism and the decomposition of social democracy demand that the idea of a radical left unity projects is not jettisoned for reasons of any short-term difficulties. For the radical left, in these aforementioned conditions, to be a credible option for a growing body of disillusioned and progressive opinion, unity and cooperation amongst itself are vital. Uniting the radical left together is not just about making one new alliance or organisation the sum of its constituent parts so that it is not divided, important though that is. Rather, it is about making the new organisation more than the sum of its parts. Therefore, unity can help prefigure growth of members and influence through pooling resources, pushing in the same direction, working to common priorities and being more credible to wider social movements and the like.

Unity can take different forms. The basic form is working together in genuine, full and trusting ways in campaigns, while the higher forms involve electoral alliances and organisational fusions. Joint-working or electoral alliances may be the pre-figurative basis for subsequent organisational fusion. For any of these forms of collective working to be possible, respect and tolerance of differences are vital while differences must also be discussed constructively. Unity must be achieved on the foundation of openly discussing and resolving differences for ‘paper’ unity will dissolve when strong differences emerge. But the basis of collective working together in the same electoral alliances and party organisations must be that overwhelming consensus on the grand political questions of our age amongst the radical left forms the bedrock of a common ideology for radical left unity, from which questions of how to operate are secondary and subject to fraternal discussion and debate. This has often been described as the ‘80:20 equation’, where the 20 per cent of disagreement is not allowed to get in the way of agreement and action on the 80 per cent of issues where there is common ground and consensus. Consequently, to facilitate agreement (the 80 per cent) and fraternal discussion (on the 20 per cent), radical left projects must be characterised by pluralism, openness and relative broadness, with some degree of interim internal autonomy to the pre-merger constituent parts.

Mindful of this, this article presents short, thumb nail sketches of the radical left unity projects in continental Europe before making some preliminary conclusions about what they can teach us in Scotland and Britain. It should not be assumed that all radical and far left groups and parties in each of the countries covered are involved in the radical left unity projects outlined below. Indeed, the communist parties with sizeable numbers of elected representatives still exist in Portugal, France, Italy and Greece outside radical left unity projects and here both radical left unity projects and sizeable communist parties exist alongside a plethora of other assorted leftists groups. Even outside the radical left unity projects - where they exist - other left and progressive groups and forces exist so the unity projects are not ‘finished products’. And in Belgium and Sweden, long-existing left parties predominate so there have been no radical left unity projects. Nonetheless, the following survey gives some idea of what happened, when and why. Readers are urged to use the free encyclopedia, Wikipedia (wikipedia.org), to learn more about these projects and their components part by typing in the name of each country, finding the section on politics, then political parties. From here, there are entries and links to the various organisations’ own websites (some of which are in English).

Denmark

The Red-Green Alliance was formed as an electoral alliance in 1989 by three leftwing parties (left social democrats, communists and Trotskyists) with Maoists joining in 1991. The Alliance then developed into an independent party based on individual membership, with the founding parties having no official influence and a majority of members not having has a past in one of the founding organisations parties. It then gained parliamentary representation in 1994, having six MPs (three per cent vote) in the 2005 elections and four MPs (two per cent) in the 2007 elections.

Finland

The Left Alliance is a green socialist party, formed from the merger of the People’s Democratic League, the Women’s Democratic League, and the Communist Party in 1990. Given the different political persuasions, divisions have been common with defections to the social democrats and the forming of a new communist party. Electoral performance has ranged from 17 to 23 MPs (nine per cent-11 per cent) for the parliament to 1,000 to 1,300 councillors (10 per cent-12 per cent vote) and one to two MEPs (nine to 10 per cent vote).

France

In addition to the Communist Party, there are three Trotskyist parties, of which the larger two (Lutte Ouvrière and Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire (LCR)) have jointly worked together on a sporadic basis in the electoral arena (regional, presidential, European). However, their enmity towards each other is also marked although the LCR has recently made a call for a broader, anti-capitalist party to be created. It remains to be seen what the reactions of the other two Trotskyist parties, Communist Party and social movements are to this.

Greece

The Coalition of the Left of Movements and Ecology is commonly known as Synaspismos or SYN. Until 2003, it was called the Coalition of the Left and Progress and is a major component of the parliamentary Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA). SYN emerged initially as an electoral coalition in the late 1980s, with two communist parties being its largest constituents, and securing over 10 per cent of the vote in parliamentary elections and a substantial number of MPs. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the coalition moved to become a party in 1991. Electoral fortunes were mixed in the early to mid-1990s but parliamentary representation was secured (10 MPs in 1996 on five per cent vote, two MEPs in 1999 on five per cent vote). In elections in 2000, SYN was supported by left ecologists, gaining just over three per cent of the vote and six MPs. In parliamentary elections of 2004, SYN together with several smaller left and left ecologists parties formed SYRIZA alliance. The alliance with the smaller parties was formed again at the end of 2005, providing a firm basis the 14 MPs gained on a five per cent vote in the 2007 parliamentary elections, which makes SYN the fourth biggest party. SYN also has many councillors, being the third biggest party in local government, and a sizable, semi-autonomous youth wing. SYN aspires to be an ‘umbrella’, where people of varying left ideological and theoretical backgrounds can find a natural home. Therefore, SYN members are encouraged to form and participate in internal platforms which mount open discussions and publish magazines, but may not work against party policy. These platforms are invited to put forward theses on party policy and strategy at triennial congresses.

SYRIZA’s genesis arose in a forum of the radical left in 2001 called the Space of Left Dialogue and Common Action, which in turn led to an electoral alliance for the 2002 local elections, and provided the basis for its formal establishment in 2004. However after the 2004 election, the smaller parties accused SYN of not honouring an agreement to have one of its MPs resign so a member of one of the smaller parties could take the seat. This crisis led SYN to run independently from the rest of the Coalition for the 2004 European elections but later in that year SYN returned to SYRIZA. By 2007, several new radical left and green organisations joined SYRIZA, helping it secure its breakthrough.

Germany

The important development of Die Linke, fusing together the former PDS, a breakaway section from the social democrats (SPD) and various far left groups is an important development. It is amply analysed in Victor Grossman’s article in this edition of the magazine. Suffice it to note The Left has polled eight to 13 per cent, is the only left party in Parliament (unless one still views the SPD and the Greens as left-of-centre) and has become the strongest of the oppositional parties. The German Communist Party (DKP), the traditional party of the left in western Germany, retains some roots among some workers and students. Although often critical of the Left, it supports The Left in elections and has friendly ties to that party’s Communist Platform. The newer Communist Party of Germany (KPF) also has some such ties but rarely supports The Left. There are also smaller Maoist and Trotskyist parties or groups, very visible at demonstrations, as well as ecological and immigrant groups and the anti-globalisation Attac.

Italy

In 1991, when the Italian Communist Party became the Democratic Party of the Left (PDS), dissidents founded Communist Refoundation (PRC) as a party to unite all communists. It was joined by Proletarian Democracy, a Trotskyist party. PRC was led by Fausto Bertinotti, a long-time CGIL union leader (from 1994-2006), helping it achieve nine per cent in the 1996 election. The party’s MPs supported and then opposed the Olive Tree centre-left coalition leading to its fall and a split in PRC with the setting up of the Party of Italian Communists. In 2004, PRC joined the centre-left opposition, The Union, entering government when it won power in 2006. The decision to participate in the coalition government, particularly in light of the government’s policy on Afghanistan and Lebanon, attracted much criticism. Internally, the PRC has recognised tendencies ‘Being Communists’, Critical Left (which quit in 2007) and the Communist Project (which quit in 2006). PRC has around 70 MPs currently based on gaining seven per cent votes.

Luxembourg

The Left was formed in 1999 by activists from existing political parties (communist, New Left, Revolutionary Socialist Party and Socialist Workers’ Party) and won three per cent vote and one MP in that year. But a dispute between the communists and the majority of the Left led to both running separately in the 2004 elections, with the Left losing its MP.

Netherlands

Although the Socialist Party (originating from a Maoist communist party in 1972) is currently larger in parliamentary terms, GreenLeft is a larger extra-parliamentary organisation. It began life as an alliance of four parties (communists, socialists, greens and Christians). Initially, it had 16 MPs in 1972 but this fell to six in 1977, precipitating further cooperation albeit of an uneven outcome involving splits from each party and leading to a situation where only two of the four parties had just three MPs between them by 1986. This increased the pressure for full fusion, particularly from unions and environmentalists. In 1989, an interim organisation was formed for the 1989 European elections, leading to the creation of GreenLeft in 1990 as a party and the dissolution of the four former parties. Again this precipitated splits, leading to the formation of splinter groups. Political unity was slowly fashioned out of diverse opinion, although divisions remained over issues of Kosovo, Afghanistan and individual freedom. Between 1990 and 2007, GreenLeft has had between nine and 19 MPs, one and four MEPs, 50-odd members of provincial legislatures and tens of other elected position in local government.

Norway

The Socialist Left Party was founded in 1975 although it began life in 1973 as the Socialist Electoral League (SEL), an alliance of the Socialist People’s Party, Communist Party of Norway, Democratic Socialists and independent Socialists following the victory for the ‘No’ campaign in the European Community referendum of 1972. In the 1973 elections, the SEL achieved an 11 per cent vote and 16 MPs. However, as SEL moved to become a party with its constituent parties disbanding, the Communist Party left, and it was not until the late 1980s that its first level of electoral success was repeated. In 2005, with nine per cent vote and 15 MPs it joined the centre-left Red-Green government coalition. Meanwhile, the Red Electoral Alliance (REA) was founded in 1973 as an election front for the Maoist communist party, becoming its own independent party in 1991. From 1993 to 1997, REA had one MP but despite recording its highest ever vote (two per cent), it lost its seat and failed to regain it in 2005 with a lower vote (one per cent) although it maintained around 60 councillors. This retrenchment led in 2007 to a fusion with the Maoist communist party to form Red.

Portugal

Left Bloc (Bloco de Esquerda, LB) was founded in 1999 from a number of far-left parties from Maoist, Trotskyist and communist backgrounds. All of these parties had stood in elections and became currents within the LB. Initially developed as a coalition, the LB has since become a party while its constituent components have maintained their existence and some levels of autonomy, leading to a loose structure. This structure may also provide an umbrella for other interested socialist organisations. In 1999, the LB polled two per cent in the Portuguese parliamentary election with this rising to three per cent in 2002. These results were generally better than the collective results of its predecessor components. In 2005, the LB achieved a breakthrough with 6.5 per cent and eight MPs. It also has one MEP and many local councillors, making it Portugal’s fifth biggest party. The LB’s presidential candidate in 2006 received 288,224 votes (five per cent). With support from students and unions in particular, the LB is becoming to be seen as a credible left alternative to the older, more established communist party and the more centre-left socialist party because it has become a pole of attraction for many involved in various social movements. The BL proposed Portugal’s first law on domestic violence, which was passed in parliament with the support of the socialist party.

Portugal is unusual in that it has another radical left unity project, the Unitarian Democratic Coalition (UDC), consisting of the Communist Party, the Ecologist Party and Democratic Intervention. The coalition was formed in 1987 to run in the simultaneous national and European parliamentary elections, and in every election since these parties have stood together at the UDC, even though the Communist Party is the major element within it. Tensions are minimalised by the sharing out of lead candidatures. Since 1987 the UDC has had in: the national parliament between 12 and 31 MPs (eight to 12 per cent vote); local government in excess of 200 councillors (11 to 13 per cent vote); and the European Parliament two to four MEPs (nine per cent to 14 per cent vote).

Spain

United Left (Izquierda Unida) was formed as a political coalition in 1986 during the mobilisations against NATO by several groups of leftists, greens, left-wing socialists and republicans but was always dominated by the Communist Party. After the electoral decline of the Communist Party in 1982 (from 10 per cent to three per cent), the UL slowly improved its electoral results reaching nine per cent in 1993 (1.8 million votes) and 11 per cent in 1996 (2.6m votes). From 1999, it went into decline, with its support slipping to five per cent in 2000. In that election it signed a pact with the Socialist Party. Following the tradition of the Spanish left, the UL does not have an organisation in Catalonia. Until 1998, UL’s counterpart in Catalonia was Iniciativa per Catalunya (IC-V). But IC-V moved towards the centre, and broke relations with the UL, leading the UL to set up its own organisation in Catalonia, Esquerra Unida i Alternativa (EUiA). In 2004, UL ran with IC-V, achieving five per cent and five MPs. UL has around 70,000 activists and more than 2,500 councillors. Founded in 1995, Alternative Space is a political organisation from a Trotskyist tradition but draws on anti-capitalist, feminist and ecologist perspectives following the different currents that formed it. It operates as a current with UL but is also an autonomous organisation and most of its members do not belong to this coalition.

Switzerland

In Switzerland, the radical left consists of three groups (Alternative List, Solidarites, Swiss Party of Labour) which have a smattering between them of elected representatives at the various levels. However, they worked together in coalitions when standing for elections in 2005 (as Left Alliance) and 2007 (as À gauche toute! Genève).

Lessons for the Scottish and British radical left

This brief cook’s tour around the most significant western European radical left unity projects has a number of lessons:

What seem like disparate groups can work and fuse together (although it is interesting to note that in nearly all instances they do not include members of sister organisations of the Socialist Party (ex-Militant) in Britain and where they include members of sister organisations of the British Socialist Workers’ Party, these members have no significant influence on the radical left unity projects). Working together and, ultimately, fusing is often brought about by prior campaigning activities and joint electoral slates. Of course, while such fusion should be welcomed in itself, sometimes the underlying recognition is that individual parties have often ceased to be credible or influential players on their own so fusion is required to regain some kind of radical left critical mass.

The degree of success for the radical left unity projects is sufficiently high that acquiring further knowledge about them, if not trying to emulate them, is desirable. This can be gauged by their presence in representative legislatures and membership numbers, particularly amongst members from formerly-aligned, non-aligned and independent backgrounds. However, success in attracting left members from social democratic, Labour-type parties has been less evident.

Despite successes, radical left unity projects do suffer from ups and downs reflecting wider changes in society, struggle and consciousness - in other words, left unity does not guarantee inexorable upward momentum.

Engaging in the electoral arena is vital but so is campaigning in extra-parliamentary terms outside elections (although this has been more difficult to show in this cook’s tour). Indeed, it would be a strange notion to counter-pose the two - elections and campaigning - as at cross purposes with each other.

Splits do take place, either as a result of deeply held policy differences or the reluctance to consent to the dissolution of an organisation upon fusing with others. However, fusion need not led to this outcome depending on the process and nature of fusion. Seldom have splits come about because of entering government coalitions - this will remain the great test of these projects given that any government in the foreseeable future in any of the European countries is likely to be dominated by neo-liberal, bellicose parties.

The history of radical left unity far pre-dates the watershed of the rise of the anti-globalisation and anti-war movements in the new millennium.
Different ‘models’ exist of radical left unity and activists should look at which they think are most appropriate to their situation.

Some Green/ecologist parties and organisations have been involved but this is far from standard practice and given an impending environmental catastrophe, opening up avenues to the left of the Green movement is an important future task for the radical left unity projects.

Clearly, a long way still has to be travelled until an alternative is built to the crumbling edifice of mainstream social democracy but these projects provide food for thought and for action.

Professor Gregor Gall is Professor of Industrial Relations at the University of Hertfordshire and author of ‘The Political Economy of Scotland - Red Scotland? Radical Scotland’ (University of Wales Press, 2005). He lives in Edinburgh.

In an astonishingly incompetent letter sent to the Guardian, the excellent journalist Ed Vulliamy added his signature to the effect that Noam Chomsky denied the “‘genocide’… at Srebrenica”. Although this was a remarkably ill-considered letter on many fronts, even more remarkable was the fact those who added their signatures were seemingly unaware that they themselves were guilty of using the very same terminology (and in the body of the text of the dispatched letter!) that Chomsky does: the use of the word “massacre” instead of “genocide”. Like “fascism”, “genocide” is a word that ought to be used accurately and therefore sparingly, and so once faced with genocide one would not resort to using the term massacre. Does not the Nazi “massacre” of the Jews appear somewhat lacking in the whole truth and nothing but the truth? Appearances may be deceptive, but in this case I venture to suggest that deception is the aim if one were to contort oneself in the way David Irving does on a good day.

In the last of five remarkably bizarre charges, some surely knowingly mendacious, the signatories state: “Finally, both Johnstone and Chomsky reject the use of the term ‘genocide’ in reference to the actions of Serb forces at Srebrenica or in Bosnia as a whole.” Now, one may claim that by using the term “genocide” one is by definition accepting a massacre, whereas the contrary position is not valid. That would be a necessary but not sufficient position, though, because then one would have a responsibility to explain that Chomsky’s argument is whether the legal definition is in fact consistent with the etymology, which is certainly a substantial point, to say the very least. My rebuttal and defence of Chomsky can be read here.

One would therefore expect that in yesterday’s Observer - its “cover story” in the Review supplement, no less – that Vulliamy would mention the “genocide” in Srebrenica. But no, not at all. He refers three times to the “Srebrenica massacre” and once to the “mass executions at Srebrenica”. There is not a whiff of the term “genocide” except for when Vulliamy’s interviewee Cara Del Ponte, chief prosecutor at the United Nations War Crimes Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, refers to it as such. Of course, if we have no reservations concerning the legal definition of “genocide”, the massacres at Srebrenica are undeniably genocidal, but then, given the specific definition in international law of “genocide”, there would also seem very few outbreaks of mass murder that would not fit the legal definition of “part” or “whole”, as I have pointed out elsewhere.

In a recent thread on this blog there have been some questions asked about whether I accepted that the Nato action in Kosovo was justified and regret the West’s “failure to intervene” in Bosnia. With respect to the first question regarding Kosovo, I replied that the United States engineered a situation such that war would break out: at Rambouillet, once a peace deal had been agreed by the Serbs and the Kosovars, the U.S. insisted on adding an appendix to the agreement such that Nato could enter Serbia proper and, moreover, that Nato would have legal immunity from legal redress. Predictably, this scuppered the peace agreement and led inevitably to war. This was yet another case of the United States not taking yes for an answer. Why the U.S. precipitated the war is another matter. That it did so, however, is undeniable. It did so without even bothering to satisfy the low requirements of the old adage of “plausible deniability”.

The second question concerned the West’s “failure to intervene” in Bosnia. I responded that the question didn’t make any sense and was somewhat puzzled that the questioner could not fathom the contradiction, if not in terms of absolute logic, in a juxtaposition that should furrow the brow. There was no Western “failure to intervene” in Bosnia, but far too much intervention – and of the most cynical variety at that. Simply put, the objective was that Bosnia would be partitioned, with Croatia’s aim of a “Greater Croatia” in Bosnia realised. Since that aim clashed with Milosevic’s own of a “Greater Serbia”, also in Bosnia (and elsewhere for that matter), Bosnia was then seized by a bloody war in which all actors were responsible, but with some far more responsible than others, and with few willing to compromise and make peace.

As reprehensible in many ways as President Izetbegovic of Bosnia was, it is undeniable that Milosevic’s Serbia and Tudjman’s Croatia are ultimately responsible for the disaster that befell Bosnia. Two Jinnah-lke figures (and an aspiring one in Izetbegovic) is two too many, especially in a region replete with extreme violence, let alone anywhere else. And notwithstanding the territorial ambitions of both countries, it is possible that had it not been for the especially sordid mindsets of Milosevic and Tudjman may have been spared much of what it then was made to endure. It was Milosevic and Tudjman who fostered the extreme nationalism, xenophobia and religious bigotry – with Tudjman probably out-doing Milosevic in this race to depravity – that unleashed the types of crimes against humanity Europe, or at least the citizens of Europe, had hoped it would never witness again.

The standard narrative is that the West “helplessly stood by” or “impotently looked the other way” while a savage war raged in the Balkans – the Balkans, for pity’s sake! – one area that the Western powers knows is in no one’s interests, least of all its own, to “ignore”. The other piece of received wisdom is of the saintliness of Franjo Tudjman, or as I wrote some time ago, “a name to be mentioned in the same breath as those other godly figures of the twentieth century: JFK, Mother Teresa, Pope John Paul II, Anwar Sadat and Princess Diana.”

And in an article almost entirely devoted to Radovan Karadzic, and the plausible theory that there is no hunt for him and no intention of ever bringing him to justice, Vulliamy is almost of the same opinion as the so-called “revisionists” on the West’s supposed inaction in Bosnia: “As the war drew to a close with Srebrenica, the doctrine of appeasement of the Serbs advocated by Britain and the UN had become demonstrably grotesque [but wasn’t that grotesque until then?] and America took the reins in a final effort fronted by the envoy Richard Holbrooke. Holbrooke’s first action was to stop the Bosnian army in its tracks as it was finally turning the tide, then knock the heads of the leaders of all sides together to produce the Dayton peace agreement of December 1995, partitioning Bosnia into the Republika Srpska Karadic wanted and a Muslim-Croat Federation. Rarely in European history has mass murder been so bountifully rewarded at the negotiating table.”

Well, “appeasement” is certainly one way of putting it; another way of putting it is the active aiding in the destruction and partition of Bosnia and the rewarding of the aggressors. One further point missing from Vulliamy’s summation is the West’s deplorable collaboration with Franjo Tudjman’s desire for a “Greater Croatia”. That, essentially, is the story of Bosnia: a cosmopolitan and remarkable nation torn between the insatiable appetites of its neighbours Serbia and Croatia (as well as, it must be said, those of Izetbegovic), with Western Europe and the United States favouring Croatia’s territorial ambitions over those of Russia-allied Serbia.

Now as war clouds loom again over Kosovo and the seeds of war clouds start to coalesce over pitiful Bosnia, expect further outbreaks of delusion and outright mendacity as the pro-war “Left” propagandises about the West’s alleged “failure to intervene” in Bosnia, and the concomitant chorus of “never again”, and how Kosovo can be made more of a success story. As elsewhere, the history of the Balkans is written by the victors, albeit in an incoherent fashion, but in the process this history has now become as Balkanised (divided, fragmented and hostile) as the region the historian, especially those in the “first draft” category, sets his or her mind to comprehend.

General Broulard: Colonel Dax, you’re a disappointment to me. You’re an idealist, and I pity you as I would the village idiot. We’re fighting a war, Dax. A war that we’ve got to win. Wherein have I done wrong?

Colonel Dax: Because you don’t know the answer to that question, I pity you.

COMRADE HORSE YOGHURT

And so the hoopla surrounding Martin Amis continues. Terry Eagleton’s extremely mild comments to the effect that Amis is a bigot and an idiot is still making waves. But why? On This Week, some time ago now, Amis twittered about Islam willing “to take the hit” of a nuclear strike if it meant that it could acquire the bomb itself. Amis (First in English) is seemingly unaware that a religion cannot acquire a bomb. Nevertheless, let’s play this shallow game: Pakistan is in possession of nukes, so where does that leave your argument, Mart?

On Question Time Amis raved that the US has “many good reasons for a causus belli with Iran”, like an Al Qaeda bombing which Iran had nothing to do with, and the American “hostages” held in Tehran in 1979 after the US granted the Shah “political asylum”. I thought nothing of it: Amis is an overrated novelist (goodish here and there but no great shakes). He is not known for his political insights, and This Week and Question Time do have a habit of inviting supremely uninformed folk on to the show – remember the showbiz Sun columnist on Question Time whose answers made the audience cringe and snigger in equal measure? Unfortunately, newspapers can’t help themselves either: they too need to know what Martin thinks.

The last media frenzy surrounded Ziauddin Sardar’s tame but misjudged article, “Welcome to Planet Blitcon”, which presented Amis, McEwan (by the way, his On Chesil Beach is extremely mediocre) and Rushdie as neocons. One really must read Martin Amis’s stuff on Islam, especially his stupid three-part essay on Islam, printed in the Observer, entitled “The Age of Horrorism”, to gauge what a warped and funny individual Amis is. (The last time I found Amis funny was when he placed himself alongside Bellow and Nabokov in literature’s pantheon of prose stylists, which reminded me a great deal of Tom Wolfe placing his “Bonfire of the Vanities” alongside the works of Dickens and Thackeray.) I must say that I found “Horrorism” profoundly interesting in the watching-a-car-crash sort of way. If only a literary version of the Darwin Awards existed, I mused. Indeed, I started to seriously wonder whether Martin Amis actually exists. Perhaps he really is the creation of Craig Brown’s wonderful imagination.

In a long and error-ridden essay for the Observer, Martin Amis starts by announcing his love for humanity but dislike for bin Laden: “All men are my brothers. I would have liked to have said it then, and I would like to say it now: all men are my brothers. But all men are not my brothers. Why? Because all women are my sisters. And the brother who denies the rights of his sister: that brother is not my brother. At the very best, he is my half-brother - by definition. Osama is not my brother.” Jolly good to know. Each time I stumble across Amis I’m reminded of Brown’s Comrade Horse Yoghurt spoof (I guffawed for a week, crawled into hospital and demanded a general anaesthetic).

For the unbrotherly but very sisterly Amis the world changed on 11 September - “shifts in the paradigm like the attack of 11 September 2001” - and he’s miffed. (Incidentally, for Amis and his liberal bozo friends, there was no “shift in the paradigm” when far worse atrocities occurred elsewhere.) For one, he’s not best pleased that his family has been searched at an airport. Why can’t security, he cogitates, “stick to people who look like they’re from the Middle East”. And what to do if the terrorist is a light-skinned terrorist from Chechnya, other parts of the Caucuses, Bosnia, Kosovo or a white covert for instance? Having since realised that he came across as a fascist goon, Amis has since claimed that he did not mean this seriously and was just, you know, thinking aloud.

But how often does one need to think the same thought aloud? Earlier in the year, in the Times, Amis opined in similar but more menacing fashion: “There’s a definite urge – don’t you have it? [actually, no] – to say, ‘The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.’ What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation – further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan . . . Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children. They hate us for letting our children have sex and take drugs – well, they’ve got to stop their children killing people. It’s a huge dereliction on their part. I suppose they justify it on the grounds that they have suffered from state terrorism in the past, but I don’t think that’s wholly irrational.”

There’s no need to dissect this depraved rant; it suffices to quote it. The only thing that’s missing is Amis demanding Muslims wear badges…Anyway, what’s worth noting is Amis’s eccentric logic: “they hate us” for something he believes is rational (presumably not because of the horny kids on crack); however, “they” must be made to “suffer until it gets house in order” and therefore act in an irrational way. More of Amis’s logic later. No such admonition for the “West” to get “its house in order”, of course.

Even when Amis tries to be profound and visionary, though, he doesn’t quite realise the own-goal he’s scoring: “And I couldn’t defend myself from a vision of the future; in this future, riding a city bus will be like flying El Al”. Martin doesn’t enlighten his readers why it is El Al is like El Al rather than, say, Swiss Air. Or to put it another way, why does Aer Lingus not have Palestinians hijacking their airliners but El Al does? Or is that still more proof of their horrible (or should that be horriblist?) nature? This is some conspiracy: the Palestinians had to anxiously await centuries to be maltreated by Jews so as to put into action a long-planned violent response under the guise of national liberation. That’s some conspiracy theory. One reason Amis can’t accept anything but the most depraved reasoning is his pitiful reading matter: Amis’s lodestone on Islam is, predictably, the deranged Bernard Lewis; his lodestone for terrorism is the liberal clown Paul Berman, a man of comically little insight.

“Until recently,” writes Amis, “it was being said that what we are confronted with, here, is ‘a civil war’ within Islam. That’s what all this was supposed to be: not a clash of civilisations or anything like that, but a civil war within Islam. Well, the civil war appears to be over. And Islamism won it. The loser, moderate Islam, is always deceptively well-represented on the level of the op-ed page and the public debate; elsewhere, it is supine and inaudible. We are not hearing from moderate Islam. Whereas Islamism, as a mover and shaper of world events, is pretty well all there is.” The reason Amis does not hear from “moderate Islam” is because he is deaf to all but the most extreme voices. “Islamism”, according to Amis, is the winner in every Islamic country where they barely even register as a force. Even in Pakistan, when elections are held, the Islamists barely register. In Indonesia, the largest Muslim country, the Islamists can only dream of reaching the weak position of their Pakistani comrades. Like Irshad Manji, Martin Amis does not like facts. Or to put it in the language Amis will understand: Facts; Martin Amis like does not.

Like Manji, obligatory but perfunctory references are required for Amis to pose as someone who knows what he’s blathering on about. So he tries to be knowledgeable about Islam: “The Surah [the sayings of the Prophet]…” No, Mart, Surah means chapter; “the sayings of the Prophet” are the Sunnah and are collected in the Hadiths. Amis has problems with even the most well-known words: “intifada (‘earthquake’)”. Wrong again, Mart: it means “shaking off”, although it is commonly accepted to mean “uprising”. Because Amis is so inept at arguing his position, it gets worse, much worse. But there are far too many idiocies to correct. The least I can do is to point out the more glaring ones.

Here Amis tries for overarching political thinking: “And we now know what happens when Islamism gets its hands on an army (Algeria)… the result was fratricide, with 100,000 dead…” Unbelievably, extraordinarily, Amis believes that the death toll in Algeria was the result of Islamist control of the Algerian army. It is clear that Amis does not know anything about the Arab world or Islam, except that he hates it, and because he hates it, he makes utterly stupid claims like Algeria’s army having been under the control of Islamic fundamentalists it was butchering by the thousand. Solely because Amis is who he is, is he allowed swathes of space to twitter, in bigoted fashion, about things he knows nothing. Celebrity seems to be a good enough reason for the Observer to give this amazingly ignorant man space to write thousands of words of complete tripe - and no one at the unobservant Observer noticed this astonishing mistake.

“THE FRESHLY FORTIFIED SUSPICION”

Just when you think Amis can’t descend any further into the intellectual gutter, he digs a hole and leaps into the sewer. Amis has “the freshly fortified suspicion that there exists on our planet a kind of human being who will become a Muslim in order to pursue suicide-mass murder”. Translation: no one other than someone for a bent for mass-murder (i.e. bloodthirsty psychopaths) would want to become a Muslim – albeit this Nazi-style bigotry is only a “suspicion”. If that’s not enough, Amis meets a Muslim and he determines that this man’s “expression, previously cordial and cold, became a mask; and the mask was saying that killing me, my wife and my children was something for which he now had warrant.” Amis could tell all this from an “expression” of a man he had just met. This particular gift was previously the preserve of Hitler.

Our historian finds yet another Hitler-Stalin pact, so to speak: “And the flame [of influence] passed from Germany to the USSR” and “So Islam, in the end, proved responsive to European influence: the influence of Hitler and Stalin”. Presumably this is the famous Amis wit? How the Nazis or Stalin influenced Islamic thought is Amis’s little secret. Though Amis considers himself some sort of authority on Stalin and evidently has a Nazi-style predilection to races and cultures, the basis for this Hitler-Stalin-Islam nexus seems to be that it sounded too good to be left out. Something this ludicrous can only have come from Mr Clown himself, Paul Berman, Amis’s lodestone.

I discover Mart’s visceral hatred for Muslims in the Times: “They’re also gaining on us demographically at a huge rate. A quarter of humanity now and by 2025 they’ll be a third. Italy’s down to 1.1 child per woman. We’re just going to be outnumbered.” “Outnumbered” by Muslims – has Amis been reading Mark Steyn (see my “A Steyn On Humanity”) as well as Hitler?

Amis on the disastrous invasion of Iraq: “still, we should not delude ourselves that the motives behind it were dishonourable”. If the motives were so honourable, Martin, why not enlighten us as to what they were and are? In any case, why is Iraq in the mess it’s in? As ever, Amis has the answer: “It is by now not too difficult to trace what went wrong, psychologically, with the Iraq War. The fatal turn, the fatal forfeiture of legitimacy, came not with the mistaken [untrue] but also cynical emphasis on Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction: the intelligence agencies of every country on earth, Iraq included, believed that he had them [untrue]. The fatal turn was the American President’s all too palpable submission to the intoxicant of power. His walk, his voice, his idiom, right up to his mortifying appearance in the flight suit on the aircraft-carrier, USS Abraham Lincoln (‘Mission Accomplished’) - every dash and comma in his body language betrayed the unscrupulous confidence of the power surge.” George Bush’s walk, eh? Dubya’s voice, huh? The dash and comma in George’s body language. And there I was thinking it was the occupation itself. I must stop paying too much attention to that bloody fool Patrick Cockburn. Tune in to those blasted commas and dashes in body language.

Move over Aristotle and Godel, here’s Amis the logician: “The Iraq project was foredoomed by three intrinsic historical realities. First, the Middle East is clearly unable, for now, to sustain democratic rule - for the simple reason that its peoples will vote against it.” Never mind that the “foredoom” is after the fact and in hindsight, the logic is amusing. Iraqis “will vote against” democracy in a democratic election? On each occasion there has been an election in Iraq, Iraqis have come out in extraordinary numbers, braving death, so as to vote against voting? Martin, you have no idea what you’re talking about, do you? Needless to say, Amis is a moronic inferno.

The Islamic world’s problems, writes our talented historian, are due to a “peculiarly Islamist triumvirate (codified early on by [what a surprise] Christopher Hitchens) of self-righteousness, self-pity, and self-hatred - the self-righteousness dating from the seventh century, the self-pity from the 13th (when the ‘last’ Caliph was kicked to death in Baghdad by the Mongol warlord Hulagu), and the self-hatred from the 20th.” The entire Islamic world succumbed to “self-pity” after a Mongol kicked the Caliph to death? Or could it be that the Islamic world was shocked by the fact that this same Mongol warlord and his army destroyed and looted Baghdad and then made his way with his goons across the Middle East happily raping and killing hundreds of thousands of people? Is Amis unaware that Iraqis, especially Baghdadis, refer to the Americans as Mongols? Yet anyone who found this Mongol devastation an outrage is guilty of “self-pity”, although Amis will be hard put to find many Muslims today who are obsessed with the Mongol warlord Hulagu. It is appropriate that this absurd “triumvirate” is the product of the same man who blames “theocratic fascism” on the apparent biological fact that “our prefrontal lobes are too small and our adrenaline glands are too big”.

We should, however, expect this perversion of history from Amis. Forget the grand narrative (the “peculiarly Islamic triumvirate”), the poor man purposely distorts historical dates so as to make things a bit sexier. Writing in the Sunday Times, Amis connects the terrorist attacks of September 11 with the defeat of the “armies of Islam” at the “gates of Vienna” in 1683 on – sigh – September 11. There are a few things to be said about this. One, it was September 12, not September 11, that the so-called “armies of Islam” were repelled by the Frankish forces. Two, had Al Qaeda wanted to revenge the defeat, they would not have staged the attack on September 11. This date has meaning in a solar calendar; it has no meaning in the Islamic lunar calendar (the possibility exists that these two dates tally, but the odds are so remote that I’ll eat my spine if they do match). Three, there are any number of Crusader dates that would coincide with U.S. actions in the Middle East. Should we make anything of that?

AMIS THE POLYMATH

There is no beginning to Amis’s talents. He gives psychoanalysis a whirl: “We shouldunderstand that the Islamists’ hatred of America is as much abstract as historical, andirrationally abstract, too; none of the usual things can be expected to appease it. The hatred contains much historical emotion, but it is their history, and not ours, that haunts them.” Psychoanalysis part two: “Contemplating intense violence, you very rationally ask yourself, what are the reasons for this? And compassionately frowning newscasters are still asking that same question. It is time to move on. We are not dealing in reasons because we are not dealing in reason.” Let me get this right. The “hatred” has a “historical” reason yet has no “reason”. Amis’s logic is a joy. Moreover, we should “understand” that the 9/11 terrorists, for example, flew airliners into the Twin Towers, hoping to kill tens of thousands of innocent people, because of “abstract” hatred and “historical emotion”? That Al Qaeda indoctrinates its “soldiers” with appeals to the “abstract”? Has Amis heard of Robert Pape and Scott Atran, not to mention Michael Scheuer (former head of the CIA’s bin Laden unit)? They’ve identified the reasons for suicide terrorism – and, strangely enough, “irrationally abstract” hatred does not make an appearance.

Ethics is next on the list for the polymath: “Our moral advantage, still vast and obvious, is not a liability, and we should strengthen and expand it. Like our dependence on reason, it is a strategic strength, and it shores up our legitimacy.” The “moral advantage”, so “vast and obvious”, can be seen in supporting Israel’s destruction of Lebanon and the West’s continued shoring up of the odious Saudi mafia with a multi-billion pound arms sale, to name but two factors making up the “moral advantage” and “our dependence on reason”.

Amis the historian of ideas: “The stout self-sufficiency or, if you prefer, the extreme incuriosity of Islamic culture has been much remarked. Present-day Spain translates as many books into Spanish, annually, as the Arab world has translated into Arabic in the past 1,100 years. And the late-medieval Islamic powers barely noticed the existence of the West until it started losing battles to it. The tradition of intellectual autarky was so robust that Islam remained indifferent even to readily available and obviously useful innovations, including, incredibly, the wheel. The wheel, as we know, makes things easier to roll; Bernard Lewis, in What Went Wrong?, sagely notes that it also makes things easier to steal.” Amis, obviously, means the “extreme incuriosity of Islamic culture” as represented by the totalitarian regimes of today, not the glorious and curious cultures of yesteryear. This is no mere pedantry on my part; this is taking history seriously. The use of the wheel did indeed decline – but in pre-Islamic Arabia, not, as Amis insinuates, after Islam’s triumph of the peninsula.

I have recently corresponded with Professor Richard W. Bulliet, the world’s pre-eminent scholar in this field (author of the groundbreaking “The Wheel and the Camel”). He affirms that “wheels disappeared in the first half of the common era before the rise of Islam” and that preference of the camel over the wheel was simply due to the “intrinsic economy of raising immensely strong animals on low quality desert grazing” and that “camel caravans had the advantage of not requiring much in the way of road upkeep.” That is to say, it was a question of economics.

Bulliet replies that Amis’s argument is “silly” and that “it should be easy to show that Islam has nothing do with any of this. Muslims used wheeled vehicles in Central Asia, India, and China; and the Muslim ladies of Istanbul commonly went on picnics outside of town in parties carried by covered wagons drawn by usually four oxen. This, of course, was a matter of comfort, not of economic efficiency. In temperate climes where cheap camel labour was not so readily available, wheeled vehicles did not disappear.”

Moreover, Bulliet writes: “If Amis had wanted to explore intellectual blinders in this arena, he might instead have noticed that everywhere in the world for the two millennia that preceded the nineteenth century, the two-wheeled vehicles were so much preferred over four-wheeled vehicles that the latter were practically non-existent . . . except in Europe. Europeans have used four-wheeled vehicles for some 5000 years despite obvious and severe inefficiencies in friction, harnessing, steering, braking, and road requirements. ‘The tradition of intellectual autarky was so robust’ in Europe, I guess, that they failed to notice that everyone outside of Europe realized that four-wheeled transport really sucked before about 1500.” Bulliet ends with the inspiring, “Good luck on rapping Amis-Lewis knuckles. Their sort of foolishness is so widespread these days that it’s an uphill battle.” Well, I hope I haven’t done too badly, Professor Bulliet. You’ve certainly kicked Amis’s teeth in - or what’s famously left of them.

Given that Amis believes that the Algerian military was under the control of the Islamic fundamentalist movement they were at war with (similarly the U.S. air force is controlled by bin Laden), an “uphill battle” is rather an understatement. The “incuriosity” Amis refers to – or more accurately enforced “incuriosity” by despotic regimes supported by the liberalism he supports – is indeed tragic, but Amis is incapable of reflecting upon the fact that most of the Islamic world is ruled by dictatorships, nearly all of which are backed by the West, and that dictators are prone to censoring speech and anything with a whiff of freedom. It is telling that Amis does not understand this. No wonder Amis believes that the Islamic world “remained indifferent even to readily available and obviously useful innovations, including, incredibly, the wheel”. Nice to see Amis not doing his homework: Bernard Lewis, rather than Hourani, Hitti, Said, Achcar or Aburish. Lewis’s antipathy for the Islamic world is well-known. Why would Amis resort to quoting Lewis? The answer is fairly obvious: one quotes those who share your own prejudices. As a novelist, Martin was always going to struggle to stay in touching distance of Kingsley; as a bigot, however, Martin is streets ahead of his pa.

Logic, psychoanalysis, ethics and history give way to socio-economics: “In 2002 the aggregate GDP of all the Arab countries was less than the GDP of Spain; and the Islamic states lag behind the West, and the Far East, in every index of industrial and manufacturing output, job creation, technology, literacy, life-expectancy, human development, and intellectual vitality. (A recondite example: in terms of the ownership of telephone lines, the leading Islamic nation is the UAE, listed in 33rd place, between Reunion and Macau.) Then, too, there is the matter of tyranny, corruption, and the absence of civil rights and civil society.” And there we have it (the “too”): “Then, too, there is the matter of tyranny, corruption, and the absence of civil rights and civil society.” The “too” is to be divorced from the tyranny his beloved liberalism bolsters.

There is an insufferable disorder that, unless assiduously guarded against, the middle-aged rich liberal will succumb to, and Amis has been subsumed by the plague of blaming the victim. The “tyranny, corruption, and the absence of civil rights and civil society” is not the cause of the “lag behind the West, and the Far East, in every index of industrial and manufacturing output, job creation, technology, literacy, life-expectancy, human development, and intellectual vitality.” It is the natural concomitant of a country full with Muslims. By Amis’s logic, such as it is, Dubai’s claim to be the richest country in the world is a result of the tyranny in place. Ergo, the riches of Dubai are there for all if only they imitated Dubai’s tyrannical form of government.

It’s disconcerting that Amis couldn’t just be another second-rate novelist and be left to slither away into middle-age and wallow in reactionary politics. A certain mastery of hyperbole has made him a man whose views must be sought on great political matters. If people still want to take seriously someone as extraordinarily stupid and bigoted as Amis clearly is, well, that’s proof of the bigotry and ignorance over the very “reason” and rationality Amis pretends to hold dear. He is an object lesson in unreason and irrationality. Amis can inform his listeners how Islamists came to power in Algeria when they didn’t. How these Islamists got hold of a military when they didn’t. How these Islamists unleashed this military on unsuspecting Algerians, er, when they didn’t. But the last word should go to Amis. On page 82 of his memoir “Experience” Martin informs us: “My mouth wasn’t any good at knowing when to stop”. Quite so.

I wish to thank Professor Richard W Bulliet for his insightful comments. Other than the quotes attributed to him, he is not responsible for any errors of fact or the opinions stated.

Interesting words from James Bissett, Canada’s Ambassador to Yugoslavia 1990-1992:

‘This weekend marks the eighth anniversary of the U.S.-led NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. The implications of that action are still with us.

‘The onslaught that began March 24, 1999, continued for 78 days, causing an estimated 10,000 civilian casualties and inflicting widespread damage on the country’s infrastructure. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s unprecedented attack against a sovereign state was done without United Nations authority and in violation of the UN Charter and international law. It also set a dangerous precedent: It transformed NATO from a purely defensive organization into a powerful alliance prepared to intervene militarily wherever it chose to do so. And it paved the way for the unilateral U.S. invasion of Iraq.

‘Bill Clinton and other NATO leaders justified the bombing on humanitarian grounds. It was alleged that genocide was taking place in Kosovo and that Serbian security forces were driving out the Albanian population. Later, it was disclosed there was no genocide in Kosovo. (Of course, the outcome appears to be an independent quasi-state of Kosovo, as shall be recommended next week to the UN Security Council.) Before the bombing, several thousand Albanians had been displaced within Kosovo as a result of the fighting between Serbian security forces and the Kosovo Liberation Army. But nearly all of the Albanians who fled Kosovo did so after the bombing began. The real ethnic cleansing came after Serbian forces withdrew and more than 200,000 Serbs, Roma, Jews and other non-Albanians were forced to flee; more than 150 Christian churches and monasteries have since been burned by Albanian mobs.

‘The bombing had little, if anything, to do with humanitarian concerns. It had everything to do with the determination of the United States to maintain NATO as an essential military organization. The fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the withdrawal of Warsaw Pact armies had called into question NATO’s reason for existence. Why was such a powerful and expensive military organization needed to defend Western Europe when there was no longer any threat from Soviet communism?

‘The armed rebellion by the terrorist Kosovo Liberation Army provided Washington with the opportunity needed to demonstrate to Western Europe that NATO was still needed. So, it was essential to convince the news media and the public that atrocities and ethnic cleansing were taking place in Kosovo.This was done with relative ease by a campaign of misinformation aimed at demonizing the Serbs and by assertions by Mr. Clinton, Tony Blair and other NATO spokesmen that hundreds of young Albanian men were “missing” and that mass executions and genocide were taking place in Kosovo. Compliant journalists and a credulous public accepted these lies.

‘In April, 1999, at the peak of the bombing, Mr. Clinton gathered NATO’s political leaders in Washington to celebrate the alliance’s 50th birthday. The party was used as a platform for Mr. Clinton to announce a new”strategic concept” — NATO was to be modernized and made ready for the new century. There was no reference to defence or the settling of international disputes by peaceful means or of complying with the principles of the UN Charter. The new emphasis would be on “conflict prevention,” “crisis management” and “crisis response operation.”

‘Usually when a treaty is to be amended or changed, it must be approved and ratified by the legislatures of the contracting states. This was not done with the North Atlantic Treaty. It was changed by an announcement from the U.S. president, with little or no debate by the legislatures of member countries. It may well be that NATO should be in a position to intervene militarily in the internal affairs of another country, but it surely is essential that the ground rules for such intervention be in accordance withthe UN Charter and only after concurrence of member states. NATO should not become a convenient political “cover” to justify the use of military power by the United States.’

Yesterday’s ruling of the UN International Court of Justice in The Hague that the Serbian state was not directly responsible for any genocide in Bosnia has a very clear implication.

Had President Slobodan Milosevic not died in custody he would have been acquitted, and found not guilty of the charges brought against him.

As Harold Pinter, Nobel Prize laureate for Literature 2005 said: “The US/NATO court trying Slobodan Milosevic was always totally illegitimate. It could never be taken seriously as a court of justice. Milosevic’s defense is powerful, convincing, persuasive and impossible to dismiss.”

The probability of Milosevic’s acquitall had already been noted, even by some who supported the show trial, despite the fact that in the highly politicised context of this trial the presumption of innocence had already been discarded. In July 2004, James Gow, an “expert” on war crimes, and a cheer-leader for the prosecution told BBC Newsnight that he thought it would be better if Milosevic died in the dock, because if the trial ran its course he might be sentenced for only relatively minor charges.

As reported in the Spectator: “Since the trial started in February 2002, the prosecution has wheeled out more than 100 witnesses, and it has produced 600,000 pages of evidence. Not a single person has testified that Milosevic ordered war crimes. Whole swaths of the indictment on Kosovo have been left unsubstantiated, even though Milosevic’s command responsibility here is clearest. And when the prosecution did try to substantiate its charges, the result was often farce. Highlights include the Serbian ‘insider’ who claimed to have worked in the presidential administration but who did not know what floor Milosevic’s office was on; ‘Arkan’s secretary’, who turned out to have worked only as a temp for a few months in the same building as the notorious paramilitary; the testimony of the former federal prime minister, Ante Markovic, dramatically rumbled by Milosevic, who produced Markovic’s own diary for the days when he claimed to h ave had meetings with him; the Kosovo Albanian peasant who said he had never heard of the KLA even though there is a monument to that terrorist organisation in his own village; and the former head of the Yugoslav secret services, Radomir Markovic, who not only claimed that he had been tortured by the new democratic government in Belgrade to testify against his former boss, but who also agreed, under cross-examination by Milosevic, that no orders had been given to expel the Kosovo Albanians and that, on the contrary, Milosevic had instructed the police and army to protect civilians. And these, note, were the prosecution witnesses.”

It has been very hard to follow the story of Milosevic’s trial in the British press. Is that because the narrative provided by the evidence did not support the cosy but mendacious case that the Serbian state were responsible for war crimes, while NATO’s allies were as pure as the driven snow. The myth of the innocent Bosnian Muslims was dealt a blow when Eve-Ann Prentice, a journalist who has written for the Guardian and the Times, testified in court that in November 1994, while she was waiting in Izetbegovic’s foyer both she, and a journalist from Der Speigel, saw Osama bin Laden being escorted into Izetbegovic’s office.

The popular perception of Serbia being the villain in Yugoslavia remains unshaken. Yet it has recently been established that the first war crime in modern Yugoslavia was the illegal execution of three prisoners of war (two Serbs and a Croat) in Slovenia in 1991, yet the Slovenian government declines to prosecute, and is feted as a model democracy by the EU.

It should be noted that the Serbian state has been found guilty of failing to prevent genocide at Srebrinica in 1995, where perhaps 7000 Muslims were murdered by Bisnian Serb militias. These are serious charges, but note that Milosevic is widely credited with having had the dangerous Serb fascist Arkan assassinated due to his role in Ethnic cleansing (he was too powerful to have dealt with by lawful process), and General Farkas, chief of the Security Dept. of the Yugoslav Army in 1999, gave testimony in The Hague that when Milosevic learned of crimes committed by reserve policemen who had associated with Slobodan Medic “Boca,” he became extremely angry. He demanded an explanation of how the Skorpions commander could have been active in Kosovo, then he demanded that the perpetrators be prosecuted and that nothing like that be permitted to happen in the future.

The people really guilty of failing to prevent genocide in Srebrenica were the craven cowards of the Dutch UN peacekeeping force. Yet Dutch Colonel Tom Karremans was not in the dock in The Hague. Around 5000 Bosnian Muslims had taken sanctuary in the UN base, protected by 600 Dutch troops, but Colonel Karremans handed them to Bosnian Serb militiamen, indifferent to their almost certain fate, in return for safe conduct for himself and his men. They even left their weapons behind.

Milosevic may have been guilty of many things. But he was not a war criminal. The Jugoslav state was broken up over a period of years because that suited the interests of the western powers. Serbia stood against that disintegration and also sought to defend parts of its planned economy. That is why there has been a propaganda war to paint the Serbs as the villains. (The wider context of this is explained quite well by Richard at Lenin’s Tomb.)

As victims of injustice go, then perhaps Slobodan Milosevic is not the highest priority. As John Pilger described him: “Milosevic was a brute; he was also a banker once regarded as the west’s man who was prepared to implement “economic reforms” in keeping with IMF, World Bank and European Community demands.”

The old dictator died in prison during 2006, perhaps somewhat fortuitously for the prosecutors in the Hague, as the prospect of Milosevic’s acquittal was a real one.

Strange things happen in the Blogosphere, and Dave Osler bundled a celebration of Milosevic’s death in with Pinochet, Niyazov and Saddam. In the thread of comments supporters of the AWL have repeated the NATO lie that Serbia was planning a “extermination or expulsion” of the Albanian population of Kosovo. Yet for some reasons Dave’s blog wouldn’t allow me to reply to them. (This problem seems to have been solved)

The dismantling of Yugoslavia, and the subsequent NATO attack on Serbia were an historic turning point.

In particular, it saw the manufacturing of a casus belli through NATO seeking to impose a military occupation of the whole of Serbia in the first draft of the Rambouillet agreement, under terms that no Serbian government could accept – a condition that NATO removed after weeks of bombing to secure an agreement. NATO then attacked Serbia in alliance with the terrorist Albanian supremacist organisation, the KLA. (shown in the picture)

And most significantly it was a rehearsal for manufacturing consent for a war under cover of a specious humanitarian intervention. John Pilger quotes UN Balkans commander, Major-General Lewis MacKenzie, “We have subsidised and indirectly supported [the KLA’s] violent campaign for an ethnically pure Kosovo. We have never blamed them for being the perpetrators of the violence in the early 1990s and we continue to portray them as the designated victim today in spite of evidence to the contrary.” The Serbia war also saw parts of the British left line up with NATO, uncritically repeating allegations of atrocities, and misrepresenting the dismantling of Yugoslavia as national liberation from Serb domination.

Even the usually pro-US NGO, Human Rights Watch, (who supported the war) documented human rights abuses by the KLA in the lead up to war that are symmetrical to those committed by Yugoslav forces:

There is an excellent demolition of this NATO spin, in Herman and Peterson’s article in ZNET. They argue: “The word genocide was applied to Serb operations in Kosovo even before the NATO bombing, although the number killed in the prior 15 months was perhaps 2,000 on all sides and despite the fact that there was no evidence of an intent to exterminate or expel all Albanians. The Kosovo conflict was a civil war with defining ethnic overtones and brutal but not unfamiliar repression (less ferocious than that carried out by the Croatian army against the Krajina Serbs in August 1995, in which some 2,500 civilians were slaughtered in the course of a few days). Even for the period of the bombing the term genocide is ludicrously inapplicable. The Serb reaction to bombing, while frequently savage, was based on their correct understanding that the KLA was linked to NATO and that NATO was giving it air support (Tom Walker and Aidan Laverty, “CIA Aided Kosovo Guerrilla Army,” Sunday Times [London], March 13, 2000). Their brutalities and expulsions were concentrated in KLA stronghold areas, and those expelled were sent not to death camps but to safe havens outside Kosovo. The intensive postwar search for killings and mass graves has produced under 3,000 dead bodies from all causes—killings of the same order of magnitude as the 1995 Krajina massacres of Serbs, carried out with U.S. support.”

A good summary of the arguments is in John Pilger’s article, originally from the New Statesman: “the International War Crimes Tribunal, a body effectively set up by Nato, announced that the final count of bodies found in Kosovo’s “mass graves” was 2,788. This included combatants on both sides and Serbs and Roma murdered by the Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army. “

Had NATO been seeking to prevent an actually occuring genocide, then then choice of targets was eccentric. For example bllowing up the bridges in the Northern City of Novi Sad, as far from Kosovo as it was possible to be. Pilger reports. ” In the bombing campaign that followed, it was state owned companies, rather than military sites, that were targeted. Nato’s destruction of only 14 Yugoslav army tanks compares with its bombing of 372 centres of industry, including the Zastava car factory, leaving hundreds of thousands jobless. Not one foreign or privately owned factory was bombed.

Strangely the British leftists who trumpeted the exagerated atrocity claims in support of an independent Kosovo are rather silent about the brutal reality Of Kosovo today. Not only is the province now a wild west haven of gangster capitalism, domiated by prostitution and drug trafficking, but as I have written before, NATO ruled Kosovo has also seen a systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing.

In March 2004, up to 50000 ethnic Albanian rioters launched a pogrom against their Serb and Roma (Gypsy) neighbours. The pogrom followed delibertely inflammatory and untruthful broadcasts that the tragic drowning of three Albanian boys at the village of Cabra was due to them being driven into a river by a mob of Serbs. An account that the well respected agency Human Rights Watch concluded was completely untrue.The account of the following pogrom in 2004 by Human Rights Watch is truly shocking. As they report “Once the violence began, it swept throughout Kosovo with almost clinical precision: after two days of rioting, every single Serb, Roma, or Askaeli home had been burned in most of the communities affected by the violence, but neighboring ethnic Albanian homes were left untouched.” NATO troops took 6 hours to respond to calls for help by Serbs in Pristina, despite elderly defenceless and disabled people being attacked in their homes by the mob of Albanian extremists.It is important to note that according to HRW the ethnic cleansing of minorities by the NATO backed KLA/UCK started immediately after the Serbs withdrew: “Before the 1999 war, some 350 Ashkali families lived in Vucitrn, many of them engaged in the butcher trade. After the war, many of the Ashkali were attacked by ethnic Albanians. At least five Ashkalis from the town were abducted and “disappeared” and more than a hundred Ashkali homes burned. Almost the entire Ashkali community of Vucitrn fled, with only ten to fifteen families deciding to stay.”In 2004 the Albanian supremacists came to finish the job, watched and not hindered by NATO troops: “the Ashkali recalled the terror they felt when their homes were set on fire with their families inside and no-one came to help them. Nejib Cizmolli, a thirty-seven-year-old Ashkali [man], recalled being trapped on the second floor of his burning home with eleven people, including children aged three, eight, fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen”