Date: Wed, 19 Feb 1997 00:35:16 +0100 From: m-14970-AT-mailbox.swipnet.se (Hugh Rodwell) Subject: M-I: The WRP and Workers Aid for Bosnia Bob M just published a "warning" letter on the WRP in Cockroach. The letter is scandalous. For a start, the language is Stalinist: "scumbags", "scum", "Burn in Hell, Slaughter". The whistle-blower calls the WRP degenerate but only gives a single explicit reason for this characterization, which boils down to organizing "Workers Aid for Bosnia". Workers Aid was and is an organization of rank and file workers and students devoting their own time and money to getting convoys of trucks together, loading them with donated necessaries, and driving them themselves down to Tuzla. It is strong in Britain, France and Spain and has support in other countries. The political motivation for the aid to Bosnia is the same as Trotsky's support for Catalonian independence during the Spanish Civil War. If democratic problems such as the national question aren't solved, class problems will become more protracted and infected. Or perhaps whistle-blower knows better and thinks the first thing Lenin and Trotsky should have done after the October Revolution was not to grant Finland (white, reactionary, butcher-run Finland, whose rulers were scouting around after a Prussian King!!!) its independence but to fuse it completely with the Soviet homeland? The allegations against Workers Aid for Bosnia are that aid and supplies were sent to: a) Sarajevo -- a lie. The aid was sent to Tuzla and surrounding villages. b) Muslims -- a lie. Tuzla is a centre of multi-ethnic working-class tradition (mining) in Bosnia and ex-Yugoslavia. c) fundamentalists -- a lie. See b) and consider the very non-fundamentalist traditions of Bosnian islam. Some inroads made by fundamentalism in government circles and in Sarajevo do not constitute a fundamentalist Islam. Accepting military aid from Iran is compromising but doesn't make anyone a fundamentalist. As for religion, perhaps whistle-blower thinks the Orthodox cross is a hammer and sickle? d) ethnic-cleansing -- this charge is an obscene lie. The whistle-blower, naturally, doesn't go into the glorious exploits of the Bosnian Serb warriors or their backers in Belgrade, but presumably thinks they were raped and starved and bulldozed into mass graves by crazed Muslim women in veils while valiantly defending the Yugoslav workers' homeland. e) butchers -- halal, no doubt. The government in Sarajevo, to which Workers Aid sent nothing, is characterized as: a) armed and b) funded by American imperialism. Some arms! Some funds! Perhaps whistle-blower hallucinates that the blockading troops of the UN were putting guns and money into the hands of the Bosnian government! On imperialist orders, the UN was preventing guns, money and supplies from getting into Bosnia, while the Bosnian Serbs were getting away with murder using freely shifted rump-Yugoslav weaponry. The single biggest obstacle blocking the way for Workers Aid was the UN. They refused to open the short northern route into Tuzla, and refused to open the Tuzla airport. They created all kinds of bureaucratic and malicious difficulties for the convoys. The aim was to starve the Bosnians into submitting to imperialist Vance-Owen carve-up. Whistle-blower writes: >>Needless to say, this would have been a bit like western leftists trying >>to >>rush aid to South Vietnam during the war there! Needless for whistle-blower, but not for anyone rational who needs explanations. W-b seems to be equating the Bosnians with the South Vietnamese quislings and US puppets, and the Serbs with the North Vietnamese. To put it mildly, this is far-fetched. Does w-b also want us to believe that *all* of South Vietnam was pro-American during the Vietnam war? This is an interesting twist. Wouldn't leftist aid to forces fighting imperialist and ethnic oppression have been welcome there? Perhaps w-b, writing about picketing Whitehall to "Save Bosnia" forgets the imperialist plans for a carve-up of Bosnia between "German" Croatia and British "Serbia". Alongside all this there is a flimsy accusation of class-collaboration against the Namibian section of the WI. Given w-b's line on Bosnia, it is impossible to take any characterization of his regarding "nationalism", bourgeois or not, seriously. The alleged split of the South African section from the WI comes way after any Bosnian effect, and can have nothing to do with this. More likely there are disagreements on the present strategy with respect to the question of the party. If w-b has any documents, we'd love to see them. The parting shot is the vaguest of the lot: >>considering what these scum were up to when Healy was alive Not a word of explanation or exemplification. Given the rabid anti-Muslim bias of the rest of the letter (whistle-blower's been watching some CIA films like Nostradamus or Iron Eagle), this is presumably a reference to economic ties to Libya and Khaddafi. But this sort of letter doesn't exactly thrust concrete examples and sound Marxist characterizations in our faces. Cliff Slaughter and the people (not just in the WRP) forming the core of Workers Aid were all leaders in the struggle to rid the party of Healy and his hangers-on in the eighties. And succeeded. >>With a warm comradely handshake, After a nasty piece of work like that letter, I'd think twice. Cheers, Hugh PS The Bosnian vs Serbian issue has split a number of parties in the Trotskyist movement. The question of whether the Serbs represent a degenerated workers' state that should be defended and the question of the validity for revolutionary Marxists of the Bosnian claim to national independence are not simple questions and deserve serious discussion. The kind of letter whistle-blower treated us to is not the kind of discussion we need on these issues. I think Dave B's tendency has strong views on this question -- perhaps he'd like to kick off on the relationship between the civil wars in Yugoslavia, the national question and internationalism. --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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