File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/97-02-21.035, message 46


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.




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