those who fought against apartheid — however brutal their methods — were the flip side of the State?
What about those who fought the French in Algeria? Or those who fought the Nazis? Or those who fought colonial regimes? Or those who are fighting the US occupation of Iraq? Are they the flip side of the State?
This facile new reportdriven 'human rights' discourse, this meaningless condemnation game that we are all forced to play, makes politicians of us all and leaches the real politics out of everything.
However pristine we would like to be, however hard we polish our halos, the tragedy is that we have run out of pristine choices.
There is a civil war in Chhattisgarh sponsored, created by the India is about to Chhattisgarh government, which is become a police publicly pursing the Bush doc- state in which trine: if you're not everybody who with us, you are disagrees with with the terrorists. what's going on
The lynchpin of this war, apart risks being from the formal
called a security forces, is the Salva Judum terrorist.
- a governmentbacked militia of ordinary people forced to take up arms, forced to become SPOs (special police officers).
The Indian State has tried this in Kashmir, in Manipur, in Nagaland. Tens of thousands have been killed, hundreds of thousands tortured, thousands have disappeared.
Any banana republic would be proud of this record. Now the government wants gies into the heartland.
Thousands of adivasis have been forcibly moved off their mineral-rich lands into police camps. Hundreds of villages have been forcibly evacuated.
Those lands, rich in ironore, are being eyed by corporations like the Tatas and Essar. Mous have been signed, but no one knows what they say. Land acquisition has begun.. Of course it's horrible that 55 policemen were killed. But they're as much the victims of government policy as anybody else.
For the government and the corporations they're just cannon fodder there's plenty more where they came from. ..
For the Maoist guerrillas, the police and SPOs they killed were the armed personnel of the Indian State, the
main, hands-on perpetrators of repression, torLUTC, custodial killings, false encounters. They're not innocent civilians - if such thing exists - by any stretch of imagination. I have no doubt that the Maoists can be agents of terror and coercion too. I have no doubt they have committed unspeakable atrocities.
I have no doubt they cannot lay claim to undisputed support from local people - but who can?
Still, no guerrilla army can survive without local support. That's a logistical impossibility. And the support for Maoists is growing, not Terry Conway Pakistan has figured rather a lot in the British press rather a lot over recent weeks following the murder of the team's cricket coach in the West Indies during the World cup. But you have to go to the Pakistani media to see the much more significant political tale that it has overshadowed. On March 9 Pakistan's President Musharaff suspended the Lord Chief Justice, Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry, accusing him in vague terms of misconduct and the abuse of power. It was not until several weeks after the dismissal he concretised the accusation by saying that Chaudry had used his influence to have his son to a key government position.
General Musharaff's real concern was that the country's judiciary were showing increasing political independence from his autocratic regime, a problem for him in election year. He wants to legalise his own reelection without giving up his post as head of the army.
At stake is not just a question of pride but something rather more fundamental as he seeks to extend his already illegitimate term of office beyond the eight and a half years of misery it has already lasted.
Chaudry was placed under house arrest and lawyers protesting in Lahore against his suspension were baton charged and tear gassed by police. An independent TV station in Islamabad was also attacked by police.
The British media tends to suggest that Musharaff's opponents are all Islamists. Thus they seem to swallow the message that this friend of Bush and Blair wants them to -that however unsavoury he may be the alternatives are so much
Benazir Bhutto's Pakistan People Party and Nawaz Sharif's Muslim League, ie the two main parliamentary parties in the country, banded together in July last year to form the Alliance for the Restoration of Democracy (ARD). They called for a day of concerted protest against the regime on Monday March 26
At least 1000 oppositionists were arrested in advance of the protests in an attempt to intimidate them and threats were made that no one would be allowed onto the streets but in the end the demonstrations were allowed to proceed. 5000 marched in Lahore, 4,000 in Karachi and 3,000 in Quetta.
Peshawar on the other hand saw an interesting test of strength between the fundamentalists and other. The leader of Pakistan's coalition of Islamic parties (Muttahida Majlis e Amal, MMA), Qazi Hussain Ahmed, told about 1,000 supporters that Musharrat had violated the constitution. A separate public meeting held by secular parties in Peshawar spearheaded by the Awami League attracted 6,000.
This is the context in which the Labour Party Pakistan decided to postpone its planned Congress in order to join the protests on March 26
General Secretary Farooq Tarig told a press conference on March 22:
"We welcome ARD's decision not to go along with the religious fundamentalists during the movement. The MMA, the main alliance of the religious forces, has cooperated with the military regime at every crucial times. They will again back down at decisive times" Faroq Tarig told the media.
"We support the movement of the advocates because they have challenged the writ of the regime in a very effective way. We welcome the decisions of the chief justice Iftikhar Choudry in favour of the working class but want to make it clear that we are not in the movement to make oneperson hero; this is a movement to overthrow the military regime.
We appeal to the trade unions, radical social organizations and progressive political parties to unit and launch a mass movement against the regime. We have not used a different day than that of ARD as we want to have a united movement."
page 20 of the scan
Following his recent successful visit to Britain in February, on March 18 NSSP leader Dr
OPEN AS
END STARVATION In last month's Socialist Resistance we reported on the launch of a new campaign on the question of Sri Lanka, Solidarity for Peace. The campaign organised an impressive picket at the Foreign Office on