The Homeland Front in the “War on Terrorism”
Almost all
governments have unleashed new repression since 11 September, some
with US encouragement, some following American orders and others
because it suits their own interests. But while there is an overall
trend, it is not necessarily the same everywhere. This is for two
reasons.
First, this
new global situation does not cancel the basic difference between
the imperialist countries and the countries they oppress. As the
Declaration of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement
explains about the latter, “In these countries the exploitation
of the proletariat is severe, the outrages of imperialist domination
constant, and the ruling classes usually exercise their dictatorship
nakedly and brutally and even when they utilise the bourgeois-democratic
or parliamentary form their dictatorship is only very thinly veiled.”
It is significant that India, sometimes called the Third World’s
outstanding parliamentary democracy, has become an outstanding example
of open political repression with the “Prevention of Terrorism Act”.
This March 2002 law makes permanent a series of measures already
in force by presidential decree. It outlaws two Maoist organisations
engaged in armed struggle, the Maoist Communist Centre and the Communist
Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) (People’s War), which until now
were illegal only in the states where fighting has been focused.
Among other provisions, the law allows police to detain suspected
members or supporters of groups defined as “terrorist”, or even
people who unknowingly help them, for up to six months without trial.
Evidence can come from unidentified witnesses or from “confessions”
signed in police custody, even if not backed up in court. This simply
amounts to permission to torture. This is a very serious threat
to legal political activity and publications in the big cities.
But as a method of repression it is supplementary to the ongoing
police murder of revolutionaries in staged “encounters” and the
ordinary workings of a society where the broad masses of people,
especially in most of the countryside, in practice have no rights
at all.
Second, although
vicious and often violent campaigns against foreigners are now a
feature of most imperialist countries, from Scandinavia to Australia,
there are immediate reasons that necessitate a qualitative increase
in broader political repression in the countries most involved in
the new wars. This means above all the US and its close ally Britain,
although this trend is far from unique to these two states.
The New Political
Terrain in the US
Bush’s talk
about the “two fronts” in the “war against terrorism” is accurate:
in order to carry out their war against the world’s people, his
government has launched an unprecedented offensive on what he likes
to call “the home front”.
More than a
wave of repression, it involves what Revolutionary Communist Party
USA Chairman Bob Avakian has called, “a highly repressive social
and cultural agenda…. Sections of the ruling class, in particular
those that are right at the key levers of power now (the crew that’s
grouped around Bush – whoever’s actually running things), are now
setting the terms within the ruling class as a whole. And… there
is a feeling among this same crew that what they want to have happen,
and the kind of terms they want to set, within the US itself, has
got to be radically different than what it has been since the end
of the Cold War.” (Revolutionary Worker, 17 March 2002)
Three of the
main ingredients of this reactionary offensive are the mass detention
of immigrants, the overturning of what were formerly considered
democratic rights and a broad attempt to censor and stifle political,
social and cultural dissent.
Some legal
commentators note that the US has basically abolished habeas corpus
(the Anglo-American legal concept that people can only be imprisoned
if there is some basis in law to do so, and not just arbitrarily)
wherever American force can reach. This is also true for foreigners
in the United States itself.
Over 1,500
foreigners residing in the US were rounded up shortly after 11 September.
They come from Pakistan, Egypt, Turkey, Yemen and a very broad range
of countries on every continent. Many were beaten, abused and threatened
with military tribunals. Some were held in isolation, subject to
what an Amnesty International report called “cruel, inhuman and
degrading treatment”. The exact number of people detained, their
names, their location, the charges against them (if any) – all this
has been kept secret. On 15 February, the government said 327 people
would be kept in jail for violations of their immigration status
(often petty), and more than 100 for crimes allegedly uncovered
whilst they were imprisoned. Many have been deported. In addition,
the authorities drew up an initial list of 5,000 foreign-born people
to be subjected to aggressive FBI interrogation and other forms
of bullying and intimidation, although none of them were considered
to have violated any laws. The government has demanded the death
penalty against the only person residing in the US accused of any
connection to the 11 September events, Zacarias Moussaoui, a French
citizen who was in jail when the events occurred.
As an article
in the Revolutionary Worker (RW) pointed out, there
is a difference between these and similar mass roundups of the twentieth
century (the infamous Palmer raids in the early 1920s, when 4,000
immigrants suspected of being revolutionaries were jailed and many
deported, and the internment of 110,000 Japanese-Americans during
the Second World War). These latest outrages have been accompanied
by new laws that would make the constant threat of such treatment
a permanent fact of life in America. “Anti-terrorist” legislation,
passed with only one opposing vote in the US Congress, authorises
the government to hold foreigners in prison without charges indefinitely.
It also overturns
what the RW called “remaining vestiges of Fourth Amendment
[Constitutional] protection against search and seizure” by vastly
expanding the government’s legal powers to intercept communications,
search homes openly or secretly, monitor bank accounts and other
records and carry out other forms of surveillance. Prisoners are
no longer to be allowed to communicate privately with their counsel.
Organisations that are otherwise legal can be shut down if a member
is convicted of “terrorism”, even if the only evidence is a “confession”.
Previous restrictions against the use of the armed forces to perform
police actions within the US itself have been overturned, and the
President may now “deploy the military against organisations and
individuals domestically”, as the RW puts it.
This legislation
alone does not convey a full sense of the climate in a country where
a Bush spokesman direly warned, “People have to watch what they
say and watch what they do.” Demonstrations are met with official
threats, massive police deployments and sometimes attack. The use
of torture is discussed in scholarly terms in leading newspapers.
The government and the media (which in most cases seems to be the
same thing nowadays) have worked to whip up a lynch mob/pogromist
atmosphere among certain sections of the middle classes against
everything considered insufficiently patriotic, or even insufficiently
consistent with “Christian” (or sometimes “Judeo-Christian”) virtues.
The wife of the US Vice-President, Lynne Cheney, sponsored a report
entitled, “Defending Civilization: How Our Universities are Failing
America and What Can be Done About It”. It documented “professors
across the country [who] sponsored teach-ins that typically ranged
from moral equivocation to explicit condemnations of America” and
gave the names of 40 professors to be punished. “Multiculturalism”,
which refers to university teaching and research from the point
of view that white Christian men are not the centre of the universe,
has come under attack politically and practically. This has been
accompanied by a wave of racist, fascistic radio chat-show diatribes
against Arabs and/or Muslims.
The UK in
the Repression Vanguard
Although the
Blair government has not and could not stir up the same degree of
hysteria as in the US, in some ways it is ahead of the US in legislating
political repression. Its harsh anti-immigrant policies against
asylum seekers are hypocritical, since this is currently a main
form of immigration into a labour-hungry UK. The “Anti-Terrorism,
Crime and Security Act” passed in December permits non-citizens
to be detained indefinitely without charge or trial if the Home
Secretary “believes and suspects” them to be a national security
risk and/or a suspected “international terrorist”. This suspicion
may be based on secret evidence and then confirmed by a judicial
body that can hold hearings in secret, excluding the detainees and
their counsel, and basing its decision on secret evidence. The British
police already had wide powers to intercept communications in the
course of investigating alleged crimes. With this new legislation,
the authorities will keep records of all electronic communications,
regardless of any reason to suspect anything, in addition to their
other, more targeted monitoring activities.
This trend
is far from new in the UK. The “Anti-Terrorism Bill” of 2000 already
provided for people to be classified as “terrorists”, based not
on the seriousness of their alleged offence, but on their “political,
religious or ideological cause”. The authorities can interpret this
as they like and could use it against almost any variety of political
or social protest. The clause against “inciting overseas terrorism”
is specifically aimed at any form of support for proscribed national
liberation struggles and people’s wars, even verbal support, or
the wearing of a T-shirt. Much of this particular bill and the laws
and practices that proceeded it were aimed at the struggle against
British rule of Northern Ireland, where Britain has set world standards
for viciousness and arbitrary cruelty in the name of the law, including
imprisonment without trial.
Italy after
Genoa and 11 September
Italy has also
done its best to become involved in the war against Afghanistan,
particularly in terms of sending naval forces, as well as bombers
and troops. But as described in the Maoist publication Rossoperaio
(RO), October 2001, a particularity in Italy is the way in
which the post-11 September situation has allowed “the government
to face the consequences of Genoa [the mass anti-globalisation protests
of July 2001]. The Genoa days represented the entry of a new generation
onto the field, which has begun to redraw the map of social conflicts
and put a new force at the centre of a scene characterised by an
increasingly sharp class conflict (an end to concertazione
[labour union-employer ‘partnership’], the metal workers’ contracts,
etc., and a growing consciousness that it is right to rebel. The
war climate facilitates the bourgeoisie’s moves to criminalise this
movement and drive it off the political stage. It also helps justify
repression against the movement’s more advanced wing to be able
to target the movement and the proletariat separately and facilitate
the political and social reconstruction [the ruling class] has been
striving for….
“The new anti-terrorism
law calls for the persecution of foreign ‘terrorists’ even if they
have done nothing (a way to persecute the representatives of all
the movements for the liberation of oppressed countries). It also
calls for the extension of the use of wire-tapping and searches,
and arrests without any obvious crime.”
In the November-December
issue, RO continues: “In Italy, the Berlusconi government
first issued a decree establishing the crime of ‘international terrorism’,
punishable by 7-15 years in prison for ‘promoting, constituting,
organising, directing, leading, financing even indirectly, an association’
whose object is to attack another state or international organisation.…
In the course of an anti-terrorist investigation, the judicial police
can imprison people for 48 hours as an emergency preventative measure….
This is a royal invitation to the forces of order, who before and
after Genoa were carrying out generalised repression against social
[protest] centres, immigrants, workers, revolutionary groups and
anyone protesting against the way things are today, to clear them
out through searches and arrests.”
What the
Future Holds
How far the
imperialists and other reactionaries go in these attacks against
the people cannot presently be predicted. It depends on many factors,
including the unfolding of the war situation, the blows waged against
them on the battlefield and people’s resistance at home. But if
the present situation is interpreted only in light of the immediate,
“peacetime” past, we will fail to grasp its potential horrors –
and the potential for revolution.
The more evil
the imperialists do, the more they make it possible to unite the
world’s people against them, despite the difficulties in the situation,
and the more they drop their mask and resort to open repression
and terror, the more they provide the context to make it clear just
what their rule rests on and what it will take to overthrow them.
Guantanamo:
America’s “Ground Zero” for Repression
When it comes
to administering its empire, the basic rule the US wants everyone
to understand is that there are no rules. The concentration camp
in Guantanamo, Cuba, is a model – a model in miniature and an extreme
one, but very real – of the US’s self-proclaimed right to disregard
international law, trample on the sovereignty of other states and
exercise brutal dictatorship over those who get in its way.
Some 300 men
of 26 nationalities are reportedly held at this American naval base
on land seized from Cuba when the US occupied the island in the
early twentieth century. Journalists are not allowed to see the
prisoners. According to sparse press accounts, they are confined
in rows of wire cages measuring 2.4 by 2.4 metres with corrugated
metal roofs, exposed to the tropical sun during the day and damp
breezes at night, with a bucket for a toilet. They are never out
of sight of their captors. Exercise time is limited to a maximum
of two 15-minute sessions a week. When taken out of their cells,
they are chained hand and foot and their faces are hooded. US officials
say that FBI and US military personnel are interrogating them. Two-thirds
of the Guantanamo prisoners went on hunger strike against humiliating
regulations on 27 February. They challenged rules against “talking
loudly” by chanting and threw objects out of their cells. Many resumed
eating after winning some concessions, such as the right to wear
glasses, and to cover their heads during prayer, whilst others were
eventually drugged and force-fed.
Under the Geneva
international conventions (which even Nazi Germany abided by when
it came to American and British prisoners), prisoners of war may
be detained for the duration of hostilities but not punished for
having been soldiers. The US refuses to recognise these captives
as prisoners of war. Instead, some or all will be sent before military
tribunals, where American officers (answerable to their own military
superiors) can decide who to execute. The US announced that if any
happen to be acquitted they may be kept in Guantanamo indefinitely.
“If we don’t have any interest in a person, we’ll let them go,”
a US Defence Department official bragged.
The US does
not consider this a temporary situation. The camp is being expanded.
As of early April, hundreds of prisoners at two US military camps
in Afghanistan were waiting shipment to Cuba, and the FBI was grabbing
other potential Guantanamo inmates in Pakistan and elsewhere.
Conditions
for prisoners in Afghanistan being held by warlords under US authority
are far worse. An account of a visit to Jowzjan jail (New York
Times, 15 March 2002) describes a scene more like a death camp
than an internment centre. Most of the 3,000 men there are soldiers
and civilians who surrendered to the US-led forces after the battle
of Kunduz in late 2001, when they were told they would be turned
over to the United Nations. American soldiers brought them to this
prison camp, sorted out some for Guantanamo, and left the rest to
die slowly. They are held 75 men to a cell in 40 cells, with no
medical attention for their wounds and with the sole prospect slow
starvation. (The official explanation given to the reporter was
plain enough: the new US-installed government has not allocated
food rations for them.) American military officials say that about
8,000 prisoners are being held in camps in Afghanistan.
Further, carrying
out torture and murder through third countries, a practise the US
has increasingly resorted to in the last few years, has now become
all but official US policy. Dozens of people have been kidnapped
in various Asian countries and taken secretly to third countries,
often Egypt and Jordan, where their American captors or their local
apprentices can torture or murder them freely. “Since September
11, these sorts of movements have been occurring all the time”,
a US diplomat was quoted as saying.