1. The Coordinating Committee of the Balkan Socialist Center ”Christian Rakovsky” had an Emergency Meeting on December 14-15, 2002 to discuss the crisis situation in the Middle East; the U.S- led imperialist war drive against Iraq and the tasks of the revolutionary forces in the region. Founded in the aftermath of the NATO war against Yugoslavia in 1999 to fight against imperialist intervention and the local chauvinist cliques on a revolutionary internationalist basis, our Center had to extend in the following years the scope of its activities to include the Middle East and the post Soviet space as the Balkan wars of the ’90s were only a transition to a new wider round of international confrontations between imperialism and the oppressed popular masses in the region and internationally. For the forces united in this Center revolutionary internationalism, now more than ever before, is the only way out from the crisis.
2. As the U.N. arms inspection process reaches its end, tension is mounting.
65.000 U.S troops are already in the Gulf; Apache gunships, tanks and armored vehicles have been deployed; new U.S military bases have been established in northern Kuwait; the other U.S./NATO bases in the region are already on alert.
Paul Wolfovitz in his recent visit to Ankara presented to the Turkish authorities the U.S. requests for an eventual attack on Iraq: use of Turkish air space, military bases and harbors, permission for U.S. troops to launch an operation from Turkish territory bordering Northern Iraq and active involvement of Turkish troops in the offensive. Washington has asked for permission to station up to 90,000 troops in southern Turkey, CBC reported. A convoy of U.S. military equipment has entered South Kurdistan via Turkey in preparation of the attack, a Turkish news agency reported on Dec 16, 2002. The former deputy chief of the Turkish Armed Forces General Cevik Bir has called the United States for a military occupation of Iraq which, from Ankara’s viewpoint, he said, is the best plan of action to control the country as it did with Germany after World War II.
In preparation for the “change of regime” in Baghdad, a Conference of the so-called “Iraqi Opposition” summoned by the CIA and the State Department is gathering in London these days. The Conference was decided already in Washington last August following meetings between senior US officials and representatives of the Iraqi National Congress (sponsored by the US Defense department but distrusted by the CIA, created by the remnants of the former regime, the butchers of communists and Kurds), the CIA sponsored Iraqi National Accord, the Shiite Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the Constitutional Monarchy Movement, which wants a restoration of the Hashemite dynasty in Iraq and the two Kurdish Parties, the Kurdistan Democratic Party of Barzani and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan of Talabani. While the first four Iraqi groups have no real basis in Iraq, the Kurdish Parties have established from a long period a social basis in South Kurdistan. U.S imperialism which want to make the world believe that all opponents of the regime are on its side and is alarmed by the infighting among these groups, send its officials from the US State Department, the Pentagon and the National Security Council to London to mediate between them. The emissary of U.S. President George W. Bush is Zalmad Alizad. After some delay the Conference reached an agreement in preparation for a transitional government in the post war period and formed a 65 members committee.
Neither imperialism and its stooges, with their hypocritical concern on “democracy and human rights” nor the local oppressive regime can bring democratic freedoms, peace and social justice to the Iraqi people. The emancipation of the workers and of the oppressed peoples can be achieved only by their own independent revolutionary struggle.
It is clear that the danger of barbarism threatening the humankind by a crisis ridden world capitalist system in its advance imperialist decay is real and immediate and necessitates the urgent mass mobilization and mass actions of the international working class and of the oppressed popular masses of the region and of the entire world to be defeated.
3. The extension of the threats to other countries-targets and the scope of the war preparations demonstrate the world character both of the source and of the aims of the imperialist war drive. The driving force is the world crisis of capitalism in decline, the intensification of its tendencies towards self-dissolution, in an unprecedented crisis o over-accumulation of capital. The deflationary spiral is unfolded in all the metropolitan centers, in Japan, America and Europe. The financial crises of the late ’90s and the bursting of the financial bubble in which finance globalization has led are transformed into the collapse of the “new dot.com” economy in US and internationally, the disintegration of big industry, as in Italy and Europe, and into the collapse of the social organization of entire countries, as in Argentina. The explosion of the world contradictions of capital, the historical weakness of the system and not the strength of the “Empire”, as the myth goes, is behind the war drive. Imperialist war becomes the desperate attempt to militarily save a bankrupt world economic system.
The strategic aim of U.S. imperialism is not limited in the occupation of Iraq and the control of its rich oil resources. It strives to control the oilfields in Iraq, Middle East, Caucasus and Central Asia as part of a strategy to re-shape the political map of the whole region, to submit its vulnerable imperialist rivals in the European Union, preventing its attempts to become a superpower challenging American hegemony, and, last but not least to re-colonize the vast space of the former Soviet Union and China, the regions where capital was expropriated by the October Revolution of 1917 and the Chinese Revolution of 1949.
But imperialism’s offensive exacerbates all the contradictions. An already destabilized Middle East will become even more chaotic with the crisis exploding in such traditional bastions of imperialist interests in the region such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt, with Iran, Syria and Yemen to be immediately involved as well in the maelstrom.
4. Turkey, which is economically bankrupt and has its political system in ruins as the last elections demonstrate, has expressed its deep fear that an independent Kurdish State emerges as a result of the war on Iraq demands and receives guaranties by U.S. imperialism that such an eventuality will be prevented and any attempt to a Kurdish political independence will be crashed by U.S and Turkish intervention. In order to keep South Kurdistan under threat and occupy it, if it becomes necessary, Turkey mobilized its troops and made concentrated military forces at the border of Iraq. It is obvious, in this sense, that the future for the struggle for the national emancipation of the Kurdish people, including the future of its gains in South Kurdistan, is not at all bound to but threatened by the false promises, alongside the threats and pressures, given to the Kurdish leaderships by the imperialists, as the tragic results from the recent and remote past show; the national independence of the Kurdish people necessitates the united struggle of the Kurdish people together with the Iraqi Arab people and all the peoples in the region to defeat imperialism and its war plans. South Kurdistan has to be defended against imperialism and against the attacks and oppression by the local regimes in Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Syria as a basis for the struggle for a United, Free and Socialist Kurdistan and not as a springboard for CIA operations and imperialist military aggression.
The fraud propagated by the European imperialists and Ankara that in preparation for Turkey’s entry in the EU “human rights” will extend not only to the Turkish but also to the Kurdish population as well in the North Kurdistan - the fraud of “democratization” which is assisted now by the open capitulation of Ocalan and his Party- has to be totally rejected. They used it to win Kurdish support to their war plans and afterwards they will turn openly against all the rights of the Kurds. The denial of the right of national self-determination of the Kurdish people and the fragmentation of Kurdistan by imperialism and the occupation of its segments between Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria is central for the imperialist order in the Middle East. The fight to overthrow this barbaric order and the struggle for Kurdish independence are insolubly connected.
5. The imperialists want, using as axis this reactionary war, to re-shape the map of the Middle East. At its door, in divided Cyprus, they urgently advanced the UN plan for a Bosnia-like NATO protectorate - a recipe for disaster for both communities, Greek and Turkish Cypriot alike. The role not only of US imperialism but also of the European Union is obvious. The entry in the EU of Cyprus as well as of Turkey is used as a mechanism to impose the imperialist plans and interests in the region, transforming the island into a huge NATO basis for interventions in the Middle East. We call for the rejection of this conspiracy and for a united struggle of both communities
6. There is no doubt that the center of the Middle East crisis is the Palestinian Question. The Zionists, despite the use of their terror State machine, failed to defeat the heroic new Intifada of the Palestinian people and now they openly threaten to use the coming war against Iraq for their plans of “transfer”, of ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population of the territories. We call for a continuous campaign for solidarity to the Palestinian people, for the defeat of Zionism, the victory of the Intifada, the unity between the Palestinian Arab national movement and the Jewish workers and poor, for the establishment of a United, Socialist Republic in the entire historic territory of Palestine.
Against imperialism’s strategy to reshape the Middle East by “divide and rule” on the barbaric reactionary basis of its interests we have to counter-pose an international revolutionary strategy for the unification of the region on a revolutionary basis in a Socialist Federation of the Middle East.
7. We have to fight for a strategy and a revolutionary program against the imperialist war both in the region and internationally. Already a powerful anti-war movement has been developed both in Europe, where mass demonstrations have taken place, such the half a million demonstration in London and the one million strong demonstration in Florence. This movement has to overcome the political limitations imposed on it by the professional pacifists and the pro-imperialist center-leftists of the World and European ‘Social Forums’ who call for the “re-orientation of the national and EU institutions” and the “empowerment of the institutions of international legitimacy such as the United Nations”. It is precisely these bourgeois and imperialist institutions that are the centers for the preparation and legitimacy of vicious attacks against workers and peoples all over the world, including the coming war in the Middle East. Peace can be achieved only through a resolute struggle against these institutions, against the bourgeois government in “our own country”, for its overthrow by the masses and the establishment of workers power, against NATO, the EU and their instrument, the UN, for their revolutionary dissolution and the socialist unification of Europe and the entire world.
We call the workers in Europe and the United States to mobilize against the imperialist war, organizing demonstrations and strikes against the movement of troops and of military material, surrounding the US and NATO bases, demanding their expulsion.
We call the workers and the popular masses in Turkey, Syria, Iran, in all the Arab countries and the Muslim world to stand by the side of the Iraqi people and defend it with mass actions against the imperialist aggressors. Against imperialism and its international coalition of State terrorists waging a worldwide infamous “war on terror”, the most important weapon that we need to forge is a new, workers revolutionary International, a task that for many of us coincides with the struggle for the re-foundation of the Fourth International.
The Coordinating Committee of the Balkan Socialist Center ‘Christian Rakovsky”
Athens, December 15, 2002
Workers Revolutionary Party/EEK (Greece)
Marxist Workers League-Turkey
Socialist Workers League- Palestine
Kurdistan Liberation Party- Rizgari
Marxist Workers League- Finland
Workers Party/ Partido Obrero - Argentina
Note: In the Emergency Meeting of the Coordinating Committee of the Balkan Socialist Center “Christian Rakovsky” on December 14-15,2002 participated representatives from EEK (Greece), MWL (Turkey), SWL (Palestine), Rizgari (Kurdistan). The Nucleo Marx (Romania) sent a message of support but it was not possible to participate for technical reasons. For technical reasons as well the representatives from Russia could not take part. The Marxist Workers League of Finland and the Partido Obrero of Argentina participated as observers and supporters of the political work of the Center.