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THE COVER STORY |
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Within a few days of the opening of NATO's Balkans bombing campaign public meetings had been called and the first demonstrations organised. The contrast with Russia's brutal war on the Chechen's is stark. by Mark Osborn |
Five months into the war there has not yet been a single protest against the Russian war with more than 20 people on it.
Why the difference? (And especially as the issues are quite clear - or at least less complex than the Balkans - and the Russian violence is spectacular and extreme).
No doubt many simply feel that as Chechnya is a long way away, and as this is not a war "our" government is directly involved in we have, consequently, less responsibility to act and less opportunity to make a difference. These are real - if unforgiveable - factors.
But not the whole story. There is a political reluctance among those who normally initiate anti-war campaigns - the CNDers, Labour left MPs, the Morning Star, the various Trotskyist groupings and fragments - to move on the question. Some of the Stalinists are more than reluctant: they actually support the Russian war. The broad left sympathises with, or is reluctant to oppose, former "socialist" states, even long after the collapse of the Eastern Bloc.
This "campism" dates from the time when the Kremlin taught the left that the key class struggle was taking place between the Cold War blocs, rather than between the workers and the ruling class. A lingering "left-wing" fondness for Russia has survived. Its flip-side is a knee-jerk, blanket anti-Americanism and a longing for some state to stand up to the US, filling the role that the USSR used to have.
The problem with this type of politics is two-fold: it fades the working class out of the picture; it ignores the issues being fought over. Two not unimportant matters for the real socialists.
These disorienting politics mean, for example, that some socialists responded to the Balkans war by vigorously opposing outside help for the oppressed Kosovars, and then, three months later, demanding Western intervention against the Indonesian state in favour of the East Timorese (or, in the case of the British SWP, by going quiet on the issue). The issues were essentially the same: should the left call on the West to intervene in favour of an oppressed people facing obliteration? Some answered one way over the Balkan war and the opposite way over East Timor. The explanation for the flip-flopping is that many believe Milosevic's rump Yugoslav state is somehow "ours", to be "defended against imperialism". And, as the Indonesian military is a friend of the US's, we must do all we can to oppose it (and help their enemies, the East Timorese).
There is still a reluctance to recognise imperialist aggression when it is not carried out by America or states traditionally in the US's anti-Soviet bloc. Serbia, apparently, cannot be imperialist, despite its role in the wars which destroyed Yugoslavia and its former colonial relationship to the ethnic Albanians of Kosova - because it is too small, it still maintains "socialist" nationalised property, it has a leader, Milosevic, who comes out of the "Communist" movement, it used to be a "socialist" state under Tito. Those that fight "our side", the Kosovars, are our enemies, or can be ignored as "right wingers" who are "funded by the CIA".
Russia can not be imperialist because, well, it's Russia. The Stalinist Morning Star has dealt with the Chechen crisis by trying to ignore it. When it does comment it prints press statements from the Yeltsin-Putin government (which it opposes; its friends in Russia are the nationalist, anti-Semitic rump Russian Communist Party). The connection, of course, is that the Russian CP supports the government's war policy and both the Russian CP and the Morning Star hope that Russia will rise again to confront the US.
This class campism made absolutely no sense for real socialists even when the Stalinists sat in the Kremlin and flew the Red Flag. In those days the British left did little to oppose the Russian war in Afghanistan and many denounced the Polish workers' organisation, Solidarnosc, as a "stooge of the CIA and the Catholic church". Now, with Russia under Mafia capitalism, perhaps the left can re-assess. Part of that re-assessment must be to make solidarity with the Chechens.
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