Wednesday, January 4, 2012

Mixing the smell of life With the smell of sweat Bartering life’s vicissitudes With timmur



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From: Sivanandam Sivasegaram <sivasegaram@yahoo.com>
Date: Tue, Jan 3, 2012 at 11:31 PM
Subject: ND 43
To: Sivasegaram <sivasegaram@yahoo.com>


Dear Friends
Please find attached the MS Word & PDF versions of ND 43.
Sincerely
Siva
  
   Mani Thapa, Jose Maria Sison
Editorial ● NDP Diary ● Sri Lankan Events ● World Events  
________________________________________________
Website: www.ndpsl.org Gamaliharu 
Mani Thapa 
Gamaliharu
1
Mixing the smell of life 
With the smell of sweat 
Bartering life's vicissitudes 
With timmur
2
 seeds 
Breaking head inside the quarries 
For roofing other's houses 
Swallowing salt-mixed porridge barely for the self 
While cooking potatoes for the world: 
The story of Gamalis 
Used to sound strange, it used to sound time-worn 
Haven't these faces came from some forest? 
Aren't these famine-ravaged ugly faces? 
Aren't these outlines pressed hard by landslides? 
It seemed they were, they did really seem exotic 
Seem as though the pressure of work caused the loss of their identity 
Seem as though they're searching Gaam after the loss of their identity 
Seem as though they've turned refugees after their Gaam's been looted 
Seem ever helpless: seem ever estranged 
Seem energy-less; seem as though they've lost their moon 
The narrative of Gamalis 
Looked like a kitchen with uncooked porridge. 
It was not written on any limestone: 
Their names and the name of the village they came from 
It was not discovered in any voter list 
Their name and name of the village they came from 
Seemed as though their country's been looted; their form's been looted 
Shedding blood ever inside the timmur bush 
Shedding tears ever on bamboo shoots 
Cow dung all in fingernails 
(Continued on inside back cover) From the Editor's Desk 
The Report of the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission has been 
released an year later than initially scheduled. It is unlikely, however, that it will 
appease the US and its allies, despite their formal welcoming of its release.  
The mandate of the LLRC was too restricted to give it room to deal with the 
roots of the national question or investigate issues of war crimes and human 
rights violations. It was this weakness that made organisations representing 
the Tamil people, reputed human rights organisations and the Tamil public 
unwilling to appear before the LLRC. Some did eventually give evidence amid 
intimidation by pro-government goons, only to place their views on record.  
Despite boastful government claims about what the LLRC would achieve, 
the Report, besides ducking issues that could challenge chauvinistic 
hegemony, has gone on to express biased views about war crimes and 
declare that no war crimes had been committed by the armed forces. 
Meantime, it has eluded the question of the thousands who have been 
abducted or gone missing, denied due weight to evidence placed before it on 
arrests, abductions, and, disappearances, and not made recommendations 
based on the evidence. 
The Report has not even hinted at any meaningful way to provide the Tamil 
people— who continue to suffer the destruction and misery caused by the war 
—with the necessary relief, reconstruction and rehabilitation. It does, however, 
admit that the Tamil people have problems, but avoids identifying them or 
assessing their gravity. The LLRC, rather than seeking ways to find short and 
long term solutions to the problems, has concentrated its efforts on 
rationalising the conduct of the armed  forces, thereby, effectively endorsing 
the chauvinism of the government and its brutal conduct of the war. 
The LLRC has also been selective in handling information accessible to it, 
and gone out of its way to denounce various international organisations like 
the Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch for refusing to appear 
before it in protest of its limited mandate, and to reject the Channel 4 
documentary on war crimes as faked. It has also claimed that there is no case 
for the Sri Lankan government or its armed forces to answer on matters of war 
crimes and violation of human rights. 
What is overwhelmingly clear is that the LLRC, in order to exonerate the 
state and the armed forces of all wrongdoing and defend them against 
international pressure, has opted to gloss over issues of central importance to 
the national question and matters relating to the conduct of the war. Thus, it 
seems that the LLRC has done what it has been commissioned to do, namely 
to blame the LTTE and the Norwegians for the crash of the peace process and 
thereby justify the resumption of the war by the Rajapaksa government.  Whether or not the LLRC Report would help to ease external pressure on 
the government on the questions of human rights and war crimes, the point to 
note is that the cruel war seems to have no useful lessons to the LLRC on the 
gravity of the national question. What the Report contains is biased opinion 
blind to all evidence to the contrary. 
The terms of reference of the LLRC cast doubts on the fairness of the 
investigation. The contents of the Report and the favourable response of the 
chauvinistic media have vindicated those fears. The Report will of course help 
the government to dodge the basic issues in the short and the long terms. 
That is unsurprising since no commission appointed thus far to inquire into 
major national issues has yielded results, as their purpose has not been to 
solve problems but to avoid dealing with them. What is sad is that, given the 
callous indifference of the government towards the national question, even the 
wishy-washy recommendations of the LLRC on 'demilitarisation' of society, 
detentions, armed militias, devolution of power and new Sinhalese settlements 
in the North-East— with no mention of power over of police and land to 
provincial governments —are unlikely to be acted upon. 
The Report has come amid external pressure based on charges of war 
crimes and human rights violations as well as growing mass disaffection with 
government on a variety of issues including education, health, social services, 
wages, unemployment, soaring prices  and the rising cost of living. The 
government will use each unfavourable foreign response to the Report to 
accuse the 'International Community' of being unfair and to deflect attention 
from the issues facing the people by arguing the need to defend the 
sovereignty of the country against foreign and Tamil nationalist conspiracy. 
Thus, the various shades of Tamil nationalists, by openly appealing to 
foreign powers to intervene in the national question, will only add to the 
credibility of the claims of the Rajapaksa regime while letting themselves to be 
used in the schemes of the regional hegemon and the imperialist West to 
dominate Sri Lanka, with no eventual benefit to the Tamil people.   
In this context, the left and progressive elements among the Sinhalese 
have a major responsibility in preventing foreign forces from taking advantage 
of the national question to serve their purpose of domination over Sri Lanka. 
They have the historical responsibility of defeating the reactionary chauvinist 
forces among the Sinhalese.  By addressing the national question in a way 
that defends the rights of the Tamil, Muslim and Hill Country Tamils against 
chauvinist oppression they will not only help the minority nationalities to reject 
their archaic, reactionary and bankrupt leaders who have for too long 
dominated their affairs but also strengthen the struggle of the Sinhalese to 
rescue the fast eroding democracy and social justice in the country and to 
defend the country against foreign domination and control. 
***** Culture as Imperialist Tool  
to Hegemonise  
the People of the World
COMRADE E. THAMBIAH 
[Draft text of paper by Comrade E Thambiah, International Organiser, 
New-Democratic Marxist Leninist Party for presentation at the 3
rd
 AntiImperialist International Conference, Dhaka, Bangladesh, 27-29 
November 2011] 
It is now clear that globalisation of imperialism or imperialist globalisation is a 
new phase of imperialism which was born out of imperialist crisis and has in 
no way invalidated the scientific findings of Karl Marx or the definition of 
imperialism by Lenin. If at all it has only confirmed the findings of these great 
teachers. 
Imperialism is the main enemy not only to Marxists but also to each and 
every human being who desires a life free of all manner of hegemony, 
discrimination and exploitation and wishes to preserve all good things in 
nature for future generations. 
We have little time to waste on mischievous attempts to discredit the 
scientific findings and interpretations  of imperialism by Marxists, although 
there are times when such mischief has to be exposed. The anti-imperialist 
task facing us is very important at both theoretical and practical levels and its 
implementation needs the broadest possible mass base and its building up 
must be in a revolutionary sprit enabling the unity and broadest possible 
participation of the people of the world. 
Broad-based alliances also need to take into account the objective reality 
about the forces that could be united against imperialism. For example, the 
national bourgeois class under classic colonialism played a major role in 
freeing nations from the colonial domination. However, with the emergence of 
neo-colonialism and imperialist globalisation in the post-colonial era, the 
national bourgeoisie have lost their anti-imperialist potential and submitted to 
imperialism. In the face of local and international economic challenges in the postcolonial era, which soon became the neo-colonial era, the nationalist elite who 
took over the regime from the colonial masters became increasingly 
oppressive towards the people. In course of time, the oppressive nationalist 
elite have become willing to surrender the sovereignty of their nations to fit the 
imperialist agenda in return for support and protection by the imperialists from 
their own people. 
Amid the global surrender by nationalist rulers, a section of the nationalist 
elite, although void of anti-imperialist substance, continued with faked antiimperialist posturing. Such nationalist rulers are being weeded out by 
imperialism by taking advantage of their anti-people, anti-democratic and antihuman-rights records. The process of weeding does not stop at the defeat or 
annihilation of individual oppressors but proceeds to bring the entire nation 
and its people under the heels of Imperialism. 
Thus, unlike during classic colonialism and the early post-colonial period 
when neo-colonialism took shape, nations and people of the world now face a 
complex situation in confronting imperialism manifesting itself as imperialist 
globalisation and neo-colonialism. 
It is important to note in this context that imperialism, besides penetrating 
the farthest reaches of  economics, politics, political economy and political 
geography, has also penetrated culture in every country within its reach. 
Karl Marx explained that culture was a superstructure built by the dominant 
classes and that it exercised hegemony over the entire social life in order to 
ensure economic exploitation of the oppressed classes by the dominant 
classes.  
Several Marxist teachers have dealt extensively with cultural domination of 
capitalism and imperialism. Recent studies provide detailed evidence of how 
imperialism has by means of globalisation penetrated nation states, mass 
organisations, liberation struggles and exercises hegemony over the minds of 
people through pervasive cultural industries. 
It is broadly accepted that culture produces values without coercion which 
are shared without mediation of exchange value for the satisfaction of the 
common needs of the people, including aesthetic values. Culture, being an 
aesthetic and intellectual product, is considered as a means of communication 
and social practice through which meaning and values are produced and 
disseminated. 
National culture could manifest itself in an anti-colonial nationalist form or 
as ethnic nationalism and macro world culture. Imperialism has now very 
much commoditised culture and has supplemented if not substituted the 
minimum cultural values based on market needs to establish its hegemony through an imposed culture and by posing cultural issues in ways favourable 
to imperialist globalisation. 
In these circumstances we are obliged to take a closer view of at least the 
basic aspects of culture of globalisation.  
1.  Culture as commodity
Cultural products are brought to market as saleable commodities and 
thereby ignoring their intrinsic social values. 
Although there is national and transnational collaboration in commoditising 
cultural products, there is pressure to register cultural products and 
creations directly or indirectly as intellectual property nationally as well as 
internationally through the World Trade Organisation, a major instrument of 
imperialist globalisation. Consequently, even rural folk culture comes under 
imperialist monopoly.  
2. Consumerism as life style 
Day to day life centres on consumerism. The market decides consumption, 
urging the spending entire earnings on consumer goods and pressing for 
increased earnings to meet the demands of consumption. Electronic media 
in the form of television and internet communication networking has 
invaded all homes to push people further into consumerism. Market forces 
not only condition choice in household necessities but also alter values of 
lived life, consumption patterns and even matters of human desire like love 
and sex.  
3. Individualism as life style
In order to achieve macro-scale impact on culture, imperialism destroys the 
finer or micro-scale values of human life. Individualism is promoted under 
globalisation by projecting the life-style and attitudes of the affluent classes 
as the norm thereby weakening collectivism and shared public interests. 
Many left intellectuals have fallen victim to individualist social practice to 
become bourgeois intellectuals. What used to be voluntary social work has 
been transformed into projects of non-governmental organisations which 
promote personal profit and individualism, particularly among intellectuals. 
Individualism disunites the people, nations and working people. When 
pitted against collective interest, it makes society an incohesive collection 
of individuals and thereby undermines resistance to social injustice.  
4. The nation state as corporate body under imperialism 
Nation states, following liberation from colonial rule, were progressive and 
independent until the process of globalisation gathered momentum, and 
today most nation states depend on imperialism for their survival. Imperialism has designated the nation  state the role of a corporate body 
that would implement imperialist globalisation, thus rendering meaningless 
all nationalist claims to sovereignty, integrity and independence. 
Meanwhile, 'new' political thoughts are introduced into the nationalist 
agenda to accommodate imperialism.  
5. Human rights as imperialist weapon
It is imperialism, more than dictatorial nation states in the neo-colonies, 
which nakedly violates human rights and humanitarian laws, while claiming 
to propagate human rights through the UN and its agencies as well as local 
and international political NGOs. 
The imperialist agenda for human rights generally reduces issues of human 
rights to mere studies and confines struggles for human rights to matters of 
litigation and pressurising. 
Where imperialism uses human rights as a basis for 'regime change' 
through encouraging dissident forces or by invading the country, the human 
rights issues invariably concern capitalist interests. NGOs play a role in 
creating a local political climate conducive to a 'regime change' that suits 
imperialist interests.  
6. 'Cultural shocks' and 'cultural mediators'
The 'cultural shocks' and 'cultural mediators' under globalisation are not 
what one has in mind in discussions to exchange progressive culture or 
progressive cultural adaptation. 
Cultural globalisation has its agenda of 'cultural shocks' and 'cultural 
mediation' which seek to eradicate the lived values of culture and to 
substitute them with values of corporate or market culture to exercise 
hegemony on the minds of the people in order that they accept imperialist 
globalisation as inevitable destiny. 
Cultural shocks include the marketing of Valentine's Day as a celebration at 
international level and the promotion  of gay rights in counterproductive 
ways. War, torture, butchery and other crude forms of violence are either 
glorified or transformed into 'entertainment' by powerful propagation in 
order that people are conditioned to accept them as normal if not justifiable 
events. 
Besides bourgeois intellectuals, propagators of postmodernism serve as 
cultural mediators of imperialism, either knowingly or by participation in 
well-paid projects work. Postmodernist rejection of all existing values brings 
them close the cultural agenda of imperialist globalisation, so that 
postmodernists, implicitly or explicitly, end up promoting the culture of 
globalisation.  There are several more aspects to  the culture of globalisation that go 
against freedom of humanity and remain to be addresses. The present 
survey it is hoped draws sufficient attention to the threat posed by the 
culture of globalisation and the need to resist it. 
STRUGGLES AGAINST THE IMPERIALIST CULTURE OF GLOBALISATION  
Careful analysis of the present global  situation will show that struggles on 
macro and micro scales against imperialism in the field of culture during the 
phase of imperialist globalisation are far more important than during earlier 
phases of imperialism.  
At local level, within a country or a nation, the impact of globalisation often 
becomes evident in relation to specific issues or of concern to particular 
sections of society and consequently micro scale struggles become 
necessary. Such struggles could be carried out by individuals acting as a 
group or by an organisation. 
Macro-scale struggles become necessary at a regional level or at 
international level. We witness dedicated efforts by individuals and groups 
both regionally and internationally. Yet they are inadequate to meet the 
challenges of imperialist globalisation. 
In addition to activities expressing solidarity with just causes, there is a 
need for well co-ordinated concrete, organised activity guided in a coherent 
manner by confederated international structure. One cannot rightly claim that 
micro-scale struggles on a national or countrywide level constitute macroscale struggles. Micro-scale struggles, irrespective of their spread and 
frequency, are no substitute for macro-scale struggles at an international level. 
Thus there is a need for international institutions and organisations, and 
internationalised struggles against imperialism. The International AntiImperialist Co-ordination Committee, for example, can play a role as a cultural 
organisation to meet imperialist challenges. Observation of the International 
Anti-Imperialist Day, regular international publications and campaign using the 
internet and other means could contribute to the growth and solidarity among 
local struggles to acquire an international dimension as well as reinforce 
ongoing international struggles. 
A culture of resistance is at present an essential first step in combating the 
culture of imperialist globalisation. At the same time thought has to be given to 
developing a new alternative culture that will unite humanity and free it from all 
forms of hegemony.  
*****    
Re-Reading  
"Humanitarian Intervention"  
in the Light of Libyan Occupation 
Asvaththaamaa
Introduction 
What we have witnessed in Libya and Côte d'Ivoire has a lot more to them 
than simply international interventions. The events and outcomes in those 
countries have set new precedents and also shown the Modus Operandi of a 
world in the making. The NATO-led intervention in Libya, "Operation Unified 
Protector", is noteworthy for two central reasons. Firstly, it is the first instance 
in over a decade of what Andrew Cottey calls "classical humanitarian 
intervention"— that is, humanitarian intervention that lacks the consent of the 
government of the target state, has a significant military and forcible element, 
and is undertaken by Western states (Cottey 2008).  
It appeared for a while as if the sun had set on (classical) humanitarian 
intervention (Weiss 2004). The focus of the West, especially of the US, was on 
fighting the 'war on terror' and using force in the name of freedom and 
democracy, rather than trying to halt mass atrocities. Moreover, the domestic 
and international costs of the actions in Iraq and Afghanistan led to a widely 
held expectation that there would not  be another major Western-led military 
intervention any time soon, let alone in response to mass atrocities and in 
another Muslim state. Libya thus caught  many by surprise. This is the first 
classical case of humanitarian intervention since the report of the International 
Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS),  The 
Responsibility to Protect (RTP), and agreement among states at the 2005 UN 
World Summit that there exists a responsibility to protect (ICISS 2001, UN 
2005). There has since been much talk of the need to "operationalise", 
"implement "and "realise" RTP, as well as to turn "words into deeds" and 
"rhetoric into practice". Without a major humanitarian intervention in the name 
of RTP, the doctrine was viewed by some as a catchy slogan, but ultimately 
hollow and lacking in any real practical effect (Hehir 2010). 
UN Security Council Resolution 1973 against Libya authorised "all 
necessary measures" to protect civilians without the consent of the "host" 
state. In contrast to other crises involving alleged crimes against humanity, diplomacy produced a decisive response in a relatively short time. Hence the 
Libyan intervention went well; it will put teeth in the fledgling RTP doctrine. 
The ICISS sandwiched military force  between the sliced white bread of 
prevention and post-conflict peace building. With its more popular elements on 
either end of the RTP continuum, the option of military intervention to protect 
human lives became somewhat more palatable than it had been, especially in 
the global South. 
Despite widespread opprobrium and numerous UN resolutions, the 
collective acceptance to military action in 2010-2011 to oust Laurent Gbagbo 
and install Alassane Ouattara in Ivory Coast (Côte d'Ivoire) provides a 
situation very similar to Libya. The departure of Gbagbo in April followed a half 
year of dawdling as Côte d'Ivoire's unspeakable disaster unfolded. Three 
times in March 2011 alone the Security Council menaced the designated loser 
of the November 2010 elections and repeated its authorisation to "use all 
necessary means to carry out its mandate to protect civilians". In early April 
2011, action led by the 1 650-strong French Licorne force did what was 
expected for the wishes of the West. The international willingness to use 
significant armed force abetted Gbagbo's intransigence. Thus Ivory Coast too 
presents a case of how the 'humanitarian intervention' and 'RTP' is perceived 
and operates.  
Setting the Stage for Interventions  
The preoccupation with naming follows from the legal implications of how a 
thing is named: 'genocide' goes with an international responsibility to 
intervene. In the post-cold war era, that responsibility has been defined as 'the 
responsibility to protect' and broadened to include three crimes in particular: 
genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. Arranged in order of 
gravity, they are said to justify a 'humanitarian intervention' and the jurisdiction 
of an International Criminal Court― the first based on a right to protect and the 
second on a right to punish ―both overriding claims of sovereignty.  
The new order is sanctioned by a new language that departs markedly 
from the older language of democracy and citizenship. It describes as 'human' 
the populations to be protected, and as  'humanitarian' the crisis they suffer 
from, the intervention that promises  to rescue them and the agencies that 
carry out the intervention. Whereas the language of sovereignty is profoundly 
political, that of humanitarian intervention is seemingly apolitical, and at times 
even anti-political. Looked at closely and critically, what we are witnessing is 
not a global, but a partial, transition. The transition from the old system of 
sovereignty to a new humanitarian order is confined to those states defined as 
'failed' or 'rogue' states. The result  is a bifurcated system whereby state 
sovereignty obtains in large parts of the world but is suspended in more and 
more countries in Africa and the Middle East (Mamdani 2010). The era of international humanitarian order is not something new. It draws 
on the entire history of modern Western  colonialism. At the very outset of 
Western colonial expansion in the  eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, 
leading Western powers (UK, France, Russia) claimed to protect 'vulnerable 
groups'. When it came to countries controlled by rival powers, such as the 
Ottoman Empire, Western powers claimed to protect populations they 
considered 'vulnerable', mainly religious minorities such as specific Christian 
denominations and Jews. The most extreme political outcome of this strategy 
can be glimpsed in the confessional constitution bequeathed by France on 
independent Lebanon (Makdisi 2000).When it came to lands not yet colonised 
by any power, such as South Asia and large parts of Africa, the practice was 
to highlight local atrocities and pledge to protect victims against rulers. It was 
not for lack of reason that the language of modern Western colonialism 
juxtaposed the promise of civilisation against the reality of barbaric practices. 
War has long ceased to be a confrontation between the armed forces of 
two states. As became clear during the confrontation between the Allied and 
Axis powers in the Second World War, in America's Indochina War in the 
1960s and 1970s, its Iraq War in 1991 and then again in its 2003 invasion of 
Iraq, states do not just target the armed forces of adversary states; they target 
society itself: war-related industry and infrastructure, economy and workforce, 
and, sometimes, as in the aerial bombardment of cities, the civilian population 
in general. The trend is for political violence to become generalised and 
indiscriminate. Thus modern war is total war. 
This particular development in the nature of modern war has tended to 
follow an earlier development of counter-insurgency in colonial contexts. 
Faced with insurgent guerrillas who were none other than armed civilians, 
colonial powers targeted the population of occupied territories. If Mao Zedong 
wrote that guerrillas must be as fish in water, the American counter-insurgency 
theorist, Samuel Huntington, writing during the time of the Vietnam War, 
responded that the object of counter-insurgency must be to drain the water 
and isolate the fish, i.e., ethnic cleansing. But the practice is older than postSecond World War counter-insurgency. 
The distinction between war, counter-insurgency and genocide is blurred in 
practice. All three tend to target civilian populations. In the era of nationalism 
and nation-states, power as well as its adversaries tends to be identified with 
entire national communities, whether defined by race, ethnicity or religion. Yet, 
the regime identified with the international humanitarian order makes a sharp 
distinction between genocide and other kinds of mass violence. International 
legal norms tend to be tolerant of counter-insurgency as integral to the 
exercise of national sovereignty and war as a standard feature of international 
politics― but not of genocide. The purpose  of the distinction is to reserve 
universal condemnation for only one form of mass violence― genocide ―as 
the ultimate crime and thus call for 'humanitarian' intervention only where 'genocide' has been unleashed, while treating both counter-insurgency and 
war between states as normal developments, one in the internal functioning of 
nation-states and the other in the international relations between them. The 
point, even if not made explicitly, is clear: counter-insurgency and inter-state 
violence are after all what states do. It is genocide that is violence gone amok, 
amoral, evil. The former is normal violence, only the latter is bad violence. 
The depoliticising language of humanitarian intervention has a wider 
function: 'humanitarian intervention' is  not an antidote to international power 
relations, but its latest product. Bolton sensed that the most likely 
consequence of the absence of formal political accountability would be the 
informal politicisation of the ICC. His worry, though, was that 'the ICC will be 
''captured'' not by governments but by NGOs and others with narrow special 
interests, and the time and resources  to pursue them' (Bolton 2001). What 
Bolton failed to foresee or foretell was that the ICC would be captured by the 
US governmental power rather than by NGOs. None should be surprised that 
the US used its position as the leading power in the Security Council to 
advance its bid 'to capture' the ICC. 
The contrast is provided by Bosnia and Rwanda, two countries where the 
administration of justice became an international responsibility: 'Bosnia is a 
clear example of how a decision to detach war crimes from the underlying 
political reality advances neither the political resolution of a crisis nor the goal 
of punishing war criminals. Like Bosnia, justice in Rwanda too has become a 
ruse for 'score-settling'. The focus of the Rwanda tribunal, says Bolton, has 
been 'war by other means', so much so that 'it is delusional to call this 
''justice'' rather than ''politics''', and he rightly concludes: "Many questions are 
clearly political, not legal: How shall the formerly warring parties live with each 
other in the future? What efforts shall be taken to expunge the causes of the 
previous inhumanity? Can the truth of what actually happened be established 
so that succeeding generations do not  make the same mistakes?" (Bolton 
2001) 
Morality Justification  
Today the ideals of international justice and the breaking down of state 
sovereignty are argued to be not an  expression of growing international 
morality but an extension of American power. Certainly for Western states, 
major military interventions were justified in highly moral and altruistic terms, 
of being fought on behalf of others. Vaclav Havel famously called the NATO 
intervention in Kosovo a war for 'values' (Clark 2009). Even the first Gulf War, 
often understood to be a 'traditional' conflict, was framed by George Bush, 
Senior in a strikingly novel manner. In his notorious 'new world order' speech 
President Bush announced a new order in which the rule of law replaced the 
old power politics, 'A world in which nations recognise the shared 
responsibility for freedom and justice; A world where the strong respect the 
rights of the weak' (Bush 1990). As elaborated by Robert Cooper, post-cold war military interventions conducted by the West arise from: 'The wish to 
protect individuals, rather than to resolve the security problems of states' 
(Cooper 2004).  
Yet in Kosovo, after the war NATO's local ally, the Kosovo Liberation Army, 
an ethnic Albanian militia, expelled 100 000 non-Albanians from Kosovo whilst 
Kosovo was supposedly controlled by international forces (see, for example, 
the report by the International Crisis Group in 1999 [ICG 1999], also Bancroft 
2009). However, despite this disastrous outcome, as we have seen the 
Kosovo conflict is upheld by advocates of humanitarian intervention and the 
RTP as an example of a successful intervention which can provide a pattern 
for future interventions.  
Chandler (2002) suggests that the  roots of contemporary ethical foreign 
policy are to be sought in the evolution of the NGO movement. The grievous 
experience of the Biafran crisis prompted the establishment of a new 
generation of NGOs. Having abandoned the traditional neutral standards of 
humanitarian action, these representatives of civil society base their activities 
on two 'solidarity principles', namely 'freedom of criticism' or 'denunciation' 
and 'subsidiary of sovereignty' or 'right  of intervention'. In other words, they 
feel free to criticise oppressive governments as well as to intervene in cases of 
humanitarian emergency. In time, some of these agencies started to claim that 
aid merely treats the symptoms rather than the roots of the problem, and could 
even prolong crises. In order to avoid that risk and to enhance the 
effectiveness of operations, assistance has been increasingly subjected to 
political as well as human rights conditions, the non-fulfilment of which could 
even provide an ethical justification for  the denial of help. The most radical 
advocates of the 'new humanitarianism', however, consider the conventional 
forms of relief insufficient and urge military action. Humanitarianism has, thus, 
often been subverted to become its opposite: coercive, partial and politicised. 
He argues that Western governments ostensibly resort to force to protect 
human rights abroad, but their purpose is to overcome certain problems of 
their own. The strength of  an ethical foreign policy, in his view, is that it 
demonstrates adherence to values and goals― the protection and promotion 
of human rights ―that are able to unify a society and consolidate the domestic 
authority of Western governments by providing a new form of legitimacy. 
Ethical foreign policy can legitimise political power in a non-political manner 
and establish an area where 'the government can operate outside the 
traditional sphere of policy-making' (Chandler 2002). Chandler points out that 
the pursuit of such policy has other advantages as well: the object of criticism 
is a foreign government and 'credit can be claimed for any positive outcome of 
international policy, while any negative outcome can be blamed on the 
government which was the object of criticism'. 
What human rights advocates consider the strengthening of international 
law runs the risk of being, in fact, its abolition. The implicit denial of the sovereign equality of states, the bypassing of the Security Council and the 
marginalisation of the UN are likely  to deprive international law of its 
consensual basis, introduce institutionalised inequality among its subjects, 
raise the frequency of armed conflicts, and revive the old Westphalian order 
(Chandler 2002). The rise of international criminal justice, as well as the 
inclination of Western powers towards the invocation of a 'higher duty' of 
fighting evil for the justification of unauthorised armed interventions are, in 
Chandler's view, all eloquent symptoms of this tendency. His gloomy vision of 
a 'post-UN international order' adequately identifies certain anomalies and 
echoes the concerns of many experts. Humanitarian intervention is not 
altogether advantageous is because of  the way the human rights discourse 
challenges political equality and popular democracy at the domestic level, both 
within the intervening Western and in the non-Western target states. 
Human rights advocates will describe both the local political elite and the 
local people as politically incompetent thus legitimising calls for an alternative 
regulation dictated by external actors on the basis of human rights― for 
instance in the form of long-term transnational authorities, such as those in 
Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, East Timor or Afghanistan. This solution, 
however, substantially undermines the legitimacy of a non-Western state, 
which is increasingly evaluated by other states or international organisations 
based on human rights rather than through domestic democratic channels.  
Theses of democratic peace hold that international peace can be achieved 
via the establishment of a world of liberal states. It has to be noted that the line 
of demarcation between liberal and non-liberal states is unclear. In fact, there 
are unacknowledged links between democracy and authoritarianism: 'nonliberal democratic states invariably have some democratic and liberal features 
and further potentials', while 'liberal-democratic states certainly have nondemocratic and non-liberal features and potentials'. 
Use of Force 
The main way that the use of force has been expanded is that it is no longer 
seen as a universal right of self-defence. Thus, for some powers, the selfselecting US-led 'coalitions of the willing' have argued that they have a right to 
self-defence that other countries do not necessarily have. That makes 
definitions of self-defence rely on who makes the decisions about self-defence 
and what it entails in a new era. It is no longer something adjudicated by the 
UN or limited to an image of direct threat, but expanded to be much broader 
not merely in terms of the willingness to use force and the legitimacy of the 
objects of such force, but also in endorsing the idea that it is legitimate for 
some countries to use self-defence, but not for others. One would never find 
people arguing that India or Pakistan have the right to self-defence or preemptive strikes against potential threats or should act globally in terms of 
preventive intervention. It's very clear that this is a definition that stands 
outside any formal framework of international law. No one is arguing the case for a broader extension of the right  to self-defence: the debate concerns 
Western or 'Great Power' responsibilities. 
The legitimacy of self-defence is one of the problems of international life, 
but not the only one. An equally important problem is the effectiveness of selfdefence. Even if the UN Charter and international law guarantee the right to 
self-defence to almost everyone, the  real problem is that some powers are 
able to defend themselves while others are not. For example, a weak political 
entity such as the Palestinian people might have the legal right to self-defence 
but that is of little use since they lack the instruments to exercise the right. In 
Rwanda, as in Bosnia, the international community was closely involved from 
the beginning. People were aware that there was already international reform 
of the governing process that created instability. There was also a war going 
on: an invasion from Uganda that was supported by the US and UK. One 
reason for the unwillingness to intervene was that the international community 
was already so involved. The understanding that the genocide came out of 
nowhere, is as ridiculous as the idea that the genocide in Bosnia came out of 
nowhere without international intervention, which ignores the whole 
international involvement in the breakup of Yugoslavia, the recognition of the 
separation of the republics and the undermining of the rights of the federal 
state to defend its borders. 
Human Rights 
With the end of the Cold War, human rights concerns shifted from the margins 
to the mainstream of international concerns as universal humanitarianism 
appeared to be a feasible possibility. Western states and international 
institutions had much greater freedom to act in the international sphere with 
the attenuation of Cold War rivalries freeing policy from narrow geo-strategic 
concerns. New possibilities for intervention and aspirations for a more 
universal framework of policy making were increasingly expressed through the 
expanding discourse of human rights. 
It was in the humanitarian sphere that the shift from formal views of rights, 
based on rational autonomous subjects, to ethical views of rights, based on a 
lack of capacity and the need for external advocacy and intervention, became 
a major factor in international relations. The introduction of the human rightsbased approach into traditional humanitarian practices reflected two trends: 
firstly, the increased penetration of external actors and agencies into postcolonial states and societies; and secondly, the transformation of the content 
of traditional humanitarian principles. 
As Western humanitarian non-governmental organisations (NGOs) 
acquired greater powers and authority within post-colonial countries, they 
redefined the central principles guiding their work. Universality and neutrality 
came to be redefined, based not on a universal view of humanity as being 
equally moral and autonomous, but on end goals or aspirations. This expansion of external power, through redefining the 'human' as lacking 
autonomy, effectively set up a hierarchy of the 'helper' and the 'helpless'. 
Through the ethic of responsibility to  assist the 'helpless'— those without 
autonomy —this discourse reframed political choices as ethical questions. In 
this way, external NGO actors maintained a 'non-political' stance of neutrality 
while at the same time claiming extended rights to intervene in domestic 
political processes. From the late 1960s onwards, international humanitarian 
NGOs used the discourse of human rights to rewrite the boundaries of their 
authority through expanding the sphere of  ethics into the sphere of political 
decision making. 
The human rights-based discourse of humanitarianism enabled NGOs to 
blur the distinction between politics and ethics. Central to this conflation of 
politics and ethics was the development of new codes of practice based 
around redefining neutrality. Neutrality no longer meant equal respect for 
parties to conflict or for locally-instituted authorities, but was redefined as 
neutrality with respect to human rights frameworks and outcomes. In this way, 
NGOs claimed decision-making powers over who deserved aid and which 
practices of development were most appropriate. NGOs accrued more 
authority through the human rights discourse because they were held to be 
acting on behalf of those unable to act  or incapable of acting on their own 
behalf. 
The extension of the power and authority of humanitarian non-state actors 
took place in relation to changes in approaches to both conflict and 
development. Firstly, through the extension  of assistance to victims of war, 
there was a shift from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) 
approach of aid to casualties and assistance to prisoners regardless of 
political affiliation to a more engaged, 'solidarity' approach, advocated by 
agencies such as 'Médecins Sans Frontières' (Doctors without Borders) who 
argued that there was a need to discriminate between abusers and victims 
and to intervene in conflict with a view to rights-based outcomes. Secondly, 
there was a shift in NGO approaches to emergency relief, and an increased 
understanding that famines and natural disasters could be better addressed 
by long-term developmental approaches rather than short-term palliative ones.  
It now appeared that humanitarian NGOs were duty bound to intervene in 
more direct and lasting ways. However, this approach of solidarity, and 
education and training meant that the relationship between NGOs and their 
beneficiaries changed from one of charity between ostensible equals to one of 
dependency and empowerment. The humanitarian NGOs shifted from a 
traditional liberal rights-based approach of equality to an ethico-political 
approach of human rights that facilitated the inequality of treatment. This has 
resulted in humanitarian NGOs opposing the provision of aid in cases where it 
was felt that human rights outcomes could be undermined (Leader, 1998; Fox, 
2001). By the end of the Cold War, the discourse of humanitarian universalism 
had become a highly interventionist one, transformed through the modern 
discourse of human rights values and assumptions. Once the barriers to state 
actors intervening were diminished, this discourse was increasingly taken over 
by leading states and international institutions and NGOs boomed in numbers 
and authority as new frameworks of intervention were instituted. According to 
Mark Duffield, the 'petty sovereignty' of NGOs— their increasing assumption 
of political decision making powers in regions intervened in —was 
'governmentalised' in the 1990s: integrated within a growing web of 
interventionist institutions and practices  associated with external intervention 
and regulation (Duffield 2007). 
The privileging of human rights as individual rights above the sovereign 
rights of states has altered traditional  international practices, especially with 
regard to international law and the use of force. The human rights-based 
justification for military intervention is often posed in terms of the revival of premodern 'just war' thinking, which is concerned with the moral and ethical 
bases of war rather than with its legal grounding. Here the clash between the 
universal ethics of human rights and the legal framework of international 
society as it is currently situated comes into stark clarity. 
Rather than universal discourses of human rights expressing a new 
progressive political era, Ignatieff highlights that the focus on human rights 
expresses disillusionment with political engagement and social change: the 
concern that 'there are no good causes left— only victims of bad causes' 
(Ignatieff 1998). He notes (1998) the danger of this modern moral 
universalism, which 'has taken the form of an anti-ideological and anti-political 
ethic of siding with the victim; the moral risk entailed by this ethic is 
misanthropy'. 
Re-reading Libya 
The adoption of Resolution 1973 by the UN Security Council on 17
th
 May 2011 
approving a no-fly zone over Libya and calling for "all necessary measures" to 
protect civilians, reflected a change in the Council's attitude toward the use of 
force for human protection purposes,  and the role played by the UN's new 
Joint Office on the Prevention of Genocide and the Responsibility to Protect 
point toward the potential for this new  capacity to identify threats of mass 
atrocities and to focus the UN's attention on preventing them. 
In Resolution 794, the Security Council authorised the Unified Task Force 
to enter Somalia to ease the humanitarian crisis, but this was in the absence 
of a central government rather than against one― a point specifically made at 
the time by several Council members (Williams 2011). Similarly, in Resolution 
929 the Security Council authorised the French-led Operation Turquoise, 
ostensibly to protect victims of the ongoing genocide in Rwanda. Operation 
Turquoise enjoyed the consent of the interim government in Rwanda as well as its armed forces. More recently, in Haiti, the Democratic Republic of Congo, 
Sudan, and Ivory Coast, the Security Council has authorised the use of "all 
necessary measures" to protect civilians, but all the peace operations in these 
countries are carried out with the consent of the host state (Williams 2011). 
But it was not the case in Libya 
None of the world's various risk-assessment frameworks viewed Libya as 
posing any threat of mass atrocities. That the UN had authorised action 
despite an extremely short time frame exposes the intentions and politics 
behind the intervention. The UN Secretariat was purposefully assessing the 
situation through the prism of RTP and drawing attention to human protection 
issues. Of course, there can be times when plausible options are extremely 
limited. Somalia is a case in point. Following the upsurge of violence in 
Somalia in 2006, the African Union and the Bush administration called upon 
the UN to deploy a peace operation. European members of the Security 
Council countered that the conditions were not ripe for peacekeeping because 
there was no viable and inclusive political process, no peace agreement and 
little local commitment. In this context, they argued that a UN peace operation 
was likely to be counterproductive. The Security Council compromised and 
asked the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) to assess the 
military options. The DPKO reported that UN peacekeeping was viable only if 
certain conditions were met (especially a lasting cease-fire and viable and 
inclusive political process) and that, in their absence. the only plausible 
military option was the deployment of a large and highly capable multinational 
force to conduct a peace enforcement operation and impose a settlement. 
Given past experience in Somalia, Western military overstretch, the likelihood 
of external intervention being treated as hostile by several armed groups, and 
the absence of a clear route from large-scale military intervention to exit and 
sustainable peace, there was understandably little enthusiasm for the 
multinational force option. With Security Council approval, the African Union 
eventually authorised and deployed an  8 000-strong mission in Somalia 
(AMISOM) to support the peace process and transitional institutions. But, as 
predicted, it has proven unable to bring peace, deployed only 6 000 of its 
mandated 8 000 troops, and become party to the conflict (Williams 2009). 
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon in his January 2009 report 
emphasised state responsibility, capacity building, and international responses 
as the "three pillars" of RTP. A formula aiming to add finesse to the third pillar 
includes the use or the threat to use military force to stop mass atrocities (Ban 
Ki-moon 2009).Clausewitz is the usual point of departure for those who argue 
that diplomats should step aside when negotiations fail and let soldiers pursue 
politics by other means. However, RTP requires that diplomats succeed in 
securing agreement either on preventive measures or on the deployment of 
military force. In the latter case,  diplomats stand aside after they have 
succeeded, and soldiers do what diplomats cannot— halt mass atrocities. The 
international action against Libya was all about bombing for democracy, sending messages to Iran, implementing regime change, keeping oil prices 
low and pursuing other such narrow interests. In real terms it is not about 
saving lives or stopping genocide but about narrow interests of oil. As reported 
recently, atrocities and human rights violations occurred on a large scale in the 
so called "liberated" areas in Libya. The question remains as to who will take 
responsibility for the killing of innocent people by indiscriminate NATO 
bombings. 
Concluding Remarks  
What has happened in Ivory Coast and Libya is a resonance of the politics of 
armed interventions. The number of civilians killed by foreign forces in Libya 
remains unknown and it will remain unaccounted forever. As for the role of the 
UN and the International Community, the events in Libya and Ivory Coast 
have once again shown how the world order works or does not work on the 
pretext of justice and morality, as discussed earlier.  
A military campaign was launched ostensibly to enforce the UN Security 
Council Resolution 1973 in order to protect civilians in Libya. The bombing of 
Ivory Coast was undertaken to enforce Security Council Resolution 1975 to 
protect civilians there. The UN Charter does not permit the use of military 
force for humanitarian interventions. Military interventions in Libya and Ivory 
Coast have been justified by reference to the RTP doctrine. It is thus useful to 
reread the two Security Council resolutions to shed more light on the matter.  
Resolution 1973 begins with the call for "the immediate establishment of a 
ceasefire." It reiterates "the responsibility of the Libyan authorities to protect 
the Libyan population" and reaffirms that "parties to armed conflicts bear the 
primary responsibility to take all feasible steps to ensure the protection of 
civilians. The resolution authorises UN Member States "to take all necessary 
measures ... to protect civilians and civilian populated areas" of Libya. 
But immediate military action was taken instead of pursuing an immediate 
ceasefire. The military force had exceeded the bounds of the "all necessary 
measures" authorisation.  "All necessary measures" should firstly have been 
peaceful measures to settle the conflict. But peaceful means were not 
exhausted before the military invasion began. A high level international team 
consisting of representatives from the Arab League, the African Union, and the 
UN Secretary General should have been dispatched to Tripoli to negotiate a 
real cease-fire, set up a mechanism for elections, and protecting civilians. 
Moreover, following the passage of the resolution, Libya immediately offered 
to accept international monitors and Qadaffi offered to step down and leave 
Libya. These offers were promptly rejected by the opposition. Security Council 
Resolution 1975 on Ivory Coast is similar to resolution 1973 on Libya, and 
authorised the use of "all necessary  means to ... protect civilians under 
imminent threat of physical violence" in Ivory Coast. It reaffirmed "the primary 
responsibility of each state to protect civilians" and reiterated that "parties to armed conflicts bear the primary responsibility to take all feasible steps to 
ensure the protection of civilians." 
The UN Charter commands all member states to settle their international 
disputes by peaceful means, and to maintain international peace, security, and 
justice. Members are obliged to refrain from the threat or use of force against 
the territorial integrity or political independence of any state or in act in any 
manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations. Under the UN 
Charter, a state can militarily attack another state only when it acts in selfdefence, in response to an armed attack by one country against another. The 
need for self-defence must be overwhelming, leaving no choice of means and 
no moment for deliberation. Neither Libya nor Ivory Coast had attacked 
another country. The US, France and Britain in Libya and France and the UN 
in Ivory Coast were not acting in self-defence; and humanitarian concerns do 
not constitute self-defence. 
There is a double standard in the use of military force to protect civilians. 
US did not attack Bahrain where lethal force was used to quell antigovernment protests, because that is where the US Fifth Fleet is stationed. 
The Asia Times reported that before the invasion of Libya, the US made a 
deal with Saudi Arabia, whereby Saudi Arabia would invade Bahrain to help 
put down the pro-democracy protests and enlist the support of the Arab 
League for a no-fly-zone over Libya. When Obama defended his military 
actions in Libya, he said "Some nations may be able to turn a blind eye to 
atrocities in other countries. The United States of America is different." Two 
weeks later, the Arab League asked the Security Council to consider imposing 
a no-fly-zone over the Gaza Strip in order to protect civilians from Israeli air 
strikes. But the US, an ally of Israel, as always, refused to allow the passage 
of such a resolution, regardless of the number of Palestinian civilians killed by 
Israel. That is how the politics of imperialism works.  
During a discussion of the RTP in the General Assembly on 23
rd
 July 2009, 
the Cuban government raised some pertinent questions that should make 
those who support this notion pause: "Who is to decide if there is an urgent 
need for an intervention in a given state,  according to what criteria, in what 
framework, and on the basis of what conditions? Who decides it is evident the 
authorities of a state do not protect their people, and how is it decided? Who 
determines peaceful means are not adequate in a certain situation, and on 
what criteria? Do small states have also the right and the actual prospect of 
interfering in the affairs of larger states? Would any developed country allow, 
either in principle or in practice, humanitarian intervention in its own territory? 
How and where do we draw the line between an intervention under the 
Responsibility to Protect and an intervention for political or strategic purposes, 
and when do political considerations prevail over humanitarian concerns?" 
These questions still remain valid and will remain so for years to come.  References 
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crisis and the federal budget deficit [online]. 
Chandler, David. 2002. From Kosovo to Kabul: Human Rights and International 
Intervention. London: Pluto Press.  
Clark, David. 2009. 'Kosovo was a just war, not an imperialist dress rehearsal' [online]. 
Cooper, Robert. 2004. The breaking of nations: Order and chaos in the twenty-first 
century. London: Atlantic. 
Cottey, Andrew. 2008. "Beyond Humanitarian Intervention: The New Politics of 
Peacekeeping and Intervention." Contemporary Politics 14(4): 429–46.  
Duffield, Mark. 2007. Development, Security and Unending War: Governing the World 
of Peoples. Cambridge: Polity.  
Fox, Fiona. 2001 "New Humanitarianism: Does It Provide a Moral Banner for the 21
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Century?" Disasters 25(4): 275–89.  
Hehir, Aidan. 2010. "The Responsibility to Protect: 'Sound and Fury Signifying 
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ICG. 1999. 'Violence in Kosovo, who is killing whom?' [Online]. 
ICISS. 2001. The Responsibility to Protect: the Report of the International Commission 
on Intervention and State Sovereignty. Ottawa: International Development Research 
Council.
Ignatieff, Michael. 1998. The Warrior's Honor: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience.
New York: Chatto & Windus.  
Ki-moon, Ban. 2009 "Implementing the Responsibility to Protect: Report from the 
Secretary-General," UN document A/63/677, January 12.  
Leader, Nicholas. 1998. "Proliferating principles, or how to sup with the devil without 
getting eaten." The International Journal of Human Rights 2(4): 1-27. 
Makdisi, Ussama. 2000. The culture of sectarianism, community, history and violence 
in nineteenth-century Ottoman Lebanon. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. 
Mamdani, Mohmood. 2010. "Responsibility to Protect or Right to Punish?" Journal of 
Intervention and Statebuilding 4(1): 53–96.  
UN. 2005. 'World Summit Outcome 2005. General Assembly Resolution 60/1' [online] 
Williams, Paul. 2011. "Briefing: the Road to Humanitarian War in Libya." Global 
Responsibility to Protect 3(2): 248–59.  
Williams, Paul. 2009. "Into the Mogadishu Maelstrom: The African Union Mission in 
Somalia." International Peacekeeping 16(4): 514–30.
***** Dhaka Declaration, 2011 
The Third International Anti-imperialist Conference jointly 
convened by International Anti-imperialist Coordinating 
Committee (IACC) and Socialist Party of Bangladesh (SPB) have 
adopted after two days of deliberations the following document 
as the Dhaka Declaration, 2011. 
The Calcutta Declaration adopted at the Anti-imperialist Convention held in 1995 
stressed that with the counterrevolutionary overthrow of socialism in Soviet Russia 
and the East European countries the imperialist forces became more and more 
belligerent and aggressive, and the grave international situation underscored the 
necessity to build up broad-based People's Fronts inclusive of all progressive, 
democratic-minded, anti-imperialist people irrespective of their political opinions to 
fight against the imperialist menace. Such broad-based committees with 
communists at the core would conduct militant anti-imperialist and anti-war 
movements conducive to revolutionary struggles for the emancipation of the 
people.  A call was given to coordinate the anti-imperialist movements surging 
forward in different countries so that a mighty torrent of global anti-imperialist 
movement is released. In response to this call the International Anti-imperialist and 
People's Solidarity Coordinating Committee, now renamed as the International 
Anti-imperialist Coordinating Committee (IACC), was formed in 2007. This 
Committee, in collaboration with other organizations, organized the Second 
International Anti-imperialist Conference in Beirut (Beirut International Forum for 
Resistance, Anti-imperialism, Solidarity between Peoples, and Alternatives). The 
Forum gave a call for revolutionary fight against imperialism and neoliberalism, 
hegemony and militarization policies of the imperialists. This Third International 
Anti-imperialist Conference of IACC is a step forward in building international 
coordination and solidarity. From this platform the IACC gives a call for building up 
militant anti-imperialist movements throughout the world and to coordinate such 
movements going on in different countries.  
The world situation in the twentieth century has proved beyond doubt the truth of 
Lenin's thesis that it is imperialism that begets war. The hollowness of the 
bourgeois propaganda that with the dismantling of the socialist camp the danger of 
war and the threat to world peace have disappeared stands exposed by the wars 
launched by the imperialist powers led by the USA in different corners of the 
globe. The capitalist world is racked by one crisis after another, the current one 
surpassing all the others in its depth, extent and severity. In its desperate bid to 
come out of such all-embracing and recurring crisis the ruling capitalist class in the 
imperialist as also in the developing countries must perforce resort to artificial stimulation through the militarization of the economy. This is firstly because the 
military establishments all over the world are the richest and chief consumers, and 
arms trade is the biggest economic activity in the capitalist market. Secondly, the 
aim of the imperialist powers, in particular of USA, is to establish domination over 
the so-called globalized market through flexing of their military muscle. 
Consequently, engineering local and partial warfare for the release of stockpiles of 
arms and for the establishment of political domination has become a compulsive 
necessity of imperialism. Aiding and abetting one country against another, or one 
section of people against another, provoking and fostering tension between 
nations and between communities, creating war-like situations and engineering 
local wars are constant features of imperialist machinations across the world 
today. We have witnessed this in Yugoslavia, in Afghanistan, in Iraq, and now 
glaringly in Libya. 
As the economic crisis worsens and the markets get squeezed the contradiction 
between the imperialist powers is also sharpening, and competition between them 
for shares in the shrinking world market is becoming more and more fierce. At first 
the USA was the unquestioned leader in the imperialist camp because of its 
economic and military strength. But as the traditional manufacturing base of the 
USA is withering away, other countries are coming to positions of supremacy in 
industrial production, for example, Japan in the electronics industry, Germany and 
Japan in the automobile industry, European Union in commercial aircraft 
manufacturing etc. The economic supremacy of the USA is now being challenged; 
European Union and Japan have emerged as contenders. Capitalist Russia after 
getting over the initial chaos following the overthrow of the socialist system is 
trying to expand its sphere of economic and political influence. China is also 
emerging as a global economic force in South Asia. Indian capital has attained 
imperialist character; it is a junior member of the imperialist camp but has the 
aspiration to emerge as a regional superpower. Indian finance capital is being 
exported to Nepal, Bangladesh and many other countries to exploit their resources 
and labour. Thus we see that the number of competitors is getting more while the 
market is being progressively squeezed. Inevitably, there is cut-throat competition 
between the imperialist powers to expand their own reserve markets. The 
hegemonic aspiration and the urge of each of the imperialist powers to expand its 
sphere of influence is making the world an unsafe place and is leading to military 
aggression on this or that country to bring its economy under the domination  of 
one imperialist power or a group of powers. 
The truth of Lenin's thesis that imperialism is the progenitor of war and the 
principal danger to world peace is vividly manifested in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, 
Iraq and Libya. The imperialist powers led by the USA have been directly or 
indirectly interfering in the internal affairs of other countries and violating the 
sovereignty of nations. Propagating falsehoods as excuse they ousted Saddam 
Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi from power and orchestrated their killing. They 
unleashed the most savage military attacks on these countries and put their 
puppets in the seat of power to ensure political and economic domination.  
We are now witnessing that crisis-ridden imperialism has added another tool to 
its arsenal of conspiracies. Imperialist globalization and ruthless exploitation have driven the common people in every part of the world to penury. Groaning under 
the burden of unemployment, poverty and utter destitution, the grievance of the 
people in several countries in North Africa and Middle East have burst out as 
militant mass upsurge against autocratic rulers, who were often the stooges of 
imperialists and were propped up by them. People's grievance in these countries 
has given the imperialists an opportunity to meddle in their internal affairs in the 
name of protecting democracy and thereby increase their sphere of dominance. In 
these countries, to arrest the progress of people's movements towards the goal of 
emancipation from capitalist exploitation, the imperialists are adopting different 
tactics. In some countries, in the aftermath of the ouster of imperialist stooges by 
mass upsurge they are conspiring to bring the groups friendly to them to power, 
and are propping them up. Their aim is to lead the popular movement into a blind 
alley of engineered election process and make it fizzle out. In other countries, 
where the rulers refused to bow down to imperialist diktats and took up a spirited 
oppositional stance, the imperialist powers, the USA and its cohorts in the NATO, 
instigated disaffected groups and agents to rise in rebellion against the rulers. 
They labelled these as movements for democracy, and on the pretext of aiding 
democracy they went for an all-out military attack to oust the rulers. The 
imperialists have employed this tactic very successfully in Libya, culminating in the 
murder of Colonel Gaddafi. Now they are targeting Syria for a replay of the Libyan 
scenario. 
This Conference stresses that unless a true revolutionary leadership emerges, 
the spontaneous people's upsurge against autocracy would not culminate in the 
overthrow of the oppressive, exploitative and tyrannical system. Then all the 
sacrifices of the people would be in vain, and taking advantage of the situation the 
rightist forces or the religious fundamentalists would come to power; one 
autocratic system would be replaced by another equally autocratic system.    
But the silver lining in the global scenario is that the imperialists' bid for world 
domination is being challenged by people all over the world, and they are 
demanding to put an end to capitalist oppression and aggression. Massive antiwar, anti-globalization demonstrations have shaken even the advanced capitalist 
countries. Vibrant people's movements in "Arab Spring" have unseated several 
stooges of imperialism. Spirited resistance in Middle East that fights against 
capitalism, imperialism and Zionist aggression is getting stronger. In 2006 the 
Lebanese resistance successfully fought off the Israeli aggression in southern 
Lebanon. Determined resistance in Iraq foiled the US conspiracy to keep the 
country under military occupation and forced the imperialists to ignominious troop 
withdrawal. 
 The recent movement of "Occupy Wall Street" that started in New York has 
spread like wild fire throughout the world and massive demonstrations have 
rocked 950 cities, across more than 80 countries, signifying people's anger with 
the exploitative rule of capitalism. This Conference hails the heroic fight of the 
people in different parts of the world, and stresses that their aspiration for freedom 
from exploitation and oppression can be truly realized only with revolutionary 
overthrow of the capitalist system and establishment of socialist system in its place 
that would bring in social justice and solidarity of the people. The Conference enjoins that the principal task today is to organize anti-imperialist movements in all 
countries with a correct revolutionary leadership and to build up resistance 
movements against all acts of imperialist aggression or interference in the internal 
affairs of countries anywhere in the world.  
The Conference adopts the following Resolutions. 
1. This International Anti-imperialist Conference condemns in no uncertain 
terms the economic onslaughts launched by the USA and other imperialist 
powers through the policies of globalization, liberalization and privatization, 
and through institutions like IMF, World Bank, WTO etc., leading to poverty, 
unemployment and misery for the common people in all countries.   
2. This Conference condemns the invasion and occupation of Iraq and 
Afghanistan by the imperialist powers led by the USA. Using blatant lies as 
pretext, brazenly violating international law and norms, and contemptuously 
disregarding world-wide public protests, the USA unleashed savage attacks 
on these two countries, indiscriminately bombing hospitals, schools and civil 
installations, and entire countries have turned into rubble. The imperialist 
powers have set up puppet governments in these countries, but these are 
under virtual military occupation. This Conference demands immediate, 
unconditional and total withdrawal of all occupation troops from Iraq and 
Afghanistan. The two countries are to be returned back to the people who 
are to be allowed the full freedom to decide what type of government they 
are to have, without interference from any external power. The imperialist 
powers have inflicted extensive devastations on these countries and they 
have to bear the entire responsibility of rebuilding and restitution. This 
Conference demands that the imperialist perpetrators of unjust wars and of 
massacres of native population in Iraq and Afghanistan be branded as war 
criminals and brought to justice. 
3. The Conference notes that faced by the determined Iraqi resistance the 
imperialist powers had to announce troop withdrawals, but they are 
attempting to replace their overt military presence by the deployment of 
intelligence men under the cover of diplomats and military security 
companies that continue the occupation, an act of hegemony over the Iraqi 
decision and fortunes. We condemn this heinous conspiratorial manoeuvre. 
4. This Conference condemns the military attack by NATO forces on Libya as 
a criminal act of aggression, and demands that the aggressors be branded 
as war criminals. The perpetrators of the murder of Colonel Gaddafi must be 
brought to book. Imperialist powers are to desist from interfering in the 
internal affairs of the country and totally and unconditionally withdraw their 
military presence. It is the people of Libya who are to decide, without any 
foreign interference, on the form of governance of their country.  
5. This International Anti-imperialist Conference condemns the butchery of the 
Palestinian people by Israel, its military raids and its forcible encroachment 
upon and resettlement in Palestine territory, all with the full backing of imperialist USA. Israel's blockade of Gaza has been going on for years and 
the entry of even humanitarian aid is stopped using military force. Bombing 
and shelling on the people of Gaza are continuing unabated. The imperialist 
powers are in effect encouraging the state terrorism of Israel. This 
Conference demands that Israel must stop its attack on the Palestinian 
people, give back to them the forcibly occupied territory, and release all 
Palestinian political prisoners. This Conference expresses its unequivocal 
support to the right of the Palestine people to have their own independent 
sovereign Palestine state, and to their right to return to their homelands. We 
condemn that Israel, with full backing of the USA, is blocking all moves for 
the formation of an independent Palestine state and is violating all UN 
Resolutions to this effect.  We call upon the people of all countries to come 
forward in support of the struggle of the Palestinian people, and to organize 
movements to force their own Governments to put pressure on Israel for 
stopping the acts of aggression and for acceding to the demand for 
independent Palestine state. 
6. This Conference hails the militant spirit of the Lebanese people and the 
Lebanese Resistance in their struggle to liberate the occupied land and 
pledges full support to them. This Conference demands of the United 
Nations to act and to achieve full withdrawal of the Israeli troops from the 
occupied lands belonging to Lebanon. This Conference condemns the 
setting up of Special Tribunal for Lebanon, and its use as a means to harass 
the Lebanese Resistance and its leaders and throw them in internal and 
external crisis.  
7. The conference hails the struggle of Bahraini people against the U.S.-
backed oppressive regime and we denounce the brutal suppression of the 
opposition and the killing, detainment and torture of men, women and 
children. 
8. This Conference notes with grave concern the attempts of the imperialist 
powers and their lackeys in the Middle East to interfere in the internal affairs 
of Syria, and to bring about a regime change in that country. Ignoring all 
proclamations by the Syrian Government the imperialists are resorting to a 
constant barrage of propaganda in the western media, controlled by the 
corporate houses, about "democracy movement" in the country, and its 
alleged violent suppression by the present Government. Mass 
demonstrations in support of the Government, on the other hand, are 
blacked out. The stage is being set for a military attack on Syria to 
overthrow the present Government. This Conference demands that the 
imperialist powers desist from all attempts to oust the present regime 
through military intervention and attack on the people of Syria. We reiterate 
that it is the Syrian people who have the sole right and authority to decide 
who should govern the country and on the character of the ruler; the 
imperialist powers have no mandate to interfere in the process.  
9. This Conference condemns the constant threat of military attack against 
Iran by US-led imperialist powers. There is vociferous propaganda in the media about Iran's nuclear weapons to justify possible military action 
against Iran and there are already reports of attacks through the use of 
drones. This Conference notes that the International Atomic Agency 
reported that there is no evidence to back up the charge that Iran is 
producing nuclear weapons. We demand that the USA abandons its 
aggressive postures against Iran, and lift the sanctions. We recognize the 
right of Iran to develop and use nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. The 
Conference expresses its solidarity with the Iranian people's struggle to 
protect their sovereignty from imperialist attack. 
10. This Conference condemns in strongest terms the military attacks on the 
Kurdish people by Turkey, a staunch ally of U.S. imperialists in the Middle 
East, and its massacre of the Kurdish people, including by the use of 
chemical weapons. Thousands of Kurdish politicians are placed under 
detention. We condemn the violation of civil and human rights of the Kurdish 
people, and demand the release of all Kurdish political prisoners. 
11. This Conference condemns U.S. intervention in Sudan's internal affairs, and 
its instigation of ethnic and tribal strife there. 
12. This International Anti-imperialist Conference condemns the United Nations 
for becoming virtually a rubber stamping body to the decisions of the 
imperialist powers, particularly of the USA. This is nakedly manifested in the 
UN-sanctioned aggressions on Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. In the name of 
sending UN Peace Keeping Forces the imperialist powers are bringing 
countries under military occupation, and by setting up puppet regimes are 
controlling them politically and economically. In contrast, because of 
imperialist machinations, particularly by the USA, the United Nations has 
totally failed to stop the barbaric Israeli aggression against the Palestinian 
people, to make Israel return its forcibly occupied territories back to them, 
and to set up an independent, sovereign Palestinian state. We also 
condemn that in response to UNESCO recognition of Palestine the USA has 
stooped to curtailing its obligatory financial grant to UNESCO in order to 
pressurize the body into denying the statehood of Palestine. 
13. This Conference condemns that the International Criminal Court is targeting 
in a premeditated way the leaders of the developing countries of Africa for 
indictment, while the many criminal acts of the imperialists led by the USA in 
Iraq and Afghanistan, or the U.S. drone attacks on Pakistan, Yemen, 
Sudan, Somalia etc., or the many crimes of Israel against the people of 
Palestine and Lebanon are not brought to trial, let alone being punished.        
14. Today the world's progressive people have been ardently desiring a durable 
peace in the Korean peninsula to remove as early as possible the suffering 
of national division which has persisted for over half a century. However, the 
acute military confrontation is continuing on the Korean peninsula due to the 
U.S. manoeuvres of war provocation, which are arousing a deep concern 
and apprehension among the world people. Desirous of improving the 
situation of the reunification cause of the Korean people, this Conference 
adopts the special resolution as follows.   Today the world's progressive people have been ardently desiring a durable 
peace on the Korean peninsula to remove as early as possible the suffering 
of national division which has persisted for over half a century. However, the 
acute military confrontation is continuing on the Korean peninsula due to the 
U.S. manoeuvres of war provocation, which is arousing a deep concern and 
apprehension among the world people. Desirous of improving the situation 
of the reunification cause of the Korean people, this Conference makes the 
following points in this Resolution:      
A: The United States should renounce its hostile policy towards the DPRK, 
lift the more than 50-year old blockade, and stop at once the aggressive 
military war exercises that the USA is staging every year on the Korean 
peninsula.      
B: For an independent and peaceful reunification of Korea, the USA should 
pull out its army troops from South Korea and accede to the proposal of 
DPRK to replace the Armistice Agreement with a peace agreement.    
C: We fully support the Korean people in their struggle for an independent 
and peaceful reunification of Korea under the banner of the June 15 
Joint Declaration and the October 4 Declaration.    
D: We will extend full solidarity to the Songun policy (giving precedence to 
military affairs and advancing the socialist cause by holding up the 
armed forces as the pillar of revolution) of the Korean people to smash 
the imperialists' manoeuvres for war and aggression.   The only way to 
safeguard the socialism is to strengthen the self-reliant defence 
capabilities when the imperialists are increasing the threat of aggressive 
war and nuclear blackmail. The Songun policy carried out by the leader 
Kim Jong Il is sure guarantee for the peace and stability of the Korean 
peninsula and the region. We, all the participants in the current 
conference, once again, are extending our wholehearted support to the 
heroic Korean people who are struggling firmly in the forefront of antiimperialism. We will in the future, too, strengthen the close cooperation 
and solidarity with the Korean people in their struggle against 
imperialism and for an independent and peaceful reunification of Korea. 
15. This Conference condemns the persistent attempt by the USA to destabilize 
socialist Cuba and to overthrow socialism there by instigating counter 
revolution. We demand that the USA immediately lifts its more than half 
century old blockade against Cuba which has inflicted untold hardship on 
the life of the people there. Along with this we join all the progressive people 
of the world in calling for the immediate release of the five Cuban political 
prisoners held in U.S. prisons. 
16. This Conference hails the heroic struggle of the people of Latin America 
against the aggressive manoeuvres and conspiracies of U.S. imperialism 
and expresses solidarity with their fight. We strongly condemn the 
destabilization attempts of the USA against countries like Venezuela, Bolivia and other Latin American countries whose Governments are not bowing 
down to U.S. diktats. 
17. This conference draws attention to, condemns and calls for the closing of 
more than 1,000 U.S. military bases around the world in 150 countries. 
These bases, built to maintain U.S. imperialist domination, are a national 
affront and an attack on the sovereignty and self-determination of the 
countries forced to host them. We condemn the unequal 'Status of Forces' 
Agreements granting total immunity to crimes committed by U.S. soldiers 
that are imposed on many countries forced to host U.S. troops. We also 
condemn the rapidly expanding series of secret U.S. drone bases in Africa 
and West Asia conducting undeclared wars against totally defenceless 
populations. 
18. This International Anti-imperialist Conference notes with great concern that 
South and Southeast Asia has become a playground for imperialist 
manoeuvres, intrigues and conspiracies. These countries were erstwhile 
colonies of the European powers. Today the USA and those European 
powers are all out to expand their markets in this region and to export their 
capital to exploit the cheap labour in these countries to manufacture goods 
so that they have an edge in the competitive market. In addition to the 
western imperialist powers India and China have also emerged as powerful 
countries and both of them want to have a share in this market. Indian and 
Chinese capital is invested in countries like Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan, 
Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Vietnam. There is intense competition between all 
these powers for market share and this portends grave danger for peace in 
the region. We call upon the people of these countries to develop powerful 
anti-imperialist movements conducive to socialist revolution which alone 
could hold the marauding imperialist powers in check and save the people 
from imperialist exploitation and oppression.  
19. This Conference expresses solidarity with the struggle of the people of 
Bangladesh for protecting the oil, gas, coal and other natural resources from 
loot and plunder by the imperialist powers. The Conference expresses its 
support to the legitimate, long-standing demand of the people of 
Bangladesh for equitable sharing of river waters between India and 
Bangladesh, and condemns the unilateral decision of India to erect the 
Tipaimukh Dam in Manipur, which runs counter to the interests of both the 
countries.   
20. This International Anti-imperialist Conference hails the successful struggle 
of the Nepalese people under the leadership of the Unified Communist 
Party of Nepal (Maoist) (UCPN (M)) for overthrowing the monarchy. It notes 
with concern that the reactionary forces in Nepal aided by the imperialist 
powers, particularly India, are trying to hinder the process of adopting a 
democratic constitution for Nepal and creating obstacles in the functioning 
of the UCPN (M)-led Government. We condemn the conspiracies of India 
and the USA to scuttle the democratic process in Nepal and to prevent the 
formation of a democratic republic of Nepal. We strongly demand that all external interventions, particularly by expansionist India, be immediately 
stopped. 
21. This Conference demands that the national question of Sri Lanka be solved 
politically by finding the just solution acceptable to the Tamils and other 
oppressed nationalities of Sri Lanka. It further demands investigation into 
the alleged war crimes committed by the security forces of Sri Lanka, in 
order to avoid intervention or invasion by the imperialist powers using war 
crimes as a plea.   
22. This Conference expresses its solidarity with the renewed revolt of the 
Egyptian people against usurpation by vested interests of the fruits of their 
struggle for democracy, and condemns the police crackdown on the 
demonstrators. This Conference also hails the militant spirit of the 
demonstrators in the "Occupy Wall Street" movement that swept across the 
USA and spread to different countries in Europe, registering refusal of the 
people of those countries to accept the capitalist-imperialist system. We 
appeal to the people from all over the world to rise in solidarity with the 
people's revolt in the very citadel of imperialism.  
23. This Conference condemns the imperialist and Israeli Zionist crimes of 
mass imprisonment, kidnapping, torture, secret renditions and targeted 
assassinations. We call for a full accounting of all political prisoners from all 
over the world and their immediate release. 
24. This Conference unequivocally supports the people's struggles, armed and 
unarmed, against all forms of oppression, and national liberation 
movements going on in different parts of the world. 
25. This Anti-imperialist Conference notes that during May 15-22, 2012, military 
and civil representatives of the 28-nation military alliance of NATO, and a 
summit of the eight heads of state and the finance ministers of G8 countries 
are meeting to plan ever new draconian measures seeking to resolve the 
problems created by their crisis-ridden and profit-driven socio-economic 
system at the expense of working people and the poor everywhere. This 
Conference calls upon the people of every country to organize mass 
demonstrations on May 19, 2012, in protest against the imperialist policies 
which are affecting the lives of the common people all over the globe. 
26. This Conference notes that there is feminization of poverty on a global 
scale. Women have the highest rates of poverty and the least rights. 
Capitalist globalization impacts women as a source of cheap labour and it 
increasingly turns women into a commodity. The trafficking of women and 
sex tourism is a growing market of exploitation. Physical violence and 
atrocities against women are increasing. The largest banks and global 
finance capital ensnares the poorest women of South Asia, Africa and Latin 
America in a web of micro-loans. This Third International Anti-imperialist 
Conference declares that it stands for the full economic, political and social 
rights of women and for their full equality in all spheres. 27. Capitalism-imperialism has a long and shameful historical record of 
displacing the indigenous people and tribal people from their homelands, 
condemning them to a life of untold misery and destitution, and sometimes 
to annihilation and extinction. This Conference condemns the collusion of 
the multinationals and the governments of many countries for displacing the 
tribal people from their lands without adequate compensation or providing 
alternative means of livelihood, and demands that the displaced tribal 
people must be properly rehabilitated, and their culture protected, so that 
they can live with dignity.  
28. This Conference notes that capitalism-imperialism not only exploits people 
ruthlessly, it has scant regard for the environment. With its insatiable greed 
for profit it has polluted the environment, degraded the land and has caused 
unchecked emission of greenhouse gases leading to global climate change. 
The Conference demands that industries be forced to strictly follow the 
prescribed environmental protection regulations, and that they must not be 
allowed to flagrantly flout the regulations or clandestinely bypass them.   
29. This Conference proposes to observe 6th August, the Hiroshima Day, as 
the International Anti-imperialist Day. 
This Conference declares that its delegates, who are here to voice the words of 
millions of their countrymen, are standing up to hail the people around the world 
for their resolute struggle against occupation, onslaught, genocide, carnage, 
sanction and blockade by the imperialist powers with U.S. imperialism as the 
bulwark. We reiterate that as the crisis intensifies in the capitalist-imperialist 
countries the imperialists in their desperate bid for survival would attempt to launch 
wars, invade countries and bring them under military occupation.  From this 
platform we are giving a call to the people of every country to unite and organize 
militant movements in a coordinated way against imperialist acts of aggression 
and oppression. We emphasize that unless a correct revolutionary leadership 
emerges which can guide the guide the movements along the correct line the 
desired goal of emancipation of the people would not be attained. We further 
stress the necessity of coordinating these movements to release an 
unconquerable wave to remove the scourge of capitalism-imperialism from the 
face of the earth.  
***** NDMLP Diary
NDMLP Statement to the Media 
6
th
 September 2011 
Barbaric Attack on Student Union Leader 
The following statement denouncing the barbaric attack on S Thavabalan, 
President of the University of Jaffna Students' Union was issued by Comrade 
SK Senthivel on behalf of the Politburo of the New-Democratic MarxistLeninist Party.  
The attack in broad daylight on S Thavabalan (age 25 years), President of 
the University of Jaffna Students' Union demonstrates that the culture of 
belligerence and rowdy attacks that came into existence thirty-five years ago 
continue to persist in the North-East. Armed men on motorbikes, with faces 
covered by black cloth, have waylaid and attacked Thavabalan, causing him 
serious injury. This attack can in no way be justified or covered up. The NewDemocratic Marxist-Leninist Party strongly denounces this attack carried out 
on the University Students' Union President for holding a dissenting political 
view. At the same time, it views this attack as an attack on every university 
student. Hence, the Party joins the people in calling out aloud that such armed 
attacks that continue should be brought to an end. 
It is the government that protects an environment devoid of democracy, 
freedom and normal life in the North-East. It was amid this environment that 
armed men staged a variety of acts of intimidation, attack, burglary and 
murder. The situation still continues. People live amid fear and intimidation. 
Meantime, journalists and individuals with dissenting views are being attacked 
in a planned manner. 
Two months ago, Kuganathan, a journalist for  Uthayan, was attacked by 
armed ruffians and received severe injuries to his head. Day before yesterday, 
even before Kuganathan could recover fully from his injuries, University 
Students' Union President Thavabalan has been subjected to severe attack. 
Those who guide armed ruffians to carry out such serial attacks seek, besides 
exacting revenge from those whom they dislike, to create a mood of fear and 
intimidation among the people, especially university undergraduates. They 
seek thereby to preserve an oppressive environment by preventing the 
restoration of democracy, freedom and normal life. Hence, the Party points out 
at this juncture that there the need has arisen for democratic, progressive and 
left forces to unite based on common demands. 
SK Senthivel 
General Secretary Comrade KA Subramaniam Remembered 
The 22
nd
 death of Anniversary of Comrade KA Subramaniam (Comrade 
Maniam) founder General Secretary of the Party was marked on 27
th
November at the Kailasapathy Auditorium of the Dhesiya Kalai Ilakkiyap 
Peravai in Colombo 6. 
Dr S Sivasegaram, chairing the commemorative meeting, remembered the 
dedication of Comrade Maniam to his political cause and the high standards of 
selflessness and honesty that he showed in his private and public life.  
The Comrade KA Subramaniam Memorial Oration titled "Memories of a 
pioneer of the communist movement and current political trends" was 
delivered by Comrade SK Senthivel, General Secretary of the Party. Comrade 
Senthivel talked about the evolution of Comrade Maniam from a progressive 
reformist into an exemplary communist leader. The speech outlined the ability 
of Comrade Maniam to bring out the best in every young party member and 
activist and his role in building up the communist movement to its peak of 
strength in the North, taking the responsibility of founding the Party in 1978 
following a major crisis and split in the Marxist Leninist Communist Party and 
defending it against chauvinism and narrow nationalism through the difficult 
years of war, national oppression and LTTE tyranny in the North-East. He 
summed up the adverse and favourable  aspects of the current local and 
international political situation and emphasised the need for the younger 
generation to draw inspiration from Comrade Maniam in carrying forward the 
struggle against imperialism and chauvinistic reaction. 
Comrade Soodamani Shares Experiences  
On the occasion of the 75
th
 birthday of Comrade IK Soodamani, the Vavunia 
Branch of the New-Democratic Marxist-Leninist Party, jointly with members of 
his family, organised an event to share with Comrade Soodamani his 
revolutionary experiences. Members of the Central Committee of the Party 
and comrades from Colombo, Jaffna, Batticaloa and the Hill Country attended 
this important event. 
The revolutionary spirit of Comrade Soodamani reminded his comrades of 
the spirit of the 'old man who removed the mountains' in the well known 
Chinese fable. The event was organised since had expressed his desire to 
meet his comrades, while undergoing medical treatment in hospital during the 
preceding several weeks. 
Comrade Soodamani, born in Jaffna spent 55 years of his life not only as 
one who had accepted Marxist ideology but also as a practitioner of Marxist 
practice and mass struggle. He  has been attacked by the police for 
participation in struggles against caste oppression and detained on several 
occasions by the police for his political  activities. He is living evidence from among the many who had shed blood in the struggle for temple entry, without 
which major temples in Jaffna would not have been open for all to worship.  
Although he faced many hardships in life including the crippling of his wife 
during the war, dislocation by war,  loss of employment and poverty, he 
steadfastly stood by his policies and is proud to work for the Party even today. 
Comrade Soodamani not only successfully confronted negative criticism from 
within the community and disheartening narratives from those who had 
abandoned their party and policy for the sake of small favours and those who 
yielded to gun culture and abandoned their communist ideal to submerge 
themselves in Tamil nationalism but also gave guidance to members of his 
family. Comrades from the Hill Country reminisced that Comrade Soodamani 
who brought many people into the New-Democratic Marxist-Leninist Party in 
the Vavunia region has also participated in several people's struggles in the 
Hill Country. 
Besides making his donation to the Party as he does on his every birthday, 
he also demonstrated his selflessness by donating the entire collection of cash 
gifts for his 75
th
 birthday to a student to meet his medical expenses. 
A book and a documentary movie about the life and work of Comrade 
Soodamani are under production for the younger generation to learn from the 
spirit of Comrade Soodamani. 
Comrade Thambiah at the 3
rd
 Anti-Imperialist 
International Conference 
Comrade E Thambiah, International  Organiser, New-Democratic Marxist 
Leninist Party left for Dhaka on 25
th
 November to participate in the 3
rd
 AntiImperialist International Conference of  the International Anti-Imperialist and 
People's Solidarity Coordinating Committee convened jointly with the Socialist 
Party of Bangladesh (SPB). The event held in Dhaka, Bangladesh from 27
th
 to 
29
th
 November also marked the occasion of 94
th
 Anniversary of November 
Revolution and 31
st
 Anniversary of Foundation of SPB.  
Comrade Thambiah was invited by the Organising Committee of the 
Conference to chair two of its sessions and to address its plenary session. 
He read two papers at the Conference,  one on the role of culture as an 
imperialist tool to hegemonies the people of the world and the other on the 
imperialist grip on Sri Lanka.  
The draft text of the first talk is published in this issue of New Democracy 
and the text of the second will appear in the next issue. 
*****Sri Lankan Events 
Bold and Unbowed
At a special ceremony held in Jaffna on 20
th
 October to honour the three best 
performers at the Grade 5 Scholarship Examination from the Northern Region, 
Ten year old P Sethuragavan, the best performer, to the shock of the 
personalities present, refused requests by the organisers as well as his 
parents to fall at the feet of the Minister of Education, Banduala Gunawardane. 
Answering reporters outside the auditorium Sethuragavan explained that he 
had to struggle against difficult conditions in detention camps in the Vanni to 
attain his good results and that he owed nothing to anyone other than his 
parents and teachers. He has been commended by many for setting an 
example that deserves emulation by adults of all nationalities.
Rowdyism Prevails  
Parliamentary business descended to rowdy levels on 21
st
 November during 
the budget speech of President Rajapaksa when unruly government MPs 
sought to abuse, verbally and physically, members of the main opposition 
party, who held aloft placards and shouted slogans critical of the budget.  
What was equally shameful was the failure of the Speaker to take prompt 
action to maintain order and immediate disciplinary action against those who 
resorted to unruly and un-parliamentary conduct.  
Fatal Attraction 
Vickramabahu Karunaratne, leader of the Left Front (a.k.a. NSSP) shed the 
last shred of self respect of his Trotskyite Party by contesting on the ticket of 
the Democratic People's Front led by the Colombo-based Tamil nationalist 
Mano Ganesan. The reason for this strange alliance was the desperate need 
of Mr Karunaratne to secure a seat in a local body— following a long drought 
since election in 1999 January to the Western Provincial Council with the 
backing of the NDMLP to serve a six-year term, and bad defeats at all 
subsequent elections even with opportunist alliances. It may not totally be a 
coincidence that the veteran Trotskyite was photographed next to the leader of 
the UNP in a united campaign to 'save democracy' at a time when his senior 
partner Mano Ganesan is warming up to the UNP.  Journey to the West  
The team of TNA leaders before its visit to the US in late October claimed in 
that it was invited by the State Department for discussion with its officials and 
that it was scheduled to meet Secretary of State Hilary Clinton and was also 
expecting to have discussions with Ban Ki-Moon, Secretary General of the 
UN. Neither of these claims materialised, and what seems to have taken place 
was a rather routine meeting with officials at a low level. No joint statement 
was released at the end of the meeting or a formal photograph taken, as 
would have been the case with formal meetings. 
Whether there was an invitation at all is now in question, and it seems that 
the TNA invited itself in view of its current helpless situation where it is due to 
face elections to the Northern Provincial Council, with its Indian patrons 
unable to persuade the Sri Lankan government to conduct a serious dialogue 
with the TNA. 
Brand Name Problems  
The JVP faction despite considerable grassroots level support among JVP 
cadres and mass organisations has failed to capture the party machinery and 
has founded the Jana Aragala Vyaparaya (Movement for People's Struggle). 
The JAV, in its bid to establish its credibility among the JVP rank and file as 
the genuine successor to the JVP policies, is uncritically upholding the cult of 
Rohana Wijeweera, whose policies it claims to loyally follow, which the JVP 
establishment has betrayed.
The entire JVP has much to answer for, including its two disastrous 
insurgencies. Without a review of the past, beginning with its petit bourgeois 
origins, and going through a process of criticism and self criticism, the JAV 
could be doomed to the same fate as the JVP. The challenge for the JAV 
therefore is to carry out a serious uninhibited review of its tragic history. 
Gas Bubbles  
The country is being told that investigations have shown the existence of oil 
and gas in the sea to the north west of the country. What has not been told to 
the people is the extent of the deposits if any and the economic feasibility of 
extraction, let alone the adverse impact on the  environment and the fishing 
industry and the prospect of foreign investors taking out any likely marginal 
benefit.  
*****World Events
ASIA  
Nepal: The Great Betrayal 
The long overdue meeting of the Central Committee (CC) of the United 
Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) fixed for 19
th
 November was prorogued 
indefinitely, reportedly because of internal dispute over the 11
th
 Amendment to 
the Interim Constitution, which has since been withdrawn. Party Chairman 
Dahal (Prachanda) had been deferring the meeting meant to nail down 
differences that went public since keys to the Maoist arsenal were handed to 
the Army Integration Special Committee (AISC). He postponed the meeting 
indefinitely as the crisis further deepened with the signing of Bilateral 
Investment Protection and Promotion  Agreement (BIPPA) with India during 
Prime Minister Bhattarai's visit to India, and the seven-point deal with nonMaoist parties without due consultation within the party. The crisis in the party, 
however, remains grave and shows no sign of remission, while the inner party 
struggle has now spilled out to the streets owing to the gravity of the issues. 
Indra Mohan Sigdel (Comrade Basanta), Politburo Member of the party, in 
his article of 18
th
 November titled "The tasks of the ongoing CC meeting" 
(http://maoistroad.blogspot.com/) accused Dahal of preventing the CC from 
discussing key issues. The article also accused Dahal of not clearly declaring 
to the party his position on the party's line and strategy, despite admitting that 
the inner party struggle was due to differences over the party's line and 
strategy and insisting on taking the line struggle to its very end. 
The article urging the party's need to reach a comprehensive synthesis of 
the problems drew attention to challenges faced in the establishment of the 
correct ideological, political, organisational and cultural lines. It emphasised 
the urgency of uniting the entire party ranks based on the revolutionary line 
and developing a comprehensive plan consistent with that line in order to 
realise the party's immediate objective, namely a People's Federal Republic.  
The article accused party Chairman Dahal and Vice Chairman Baburam 
Bhattarai of taking many wrong decisions in recent months― especially since 
Bhattarai became Prime Minister  ―that are being implemented to the 
detriment to the people. It pointed out that these decisions made without due 
consultation within the party violated party policy and that, in the face of failure 
by the main leadership to stand by  the party's line, policy and system, 
Comrades Kiran and Badal shouldered the responsibility of defending the party line and debating on following key political issues within the party as well 
as among the masses.  
The first is Chairman Dahal's signing, without reference to other leaders, a 
four-point pact with Madhesi parties  consenting to a democratic republican 
constitution, contravening the party line of establishing an anti-feudal, antiimperialist People's Federal Republic. Significantly, the pact includes a vague 
statement that all the issues proposed by neighbouring countries will be 
resolved, implying support of and a commitment to implement pending 
proposals by India that Nepal signs  an extradition treaty, and allows the 
presence of a Indian Air Marshal in Nepal's Airport and intrusion by the Indian 
army to protect projects of Indian nationals in Nepal.  
The second concerns Bhattarai's signing the anti-national BIPPA with India 
during his first visit to India as Prime Minister violating the instruction of the 
Standing Committee that he should not sign any controversial agreement with 
India in this transitional period. Chairman Dahal's ambiguous utterances too 
indirectly support the BIPPA. This deal is in direct conflict with the UCPN-M 
position that the main contradiction of the Nepalese society is that between 
the Indian monopoly capitalists and their Nepalese agents on the one hand 
and the Nepalese people and the nation, on the other.  
The third concerns the relief package to the people declared by Bhattarai 
following swearing in as Prime Minister. The package with little to offer to 
landless and poor peasants, who overwhelmingly comprise the oppressed 
people, has pledged compensation to landlords whose land the landless and 
poor peasants seized during the People's War.  
The fourth concerns the UCPN-M policy of carrying out army integration 
and constitution writing side by side. But the PLA was disarmed even before 
work on the constitution started by surrendering to the AISC the keys for the 
containers with PLA weapons. The seven-point deal with non-Maoist parties 
has, thus, forced the surrender of the PLA, built to prevent counter-revolution. 
The PLA has now been dissolved through disarming and integration with the 
Nepal Army on an individual basis, with PLA fighters offered posts as forest 
security guards and watchmen, despite the UCPN-M Central Committee 
categorically stating that a national security policy should be followed by 
group-wise army integration without  disarming, and that the new force―
comprising at least 50% from the PLA and the rest from government security 
forces ―should be led by the PLA and deployed as a border security force.  
The fifth concerns the reversal of the  principle of establishing 14 federal 
states in Nepal, in order end to the national, linguistic and regional oppression 
under a unitary state. A major accomplishment of the People's War was the 
achievement of federalism. Party Chairman Dahal has reportedly agreed in a 
deal with the UML and Nepali Congress to organise Nepal as 7 federal states by reversing the majority decision  in the constitutional committee through 
setting up a parallel committee of experts for implementing federation.  
Basanta summed up the crisis as the outcome of a series of wrong 
decisions of the leadership made in  breach of earlier stands, commitments 
and concepts of the party, generally since entering the peace process and 
particularly with Bhattarai as Prime Minister. As a result of the wrong decisions 
the people have lost all their gains through ten years of People's War: there is 
no people's power; the PLA has been dissolved; and federalism has been 
hijacked by 'experts'. Privileges for the oppressed, including Dalits, women, 
indigenous people, Muslims and Mahdesis, pledged by the party are set to 
vanish in the impending constitution.  
The article argues that these failures were the result of Chairman Dahal's 
deviation from the ideological and political line and minimum strategy of the 
party. It draws attention to Dahal's  statement to the journal Krambhanga 
(meaning rupture) where he has implied that the establishment of bourgeois 
democratic revolution comprises completion of the New Democratic 
Revolution, which is against the decision of the last CC meeting at Chunwang. 
The article suggests that Dahal through that interview on the eve of the 
meeting of the CC was preparing the ground for a new revisionist line to 
liquidate the New Democratic Revolution into bourgeois democratic republic, 
and calls for the defeat of this right revisionist line to protect party unity and 
carry forward the New Democratic Revolution. 
The Economist (UK) commented on the integration process 
(http://www.economist.com/node/21538549) as follows: "The final terms of 
integration remain vague but are based on proposals produced by the army 
and accepted by the "pragmatic" wing  of the Maoists,  currently in the 
ascendant. It is a matter of speculation how deep discontent runs within the 
party, although even hardliners are not threatening imminent trouble". That is 
consistent with what Bhattarai had said at the Institute of South Asian Studies, 
National University of Singapore on 25
th
 March, several months before he 
became Prime Minister: "There is general agreement in the Maoist radical 
democratic camp that principal impediments to social progress in present-day 
Nepal are the feudal remnants in different spheres of society, economy and 
state. Hence the UCPN (Maoist) has identified its principal immediate task as 
the completion of the bourgeois democratic revolution", (http://www.ekantipur
com/2011/03/29/oped/post-conflict-restructuringi/331642.html).
 "The issue of the Maoist fighters was indeed an obstacle in writing the new 
constitution. The recent deal was greeted with relief by many, who hope the 
process will now come unstuck. Yet talk of "democratising" the army, or of 
land reform, or the other reforms promised in the CPA and once widely 
accepted as necessary, has long since slipped off the agenda. The 
constitution is already late, with several fundamental issues seemingly 
destined for inelegant, last-minute fudges sometime next year." Meantime, the All Nepal Peasants  Federation (Revolutionary) on 15
th
November declared at a press meeting that it would not return land taken over 
during the People's War. On 25
th
 November, a section of the UCPN-M in 
Bardiya District announced the return to Nepali Congress politician Binaya 
Dhoj Chand the land previously owned by him. On the 26
th
 cadres loyal to 
the revolution re-seized the property, but the police later took control of the 
certain is that returning to landlords land seized by peasants will not be as 
easy as the government led by Bhattarai thinks.  
India: Democracy at Stake 
Kishenji: Killer State and a Loving People  
Maoist sympathisers and  representatives of various people's organisations, 
civil liberties activists and hundreds of others on Sunday 27
th
 November paid 
their last respects to Kishenji (Mallojula Koteswara Rao) in his hometown 
Peddapalli in Andhra Pradesh. People turned up in large numbers at Kishenji's 
house to pay their tribute and console his family. Amid huge police presence, 
mourners, with folded hands, passed by the flower bedecked coffin. 
His remains were flown from Kolkata  to the Rajiv Gandhi International 
Airport at Shamshabad. The Police took control of Kishenji's remains on 
arrival and prevented Maoist sympathisers from taking his remains into the city 
for the people pay their last respects. Kishenji's niece Deepa Rao and Maoist 
sympathiser and renowned poet Varavara Rao, who accompanied Kishenji's 
remains from Kolkata, lodged their strong protest against the police attitude: 
"They not only killed him in cold blood but are also denying us the right to pay 
our last respects and perform his last rites the way we want to," said Varavara 
Rao. They were not alone in charging that Kishenji was tortured before being 
killed in a fake encounter on 24
th
 November and demands are growing for an 
impartial inquiry.  
New Democracy joins the freedom loving people of India in paying its 
respects to a committed revolutionary leader and fighter for social justice. 
Money for Mineral Exploration 
India's Ministry of Mines has proposed a government investment of 1.4 billion 
US dollars between 2012 and 2017 with the aim of boosting the share of 
mining in the country's GDP, currently pegged at 2.2%.
(www.miningweekly.com/topic/jharkhand).The proposal to expand mining in 
India on a large scale should be seen in the context of the desire of India's 
capitalist classes to enhance their profits from mining and of the Indian state to 
reinforce itself as a capitalist power and regional hegemon, with no concern for environmental destruction or sustainability and even less the welfare of 
indigenous peoples. 
Popular resistance backed by Maoists  in the tribal areas of Central and 
Eastern India has slowed down the expropriation of land from the people. 
Thus further capitalist mining will only mean further military and economic 
attacks on the tribal people in the name of hunting down Maoist 'terrorists'.  
Tamilnadu: Caste-based Police Violence  
Within four months of Ms Jayalalitha assuming power, police fired 
indiscriminately on Dalits who congregated at Paramakkudi in the 
Ramanathapuram District on 11
th
 September to observe the 54
th
 anniversary 
of the martyrdom of their leader Emmanuel Sekaran and killed six people and 
injured many, to the shock of the entire nation.  
The text below is based on an extensive fact finding report by the 
Tamilnadu-based Centre for Protection  of Civil Liberties (CPCL), Tamilnadu 
on police firing at Paramakkudi.  
Although upper caste atrocities against Dalits in this region are not unusual 
and in conflicts between Dalits and non-Dalits the state has always sided with 
non-Dalits, this crime was committed  by the state for no understandable 
reason since there is no evidence that the people's really went out of control to 
warrant lathy charge by the police. There is even less justification for the 
police opening fire on the people, killing four and injuring scores of others.  
The CPCL investigation also exposed the mainstream media which without 
exception reproduced as news the flawed interpretation of events by the 
Police seeking to justify its murderous brutality by accusing Dalit protesters of 
provocation. The report concludes that the police action was premeditated and 
that callous treatment of the injured by the police reflected deep-seated hatred 
towards Dalits. The report also draws attention to related incidents of police 
attack on people going to Paramakkudi from neighbouring areas to forcefully 
prevent them from attending the rally in Paramakkudi. 
The report also criticised Chief Minister Jayalalitha for interpreting the 
incident as a caste conflict between Thevars and Pallars, provoked by 
defamatory graffiti against the late Muthuramalinga Thevar (a notoriously 
caste conscious and reactionary leader of the Thevar community in the last 
century) in order to deflect attention  from the lack of professionalism of the 
state police.  
Also see "A Press Note for the Press Meet on 4 October 2011 at Chennai Press 
In ND 42 we reported the initial success of the resistance to the Koodankulam 
nuclear project.  But there was no illusion that nuclear production will not be 
initiated in Koodankulam. India's nuclear  lobby is far too strong to give up 
readily. With the Koodankulam project closely linked with plans for expansion 
of the Kalpaakkam complex the struggle was certain to have an impact across 
Tamil Nadu and beyond.  
The protest movement continued to spread across Tamilnadu, despite the 
tough line of the central government and the indifferent if not hostile attitude of 
the media to the protests. The central government, the nuclear lobby and 
other reactionary forces have since resorted to other tricks. 
In early November the establishment launched former President and 
'nuclear scientist' Dr Abdul Kalam to argue the case for the Koodankulam 
reactor and convince the people that there was nothing to fear about it. Nearly 
every argument put forward by Kalam were exposed as inaccurate if not 
intentionally misleading. 
More recently, a Hindutva dimension has been added to the issue by 
highlighting the role of the Roman Catholic clergy in promoting the protest 
campaign, mainly in view of the fact that they need to address the concerns of 
the predominantly Catholic fishing community in the region adjoin 
Koodankulam. Meanwhile the police continued to harass priests who have 
been urging people to join the protest movement. Police sources said that 76 
cases have been registered so far against the protestors, and that cases were 
registered against the RC Bishop of Tutucorin Diocese Yvon Ambrose and 
other priests for the same offence." 
Victory for a Just Struggle of the JNU Students 
After 6-months of uncompromising struggle, the student community forced the 
JNU administration to revoke its authoritarian 'restraint' order on the JNU 
Forum against War on People and lift all restraints on the Forum to hold public 
meetings, and to print and distribute pamphlets, posters etc.  
A hunger strike campaign enjoying public support and a massive united 
protest demonstration by the students forced the administration on 8
th
November to talk to a teacher's delegation and then to an all-organisation 
delegation. Unable to provide valid reasons for the imposition of the restraint 
the administration admitted its mistake in taking this unprecedented repressive 
action, and agreed to scrap the draconian circulars of 19
th
 May 2011 from the 
Proctor's Office.  Many students and students' organisations representing a wide spectrum 
of left, progressive and democratic opinion participated in the united struggle 
initiated by the JNU Forum against War on People. The Forum reiterated its 
firm resolve to continue with its struggle against the anti-people Operation 
Green Hunt campaign of the state.  
The victory of the struggle has thus delivered a strong message to the JNU 
administration and its political masters that the voices of the students and their 
rejection of the anti-people war cannot be gagged. It has also conveyed a 
message of strong solidarity with peoples' movements fighting against Green 
Hunt as well as all other forms of state repression.  
Afghanistan: Russian Rumblings 
Russia threatened to cut off NATO supply routes to Afghanistan if NATO did 
not compromise on its missile defence plans. Russian news services reported: 
"If NATO doesn't give a serious response, we have to address matters in 
relations in other areas". They  added that Russia's cooperation on 
Afghanistan may be an area for review. 
With Pakistan already cutting NATO's supply routes after NATO attacks 
killed twenty-six Pakistani soldiers,  Russia seems to take advantage of the 
plight of the US to extract concessions from it without risk of provoking the US. 
Although Pakistan's retired Lt General Hameed Gul among others share the 
view that US and NATO troops have been strangled in Afghanistan and it is 
time for Pakistan to avail itself of the opportunity that it missed on 9/11 to 
regain respect and sovereignty by taking advantage of Russia's differences 
with the US. But, given Russia's stand on a number of international issues, it 
is unlikely that Russia will do anything more than exploit the strained relation 
between the US and Pakistan to make gains closer to home. 
Hopes have been expressed that Russia could cut supply lines to NATO 
while Pakistan shuts air corridors to suffocate the US war effort in Afghanistan. 
But they belong to the world of fantasy. The US has since 2009 worked on 
options in the event that Pakistan becomes unreliable. A report in the Christian 
Science Monitor of 29
th
 November said that the US military has shifted around 
40% of its overall logistics supply to a Northern Distribution Network passing 
through Russia and other former Soviet republics and expects to increase that 
component to 75% by the end of 2011. 
On the Latvian route, cargo is carried by truck and train through Russia and 
then by truck through Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan to Afghanistan across the border post of Termez. The Georgian route avoids Russia and uses 
Azerbaijan to cross the Caspian Sea to enter Kazakhstan, and move through 
Uzbekistan to Afghanistan. Pakistan, despite its protests at the volume of US 
military materiel shipped across its territory into Afghanistan, needs the tariff 
revenues from the US for the use of its ports and roads. With much of that 
revenue diverted to countries of the former Soviet Union, the government of 
Pakistan and its transport firms are bound to suffer financially. 
Yet, the struggle against the US and NATO forces in Afghanistan of is a 
struggle by the people of Afghanistan. The US and its allies portray it as a war 
against the Taliban and whip up Islamophobia in their respective countries and 
internationally to arrest the surging unpopularity of the war.  
It is true that the fiercest military attacks are by the Taliban and its allies, 
and intensifying the war in the countryside has led to Taliban attacks on high 
profile targets in Kabul and other cities and the Taliban asserting its power in 
various ways like shutting off telecommunications at will. But what matters is 
that the people, although weary of war, remain defiant and want the foreign 
aggressors out. In a world without a powerful anti-imperialist bloc, a liberation 
struggle cannot benefit from rivalry between powers or be at the mercy of a 
big power. The struggle, as long as it is by the people, is certain to win, and 
only the oppressed people of the world can be their true ally until final victory 
and after.  
Pakistan: Growing Anti-US Feelings 
Wars are waged by the US as an aspect of its strategy of cultivating strife to 
sustain its arms industry while exerting control over vast sources of energy 
through occupation of territory. US aggression goes on ceaselessly 
irrespective of consequences to lands and people. A major consequence has 
been the brutalisation of the state, subversion of law, marginalisation of all 
democratic institutions and criminalisation of governance. Pakistan is a classic 
example of what prolonged US intervention could result in. 
Since 1947, the US provided massive sums as military and civilian 'aid' to 
Pakistan― the third-largest recipient of US 'security aid' after Israel and 
Afghanistan in recent years. During the Cold War, Pakistan was assigned a 
role to prevent Soviet expansion in the region. Despite strong US influence, 
US governments did not always have their way with Pakistan because of its 
geopolitical significance. Thus Pakistan could on occasion defy US pressure, 
for example, to maintain a close relationship with China and continue with its 
nuclear weapons programme, but not forever. 
When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, the US badly needed 
Pakistani help to overcome Soviet  forces in Afghanistan, and Pakistan became a major partner of the US in its 'crusade against communism'. 
Relations began sour when in 1998, Pakistan carried out several nuclear tests 
in response to India, which was by then warming up to the US. But Pakistan 
reasserted its geostrategic importance to the US, following the attack of 11
th
September 2001 on the World Trade Centre in New York, and the US decision 
to wage war in Afghanistan in 2001, allegedly, to overthrow the Taliban regime 
and get rid of Al-Qaeda. 
The US needed the support of Pakistan to invade Afghanistan. Having got 
itself involved in an unwinnable war, the US besides dragging Pakistan into 
the war and using Pakistani territory to fight a war from which Pakistan had 
little to gain, also launched attacks within Pakistan which killed civilians in the 
sensitive regions bordering Afghanistan. When it was clear that the US not 
only cannot win the war, but may face worse humiliation than in Vietnam 46 
years ago, it began to look for scapegoats and blamed Pakistan for not doing 
enough to control Islamic militants. Acrimony between the US and Pakistan 
got amplified and came into the open since the killing of Al-Qaeda chief 
Osama bin Laden in Pakistan on 2
nd
 May, which embarrassed Pakistan as 
well as exposed the bankruptcy of US foreign policy.  
When the US military establishment unleashed a string of bellicose 
statements targeting the Pakistani military and the intelligence service, ISI, the 
Chief of Army Staff General Ashfaq Kayani, under immense pressure from his 
own ranks, responded to assert Pakistan's legitimate strategic interests, 
something which the political leadership should have done but failed to. 
On 26
th
 November, NATO helicopters attacked two Pakistani military 
border posts along a mountainous frontier suspected of  harbouring militants 
and killed 26 soldiers. The people of Pakistan― already bitter about killing of 
civilians by US bombings inside Pakistan's territory and events like the release 
under US pressure of a CIA agent who killed two Pakistani civilians in January 
―expressed their anger in public anti-US demonstrations so that the 
government of Pakistan was compelled to call the bombings a grave 
infringement of the country's sovereignty, block vital supply routes for the USled troops in Afghanistan, and demand of the US to vacate a base used by its 
drones. Pakistan has also announced plans to review all diplomatic, military 
and intelligence links with the US and NATO. On 2
nd
 December Pakistan's 
army chief General Kayani ordered his troops to respond to NATO fire with 
fire. 
The incident has delivered a blow to US efforts to rebuild its tattered 
alliance with Pakistan which is vital for the US to wind down its losing war in 
Afghanistan. But it will be wrong to expect the main political parties of 
Pakistan, in and out of power, to sustain their defiance against the US, for 
each has, in turn, compromised the country's sovereignty to serve the 
interests of US imperialism.  The US is obsessed with absolute control over political and economic 
developments in Central Asia to isolate Russia and China. That is in conflict 
with Pakistan's strong relations with China which at present seem important to 
expedite Pakistan's development. Also in conflict with Pakistan's interests in a 
negotiated peace in Afghanistan is the US desire for long-term presence in 
Afghanistan.  
Pakistan's nuclear capability, never desired by the US, is now seen as a 
threat to the interests of the US and  its ally, India, while to Pakistan, and 
peerhaps China, it is necessary for stability in the region. The desire of the US 
to promote its principal ally India as proxy to exercise hegemony in South Asia 
too runs counter to Pakistan's interests. 
It will be futile for the rulers of  Pakistan to hope that the increasing 
assertiveness of its armed forces will persuade the US to retreat once its 
immediate interests had been secured. The interests of US imperialism and 
Pakistan disagree and will be so for long. To US desires absolute capitulation 
by Pakistan and will use its vast network of non-state militant collaborators 
and paid agents to destabilise Pakistan as has done in the recent past. 
Even as Pakistan's economy is in tatters, it is being rapidly stripped of its 
resources with the help of its corrupt  politicians and thieving elite classes. 
Pakistan faces an even bigger political crisis owing to widespread internal 
strife and the government's inability and unwillingness to deal with the root 
causes as well as due to external threats across its borders from a historically 
hostile India and an unfriendly Afghanistan ruled by a US puppet with close 
ties to India. The biggest threat to Pakistan is, however, the US, which, 
besides its flagrant violation the sovereignty of Pakistan, has subversive 
implants in every shade of the parliamentary political spectrum, Islamic 
militants and the armed forces. 
The only hope for Pakistan lies with its toiling masses who should unite 
against imperialism and its allies in the region, not on a purely nationalistic 
programme but one defending the interests of the oppressed majority against 
its oppressors who divide the people in the name of nationality and religion. 
Iran: Impending War Threat
A nonexistent "nuclear threat" is being used by the US as pretext to seek to 
install a 'friendly' regime in Iran, the  last serious obstacle to US military, 
economic and political control over the Middle East. Through it, the US hopes 
to undercut geopolitical rivals China and Russia and gain full control over Iran's vast petrochemical wealth, which has thus far been denied to 
exploitation by Western oil companies. 
The United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC) on 1
st
 December called on 
the entire progressive movement of the US to demand "No War, No 
Sanctions, and No Internal Interference in Iran!" 
The UNAC pointed out that, US hostility towards Iran since its revolution 
three decades ago has intensified in the last few months with a steady 
escalation of charges, threats, sanctions and preparations for an attack. The 
UNAC drew particular attention to Israeli media speculation since late October 
that Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu was heavily lobbying for military strikes 
on Iran's nuclear energy sites and to Israel's test firing of a missile able to 
carry a nuclear warhead into Iran. It also drew attention to Britain's armed 
forces stepping up contingency planning for potential military action against 
Iran. These developments need to be seen in the context of  
 US allegations of an Iranian plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to 
the US, allegedly using a hit-man from the Zeta drug cartel, deeply 
infiltrated by US anti-drug agents 
 Moves to forbid the President of the US from speaking to Iranian officials 
without explicit permission from Congress; 
 The Boeing Company sending to the US Air Force in November the first 
of 20 "bunker-busting" bombs, designed to destroy underground facilities 
like those housing Iran's nuclear energy program; 
 The US & UK imposing fresh sanctions against Iran's banking system, 
aiming to strangle the country's economy; and 
 The strengthening of the military alliance with the Persian Gulf states 
that, together with U.S.-occupied Iraq and Afghanistan, to form a military 
semi-circle around the Islamic Republic. 
That there is no evidence that Iran is trying to develop a nuclear weapon 
has not prevented the US, its allies and the major news media, from repeating 
the charge as if it is an established fact. 
On 8
th
 November, the International Atomic Energy Agency, the nuclear 
watchdog of the UN, released its latest report on Iran's nuclear program, which 
was unable to say that Iran is developing a nuclear bomb but repeated past 
charges and introduced new 'evidence' claimed to be from ten unnamed 
countries without showing Iran the actual 'evidence', citing unidentified 
intelligence sources, and using innuendo and political spin to give the 
impression that Iran is about to construct nuclear weapons.  
IAEA reports on Iran have become increasingly critical since 1
st
 December 
2009 when Yukiya Amano, a Japanese career diplomat, replaced Dr Mohamed El Baradei of Egypt as Director General of the IAEA. The report 
failed to mention that Iran, as a signatory to the international Nuclear NonProliferation Treaty, has an internationally recognised right to develop and use 
nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. Notably, Israel, a country with 200-300 
nuclear weapons and threatening to attack Iran, is one of only three countries 
that still refuse to sign the NPT. 
There are also other reports of the US planning cyber attacks against Iran 
as well as using terrorist proxies, including Israeli agents, to subvert Iran. On 
12
th
 November a blast at an Iranian missile base west of Teheran led to the 
killing of over 40 people including Major General Hassan Moqqadam, a senior 
leader of Iran's missile program. While Iranian officials insist that the blast was 
an 'accident', accounts in the corporate press and by independent analysts 
support the claim that Israel and the West's terrorist cat's paw, the bizarre 
political cult, Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK) were responsible. There have been 17 
reported explosions on natural gas pipelines since 2010 up from only three in 
2008 and 2009, and about 10 at oil refineries. 
Besides the cyber attack using the Stuxnet virus that wrecked the nuclear 
energy program of Iran in 2010, espionage tools like Duku are being 
developed to facilitate future attacks. It is feared that alongside the ratchetingup of bellicose anti-Iranian rhetoric, moves to collapse the economy and an 
assassination and sabotage campaign targeting Iranian scientists and military 
installations, cyber-warriors are infecting computer networks with viruses and 
"beacons" that will be used to attack air defence systems and civilian 
infrastructure.  
Of late, the US and its allies, especially the UK, have been applying a 
string of sanctions against Iranian financial and commercial institutions with 
the aim of weakening the economy. They are unable to impose a total 
embargo on business in view of its implications for the recovery of the tottering 
economies of Europe. 
Waging war on Iran in one form or the other serves several imperialist 
purposes and in what way it will be initiated and what form it will take are open 
to debate. But, if we go by the experience of Iraq, we can be certain that the 
pretext for the attacks will be Iran's 'plans to develop nuclear devices' and the 
scope of attacks will not be confined to Iran's nuclear facilities.  
When Iraq had control over its oil and asserted its right to follow its own 
political path, the US falsely accused it of developing weapons of mass 
destruction and ties to al Qaeda to make a case to wage a cruel and unjust 
war. No weapons were found, nor was evidence of ties to al Qaeda, but after 
nine years of war, Iraqi oil is open for Western exploitation. 
The threat of war is all the more real in the context of the economic 
meltdown in the West and the working class and the broad masses rising in 
rebellion against the ruling class.  [Readers are referred to the essay "Target Iran: Washington's Countdown to 
War" by Tom Burghardt in Global Research.  
Palestine: The Price of Success 
The US punished the UNESCO for voting on 31
st
 October to grant member 
status to the Palestinian Authority. The US turned to laws that prohibit US 
support of UN agencies that accept the PA as member. The US pulled out of 
the UNESCO and announced the stoppage of payment of $80 million in dues 
and voluntary contributions.  
It is expected that, although the decision has adverse implications for US 
technology companies that use UNESCO to open markets in the developing 
world and rely upon an associated entity, the World Intellectual Property 
Organisation, to police international disputes over music, movies and 
software, pressure from the pro-Israeli lobby will block withdrawal of the antiPA legislation. But it may not be correct to place the entire blame on the proIsrael lobby since Israel is not the master of the US, but a loyal servant taking 
advantage US dependence on Israel to do its dirty work in the Middle East.  
Admission of the PA to the UNESCO, nevertheless, has far-reaching 
implications including potential admission as member of the UN, which the US 
has successfully prevented for too long. That angers the US.  
Syria: Pushed towards Civil War
With help from external forces, the opposition has grown stronger in its 
confrontation with the government of President Bashar al-Assad. In 
November, army defectors and protesters had assaulted military bases, and 
a civil war looms large unless differences are settled through negotiations.  
Given the geostrategic importance of Syria in the Middle East and its close 
ties with Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas, all hostile to the West, attempts to reenact the Libyan experience in Syria will be a dangerous move. On 28
th
November, a delegation led by Burhan Galioun, president of the rebel Syrian 
National Council met with Col. Riad al-Asaad, the highest ranking Syrian army 
defector and leader of the "Free Syrian Army", and Galioun pledged support to 
the "Fighting Force", an organisation formed by army defectors in Syria.  
Sanctions against Syria by the West and more recently by the Arab League 
(a subsidiary of Saudi Arabia and repressive Gulf emirates that dances to 
Washington's tune), with Algeria, Iraq and Lebanon dissenting, will only 
aggravate the crisis and pave the way for military intervention by the West in Syria. As evidence that the West is considering an invasion of Syria― and in 
the process force Iran to retaliate ―is that, for the first time in many months, 
the US Navy super-carrier CVN 77 George HW Bush left its traditional theatre 
of operations just off the Straits of Hormuz and has parked close to Syria.  
Significantly, Western countries have also advised the opposition to refrain 
from dialogue with the government, implying that they will back moves to 
topple the government violently. Russia  has learned from the failure of its 
diplomatic efforts in Libya, and its Foreign Minister has denounced Western 
advice as 'political provocation'. Russia reaffirmed its opposition to any military 
strike against Syria, and has responded to moves by the US by sending a 
battle group led by the heavy aircraft-carrying missile cruiser, Admiral 
Kuznetsov, with two supporting ships to the Syrian port of Tartus.  
Syria has for long been geopolitically the most sensitive part of the Middle 
East so that prolonged instability there, let alone a regime change and the 
subsequent shift in diplomacy, will alter the balance of power in the region.  
Retired Major General Armagan Kuloglu, a senior Turkish security and 
defence analyst in the Ankara-based Center for Middle Eastern Strategic 
Studies, told the Iranian news agency Press TV on 3
rd
 December that military 
intervention in Syria will be a "big mistake" and warned against foreign 
meddling in Syria's internal affairs. He also noted that implementing a regime 
change will not be easy, as the Syrian government is still popular and is 
supported by Russia and China. He pointed out that Russia's sending a 
military flotilla to the eastern Mediterranean is a message of support for Syria. 
Hundreds of people, including Syrian security forces, have been killed 
during the unrest. The Syrian government accuses that outlaws, saboteurs, 
and armed terrorists orchestrated from outside the country are behind the 
turmoil and deadly violence. While the opposition blames the security forces 
for the killings, the West seems intent on using an adapted version of its 
strategy in Libya of using its clients among the opponents of the regime to 
avoid a negotiated settlement and plunge Syria into civil war. 
AFRICA 
Egypt: Army Rules, OK! 
The Egyptian revolutionary movement has called for the end of the state of 
emergency which has existed in Egypt since 1967. While the Supreme 
Command of the Armed Forces (SCAF) that is ruling Egypt has claimed that the referral of civilians for military trials would end  when the state of 
emergency is lifted, it has refused to set a date and has instead utilised this as 
a broad mandate to bring all manner of civil issues before military, rather than 
civil, courts. 
On 19
th
 November, at least one Egyptian protester calling for an end to 
military rule and the fulfilment of the revolution's demands for democracy and 
social justice was killed and over 670 injured in police attacks on protesters in 
Tahrir Square, the centre of Egypt's revolutionary mobilisations. Protests have 
taken place across Egypt and another protester was murdered by the military 
in Alexandria. 
It is clear now that, despite the fall of Mubarak, the struggle is far from over. 
Human rights abuses and military repression continue against Egyptian 
popular movements and activists. The huge protest on 18
th
 November and the 
resumed occupation of Tahrir Square marked the climax of a swelling wave of 
actions against military trials of civilians, the regime's murder of protesters in 
the joint Christian/Muslim demonstrations against anti-Copt prejudice, torture 
and coercion against prisoners, and repeated statements by the military that it 
would hold on to power even after elections. 
Three days after the murder of the 24 year old political prisoner Essam Ali Atta 
by police torture, the military on 30
th
 October detained prominent Egyptian 
blogger and activist Alaa Abdel Fattah along with another activist who was 
later released on bail for his opposition to military courts trying Egyptian 
civilians. Thousands of people angered by light sentences by the Criminal 
Court for police killers of civilians in contrast to harsh sentences handed down 
to civilians by military courts took to the streets demanding the release of 
political prisoners and an end to the unjust military trials, and called for 
international solidarity with their campaign.  
Nearly 12 000 Egyptian civilians have been tried by military courts since 
the fall of Mubarak, and the tribunals have convicted 8 071, in violation of 
Article 14 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which 
obligates states to protect and ensure the right to fair, independent and 
impartial trials and freedom of expression, and Egypt is a signatory to the 
ICCPR. For more recent  information on military trials in Egypt visit 
The flawed election process in Egypt has led to the success of 'moderate' 
Islamic political parties, which are likely to strike a deal with the SCAF which is 
ruling Egypt and has refused to let any elected civilian government to draft a 
new constitution challenging its control over Egypt. 
*** 
Islamists seem to have been the beneficiaries of the democracy campaigns in 
North Africa. In Tunisia, the moderate Islamist party An-Nahda Party won 90 out of 217 seats in elections held in October to an assembly that will write a 
new constitution for Tunisia 
In Morocco with only 45% of registered voters turning out, and only less 
than 14 million of the 21 million Moroccans of voting age registering as voters 
(2 million fewer than in 2007) the moderate Islamist PJD party won the most 
seats (107 of 395) in the country's parliamentary election. The record of the 
Islamists has thus far been collaboration with those in power and cooperation 
with the monarchy is likely to continue in Morocco.  
It will eventually be the Egyptian working class which has begun to assert 
itself since 2008 along with the new generation of radical youth that will free 
Egypt from its military rulers and their American masters who continue to arm 
successive repressive regimes. 
For further informed comment on political trends in Egypt see Peter 
  
Somalia: Ethiopian Meddling 
Russian news agency Novosti reported, citing local elders as well as the BBC 
reporting eye witnesses to at least 20 vehicles carrying Ethiopian troops, that 
several hundred Ethiopian troops with  military vehicles have crossed into 
Somalia's southern and central parts, amid denial by Ethiopian authorities and 
joint military operations undertaken by Kenyan and Somali troops against AlShabaab in the southern provinces after the two countries accused it of being 
behind a wave of abductions of foreigners. 
On 19
th
 November, Xinhua reported that, according to residents of the 
central Somali town of Beledweyne in Hiran province along the border with 
Ethiopia, hundreds of Ethiopian  troops had gathered along the common 
frontier with Somalia where Al-Shabaab  rebels are in control. Reports from 
other areas in central Somalia also said that troops from Ethiopia were seen 
along the common frontiers of the two countries and that rebel fighters' battle 
wagons were seen heading towards the frontier. 
Al-Shabaab fighters currently control much of the south and centre of the 
war ravaged country while the 'internationally recognised' Somali government 
runs only the capital Mogadishu― from which it successfully drove out AlShabaab following a major offensive backed by African Union peacekeeping 
troops ―and few parts in the south. Ethiopian troops withdrew from Somalia in 
2009 after two years of occupation during which they unsuccessfully fought 
with insurgency led by the radical Islamist group of Al-Shabaab. LATIN AMERICA & THE CARIBBEAN 
Community of Latin American and 
Caribbean States Founded  
Leaders from 33 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean met in Caracas 
on 2
nd
 and 3
rd
 December at the two-day founding summit of a new regional 
bloc― with the notable exclusion of the United States and Canada ―aimed to 
boost integration and economic development. Members of the newly-formed 
Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), which emerged 
out of the Rio Group and the Latin American and Caribbean Summit on 
Integration and Development, approved the Declaration of Caracas and 22 
other documents calling for the promotion  of regional integration in politics, 
economy and culture, and realising common regional development. 
Documents adopted at the summit covered the issues of the US embargo on 
Cuba, social inclusion, food security, counterterrorism and drug trafficking.  
The summit marks a significant move by Latin America away from its status 
as the backyard of the US to assert its importance as a player in its own right 
in international politics. With CELAC  countries holding much of the mineral 
wealth of the globe including its largest oil reserves, building on existing interregional bodies like the Union of South American Nations and the proposed 
Bank of the South will place it on a strong footing economically. 
The fact that Cuba, excluded from the Organisation of American States 
(OAS) for daring to challenge US imperialism and defend its revolution, was 
not only included but asked to host the 2013 CELAC Summit. Thus, there is 
reason to expect that the consolidation of CELAC will be the final nail in the 
coffin of the US-dominated OAS. It is therefore significant that the founding of 
CELEC occurred at a time when US economic and political power is on the 
decline and the European Union is struggling to avert economic collapse. 
The US had tried everything possible to stop CELAC and, recently, former 
Colombian president, Alvaro Uribe, a US puppet, during his recent visit to 
Venezuela had urged the right-wing opposition to issue a "public statement" 
denouncing the growing relationship between Colombia and Venezuela. But 
Colombian President Manuel Santos, despite adhering to Uribe's neoliberal 
and repressive politics at home, is adopting a foreign policy that contrasts with 
that of Uribe in seeking to integrate Colombia into regional organisations and 
strengthening bilateral relations with other Latin American countries. This does 
not mean that Colombia and other Latin American countries which follow US 
foreign policy dictates will change their attitude or enable CELAC to supersede 
the OAS. What is certain, however, is  that the US cannot for long bully the 
countries of the American continent the way it did only a decade ago. EUROPE  
Greece: Deepening Debt Crisis  
The recent sequence of events in Europe is a sequel to the public debt crisis 
of the US government. On 21
st
 July, representatives of European governments 
agreed to a new package of loans to Greece, to pre-empt Greece defaulting 
on its obligations to foreign creditors. The approval of the package rather than 
point to a solution to Europe's debt crisis, led to the failure of the first package 
for Greece agreed in 2010. Europe's financial markets continued to slide in the 
face of fear that Greece will eventually default with knock on effect on other 
European states. French President Sarkozy and German Chancellor Merkel, 
representing the strongest economies of Europe held a hasty bilateral summit 
in mid-August, and called for coordinated economic policy making in Europe 
and levying of taxes on financial transactions. The proposals met with 
scepticism so that, following the summit, share prices on Europe's financial 
markets continued to tumble with those of some European banks falling by 30 
to 40% in two weeks. The Western world is thus beset by major debt crises in 
the US and in Europe. 
When the world financial crisis erupted in 2008, most Western countries 
lent massive amounts of money to save their tottering banks. The obligation of 
the Euro zone countries to keep budgetary deficits within strict limits was 
temporarily relaxed following the crisis and public debts grew in most 
European countries. In 2010, Germany's debt constituted 80% of its GDP, and 
that of Italy 120%. Thus, Greece with public debt at around 150% was not 
alone in failing to prevent a rise in debt level. However, unlike other Euro zone 
countries, it became target to ruthless speculation which forced it to pay 
usurious interest rates in the region of 15% (much higher than the rate paid by 
any other in the EU) to private lenders including French and German banks, 
showing the dominance of Europe's leading banks over the EU and its 
member states. 
When Greece first threatened to default on its repayment in April 2010, the 
EU and the IMF jointly devised an 'aid'-package accompanied by standard 
austerity measures like reductions in social spending and wages of state 
employees and in addition the obligation to sell-off 56 billion Euro in state 
properties. The impact of austerity measures and privatisation on Greece was 
disastrous: contrary to the claim by the EU and IMF that balancing of Greek 
government budget is necessary for economic growth, the Greek economy 
showed a negative growth rate of 6.9% in 2010. Thus, the imposed conditions 
only worsened the crisis for Greece. 
Austerity measures imposed in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis led to 
Europe-wide protests including, among many others, the sustained protest 
movement by the newly emergent youth movement, the 'indignados' in Spain. Violent riots of the unemployed youth August 2011 in the UK were preceded 
by a series of protests against austerity measures and corporate tax 
avoidance. In Greece, following parliamentary approval of austerity measures 
in May 2010 to accommodate extra budget cuts of 30 billion Euros over three 
years as part of a deal with the EU and IMF for a bailout― the first ever in the 
EU ―anti-austerity protests unequivocally took the form of civil disobedience. 
Leading Greek trade unions have staged general strikes when the first 
international plan against a default was adopted in May 2010 and in early 
2011. Besides, 50% of Greece's population supports what's called the  'We 
Won't Pay' offensive, which has taken the form of people's refusal to pay the 
reportedly corrupt road-tolls, refusal to pay for the city's metro tickets in 
Athens, and a bus-fare boycott in Thessaloniki, the country's second largest 
city. The struggles against privatisation and road-toll protests have put the 
parliament and government on the defensive.  
The Euro zone's rescue package for Greece hammered out by the leaders 
of France and Germany in October 2011 was unlikely to be popular with the 
people of Greece and Prime Minister George Papandreou, much to the anger 
of the sponsors of the package, proposed a referendum on it, which the rightwing opposition as well as some members of his centre-left coalition rejected. 
Papandreou was forced to resign on 9
th
 November and an interim coalition 
government was formed on 10
th
 November with Lucas Papademos, a former 
vice-president of the European Central Bank as Prime Minister. 
The rescue package is not a long term solution and Greece is likely to 
default and leave the Euro zone, which will pave the way for others like 
Portugal and Ireland to follow suit with adverse consequences for the Euro 
and the finance capitalists of Europe whose interests are actually defended by 
the EU. 
[For an extensive analysis read "Europe's Debt Crisis Fuels Civil Resistance" 
Kosovo: NATO's War on Serbs 
Disturbances occurred in Northern Kosovo on 23
rd
 November as Serbs 
thwarted attempts by a Kosovo  Force (KFOR) contingent under NATO 
command to dismantle a barricade near the town of Zvecan in Northern 
Kosovo. In response to NATO claims that the clashes injured 21 of its soldiers, 
Serbian Deputy Prime Minister Ivica  Dacic called on the Prime Minister of 
Kosovo, Hashim Thaci to restrain his NATO led forces from attacking Serbian 
civilians and warned the Kosovo regime against any further provocation. 
The Serbian minority of Kosovo, comprising 10 per cent of the population 
and mainly resident in northern Kosovo, lost its legal status when Kosovo, 
backed by the West, unilaterally proclaimed independence from Serbia in 2008. The Serbs consider themselves citizens of Serbia, while the majority 
Albanians expect them to leave their homes and move to Serbia. 
Until July the Serbs enjoyed a measure of independence and right to free 
contact with mainland Serbia. When the Kosovo regime moved to take control 
over the border with Serbia in July, to install customs stations, the Serbs saw it 
as an initial step infringing upon their remaining freedoms, and erected 
barricades in response. Tensions have been on the rise for months over the 
disputed border crossings, and a compromise was proposed that the stations 
will be controlled by KFOR forces and not Albanians. But the Serbs, who see 
KFOR as a force that implements the policies NATO, which enabled the 
secession of Kosovo, and protects Albanian interests to the detriment of the 
Serbs, rejected it. 
NORTH AMERICA 
US: Occupying Wall Street and Beyond 
Inspired by the mass protests in Cairo's Tahrir Square and Madrid's Puerta del 
Sol Square, hundreds camped out in Zuccotti Park near Wall Street since 17
th
September, as part of the "Occupy Wall Street" (OWS) campaign. On 15
th
October, its global day of action, it drew protests by thousands  in 1,500 cities 
world-wide, including more than 100 in the United States.  
The protest campaign is going on despite cold weather and snowfall. As 
the slogan "We are the 99%" sums up, the protest is against the capitalist 
system. Although there are similarities with the anti-globalisation movements 
earlier this century against imperialist globalisation there are essential 
differences. 
By the 1990s individual issue-based protest movements (e.g. environment, 
anti-globalization, peace, women's rights, climate change etc.) had been 
promoted through NGOs mainly as substitutes to a cohesive mass movement. 
This pattern was evident in the counter G7 summits and People's Summits of 
the 1990s. The Seattle 1999 counter-summit, once upheld as a triumph for the 
anti-globalization movement, in fact, ended up helping globalisation by 
undermining the growing public awareness and resentment of globalisation by 
allowing NGOs not only to infiltrate  but also decide the agenda of the antiglobalization campaign. 50,000 people from diverse backgrounds, civil society 
organizations. The protest movement was found to have received funding 
from big corporations, and is for all practical purposes dead.
(http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=21110).The OWS campaign from its outset had a strong spontaneous element 
comprising the growing public dislike and distrust of capitalism. But it is far 
from adequate to overthrow capitalism and replace it with the only feasible 
alternative, namely socialism,   
Capitalism— which has now taken the form of globalised imperialism and 
neo-colonialism wields control over  the world economy through its highly 
centralised international trade and financial arms backed by far reaching 
military might —cannot be defeated by  disorganised groups without a clear 
goal and programme of struggle. The need for an international mass 
movements led by well organised Marxist Leninist parties is therefore even 
greater than in the colonial era. Failure of the left to act will be taken 
advantage of by imperialism through its  subversive agencies, especially the 
NGOs. 
The struggle has therefore to be directed against the main enemy, namely 
imperialism, as well as its agents among class collaborative trade union 
organisations and 'left-of-centre' political parties which do not want to upset 
the capitalist apple cart, but only rearrange things slightly so that life goes on 
the way they are used to. 
The OWS campaign, despite growing mass support within the US and 
outside and growing public frustration about the failure of the state to defend 
the interests of the people against a handful of capitalists, is at risk of not only 
failing in its general objective of taming capital but also of denying the people 
the opportunity to mobilise themselves in a struggle to be rid of the capitalist 
system. It cannot be allowed to suffer the same fate as the fore-doomed antiglobalization projects of the last decade. The task of organising the masses 
and building a left alternative political movement can no longer be postponed. 
It will, be terribly wrong to remain aloof and mock at the campaign. The 
correct approach will be to use the opportunity to educate the masses about 
the capitalist system and the need for an organised struggle not only to 
overthrow capitalism but replace it with  something that is fair and humane.  
The building blocks for a revolutionary Marxist Leninist communist party are to 
be found from among the protesters, especially the members of the working 
class. The task before Marxist Leninists is to recognise them and organise. 
***** (Continued from inside front cover)
Now preparing food by boiling the top of Sisnu
3
 in water 
Now preparing food by boiling the tip of tongue for taste 
Is it tasty or tasteless; is it hot or bitter? 
Seemed as though they've lost the taste; seemed ever hot 
The narrative of Gamalis 
Used to seem very old; used to seem unknown 
Seemed like the potato skin leftovers of porcupine 
Like heat-withered potato- plants 
Ever like the tear-drop fallen on account of weight of potato- sack 
Seemed as though potato's what defined their life 
It seemed strange. 
The story of Gamalis 
The uneducated Gamalis, who knew not the first letter of the alphabet 
Can know if now even in a poem 
While searching image and reflection 
They seem to be making pens of a bamboo 
Those whoever searched their identity on potato leaves 
Are writing these days slogans of movement on those leaves 
It seems totally new 
The narrative of Gamalis these days. 
Gamalis do not come down to Pyuthan carrying timmur these days 
Are rather busy making new chemical out of the same timmur 
Gamalis do not even grow potatoes these days 
They grow martyrs 
Gamalis do not break their head in quarries 
They carve martyr's statue on those stones; 
Wonderful Gamalis! Real, wonderful Gamalis!! 
(Source: "Poems of the People's War" published by Ichchhuk Cultural Academy) 
1. Gaam: a village development committee in Rolpa
4
, where class struggle got 
intensified. Inhabitants of Gamm are called Gamalis. Gamaliharu is plural of 
Gamali. 
2. Timur is a species of tree which produces small fruits used as spice. 
3. Sisnu is a plant, whose nettle the poor people in the villages of Nepal eat as 
substitute for food. 
4. A place in Western Nepal, known as a place of the People's War.  (
Registered as a Newspaper in Sri Lanka 
Published by E Thambiah of Upstairs Room 6, 571/15 Galle Road, Colombo 06 
Phone: 071 4302959; Fax: 011 2473757; E-mail: newdemocraticparty@hotmail.com 
Website: http://ndpsl.org 
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IN THE DARK DEPTHS 
Jose Maria Sison
The enemy wants to bury us 
In the dark depths of prison 
But shining gold is mined 
From the dark depths of the earth 
And the radiant pearl is dived 
From the dark depths of the sea. 
We suffer but we endure 
And draw up gold and pearl 
From depths of character 
Formed so long in struggle. 
10 April 1978 


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