SADDAM’S BRITISH ADMIRERS – 6

As an example of how Vanessa Redgrave and the Workers Revolutionary Party repaid Saddam Hussein's generosity (see below), here is a piece from the WRP daily News Line in 1980, which was reproduced in a pamphlet. (I have a lot more of this rubbish but am republishing this just to give a taste.) Incidentally, just to show that I have no axe to grind, Ms Redgrave said in her letter to the Sunday Telegraph that "the WRP totally and publicly opposed Saddam Hussein's regime from September 1980". She might just be right. This fawning report dates from late August of the same year.

THE PRESIDENT – SADDAM HUSSEIN
Alan Bott, from Iraq: Under the Leadership of the Arab Ba’ath Socialist Party, News Line special report 1980

The crucial importance of revolutionary leadership has been expressed in Iraq most strongly during the celebrations to mark the 12th anniversary of the July 1968 Revolution.

The occasion also marked the first anniversary of Saddam Hussein's assumption of national leadership.

Everywhere in Baghdad, his portrait was alongside that of his predecessor, Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr, and coinciding with the celebrations of the Revolution were special exhibitions - one of books by President Hussein and another documenting his life and political struggles, in contemporary photographs and documents.

It is a story which has been dramatised in a semi-fictional form, first in a two-volume novel The Long Days by Abdul Ameer Mu'alla, and a film of the same name, by the Egyptian director Tawfiq Saleh.

Both accounts present in an exciting and popular way the true story of Saddam Hussein's flight from Bagh dad into Syria after an unsuccessful attempt on the life of Abdul Kerim Qassim in 1959.

The photo-documentary exhibition of the President's life is in the attentive care of Hamid Matbei at the Baghdad Museum of Modern Art. He explains the story with genuine pride - as a part of his own past.

Saddam Hussein was born into a poor family in the spring of 1937, about 120 kilometres from Tikrit, in a village called Al Awja. His father died before ever seeing his son Saddam and the task of bringing up the future President fell to an uncle who was then an officer in the Iraqi army.

From the age of three he was looked after at the home of another uncle, Haj Ibrahim al-Hassan, who lived just south of Tikrit. The family moved when Saddam Hussein was only six and at his new home in the al-Hawaja area, he was to learn first-hand the struggle of farm life.

Another move in 1947 took the family to the Nineveh area and soon after Saddam Hussein began his formal education at schools in Tikrit and then Baghdad.

He developed political convictions which led to his taking part in the 1956 demonstrations over Allied aggression in Egypt. This was to be the turning point in his life, at the age of 19.

After the July revolution of 1958. Saddam Hussein and several of his comrades were briefly jailed along with other militants and on his release he continued both with his studies and with clandestine political work.

Abdul Kerim Qassim’s regime brought a new reign of terror in Iraq, after abandoning its original revolutionary line. Protest soon became confrontation with Qassim's government and police and it was at this point that the secret Arab Ba'ath Socialist Party Command aid plans for an attempt on
his life.

Saddam Hussein was one of seven party members selected for the mission - a daring attack on Qassim's car as it was driven along the old Rasheed Street in Baghdad city centre.

His task was to cover and protect those carrying out the attack. One comrade was killed and another badly wounded in the shooting.

It was while Saddam Hussein was carrying the wounded comrade that he was hit in the leg by a shot from a security policeman working undercover as a local greengrocer.

After making their escape from the scene, they hid for days, shattered by the news that Qassim had survived with only slight wounds.

Saddam Hussein's comrades, unable to obtain the services of a doctor, were forced to remove the bullet from his leg using a razor blade, sterilised in a flame.

His later escape from Baghdad, while police carried out continuous raids in the hunt for the attackers, is recorded in detail in the documentary exhibition and is the main subject matter of the film “The Long Days”.

On horseback, on foot, by motorcycle and donkey, he travelled the 1,000 kilometres into Syria, across the desert, in spite of his painful wound.

The photographs of those who helped him on his way are the rugged faces of Iraqi peasants, his brother in Tikrit, and other Ba'athist sympathisers.

After three months in relative safety with Ba'athists in Syria, he travelled to Nasser's Egypt, where he studied law at Cairo.

After the Ba'athist Revolution of 1963 in Iraq he returned to Baghdad, only to discover after six months of the new regime that the leadership had adopted policies to serve their own interests.

Soon he was back at work in secret, frequently disguised, using three names, in hiding and on the move from place to place to evade the police. The exhibition shows one of the best photographs of Saddam Hussein as a “Wanted” poster issued by the authorities.

Arrested, in spite of all his precautions and skill in clandestine operations, he spent two years in various Iraqi jails, before escaping to continue secret work.

Arrested again, he staged another daring escape while under armed escort in 1966, to play his part in rallying the forces for the July 17 Revolution two years later.

On the 11th anniversary of the Revolution, President Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr announced he was stepping down from office, in favour of his second in command. Saddam Hussein - a decision which carried the unanimous approval of the leadership of the Arab Ba'ath Socialist Party.

He assumed three posts at once, secretary of the party's Regional Command, chairman of the Revolution Command Council and President of the Republic.

In his speech accepting the responsibilities of leadership, the new President said: “I would never hesiate or delay undertaking the responsibilities of the forward march of the leadership, dealing with patriotic and Pan-Arab tasks on the path of unity, liberty, and socialism, embodying the spirit of revolutionary, initiative required of an official.”

Since taking office and making that pledge to the party and the Iraqi people, he has achieved a reputation as a man of firm action in home affairs, insisting on the highest standards of dedication and integrity of government officials.

He has also become a leading international statesman both on a pan-Arab level and in the movement of non-aligned nations.

He played a leading role at the 10th Arab Summit in Tunis, in making opposition to imperialism and Zionism a central issue, along with policies for economic integration of Arab states.

At the Sixth conference of the Non-Aligned Movement last September in Havana, he stressed a fiercely independent line, again rejecting imperialism and Zionism and exposing fully the treachery of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat.

Saddam Hussein's drive for modern development in Iraq, the election of a National Assembly in June, the improving of living standards through wage rises and price controls, along with new social welfare provisions, have built up a momentum of achievement which the President and the Arab Ba'ath Socialist Party are determined to maintain.

President Hussein told Iraqis in a speech to mark July 17: “When we talk about the future - expressing the conscience and aspirations of the Iraqis - it is now based on increased capability. It is based on our confidence in the possibility of attaining our ambition in an accurate way, in the light of experiences we have gained, the achievements we have accomplished and the competence we have over the past 12 years.”

SADDAM’S BRITISH ADMIRERS – 5

Oliver Kamm has poured scorn (click here) on Vanessa Redgrave's letter to the Sunday Telegraph yesterday in which she takes issue with Kevin Myers's assault on her brother Corin, published on July 4, which made this accurate point about him:

"For some 20 years, Redgrave's real day-job was as loyal, undeviating servant of a political movement that, had it been successful, would have turned Britain into a Marxist tyranny and an open-air lunatic asylum. Moreover, his powerful personality and his mastery of Trotskyite doggerel enabled him to become the ideological hatchet man within Equity for the party leader, the despicable and loathsome predator Gerry Healy."

Ms Redgrave's response:

"Mr Myers has every right to express his views, to wit, my brother and I are lunatics baying at the moon, that the WRP (which we left in 1986) was vile, evil, etc. He did not mention that Trotsky exposed to the world all the horrors of Stalin's regime before any writer in the west. I also observe that he does not mention my brother's political support for Gorbachev's Perestroika and Glasnost, which Gerry Healy and I shared.

"We three founded the Marxist Party in 1987 on the basis of this political perspective. Mr Myers repeats an allegation that Corin and I have refuted on many occasions, because it is untrue: that we supported terrorism. Specifically, that the WRP received financial backing from Saddam Hussein and Colonel Gaddafi. The WRP never received financial backing from Saddam Hussein. The WRP totally and publicly opposed Saddam Hussein's regime from September 1980, when he declared war on Iran. Corin and I were appalled by that war, and all the terrible things that followed. You will remember that the US and Israel supported that war. In the case of Libya, Colonel Gaddafi never financed the WRP."

Oh yeah? Below I reproduce two key features from the libertarian socialist journal Solidarity published way back in 1988 that take a rather different line.

THE REVOLUTION BETRAYED
Tom Burns, Solidarity, issue 16 (new series), spring 1988

Elsewhere in this issue, in a dramatic exclusive, we publish a damning extract from the secret report of an internal inquiry into corruption within the Workers Revolutionary Party. The full report, which has been leaked to us, chronicles an astonishing tale of abject perfidy by leading members of the group. In this article, Tom Burns gives the background and comments on the inquiry's extraordinary findings

We publish this document in the interests of political hygiene. It consists of about half of the con­fidential internal interim report on Gerry Healy's Workers Revolut­ionary Party prepared by a "commission" of the International Committee of the Fourth Inter­national (ICFI). Following his expulsion from the WRP on October 19 1985, Healy and his supporters were expelled from the ICFI in December 1985. This was as a result of allegations of sexual abuse, even rape, of women in the party, physical assault on other members, and the establishment of a "mercenary relationship" with a number of Arab despotisms (see Solidarity issue 11).

The text deals with the WRP's financial and other dealings with their foreign backers. It is large­ly self-explanatory, but a few background details may be helpful. The commission was set up at the insistance of David North, long­time chieftain of the Healyite Workers' League in the United States. North, together with the anti-Healy coalition inside the WRP headed by Michael Banda and Cliff Slaughter, was instrumental in the summer of 1985 in the ousting of Healy.

The ICFI inquiry had the reluctant support of the Banda-Slaughter WRP, who correctly fore­saw that an exposure of the facts could be a means of bringing pres­sure to bear to transfer control of the IC to North. (Indeed, the WRP was suspended by the ICFI on December 16, the day this report was submitted.)

The commission nevertheless had an interest in protecting the reputations of Healy's erstwhile supporters, since they had all been aware (to some extent) of what had been going on. One result of this was that the report as circulated to the WRP's leadership in late 1985 was censored. The names of those who had taken sides against Healy, together with those of Arab politicians and intelligence agents, were suppressed, and the copies of the documents from Healy's files which were attached to the original report as exhibits were removed.

The commission only had access to fragments of the documentary evid­ence. On October 9 1985, when the crisis in the WRP came to a head, Mike Banda and his anti-Healy supporters walked out of the party offices in Clapham. This left Healy's acolytes in control of the premises for about forty-eight hours, during which time they removed large quantities of the most sensitive documents. This report is therefore based on the few documents they overlooked, plus some material from other WRP files and accounts.

Healy of Arabia
Even these remnants disclose pay­ments of over a million pounds to the WRP from Arab regimes and the Palestine Liberation Organisation. The report clearly shows that for nearly a decade the WRP acted, quite literally, as the paid agent of brutal and oppressive foreign powers. This lasted from at least as early as 1975, when the first contact was made with the PLO, until 1983. During this period a series of agreements was concluded with the Libyan regime and the WRP's political perspectives were amended to suit their paymasters.

The document alleges that the WRP acted - through Gerry Healy, Alex Mitchell, Corin and Vanessa Redgrave, and a number of others -as a collector of information for Libyan Intelligence. This function had, as the report puts it, "strongly anti-semitic undertones". Put plainly, they were Jew-spotting in the media, politics and business. The Khomeini revolution and the Iran-Iraq war - in which the WRP's efforts to support both sides soon collapsed - put paid to their employment by the regime of Saddam Hussein. But before this disaster the WRP's connections with Iraq clearly generated more than the £19,697 identified in the report.

The Iraqi connection had sinister aspects. From 1979 on, the WRP provided the Iraqi embassy with intelligence on dissident Iraqis living in Britain. Since Saddam Hussein's dictatorship does not scruple to arrest the relatives of opponents, to use torture on a vast scale, or even to murder children, it seems likely that the WRP were accomplices to murder.

One example of the depths to which these corrupt practices drove the party occurred in March 1979, when with only one dissentient the central committee of the WRP voted to approve the execution (after pro­longed torture) of more than 20 opponents of the Iraqi government. One of the victims, Talib Suwailh, had only five months earlier brought fraternal greetings to the conference of the WRP's own front organisation, the All Trade Union Alliance (see the Slaughter group's News Line, 20 November 1985).

In addition to the £1,075,163 identified by the document as having come from the Middle East and Libya between 1977 and 1983, the report gives, in a section dealing with the WRP's internal finances which we do not print, breakdowns of a further £496,773 received between 1975 and 1985 from other sections of the International Committee, almost entirely from North America, Australia and Germany. This raises further questions about how additional Middle Eastern money may have been recycled to the WRP via other IC sections; it is known, for example, that the Australian section received at least one substantial payment from Libya.

The death agony of the WRP
The WRP's fission products included, at last count, six organisations plus a large number of dispersed and semi-detached individuals. On the anti-Healy side, in early 1986 Slaughter's WRP was expelled from North's International Committee; it in turn ejected North's British supporters, led by Dave and Judy Hyland, who then formed the 'International Communist Party1. Mike Banda was also expelled with a more politically disparate group who established a short-lived discussion circle, Communist Forum; Banda himself repudiated Trotskyism completely, and a number of his associates have joined the Communist Party.

In the summer of 1986 the WRP began negotiations with the LIT, Nahuel Moreno's Argentinian-based international apparat, (notable mainly for their enthusiastic support for the Argentine junta's invasion of the Falklands/Malvinas). These talks have, in turn, generated yet another inter­nal opposition (Chris Bailey, Gerry Downing, David Bruce, et al), who face expulsion if the marriage is consummated.

It is certain that the anti-Healy camp know far more about the dirt­ier aspects of the WRP's past than they have so far publically admit­ted. Indeed, their coyness about the past is one of the few things which unites the warring factions. Probably none of them know the full story, but virtually all of them know more than they have revealed so far. These include North, who has resolutely chosen not to make public even the skeletal inform­ation we publish; Cliff Slaughter, who for many years was secretary of the International Committee; and Dot Gibson, who was responsible for running - and falsifying - the accounts of the WRP and its com­panies. Silence denotes consent.

Healy and a number of his supporters are even better placed to be held accountable for the despicable practices which this report alleges. It states, for example, that Alex Mitchell and Corin Redgrave were as deeply involved as Healy himself in the dealings with Arab governments. So was Vanessa Redgrave, whose personal finances are alleged to have merged with the inflowing money.

One part of the document not published here states, "It was learned from cde [name suppressed] that one large IC donation of $140,000 to the party was never recorded. Under instructions from G Healy it was given to Vanessa Redgrave who had run into tax problems."

The pro-Healy WRP which emerged from the October 1985 schism has also had its problems. From the beginning Healy had an uneasy relationship with Sheila Torrance, who ran the organisation and the restarted daily News Line. In the summer of 1986, Mitchell suddenly quit, returning to Australia, and the association between Healy and his showbiz 11 on the one hand and Torrance on the other deterior­ated. The break came in December. Torrance kept a majority of the remaining membership and News Line, which by now had a circulation in the low hundreds.

Healy, the Redgraves, and a small rump, resurfaced in August 1987 as the Marxist Party, which has discovered a new messiah in Gorbachev, apparently due to lead a political revolution in the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, in early 1987 yet another faction, headed by Richard Price, broke away to refound trotskyist orthodoxy as the "Workers International League". Torrance, with what remains of her WRP, is currently embroiled in a tussle with yet another group led by Ray Athow over the party's remaining assets. Tedious, isn't it?

Their morals and ours
One important aspect of the corruption of the WRP not covered by the report is the mercenary relationship it established with certain local authorities. For example, the financially scandal-ridden Lambeth council was effect­ively dominated by a group of councillors who were covert members or supporters of the party (one, at least, received a party salary and car) with all that implies in terms of jobbery and corruption.

The Labour Herald, an important journal of the Labour "left" and formerly co-edited by Ken Livingstone and Ted Knight, was financed and controlled by the WRP. The party also had important influ­ence in, and access to, the highest levels of the GLC. We hope in future issues of Solidarity, with the help of our readers, to explore this further dimension of corruption. Incidentally, the WRP was far from being the sole beneficiary of such influence.

We apologise for what may appear to be an extended detour into political coprophilia. But the example of Healy's WRP raises questions which go far beyond that organisation alone.

What is relevant about this tale is not that the WRP was led by a monster (or monsters) - after all, there are plenty of those around - but that numbers of intelligent, self-sacrificing, and idealistic people (but what ideals?) accepted such a regime for decades. Psych­iatry as well as ideology is needed to explain such a phenomenon. Masochistic party or leader fetish­ism is only one facet of the problem. Another is the amoralism stemming from leninist ideology: the denial of any relationship between means and ends. For us repellent methods have only produced, and will only produce, repellent ends.

We cannot accept the attitude which says that if it is necessary to support, or keep silent about, the torture and execution of dissidents in order to augment party funds, so be it; or that ordinary people are simply there to be lied to, manipulated, exploited and sacrificed to the interest of the self-styled revolutionary elite; or that only the interests of the party - often embodied in its leader - are relevant. The symptoms presented by the WRP express in an extreme form the basic attitudes of a wide section of the authoritarian "left", and this is true both here and now and in the societies they have brought or might bring into existence.

THE CORRUPTION OF THE WORKERS REVOLUTIONARY PARTY
Extract from the Interim Report of the International Committee Commission, December 16 1985
From Solidarity, issue 16 (new series), spring 1988

Here, published for the first time, we extract four key pages of the 12-page report on corruption in the WRP, prepared by a special commission of the International Committee of the Fourth International

Relations with the colonial bourgeoisie
The Commission was able to secure a section of the correspondence relating to the Middle East from the files in G Healy's former office. The documents examined by the Commission are seven relating to Iraq, four relating to Kuwait and other Gulf states, 23 relating to the PLO and 28 relating to Libya. The following report bases itself mainly on these documents.

From internal evidence in the documents under our control, it is obvious that much more material must exist, which was either taken out of the center when the rump was in control or kept elsewhere. Therefore the actual amount of money received from these relations and the extent of these relations must be considerably bigger than what we are able to prove in this report. The documents at our disposal clearly prove that Healy established a mercenary relation­ship between the WRP and the Arab colonial bourgeoisie, through which the political principles of Trot­skyism and the interests of the working class were betrayed.

In late June 1976, the ICFI was informed for the first time that the WRP had establised official contacts with non-party forces in the Middle East. These contacts were with the PLO, a national liberation movement. However, in April 1976, two months earlier (and more than a year before a public alliance was announced between the WRP and Libya), a secret agreement with the Libyan government was signed by [name suppressed in original] and Corin Redgrave on behalf of the WRP (exhibit no 5). This was never reported to the ICFI. The Commission has not yet established who in the leadership of the WRP, beyond the signatories, knew of the agreement.

This agreement includes providing of intelligence information on the "activities, names and positions held in finance, politics, busi­ness, the communications media and elsewhere" by "Zionists". It has strongly anti-Semitic undertones, as no distinction is made between Jews and Zionists and the term Zionist could actually include every Jew in a leading position. This agreement was connected with a demand for money. The report given by the WRP delegation while staying in Libya included a demand for £50,000 to purchase a web offset press for the daily News Line, which was to be launched in May 1976. The Commission was not able to establish if any of this money was received.

In August 1977, G Healy went himself to Libya and presented a detailed plan for the expansion of News Line to six regional editions, requesting for it £100,000. G Healy also discussed the Euro-marches with the Libyan authorities and responded positively to a prop­osal to have the "Progressive Socialist Parties of the Mediterra­nean" participate in the marches. This would have included PASOK, a bourgeois party in Greece. These plans did not materialise. G Healy reported this in a letter to Al Fatah leader [name suppressed] (exhibit no 6).

This letter and a number of further letters to [name suppress­ed] (exhibit no 14) demonstrate that the relations with the PLO - which according to the claims made by the WRP before the ICFI were supposedly based on the principled resolutions of the Second Congress of the Communist International - were cynically used to make the PLO an instrument for obtaining money from the Arab bourgeoisie, thereby destroying any chance of building a section of the International Committee among the Palestinians.

The complete political opportun­ism of the relations to the Arab colonial bourgeoisie is most clearly revealed in a redraft of the WRP perspectives signed by G. Healy (exhibit no 7). This document was presented to the Libyan authorities during a visit in April 1980. It reconciles the WRP perspectives with the Green Book. Instead of the "working class" we find "the masses" and the Libyan Revolutionary Committees are identified with Soviets. The cri­terion of the class character of the state is completely abolished. Like almost every document found by the Commission relating to the Middle East, it ends with a request for money.

G Healy lined up publicly with the reactionary forces in the Middle East. During a visit to Kuwait, Qatar, Abu Dhabi and Dubai in March-April, 1979, G Healy, V Redgrave, and [name suppressed] met with the Crown Prince of Kuwait, Sheikh Sa-ad, and some of the ruling bourgeois families. When they were invited however to have dinner "with a group of left oppositionists led by the Sultan family"," according to their own report "the delegation declined to accept this invitation as we did not wish to intervene in the polit­ical matters in Kuwait" (exhibit no 8). The sole purpose of this trip was to raise money for the film Occupied Palestine.

The trip ended finally by the delegation urging the feudal and bourgeois rulers to censure a journalist of the Gulf Times who had written an article on the real purpose of their visit. The delegation finally received £116,000. In October 1979, Vanessa Redgrave visited Libya and asked for £500,000 for Youth Training (exhibit no 9). As of February 1982 the WRP had received "just over 200,000 pounds" from Libya for Youth Training (exhibit no 10). In addition to this a £100,000 fund was raised in the British working class. While approximately £300,000 was raised for this project, the real cost for the purchase, legal and building expenses for seven Youth Training Centres as of May 21, 1982 was £152,539.

In April 1980 a WRP delegation led by G Healy visited Libya, presenting his redrafted WRP perspective and asking for more money. From March 8 to 17, 1981 G Healy made a further visit to Libya, putting forward demands totalling £800,000. The Commission found a report in Healy's hand­writing of this (exhibit no 11). This report contains the following statements: "In the evening we had a two hour audience with [name suppressed]. We suggested that we should work with Libyan Intellig­ence and this was agreed. ... March 13. The delegation was visited by [name suppressed] from the intelligence". This has a special significance, considering the fact that the Libyan Intelligence has excellent relations with the German Special Branch (BKA).

The Commiss­ion has not been able to establish to whom in the WRP leadership, if anyone, this written report was shown. The same applies to all other written reports and correspondence.
At that point G Healy had considerable difficulty getting all the money he was asking for. The report goes on: "March 15th. We were told that [name suppressed] had promised £100,000 which we said was welcome but inadequate. ...April 9th. Met [name suppressed] for the first time since he returned from Tripoli. He had no news but paid up £26,500 to pay for youth premises already decided. This brings the total to date paid from the promised £500,000 to £176,500. It looks as [if] our visit made no impact whatsoever".

In May 1981, G Healy's letters asking for the money became more and more desperate. On April 15th he writes a letter, marked "confidential", to [name suppress­ed] of the People's Committee in the Libyan People's Bureau (exhibit no 12) urging him to give the money. On May 17, 1981 a "private and confidential" letter is sent to "dear [name suppressed]" (exhibit
no 13) through Alex Mitchell.

On August 25th Alex Mitchell asks PLO representative [name suppress­ed] for an immediate meeting to discuss "the very grave questions which have arisen regarding our revolutionary solidarity work in the Middle East". He informs him that "with the full agreement of the Political Committee, our Party's proposed visit to Beirut and Tripoli has been cancelled".

In a Memo to G Healy, Alex Mitchell reports that [name suppressed] proposed to write a letter to Gaddafi and forward it through [name suppressed] of Libyan Intelligence. On August 28th, G Healy writes a letter to [name suppressed] in the name of the Central Committee of the Workers Revolutionary Party, complaining that he didn't get the money from Tripoli and blaming the Libyans for the price raise in the News Line (exhibit no 14). The same day G Healy writes another "private and confidential" letter to "Brother [name suppressed]" (exhibit no 15).

The last document in the hands of the Control Commission is a letter from G Healy to the secretary of the Libyan People's Bureau, dated February 10th, 1982, under the heading "Re: 1982 Budget" (exhibit no 10).

The Israeli invasion of Lebanon in June 1982 and the right-wing turn of the Arab bourgeoisie led to the drying up of the finances coming in from the Arab colonial bourgeoisie. Only a few documents could be found on the relations with the Iraqi bourgeoisie, although we know that many trips have been made there. The relations came to an abrupt end when the Iran-Iraq war started in 1980. The total amount obtained through these relations, according to the avail­able documents, is listed below.

The Commission has not yet been able to establish all the facts relating in the case of the photographs that were handed over to the Iraqi embassy. We do know the two WRP members were instruct­ed co take photos of demonstrations of opponents of Saddam Hussein. One of the members, Cde. [name suppressed], refused the order. A receipt for £1600 for 16 minutes of documentary footage of a demon­stration is in the possession of the Commission.

Money received from the Middle East
The following report on monies received from the Middle East was put together by the Commission from a careful analysis of many docu­ments and cash books. We were told repeatedly that Healy wanted no formal record kept of the money coming in. A full list and graph of what was found is in exhibit no16.

A list by year shows the following amounts coming in:

1977 £46,208
1978 £47,784
1979 £347,755
1980 £173,671
1981 £185,128
1982 £271,217
1983 £3,400
1984 0
1985 0

TOTAL £1,075,163

Analysed by country, where it is possible to distinguish, the amounts are:
Libya £542,267
Kuwait £156,500
Qatar £50,000
Abu Dhabi £25,000
PLO £19,997
Iraq £19,697
Unidentified or other sources £261,702

TOTAL £1,075,163

The Commission was told by both [name suppressed] and [name suppressed] that frequently cash was brought to the center which would not be immediately banked. Therefore, it was possible for large sums of cash to come and go without ever being recorded.

BLAIR DID NOT MISLEAD ON WMD

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, July 23 2004

It might seem the height of perversity to most readers of Tribune, but in the past few weeks I’ve felt more than the odd pang of sympathy for Tony Blair.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve never been a fan of the man or his politics. Sure, before he became prime minister, I interviewed him a few times for Tribune and the New Statesman, and found him personable and charming. And yes, I voted for him in the 1994 Labour leadership contest.

But I was never a Blairite. I voted for him 10 years ago only because Robin Cook decided not to stand and the other candidates were not credible. My hopes of Blair (electoral success apart) were modest in the extreme — that he’d prove more of a constitutional reformer than he’d indicated previously, and that he’d be consistently pro-European.

From there, it was downhill all the way, even before he got to Number Ten. I found the “New Labour” rebranding of the Labour Party asinine and banal, its culture of spin and intolerance of dissent nauseating. Within a year of his becoming Labour leader, I was appalled by Blair’s extreme caution on everything apart from kow-towing to big business and law-and-order populism.

After 1997, with Labour in government, even my modest hopes evaporated. Far from embracing radical constitutional change, Blair did the bare minimum he could get away with. Devolution to Scotland and Wales and regional government for London went ahead — but reform of the House of Lords stalled after the removal of the hereditary peers, the long-awaited Freedom of Information Act was a damp squib, and the promised referendum on changing the electoral system for the House of Commons was postponed indefinitely.

On Europe, Blair blew his chance of securing early British entry into the euro, then stood in the way of developing a social-democratic bloc in the European Union with France, Germany and Italy by pressing a hard deregulationist position at every opportunity in every EU forum. Long before his capitulation to the Eurosceptics with his promise of a referendum, I’d given up on anything worthwhile coming from Blair’s supposed pro-Europeanism. As for the rest of the government’s record — well, there are certainly plenty of good things about it, including sustained economic growth, low unemployment and, at least in the past few years, serious increases in public spending (particularly on the health service and schools), but, as everyone knows, they have largely been down to Gordon Brown as Chancellor.

On those areas of domestic policy in which Blair has taken the lead — public service reform, crime, asylum — the government’s record has been at best uninspiring and at worst miserably illiberal. On foreign affairs, Blair’s real enthusiasm, his administration started surprisingly well, but since 2001 its unstinting support for the adventurism of George W Bush has been has been dangerously reckless and seriously damaging to Britian’s relations with Europe.

So why, you may well ask, have I started to feel some sympathy for Blair? Believe it or not, it’s because of Iraq. It’s not that I’ve come round to thinking that the war was right after all and that Blair deserves plaudits for his stance. Far from it: the decision to remove Saddam Hussein by force was irresponsibly risky and the US and Britain went ahead without adequate thought for what happened afterwards in both Iraq and the wider Middle East.

But I’m increasingly irked by the way the argument about the war has got stuck in a groove. Ever since Andrew Gilligan’s infamous broadcast more than a year ago, the media and most British opponents of the war have focused obsessively on a single issue — whether Blair lied about the threat of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction in order to bounce parliament and public opinion into backing war.

This is of course an important question. If he did lie — or, rather, if he could be proved to have lied — that would be very serious indeed, and he would be deservedly hounded from office in disgrace. Yet precisely because the consequences of being found out telling such a big lie would be so devastating, it was always implausible that Blair had gambled on any such thing. And with each inquiry and report, culminating in the publication last week of Lord Butler’s findings on the uses of intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war, it has become ever more clear that, whatever else Blair and his circle did wrong, he genuinely believed the intelligence reports that said Iraqi WMD were a threat, and he acted on them, as he put it, “in good faith”.

Of course, the intelligence was dodgy and the weapons have not been found. But that isn’t the point. On the main charge levelled against him, Blair is not guilty, and no amount of invective can secure a conviction. On this, he has been absolutely right to face down the pack that is baying for his blood. There are plenty of reasons he should go — but not for deliberately misleading us about WMD. Like it or not, he didn’t.

BRINGING HOME STALIN'S CRIMES

Paul Anderson, review of Stalin’s British Victims by Francis Beckett (Sutton, £20), Tribune, July 9 2004

Harold Evans, the legendary former editor of the Sunday Times and The Times, is famous for many things, but for journalists of my generation he will always be primarily remembered as the author of a series of “how-to” books on the crafts of journalism. I still can’t get out of my head his injunction to would-be reporters (I think adapted from Beaverbrook or Northcliffe): “Always, always, always, tell the story through people.”

I was reminded of it again this week as I read a fascinating book by Francis Beckett, Stalin’s British Victims, which, as the introduction puts it, “tells the stories of four remarkable British women whose lives were scorched by Stalin’s purges”.

Beckett is a veteran left-wing journalist whose by-line will be familiar to Tribune readers, but in recent years he has also carved out something of a niche for himself as a popular historian.

In 1995, he published a marvellously racy account of the rise and fall of the Communist Party of Great Britain, Enemy Within. Four years later came a biography of his father John Beckett, a Left-wing Labour MP in the 1920s who became Oswald Mosley’s propaganda chief and a vocal supporter of Nazism.

Stalin’s British Victims is a by-product of his research for his history of the Communist Party. While writing that book, Beckett came across the cases of Rose Cohen and Rosa Rust. Rose Cohen was a bright young middle-class London Jewish woman who joined the CP at its foundation, married the leading Bolshevik sent by Lenin to sort out the fledgling British party, moved to Moscow and spent more than a decade there as a propagandist for the communist regime before being arrested in 1937 and shot.

Rosa Rust was the daughter of William Rust, a prominent British communist (best known as editor of the Daily Worker, precursor of the Morning Star) who — to cut a very long and complex story short — abandoned her as a girl in the Soviet Union. She nearly died as a slave labourer in wartime Kazakhstan before being rescued and sent back to Britain.

Neither woman’s story was exactly secret. Rose Cohen’s arrest had been reported at the time, and by 1956 it was clear at least to her friends — among them Harry Pollitt, the general secretary of the CP, who had been a long-time admirer — that she had perished. Rosa Rust’s extraordinary tale was also known to the British communist leaders. What Beckett found disturbing and fascinating, however, was the extent to which Pollitt and the rest of the British communist leadership kept completely quiet about what they knew and did their utmost to draw a veil over the women’s stories.

Beckett started digging, tracking down Rosa Rust in Redcar and Rose Cohen’s niece in London and searching through archives in Britain and Russia — and in the process discovered two other extraordinary stories of British women caught up in the madness of the purges, Freda Utley and Pearl Rimel, both of whom “saw their husbands taken away to the gulag and had to spirit their small children out of the country”. Utley, a journalist who became a prominent anti-communist polemicist in cold-war America, told her own story in a memoir published in the late 1940s but long forgotten. Rimel’s harrowing tale was unearthed by her husband’s great-nephew, a Dutch journalist.

The result of Beckett’s efforts is an absolutely riveting book that once and for all scotches the excuse used for years by British communists and fellow-travellers for their failure to speak out about Stalin’s terror — that they didn’t know what was going on until 1956, when Khruschev denounced Stalin in his famous “secret speech”. Pollitt, William Rust et al clearly had at very least a good idea of what Stalin was up to — and they decided to do nothing about it, in part because they felt that speaking out would damage the anti-fascist cause but also because they were intellectually and emotionally incapable of confronting the fact that the revolution in which they had invested all their hopes for the future had brought forth a totalitarian police state.

Beckett’s case studies do not constitute a comprehensive account of Stalin’s British victims — as he makes clear, there are dozens, perhaps hundreds of other stories to be told — let alone an overview of the purges and the gulag. But by telling the story through people, he vividly brings home how Stalinism blighted and destroyed people’s lives — and why it still matters today.

The Guardian excerpted Stalin's British Victims a couple of weeks ago: click here

THOSE ELECTION RESULTS IN FULL - 4

Not a pretty sight. With everything done and dusted, Labour's share of the vote in the Euro-elections is the lowest it has been since it became a national party (ie since 1918) and a bunch of xenophobes playing on popular ignorance of the EU have taken 16 per cent of the vote and 12 European Parliament seats. At least the BNP and Respect were well stuffed and the Tories lost even more support than Labour. Martin Kettle has a good piece in today's Guardian (click here), and there's a sober analysis by David Cowling of the BBC here.

THOSE ELECTION RESULTS IN FULL - 3

With only Scotland to come, it's possible to get a pretty good picture of the European election results (for which click here). The big story is obviously the major gains made by Ukip, which has taken nearly 17 per cent of the vote in England and Wales and 12 European Parliament seats - an even bigger protest vote than the one in the 1989 European election, which saw the Greens come from nowhere to take 15 per cent (though no seats because that was in the days of first past the post for Euro-elections). The big losers are obviously Labour and the Tories, but don't overlook the dismal showing of Respect, which took less than 2 per cent of the vote in England and Wales.

THOSE ELECTION RESULTS IN FULL - 2

The European parliament election results are now coming in and Respect has not won a seat in London. This could be the end of George Galloway's political career.

THOSE ELECTION RESULTS IN FULL - 1

It's rather early to judge the "Super Thursday" election results for one simple reason: they're not all in yet, and the European parliament election is the one that matters most in terms of judging the national mood. But a few things can be said about the local and London elections. First, as David McKie wisely put it in the Guardian on Saturday (click here), the Tories' performance was nowhere near as good as in the late 1960s, when Harold Wilson was prime minister, or in the dying days of the Jim Callaghan government in the late 1970s. Second, the left outside the Labour Party did very badly. See here for a round-up of the left's performance. And third, the BNP did much worse than many people led us to expect.

More to come on this . . .

REAGAN DID NOT WIN THE COLD WAR

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, June 11 2004

I have no desire to speak ill of the dead, but I’m afraid some of the gushing obituaries of US President Ronald Reagan, who died last Saturday aged 93, have been too much to stomach.

I accept that the man was not the buffoon of leftist mythology. I’ll concede that he was good company and personally generous. I even acknowledge that his brand of right-wing anti-tax populism changed the face of American politics and indeed that the American economy and American society were irreversibly transformed (for better or worse) during his presidency, at least partly because of his policies.

But was he really the great statesman whose brilliant foreign policy won the cold war? Sorry, but Reagan’s role in the events that led to the collapse of communism in east-central Europe and then the Soviet Union was less than decisive.

True, the Reagan administration’s single-minded pursuit of the arms race during his first term made it clear at least to the more percipient members of the Soviet elite that there was not a lot of point in their trying to compete on warhead numbers and firepower because there was no way the Soviet Union could match either the level of US military spending or US technology.

True, this made much of the Soviet elite much keener on negotiating arms control treaties and settling for a new detente — so when in his second term Reagan changed track and offered the Kremlin jaw-jaw rather than war-war, he found a ready taker in Mikhail Gorbachev.

True, US funding of the resistance to Soviet imperialism in Afghanistan played an important role in forcing an unmanageable military crisis on the Soviet military that had a dramatic impact on morale in the upper echelons of the regime.

But the bigger truth is that the Soviet system collapsed and brought the cold war to a definitive end not because of anything America did but from within. “Actually existing socialism” had lost the plot long before Reagan came to power. By the time he won his first presidential election in 1980, it was profoundly sick.

In the Soviet Union itself, the optimistic expectations of prosperity and gradual political liberalisation that had characterised the late 1950s and early 1960s had long since been dashed. The economy was in a disastrous state: the only part of it that was remotely efficient was the military. Everything else was technologically backward and bureaucratically stifled. Even basic consumer needs for food, clothing and housing could barely be met. Politics was the exclusive preserve of a totalitarian gerontocracy.

In the Soviet empire, meanwhile, there was crisis. In Poland, Solidarnosc was posing the greatest challenge to Soviet hegemony in east-central Europe since the Hungarian revolution of 1956. In Afghanistan, the Red Army had marched in to save a crumbling client regime — and was already up against far more serious resistance than the US and Britain now face in Iraq.

Soviet relations with the West were at their worst since the Cuban missile crisis, partly because of Afghanistan and Poland but also because of the arms race. In Europe, Nato had responded to Soviet deployments of new medium-range nuclear missiles by promising its own nuclear modernisation.

What Reagan memorably described as the “Evil Empire” was vulnerable, and the time was ripe for a Western initiative to end the cold war by offering the Soviets aid in return for verfiable disarmament and political liberalisation — a point made by most of the European centre-left in the early 1980s.

Yet the Reagan administration rejected any such thing. It pumped cash into new nuclear arms, adopted new aggressive military strategies (including the Strategic Defence Initiative, otherwise known as Star Wars) and, most notoriously, supported the most unsavoury anti-Soviet forces in the developing world, including death squads and military dictators in Latin America, apartheid South Africa, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and the most extremist Islamist opponents of the Soviet client regime in Afghanistan.

Of course, it’s possible that the Kremlin in the early 1980s would have rejected western overtures of any kind; but the option was never even tried. It is certainly to Reagan’s credit that, after five years of upping the cold war stakes, he agreed to parley with Gorbachev and signed the intermediate nuclear forces treaty.

But the preceding years of relentless confrontation were wasted years of cruelty, and their shadow still hangs over the world. In particular, al-Qaida was at least partly the product of the Reagan administration’s decision to back the extremist Islamists in Afghanistan. And you don’t get grimmer unintended consequences of your actions than that.

HOUSING IS BROWN'S MAIN HEADACHE

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, May 30 2004

I have a confession to make. Over the past few months, I’ve become an increasingly avid reader of news stories about the housing market. I know it’s a terrible thing to do, and I feel guilty and embarrassed about it. But I just can’t stop. Every day I nervously scour the pages of the newspapers for the latest news on house prices and the latest predictions of what’s going to happen to them in the next 12 months.

The reason my habit started is simple. Like more than two-thirds of households in England and Wales, I am what is known as an owner-occupier. In fact, I don’t own a lot: a couple of years ago I borrowed a large amount of money from a mortgage company to buy a small house, and I still owe the mortgage company most of it. But the boom in house prices since I took out the loan means that if I sold up tomorrow I’d have a tidy sum left over after I paid it off — more than I make in a year from working, as it happens.

If the housing market continues to boom, I’m in clover and the drinks are on me. I’ve got a bit of capital I can borrow against to buy a sports car, a conservatory, some designer consumer electronics or, more likely, a new kitchen for her indoors. Or I could simply cash in the profit — take a couple of years off work, finish the book I’m writing, travel the world (though of course I’d also then have to find somewhere else to live, and I’m not quite sure how the family would survive). But if the market crashes, bang goes the credit and bang go all those dreams of la dolce vita. In fact, I could be completely stuffed, particularly if interest rates go up, with a giant millstone of debt hanging round my neck . . .

OK, I’m exaggerating. In truth, I’m rather cautious. I don’t really believe that my two-up, two-down in Ipswich is worth what the estate agents say, and I’m not gambling on the housing market (not least because I don’t really want to put my nearest and dearest on the streets).

Unless there’s a world economic crisis of some kind, I can’t see interest rates hitting the point at which my mortgage payments become impossible to pay. And I actually think the best thing would be for house prices to fall, because as they are at the moment only the very affluent (or those with well-off and generous parents) have a hope of getting somewhere decent to live in much of Britain.

But there is a serious point to this. The fact that house prices are massively inflated is probably the most important factor in the British economic equation right now. It’s the main reason for the continued buoyancy of consumer spending, which has played a key role in keeping overall demand in the economy at a level that has pushed unemployment to its lowest level in decades. It’s the main reason Britain is generally feeling pretty good about itself, the main reason that Gordon Brown has retained a reputation for being a good manager of the economy, the main reason Labour is still likely to win the next general election even if it gets a kicking in the European and local elections in a fortnight.

It’s also, however, the biggest problem now facing the British economy. The reason house prices have gone through the roof is that demand for housing has consistently exceeded supply at a time when interest rates are low and seem unlikely to rise dramatically because inflation is low elsewhere in the economy. But it is almost inconceivable that we are not experiencing a classic bubble, rather like the one in the late 1980s. Sooner or later, probably sooner, it will come to an end.

The Bank of England wants to achieve a “soft landing” by putting up interest rates just a little every month until house-price inflation fizzles out, but its strategy is by no means guaranteed success. House-price bubbles are notoriously liable to burst. The last one did, pushing countless mortgage-holders in the early 1990s into negative equity and a significant minority into repossession or even bankruptcy.

Hunch says that if this bubble goes the same way, the impact will be worse, for the simple reason that so much more consumer credit is riding on house prices than was 15 years ago. A 30-40 per cent fall in house prices today — unlikely across the board, but it’s what happened in some areas of London and the south-east during the early-1990s property-price slump — would destroy the sense of self-satisfied prosperity that has characterised Britain, or at least that two-thirds of the population who are in on the act, over the past decade and more. Even a 20 per cent fall, much touted by market analysts, would wreck Labour’s chances of re-election as dramatically as the fiasco of sterling dropping out of the exchange rate mechanism of the European Monetary System destroyed the Tories.

All in all, I’m glad I’m not in Brown’s shoes right now. Though maybe I’d be thinking that the best way out is to engineer a little coup d’etat for the big job and install some no-mark klutz — say Jack Straw? — to take the flak as the housing market collapses . . .

TROOPS OUT NOW IS NOT THE ANSWER

Paul Anderson,Tribune column, May 14 2004

First things first: the pictures of American troops humiliating Iraqi prisoners in the Abu Ghraib prison — which the US administration admits are not isolated incidents of abuse even though it denies there was a policy of torture — are utterly disgusting and shaming. And the substantiated reports that British troops also systematically mistreated prisoners, though not generally as badly, are a disgrace. There can be no excuse for such brutality. It is irrelevant that Saddam Hussein presided over much more and much worse torture, or indeed that most of the Arab regimes that have expressed horror at the Abu Ghraib pictures are hypocrites. Torture is wrong, full stop.

And it is not enough that George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Tony Blair and Geoff Hoon have apologised, or that the US soldiers caught committing vile acts on camera are in the process of being court-martialled, or that the British authorities in Iraq apparently stopped hooding prisoners last year after the Red Cross complained. It is essential that the extent of official encouragement of and acquiescence in ill-treatment of prisoners is investigated, exposed and righted. The process must take in training programmes as well as orders on the ground in Abu Ghraib. It must encompass prison regimes in Guantanamo Bay and the US itself as well as in Iraq. And it must hold to account not only those who actually did the torture but everyone who knew about it and did nothing — both in the armed forces and among politicians.

It does not follow, however, as many on the Left have argued, including Tribune, that coalition troops should be withdrawn at once from Iraq. Yes, the past fortnight’s disgusting revelations have done massive damage to the credibility of the claim that the occupation is bringing democracy and human rights to Iraq. Yes, Iraqi opnion appears to have turned against the occupation (though the hard evidence is a single opinion poll). Yes, that in itself makes it more likely that the US and its allies will withdraw their troops in the not-too-distant future.

But getting out right now would only make matters worse.

The presence of the coalition troops remains essential, for a few more months at least, if the current mess in Iraq is not to become a total disaster. If there is to be any chance of implementing the coalition plan for setting up an interim Iraqi government at the end of June and then holding elections, Iraq first of all needs security. And at present, like it or not, the coalition troops are the only available means of providing it.

The idea of replacing them with a United Nations force is fine in principle, but such a force could not be organised overnight, not least because the UN has no experience of running the sort of security operation that the situation in Iraq currently demands. For now, the only alternative to keeping the coalition troops in place is to let Iraq sink into bloody chaos. And that is the worst of all possible scenarios, regardless of whether you think the war to topple Saddam was right or wrong.

Which is not to say that the occupation can continue as it has done for the past year. The scandal of Abu Ghraib makes it essential that the coalition cleans up its act at once and is seen to do so. Most obviously, as well as justice being done and being seen to be done over past ill-treatment of prisoners, all use of coercive interrogation techniques must now stop, prisons must be opened up to independent international inspection and private security contractors must be reined in.

But it will not be enough for the coalition to address only the way it treats prisoners, essential as that is. It also needs to demonstrate to Iraqis that it is serious about handing over real power to them. That means making a concerted effort to get the democratic process off the ground — not just by ensuring that the UN envoy, Lakhdar Brahimi, is given every assistance in getting an interim government installed on schedule on June 30, but also by bringing forward the date for the elections, currently pencilled in for January next year, to early autumn, and by announcing a date for withdrawal of troops (say 12 or 24 months from now).

This would not guarantee a successful transition to democracy in Iraq, but it might just work — and there is precious little else that holds out any hope. Nothing other than elections can give a new Iraqi regime legitimacy; and nothing other than commitments to holding elections as soon as possible and getting the occupation over as soon as security is guaranteed can now legitimise continued occupation.

USE YOUR REAL NAME AS A BY-LINE - 3

Both Chris Brooke of Virtual Stoa (see link on left) and Mike Berlin tell me that, contrary to my assertion (click here) the use of the term “republic of letters” predates Thomas Jefferson by more than a century. Berlin writes:

“The ‘republic of letters’ goes back to the late 17th century, and referred to a pan-European network of intellectuals, primarily interested in shared and mutually varifiable information on natural philosophy circulating in print. I think the term is Pierre Bayle's, from his Nouvelles de La Republique des Lettres, published in exile in Amsterdam, 1684-87.

“You are however absolutely right that the original spirit of Bayle's publication and similar publications was dissident, heterodox and free from the influences of church and state. And the question of anonymity is related. Because of censorship in France, pseudonyms and clandestine or exile presses were widely used - think of Arouet aka Voltaire. But this was less of an issue in 18th-century England with its relatively free press.”

SPRING-TIME FOR FIDEL

Kevin Davey, review of Fidel Castro: A Biography by Volker Skierka (Polity, £25), Cuba: a Revolution in Motion by Isaac Saney (Zed, £13.95) and The Cuban Revolution: Past, Present and Future Perspectives by Geraldine Lievesley (Palgrave, £17.99), Tribune April 30 2004

For the last 45 years Fidel Castro has been the Jekyll and Hyde of Caribbean politics. In a weak-minded style inherited from admirers of Soviet Union in the 1930s, supporters of the Cuban revolution have cheered the Commandante’s military and social achievements, while turning a blind eye to his repression of dissent.

Fidelistas praise his brief independence of the Soviet Union, his provision of military aid to democratic Africa, his enduring ability to mobilize the majority of the population, and his regionally inspiring health and education programmes, all delivered from the jaws of an American embargo. They downplay his deference to Moscow after the revolution’s failure to deliver unrealistic targets for sugar harvests, and the consolidation of his own dictatorial power as “the undisputed caudillo of the revolution” – the description of a friend - at the head of a repressive one-party state, phone-tapping, arresting and exiling opponents, airbrushing photographs and crashing the economy in traditional style.

Fidelistas are won over by the first side of his political character, and excuse the rest. In their eyes, American hostility to Havana gives Castro unrestricted license to stifle dissent.

They are wrong. Castro is an old-style Stalinist who uses European anti-Americanism and anxieties about globalisation to distract attention from his contempt for democracy. They are also short sighted. Without reform, the regime will suffer the same fate as its former Soviet sponsor.

In the mid-1990s, after Moscow’s subsidies and markets for sugar disappeared, Cuba underwent a deep economic crisis. Fidel’s initial response was to grandstand, saying “those who do not submit to imperialism . . . they call inflexible. Long live inflexibility.” Soon after he opened Cuba’s borders to tourism and foreign investment, allowing the U.S. dollar to circulate and permitting a limited amount of private enterprise. These reforms have been plagued by reversals and uncertainty, and have exacerbated inequalities on the island. The wage paid by the state is now too little to keep Cubans from poverty and a fledgling movement of dissent has gone from strength to strength.

By 2002, 11,000 Cuban advocates of peaceful reform had signed up to the Varela project, which calls for a referendum on the introduction of freedom of speech and assembly, the release of political prisoners, market reforms and free elections.

Last year Fidel responded by imprisoning 75 of his leading critics– including 40 coordinators of the Varela Project and more than 20 journalists – for sentences varying in length from 6 to 28 years. The EU protested, mildly. Castro’s arrogance and contempt for democratic values were clearly visible in his unmeasured response. “A gang, a mafia, has joined the Yankee imperialists,” he raged, later describing the EU as "the superpower's Trojan Horse".

Castro and his followers find it offensive and incomprehensible that friends of the Cuban people, as well as their foes, want to see more democracy and human rights on the island. The EU trades with Cuba and routinely votes against the embargo at the UN. It is a friend. But Fidelistas are outraged by friends who oppose the embargo but still want political reform in Cuba. Authoritarian to the core, they see the two as incompatible.

It’s probably true that some members of the opposition have taken financial assistance from the US, and that dissident circles have also been penetrated and compromised by the Cuban security services. But Cuban dissent is a brave voice for sanity and democracy that should be welcomed and encouraged by the left. Fourteen thousand people have signed up to the Varela project since last year’s arrests. There is an unprecedented momentum for reform.

Without any sense of shame, the regime’s admirers in Europe continue to issue supportive tracts full of convoluted arguments about social achievements being more important than human rights, and wild claims that the island’s carefully regulated system of popular power – a form of populist browbeating with next to no devolved power and resources - is the most advanced form of democracy on the planet.

Fortunately Volker Skierka’s useful biography is not cast from this mould, and does not flinch from describing Fidel’s weaknesses and failures. Skierka condenses the work of his predecessors, and adds newly accessible material from the archives of the east German state, once Cuba’s closest ally after Moscow. These reports are not particularly illuminating, but some interesting episodes are recorded. In 1964 the GDR’s bewildered bureacrat in Havana noted Fidel’s “personal decision making on all important matters” and “violent reaction to suggested corrections of certain of his ideas and practices.” In 1966 the embassy dismissed out of hand a demand from Fidel that the ‘socialist family’ deploy huge armies in Vietnam, pointing out that the consequence would be global war. But in the late 1980s Erich Hoenecker and Castro stood shoulder to shoulder against Gorbachev, a doomed alliance of inflexibles. Distant from the turbulence, and with an iron grip on a resigned population, only Fidel endured. Skierka concludes that Cubans are happy to have been delivered from colonial dependence by Castro but “discontent continues to result from lack of political and material freedoms, uncertain prospects at work and in private life, uncertain political conditions, and consumer temptations that cannot be satisfied within the system.”

By contrast, Saney’s account is an unconvincing round of fellow-travelling applause. He claims that Castro has created “a unique model of development” which has won grudging praise from the World Bank. Cuba has been misunderstood by the West, he insists. It has a “unique democracy” which cannot be described as totalitarian. He then makes the ludicrous claim that the system of poder popular – people’s power – the Committees to Defend the Revolution, and the trade unions are not managed by the Communist Party. He justifies the recent arrests with an account of how dissent is sponsored by the US and condemns the Varela project as unconstitutional. Why a Fidelista should raise this objection without a blush, when the guerilla leader of the Sierra Maestra has torn up so many constitutions himself, is hard to understand.

In the best of these three studies, Geraldine Lievesley argues that regime has survived 45 years because it is legitimate in the eyes of the Cuban people and because it has developed a strong sense of cubanidad, or nationhood, which is periodically revitalized by genuine mobilizations and engagements with the people and by campaigns of rectification. She accepts the official view that candidates in assembly elections are not manipulated by the party, but she does concede it is “a politically skewed relationship with the party having the potential to assume a paternalistic role.” She also acknowledges that central government – over which Castro himself personally presides - retains control over every major aspect of state policy, leaving the elected assemblies powerless, approving rather than initiating decisions. She regrets “the official equation of criticism of government policy with counter-revolutionary intent” and calls for the deepening of poder popular, so that it engages with, rather than suppresses, the views of women, afrocubans, gay men and the churches, making the legitimacy of the state more authentic.

It may be too late for that. The reality is that Cuba is a bankrupt country, with 12 billion dollars of foreign debt, excluding the even larger contested sums owed to Russia. Economic stagnation, increased repression, and deteriorating relations with the European countries who are its major source of trade and tourism are the order of the day. The enlarged European union – whose new members have no fond memories of Stalinism – is not like likely to indulge Cuba. Nor should they. The Cuban opposition should be given the same international support as political dissidents in the east received when Europe was divided. A Cuban Spring is taking shape and gathering momentum. Fidel should agree to the referendums and step down. History will not absolve him a second time.

A SORRY SOP TO THE EUROPHOBES

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, April 30 2004

OK, I’d heard the rumours that Tony Blair was toying with the idea of doing a U-turn on the European constitution. If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have written my incisive column of a month ago (click here), which ran under the headline “We don’t need a referendum” (an accurate summary of its content).

Well, actually, it was so incisive that no one noticed — not even one of Tribune’s gaggle of geriatric Europhobe letter-writers. As for the government, the weekend before last our great leader announced that, contrary to previous declarations, the European constitution would be put to a plebiscite (or perhaps even two if the first one doesn’t turn out right).

As Private Eye’s caricature of Harold Pinter might put it: the bastard! But I’m not taking this personally. Really. Like most pro-European members of the cabinet, I’m angry because Blair’s decision was a shameless sop to the anti-European press, a surrender to the opportunist populism on Europe of Jack Straw and Gordon Brown — and totally unnecessary. It would have been completely legitimate to leave the endorsement (or otherwise) of the constitution entirely to parliament, and to do so would have saved us all from a truly gruesome fate.

Unless some other country rejects the constitution before we’ve voted (which is by no means impossible), we now face the prospect of at least 18 months and perhaps two years in which British politics will be dominated by a tedious debate about a document that will be read by hardly anyone and will make barely any difference to our everyday lives.

The “no” camp will trot out its familiar (and mendacious) claim that the constitution means an end to civilisation as we know it, a Brussels super-state swamping our dearly beloved democracy. The “yes” camp will counter with the equally well-rehearsed line that the constitution is mainly a means of streamlining the European Union as it expands eastwards that will do nothing to undermine national sovereignty. (This point happens to be true — but it is also about as inspiring as the paper clips sitting on my desk as I write this).

It will all be balls-achingly boring, an immense turn-off to an already pretty much turned-off electorate. If and when the vote takes place, plenty of people will vote “no” just to have a go at the government or because they think a “no” vote would be a way of getting rid of Blair. Hardly anyone who votes “yes” will do so out of enthusiasm for the constitution: I have yet to meet anyone who thinks it’s anything but an intergovernmentalist carve-up that does little to give the EU’s institutions the democratic legitimacy they need and is thus at best a stop gap. Rather, the motivation of “yes” voters will be simply that the “no” camp consists of the Tories, the BNP and the most ghastly elements of the brain-dead hard left.

And all for what? Well, if Britain were to vote “yes”, Blair would be able to claim a famous victory against the Europhobic press. That would, I suppose, be a good thing for democracy, though I don’t for a moment believe it would make the Sun or the Mail see the error of their ways and embrace all things European.

On the other hand, if, as is more likely, Britain were to vote “no”, the effect would be to give a massive boost to the xenophobia and parochialism that have blighted Britain’s relationship with Europe since the 1940s, effectively ruling out for the long term the possibility of Britain joining the euro or of otherwise playing a full part in the European project.

No one but the Tories could possibly benefit from such a disastrous outcome, and simply by risking it, Blair has been almost incredibly irresponsible. What on earth was going through his mind when he made his decision?

* * *

Almost as mystifying as Blair’s about-turn on the European constitution is the decision of the British National Party to invite Jean-Marie Le Pen to Britain this week to launch its campaign for June’s European Parliament elections.

Le Pen is undoubtedly the face of the contemporary continental far-Right most familiar in Britain. But that’s precisely the problem with him.

Far from reassuring voters that the BNP is now respectable — which was presumably the point of its parading him at a press conference in Cheshire then taking him to a rally near Welshpool — the appearance of the fat French fascist with Nick Griffin, the BNP leader who looks the epitome of an oily spiv, has served only to show that the BNP keeps some extremely unpleasant company.

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO MILITANT?

Stranger things have happened than this, but not many. Unless I've become the victim of an internet hox, it appears that Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez is on the verge of converting to what British leftitists once knew and loved as the Militant Tendency.

Several recent contributions to the Leftist Trainspotters discussion forum (click here) report that Chavez has not only taken a shine to the analysis peddled by Militant's ancient former guru Ted Grant and his faithful sidekick Alan Woods - now trading as Socialist Appeal - but is now recommending their works to members of his beleagured government.

Socialist Appeal was set up by Grant and a tiny bunch of cronies after he fell out with the party he set up, the Revolutionary Socialist League, better known as the Militant Tendency, in the wake of the British Labour Party's unceremonious expulsion of Militant in the 1980s and early 1990s.

Grant wanted to keep going with entrism; his erstwhile underlings said no; and the party-not-quite-within-a-party split. In Scotland the Millies set up the Scottish Socialist Party, which has won seats in the Scottish Parliament. Down south, most of them - while excoriating their Jock comrades for class treason - also left Labour and now call themselves the Socialist Party, which keeps on keeping on but doesn't really seem to have a purpose since it fell out with the Socialist Workers' Party over the Socialist Alliance some time ago.

Through all of this, Grant's tiny sect of true believers seemed irrelevant - but now, thanks to something or other, they're at the nexus of world revolution again. Or not. What's the Venezuelan equivalent of standing up in a Labour Party meeting and shouting in a fake Scouse accent: "We've got to nationalise the top 200 monopolies under workers' control!"?

USE YOUR REAL NAME AS A BY-LINE - 2

Oh well, that last post (click here) was a mistake. It seems from the over-full Gauche email inbox - sorry, I've been away - that most of you anonymous bloggers don't use your real names simply because you don't want your employers to fire you, which I have to say is a perfectly reasonable position (though it also shows your employers are a bunch of illiberal idiots).

Socialism in the Age of Waiting went further, however (click here and go to post seven):

"We'd be more inclined to respond seriously to these inquiries if Anderson hadn't used the portentous phrase 'republic of letters', and hadn't chosen such a poor piece of prose to rest his case on. Nico Macdonald sneers at 'an elitist tendency at the centre of the blogosphere' while waffling, in an absurdly elitist way, about 'intellectual leadership' . . . The last thing any of us needs is yet more self-appointed 'experts' claiming to provide 'intellectual leadership', as if the bulk of humanity are doomed always to be followers . . .

"Presumably Anderson wouldn't argue that anonymity and pseudonymity are always and everywhere indefensible - or does he think that Lenin and Trotsky should have betrayed themselves to the Russian imperial police, or that Mark Twain, George Eliot and Lewis Carroll should have been prosecuted for fraud?

". . . While we can't speak for Harry or British Spin - and we wouldn't want to speak for dsquared, whose real name is easy to find anyway - we prefer anonymity for three reasons.

"(a) One of us certainly, and the other two possibly, would risk serious trouble with employers if we used our real names here. Blogging matters, but does Anderson really think that it matters so much that we should lose our jobs for its sake?

"(b) We use a collective name rather than individual names because we write as a collective, and prefer not to let irrelevant details about our personal lives get in the way of discussing the issues we address.

"(c) It?s fun for us, and (as we know from e-mails) for at least some of our readers too, to create a persona here that, while it is neither fictional nor dishonest, is separable from our individual personalities.

"If we were engaged in 'passing off' as someone else . . . Anderson would have more cause to come the heavy copper. But why do authors? names have to matter at all? We?d be fans of, for instance, Normblog, even if we weren?t already fans of Norman Geras's books and articles . . . After all, we don't know whether 'Paul Anderson' is this blogger's real name or not, and we really don't care. We'll go on keeping Gauche in our sidebar and visiting it regularly, because, regardless of who writes it, it's interesting and thought-provoking. Well, most of the time, anyway."

OK, I'll take some of that - particularly the points on the poor quality of the prose of the piece I linked to, the undesirability of self-appointed "experts" and the supreme importance of content.

But I won't quite concede defeat. The reason I use the phrase "republic of letters", which I think was coined by Thomas Jefferson, isn't just because I'm a pretentious twit. It's useful shorthand for what Jurgen Habermas and others call the "bourgeois public sphere", the largely self-publishing print culture that exploded in 18th-century Europe and north America and was at the core of the Enlightenment and the early development of democratic and working-class politics.

One critically important element of it was the emergence from anonymity of (at least some) writers of tracts and polemics, which was massively important in the struggle against the state and the church for freedom of expression. The bravery of those writers and publishers who stuck their heads above the parapet as themselves, took on reaction and sometimes won remains an inspiration.

All right, the contemporary blogger isn't fighting the same fight as John Wilkes et al, at least in western democracies, because freedom of expression is part of the fabric of our society (albeit with qualifications). But I do think we can do something of the same. Thanks to the web (not just blogging), getting the word out to a significant readership with a minimum of capital is possible in a way it hasn't been for a long, long time. And if the self-managed web (for want of a better term) were better, it could have a tremendous impact on the whole political culture. Getting better means getting more credible, and I still think ditching anonymity, where possible, is a good start.

One other thing. I do exist, and even if the comrades from SIAW don't care whether I'm a chimera, I do.

USE YOUR REAL NAME AS A BY-LINE - 1

Nico Macdonald has a telling post on "The future of weblogging" at The Register (click here), which argues for an end to anonymity on the serious blogosphere:

"The ‘blogerati’ rightly present weblogging as opening up writing and communication to the masses. However, this populist and laudable attack on the mass communication sector disguises an elitist tendency at the centre of the blogosphere. This tendency is most obvious in the habit of using first names only (or even nicknames) when referring to fellow webloggers. For a movement that aspires to (and has achieved some) intellectual leadership, this is inappropriate.

"Public correspondences, such as that which developed around the Royal Society in London in the late seventeenth and eighteenth century, tended to be presented as between public equals, not private friends."

Why are you hiding, Harry, dsquared, British Spin and SIAW? Why not enter the republic of letters as yourselves?

DISAGREEMENT IS NOT SUPPRESSION OF DISSENT - 7

Norman Geras writes (on Normblog here):

Scott Lucas offers a clarification of the proposition that there was an attempt to silence the dissent of anti-war critics. Lucas's clarification in a nutshell: it wasn't mainly silencing he meant, though it was that to some extent; it was the fact that Christopher Hitchens and others of similar mind didn't directly or adequately respond to the serious anti-war arguments - as judged, this, by Scott Lucas - they caricatured them, thereby trying to render dissent "unacceptable".

I express my reaction to the clarification with one of the pre-clarification words of Christopher Hitchens: ridiculous. It wasn't silencing, and neither was it rendering dissent unacceptable. It was political argument - political argument about a hotly contested, passionately felt issue. As such, it was bound to produce all the varieties: from heated polemic and even distortion and abuse at one end of this particular spectrum, through vigorous but reasonably civil advocacy down the middle of it, to calm and scrupulously fair-minded debate at the other end - with, of course, further shades between these schematically defined points.

Dissent! Half the world or more lined up behind it.

Start here for discussion on this weblog and here for the Lucas discussion on Harry's Place.

DISAGREEMENT IS NOT SUPPRESSION OF DISSENT - 6

Scott Lucas writes:

The problems with the supposed parallels between interwar European fascism and Saddam, the Taliban and al-Qaida are the gaps in between the broad generalisations. "Belligerent expansionist totalitarian police-state characterised by ultra-nationalism" is so sweeping as to rule all "evil" out (arguably, there is no state where a single individual or group had "total" control) or to rule all "evil" in (your category could also include present-day North Korea, post-1949 China, post-1948 Yugoslavia-Serbia, 1970s/1980s Argentina, Putin's Russia, etc, etc). The parallels also eclipse important distinctions - Ba'athism was originally a socialist movement in the 1950s. How did it move from that to a "fascist" movement?

I'd rather deal with the specific cases. Taliban Afghanistan was the first government to denounce the World Trade Centre and Pentagon attacks; more importantly, it offered to negotiate Bin Laden's handover to Pakistan (as it had offered to hand him over in 1998 before the bombing of Sudan). The US refused any consideration of this. So the possibility of a handover, with an international trial to follow, was passed up at the cost of many thousands of lives. Perhaps a case can be made for this on the basis of "regime change", but this requires a much more thoughtful elaboration than Bush's "with us or against us".

Saddam's Iraq was expansionist and should have been opposed vigorously by the west in the 1980s rather than being aided by it but, of course, Saddam was waging war on Iran, which western governments had tagged as a "belligerent expansionist totalitarian (religious) police-state characterised by ultra-nationalism". On the grounds of "liberal intervention", there is an argument that the troops should have marched to Baghdad in 1991 but, again, there was a pass on the opportunity. In contrast, in 2003, there was no established threat to the region (I take the position that US and British governments knew they were exaggerating the intelligence) and the deaths from Saddam's reign of terror were fewer than in the 1990s, a point recently made by Human Rights Watch. So why go for "regime change" now?

In short, I agree that Saddam and the Taliban (and, indeed, other regimes that are now allies in the war on terror) should have been opposed and confronted. That, however, cannot escape the problem in your second point. US foreign policy never rested on "establishing a decent, civilised, democratic Iraq" or Afghanistan; if it had been, we would not been in the ongoing (and, in some respects) worsening mess that we are today. That's why I always supported international action to deal with al-Qaida, the Taliban and Saddam as opposed to a US-defined "coalition of the willing" which was pretty much US and UK in military terms, US in "legal" terms (rejecting any approach to international law), and US with support from a few other countries (rather than the UN) in diplomatic terms. I think a great opportunity was missed by not pursuing resolution 1441 through coercive inspections - the catch was that the US would never accept this because that would give the UN in the ongoing negotiation with Saddam and the Bush administration had decided on US-led "regime change" in February 2001.

Finally, I suggest that the framing of the SWP as "leading" the anti-war movement did not come from most of us who opposed the war and who voiced our opposition. (Is anyone really contending that those MPs who voted against intervention were just following the SWP?) Instead, it came from those who favoured the war but did not want to acknowledge the depth of or complexity of our objections. Any "untold damage" was manufactured by those who insisted that "our" leaders were George Galloway, Tariq Ali, the MAB, the SWP etc.

I would never reduce the argument for intervention to following "the prominent role" of the Bush administration in its push for war. So why be so reductionist in tagging those who questioned intervention? To me, the labelling was always a political strategy rather than an honest assessment of the critical issues.

DISAGREEMENT IS NOT SUPPRESSION OF DISSENT - 5

Paul Anderson writes:

(a) I'm no great fan of the notion of "Islamic fascism": like you I think it's a catch-all term to cover disparate contemporary regimes and terrorist groups that all differ in significant respects from interwar European fascism.

There are nevertheless legitimate parallels that can be drawn. Ba'athism was originally inspired at least in part by the example of European fascism, and Saddam's Iraq was a belligerent expansionist totalitarian police-state characterised by ultra-nationalism, the cult of the leader and systematic use of terror against its citizens - not unlike Hitler's Germany or Mussolini's Italy. Taliban Afghanistan was also a totalitarian police-state, and although it was not territorially expansionist and unlike Saddam's Iraq was inspired by Islamism, it did harbour and encourage al-Qaida, which has the goal of establishing a global totalitarian Islamist empire and echoes the Nazis in its irrationalism, its ruthless contempt for human life and its anti-Semitism. Whether or not you call them fascist, the targets of the US "war on terror" were and are enemies of everything liberals and the left should hold dear.

(b) Like you, I don't think the US had the purest of motives in getting rid of Saddam. The war was about US strategic interests first and foremost. The point the pro-war left made, however, is that these strategic interests were at least temporarily compatible with the interests of the Iraqi people in getting rid of Saddam and establishing a decent, civilised, democratic Iraq.

(c) I take your point that everyone on the February 2003 demo didn't support the SWP's defeatist position. But will you take mine that the prominent role the non-defeatist left allowed the SWP and other Leninists - to say nothing of reactionary Islamists - did untold damage to the credibility of the anti-war movement? As for Pilger, I'm sorry, but any nuances in his perspective are meaningless next to his fatuous statements backing the "resistance" in Iraq.