Globalization and terror : the O'Loan
report
Nuala O'Loan's recent report on UK government security forces'
collusion
with Loyalist death
squads in the north of Ireland points up various historical reminders
of relevance now as the Bush regime, supported by its European and
Pacific allies, ratchets up conflict with Iran. The distance to travel
is not
great in terms of either geography or time and the reminders show that
imperialism's ideological rationale and practice hardly change from one
century to the next. The UN forces' Christmas massacre in Cite
Soleil in Haiti (1), the almost daily murders by Israeli
occupation
troops in Palestine, the horrific reckless killings and outright mass
murder by US and allied forces in Iraq, Afghanistan and now Somalia
too, all follow the same
imperialist logic.
O'Loan's report dealt with a string of up to fifteen murders carried
out by Loyalist
death squads with the knowledge and collusion of the Royal Ulster
Constabulary's Special Branch . On the one hand, her report confirms in
more detail UK government forces' collusion in terror that had been
common knowledge from at least as long ago as the arrest
in 1990 of British double-agent Brian Nelson, jailed subsequently in
1992 for his role in conspiring to commit five murders in the 1980s.
(2) On
the other hand, the report leaves open the extent of the collusion,
noting, that "up to
six officers at the level of assistant chief constable or detective
chief superintendent in the Special Branch refused to cooperate. They
either did not reply to requests for interviews or their lawyers sent
letters on their behalf refusing to take part." (3)
As Irish opposition leader Enda Kenny said of the RUC, given the
"shocking and appalling culture of collusion and illegality.....one
could only wonder what other unacceptable practices remain hidden from
the public." (4) Still, Prime Minister Blair's proconsul
in Ireland, Peter Hain, may well be right when he observes in his
official
statement, "As the Report acknowledges, policing in
Northern Ireland has changed radically since the Patten reforms were
implemented and new robust systems are in place to ensure that the
failures of the past will not and cannot be repeated." Hain's
statement offers stone-cold comfort to
the families of murdered human rights defenders Pat
Finucane and Rosemary Nelson and the relatives of the numerous other
victims of terror promoted by agents of the British government.
Old colonial spots - EU unchanged
In Ireland and the United Kingdom now, all mainstream political options
are New Labour - the logic of corporate consumer capitalism has
levelled
differences to the point where all the British and Irish political
parties strain to offer varieties of corporate capitalism with a human
face.
Europe's political leadership in general pretends that their countries'
prosperity
is not sustained at the expense of the world's poor majority through
the gross injustice of current international debt, trade and aid
arrangements. In Ireland , Sinn Fein has been co-opted by
Europe's dominant centrist-social democrat political ideology. The
colonial apparatus of repression deployed against them through the
Seventies, Eighties and Nineties has long been redundant.
The
colonialist death squad machinery
of terror, its operatives and managerial staff have shifted to Iraq,
Afghanistan and the bogus "war on terror", dismissed recently as a
fiction even by Britain's Director of Public Prosecutions, a lonely
voice of dissent from the official line by a public functionary. (5)
Samir Amin is certainly right when he notes (6) that most people in
Europe believe, falsely, that their prosperity is based overwhelmingly
on
the inherent superiority and efficiency of their economic system. They
tend to forget their good fortune is principally the unjust inheritance
of wealth and advantage
resulting from
centuries of vicious criminal pillage to which Europe subjected the
peoples of
its occupied colonial territories.
Amin also observes Europe is
not "in any shape to end up being an alternative to US
hegemony.......they have instead reinforced Atlanticism and alignment
with Nato and liberal socialism. There is no other Europe in sight. And
in that sense, Europe does not exist : the European project is simply
the European face of the North American project." European Union
governments support the criminal US economic
blockades against Cuba and now Palestine. They support
the colonialist occupation of
the Palestinian territories, of Afghanistan and Haiti, of Iraq and
collude either actively or by default in helping the Bush regime
develop bogus pretexts for conflict with Iran.
They do so
because they have neither the domestic political support nor the
military might to do the heavy lifting dirty work their
collusion in corporate globalization's imperialist project requires.
Domestically, they deliver the kinds of social benefits their
populations demand. Overseas they follow long-standing double
standards exemplified most clearly in Europe by left-wing political
parties sieved over decades through the filters of consumer capitalism.
Amin recalls the old Socialist Party in Italy. He
might have referred to the even more cynical example of the left
wing
parties in France, whose dismal record socialist presidential candidate
Ségolène Royal is
unlikely to enhance.
From Algeria to "extraordinary rendition"
As Youssef Girard recalls in a recent article on the Popular Front
government of the 1930s (7) : "Beyond that social
policy on behalf of the proletariat and subaltern classes in the
hexagon, people almost never refer to the Popular Front policy in
regard to France's colonised peoples in an era when the French empire
stretched across four continents. Did that policy show significant
advances in the struggle of colonised peoples for emancipation or did
it rather define the continuation of the policy of conservative
governments?"
Girard answers his own question by noting that among the
first acts of the Popular Front elected to power in France in 1936 was
the banning of the Algerian "Etoile Nord" independence movement in
January
1937. That shameful capitulation to French colonialist practice was
compounded just twenty years later when the French Communist Party
supported the vote granting "special powers" to the French army in
Algeria, institutionalizing death squads, terror and torture not
just throughout Algeria but implicitly allowing those terror practices
to become
commonplace in France itself.
One should expect little from the political leadership of the
European Union or the governments of its member states. When the
European Parliament condemned European governmental collusion in
the blatantly illegal Bush regime "extraordinary rendition" programme,
it reported
that "EU governments, including the British, knew about the
practice known as extraordinary rendition - secret CIA flights
transferring detainees to locations where they risked being tortured -
but made a concerted attempt to obstruct investigations into it." (8)
A
report in the London Times noted, "Giovanni Claudio Fava's draft report
"deplores" the level of co-operation Geoff Hoon, the Europe Minister,
gave the MEPs, and condemns the rendition of one British citizen and
three British residents, two of whom were said to have been seized on
the basis of "partly erroneous information supplied by the UK security
service MI5". (9) So when Peter Hain remarks that things have changed
in his jurisdiction
it just means that his cynical colleagues are up to the same old tricks
elsewhere as their
forbears were in Ireland for nearly three decades.
Ministers like Geoff
Hoon and the rest of Tony Blair's
Cabinet
know very well they only have to procrastinate, block and
obfuscate to evade accounting for the crimes in Iraq and in
"extraordinary renditions" for torture in which they
have all colluded one way or another. Any investigation will happen
many years in the future
and no one will ever answer for the horror these politician's policies
have
inflicted on millions of people. What is true of Britain is true across
Europe. As Diana Johnstone wrote recently in Counterpunch of the
International Criminal Court, boycotted by the United
States out of sheer necessity, international justice is to be
administered in true colonial style, "In short,
the ICC is established according to double standards to deal with small
fry." (10)
First the League of Nations, now the UN
It is impossible not to conclude that the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and
on a smaller scale the coup in Haiti in 2004, organized between the
Bush
regime and its accomplices in the Canadian and French governments,
spell
the effective end of the UN Charter and associated humanitarian and
human rights
law as a credible normative framework governing international
relations. The UN
serves now only to mop up the blood and shit, the unconscionable
destruction resulting from imperialist interventions by the US
government supported by its European and Pacific allies. Its worthy
aid, development and health programmes serve mainly to legitimize a
criminally unjust neo-colonial international order. In Haiti, UN forces
themselves
have undertaken massacres and terror against civilian populations as
part of a supposed "peace mission". There, MINUSTAH promotes
"stability" via the cemetery gate.
Monopoly capitalism's (11) imperialist globalization project is on the
rocks up against limits provoked by environmental deterioration, US
dollar decline, armed resistance to imperialist wars, and the
emergence of contrary agendas backed by Russia, China and regional
blocs, as in Latin America . That is why politicians who front
for corporate monopoly
capitalism like Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown call
tritely for "a new world
order". (12) As if people could reasonably have any faith in some new
consensus engineered by the self-same criminal politicans who helped
wreck the UN as a credible clearing house for negotiating international
differences and conflicts.
The US government and it allies have consistently, deliberately and
cynically sabotaged the United Nations system through abuse of the
powers of the Security Council. Corporate globalization and the bogus
"war on terror" are more
clearly than ever twin strands of a ruthless rearguard campaign by
the global corporate ancien regime to hang on to their privileges
and power. To do so they have destroyed the post World War Two
settlement based around the
principle of self-determination of peoples and the humanitarian and
human rights norms that consensus generated.
So the US government and its allies support Alvaro Uribe's
narco-terror regime in Colombia but conspire against Cuba and
Venezuela. They accepted Felipe Calderon's
fraudulent electoral win in Mexico but condemned alleged electoral
fraud in the
Ukraine. They permit Israel to kidnap ten thousand political prisoners
but condemn Hezbollah for capturing two Israeli soldiers. They
accept Israel's threats of nuclear terrorism against Iran but deny
Iran's legitimate right to develop peaceful nuclear technology.
Faced with the latest US preparations for war with Iran, the EU's
foreign affairs chief Javier Solano said, "No path is envisaged by the
EU other than the UN path," and "The priority for all of us is
that Iran complies with UN security council resolutions." (13) His
script is exactly the same as the one used prior to the criminal war of
aggression against Iraq. For Solana and his US counterparts, the UN
serves
merely to rubber stamp decisions already taken by the imperialist
mobsters in the White House. The facts have already been invented and
spun. Solana's good cop humbug is part of the formal diplomatic
deniability game necessary to conceal their self-evidently cynical
concoction.
The
terrifying circumstances
endured by the peoples of Haiti, Palestine and
Iraq all signal what the US government and its hypocritical allies are
prepared to do to anyone who
resists their will. The mirror-image of the State terror they employ
against vulnerable peoples overseas can be seen in the attack on habeas
corpus and other fundamental legal norms in the US and elsewhere. Nuala
O'Loan's report on
official British
collusion with Loyalist terrorist paramilitaries is a useful reminder
that the US
government's European allies are fully prepared to countenance terror
and abuse of legal norms against
legitimate opposition in their own countries. It might easily be read
as a simile of sinister European government collusion with the failed
state terror
regime of George Bush.
Notes
1. Haiti Justice
http://blog.ijdh.org/haiti_justiceblog/2006/12/haiti_another_u.html
2. "Nelson's shadowy past", BBC News,13 April, 2003 - "Panorama
missed
the real story of collusion in Ulster", Ed Moloney, Daily
Telegraph
June 25th 2002 -
'An Appalling Vista' Collusion : British Military Intelligence
And
Brian Nelson, A Case for an Independent Public Inquiry, Submitted
to
British Government 21 December 1997 by Sinn Féin
3. "Northern Ireland police shielded loyalist killers", Guardian,
January 22, 2007
4. "O'Loan report confirms collusion", RTE News , 22 January 2007
5. " 'There is no war on terror' Outspoken DPP takes on Blair and Reid
over fear-driven legal response to threat", Clare Dyer, Guardian,
January 24, 2007
6. Interview with Samir Amin by Giuliano Battiston, translated in
ZNet, January 27th 2007 -
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=10&ItemID=11968
7. "Il y a soixante-dix ans le « Front Populaire »
prononçait la dissolution de l’Etoile Nord Africaine", Youssef
Girard, www.oumma.org, January 29th 2007
8. "MEPs condemn Britain's role in 'torture flights', ·
EU states knew about rendition, says report", Richard
Norton-Taylor & Nicholas Watt, Guardian, November 29,
2006
9. "Britain accused on secret CIA flights", David Charter, The
Times November 29, 2006
10. "Do we really need an International Criminal Court", Diana
Johnstone, Counterpunch January 27th 2007 -
http://www.counterpunch.org/johnstone01272007.html
11. "2006 and the Plutocracy", Silvia Ribeiro -
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=11937
12. "Brown wants a 'new world order'", BBC News, Friday, 19
January 2007
13. "Europeans fear US attack on Iran as nuclear row
intensifies", Ian Traynor & Jonathan Steele, Guardian,
January 31, 2007