Syria: Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste Calls to Supply Weapons to Free Syrian Army, A Critical Response.

Sectarian anti-Shiite Demonstration.

“The Syrian conflict is expected to dominate talks among leaders of the G8 nations meeting in Northern Ireland.

Russian President Vladimir Putin will meet US President Barack Obama during the two-day annual summit for what could be prickly talks, as both leaders now offer military support to opposing sides in the war.” Reports Al-Jazeera.

“UK Foreign Secretary William Hague has warned there is no “palatable option” for dealing with the crisis in Syria.

He told the BBC there were “extremists” supporting both President Assad’s government and rebel forces, but said help would go towards “moderates”.”

Says the BBC.

The French Nouveau parti anticapitaliste (NPA) has joined calls for arming the Free Syrian Army. As the governments of the US, Britain and France, will put this into practice it is worth examining the NPA’s  views. We will  place them within debates on the British left.

The NPA  begins by outlining the present developments in Syria, and the desperate state of the population. They note the self-organisation of the Syrian people, opposed to Assad regime, and assert that they largely do not recognise the authority of the opposition in exile. They then criticise the limited help given by the French, Socialist-led, government, to the resistance to the Baathist state.

Solidarité du mouvement ouvrier et démocratique

15th of June.

Alongside other European governments, the French state always finds  good reasons not to deliver weapons, especially the air defence and anti-tank  rockets demanded by the Syrian people who are bombarded daily. The French government’s response way to shake this off, and, without giving any specific response, to favour  ”serious negotiations for peace” in Geneva. This leaves Assad strengthened by its Russian, Iranian and Lebanese allies and ready to accelerate its criminal offensive against his own people.

In this twisted game the fundamentalist Gulf monarchies are supplying weapons – by drips . They thus give  arguments to the Western powers (to whom they are allied against the “terrorist threat”), and Bashar al-Assad is making the civil war into a sectarian religious – confessional –  struggle.

To top it all, while Turkey, Jordan, Iraq and Lebanon welcome over a million and a half refugees the French government has restored the need for a transit visa  for Syrians. This helps prevent their escape from death.

Faced with this situation, the responsibility of the international workers’ and democratic movement to demand that our governments immediately provide weapons to the Free Syrian Army, which should be obliged to defend  the Syrian revolution.

Justified mistrust of any direct imperialist intervention should not lead to the abandonment of the Syrian people, but to the demand for the democratic control of supplies and aid, including a greatly increased level of humanitarian assistance.

Our responsibility is to immediately provide all possible assistance to the insurgents,  from our civil society to their civil society,  and to defend Syrian refugees who manage to get into ‘fortress’  Europe.

Jacques Babel

(Rendered into idiomatic English)

The NPA’s position begins from (we summarise) the premise that the war in Syria started as (and remains) a  ”massive popular uprising against a  fascist regime that has launched a modern armoured army with all its firepower against the  people.”

One would add that a sense of urgency is propelled by accusations about the use of poison gas (sarin) and the most recent battles.

These are nevertheless some points that arise from the NPA statement.

Before making them I note that one can criticise anybody not deeply familiar with the position on the ground. Yet, when you say what somebody  agrees with this kind of remark is normally immediately  forgotten.

• However the uprising began the NPA fails to consider in detail the growing international importance of the “confessional” element in the war. In Britain former violent critics of the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood equally downplay the idea that a battle is raging  between their politicised strand of Islam and the Shiite-Alawite, forces lined up behind Assad. This has led, according to many many reports, to vicious religious inspired murders, on both sides.
• Let us be precise, Al-Qaeda’s direct involvement in Syria  exists. Al-Qaeda affiliated networks are operating in the country, including elements of al-Qaeda in Iraq, Jabhat al-Nusra, Abdullah Azzam Brigades, Fatah al-Islam and Jordanian Salafi-jihadists. They are said to be “small” but they are gaining strength. This means that  that the armed opposition to the Syrian regime contains a strong Sunni reactionary sectarian element determined to impose its agenda on any future state. They are already supplied, with the other opponents, from Saudi Arabia and Qutar, not to mention less open help from the US, Turkey, Libya and other sources.
• This political-religious fracture has spread to the heart of Arab world. Egypt’s President Morsi has now taken sides, “Last Saturday Morsi attended a rally by hard-line clerics who have called for jihad and spoke before a cheering crowd at a Cairo stadium, mainly Islamists. Waving a flag of Egypt and the Syrian opposition, he ripped into the Syrian regime, announced Egypt was cutting ties with Damascus and denounced Lebanon’s Shiite Hezbollah guerrillas for fighting alongside Assad’s forces.” Associated Press .
• The Free Syrian Army’s political allies may have a democratic programme. There are (we are reminded in Le Monde and elsewhere) that there remain powerful democratic elements in Syrian civil society. They have protested against sectarian killings. Some of them are on the left. The  National Coordination Committee for the Forces of Democratic Change is one umbrella grouping. It is not recognised by the Syrian Revolution General Commission (SRGC) and has no ties to the  Syrian National Council. It is, in other words, like the rest of the Syrian left, marginal.
• The British left is largely opposed to any form of intervention in Syria. A section of it  is morally and politically soiled. That the same left has had close relations with the same Muslim Brotherhood in undeniable. The SWP even endorsed voting, in the second round of the country’s elections,  for the Brothers’ President Morsi in Egypt. Socialist Action backed  Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi’s visit to Ken Livingstone – the same man now calling for “holy war” against Shiites. George Galloway, the vociferous pro-Syrian regime MP,  only recently supported the Bangladeshi extreme right Islamists,Hefazat-e-Islami,  whose views on Muslim heretics are as bigoted as you can get. The Stop the War Coalition (StWC) is led by members of Counterfire who appear to think that anything, absolutely anything, that comes from America and the West has to be opposed.
• There remains the suspicion that opposition to Assad from those backing intervention is motivated by his reliance on Iran and Hezbollah.

Going further into the reasons that lie behind people’s positions on Syria is important.

We could expand them to consider the motives for US, British, French and European government stands, not to mention Russia and Iran.

One can speak for a long time, a very long time, about the very good reasons to fight against Assad, (Anand Gopal discussing  here), but this analysis from North Star indicates a useful initial way of looking at things,

To start with, this revolution was rooted in the countryside where the regime’s abandonment of support for the peasantry created mass hatred for the system. But unlike the cities, where an organized working class could mount mass protests even up to and including a general strike in order to put pressure on the regime, the relatively atomized peasantry had to resort to arms almost immediately since this was the only tenable defense.

Very rapidly, those who had access to guns and the money necessary to defend the masses were propelled into the leadership. This meant for the Free Syrian Army that the owner of a cement factory became a top commander —  his access to funds was critical. In a very real sense, Syria was experiencing a kind of bourgeois-democratic revolution. It also explains the rise of the Islamist militias. With money pouring in from Qatar and Saudi Arabia, it gave the jihadists’ clout.

Yet, he argues,

Even though the Islamists have become a major factor in the Syrian struggle, Gopal pointed to the more secular and more democratic-minded mass movement’s willingness to take them on. He referred to the conflicts taking place in Raqqa, the first provincial capital under rebel rule. Even though the Islamists are trying to impose Sharia law and codes that make women second-class citizens, the secular and democratic-minded residents are not intimidated.

But the main issue remains the one posed by the NPA: should we back the arming of the Free Syrian Army?

What possible help will this bring to the cause of the Syrian people’s freedom?

Seamus Milne, the Guardian commentator, has himself has an ambiguous relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood. He has said of  its right-wing Tunisian branch (he used to call them “progressive” now he labels them ‘centrist’ ), the governing  Ennahda “its newly elected Islamist leaders pluralist enough to lead a successful democratisation and offer a progressive model for the rest of the region” (Here).

But is he wrong to say this?

The reality is that what began in Syria more than two years ago as a brutally repressed popular uprising has long since morphed into a vicious sectarian war, manipulated by outside forces to change the regional balance of power and already dangerously spilling over into neighbouring Lebanon and Iraq.

The consequences for Syria have been multiple massacres, ethnic cleansing, torture, a humanitarian crisis and the risk of the country’s breakup. The longer the war, the greater the danger of a Yugoslavian-style fragmentation into sectarian and ethnic enclaves.

The Assad regime bears responsibility for that, of course. But so do those who have funded and fuelled the war, bleeding Syria and weakening the Arab world in the process. The demand by Cameron and other western politicians to increase the flow of arms is reckless and cynical.

In summary these are further reasons why we are deeply sceptical about Louis Proyect’s call  for “solidarity with the Syrian revolution.

That should be enough: don’t take an active part in that war.

 

Update,

Comment, “ je l’espère n’est pas la position officielle du NPA”

I hope this is not the official position of the NPA.

Is it, or isn’t it?

Après mai (Something in the Air): Counter-Culture and Leftism.

Ça  réchauffe le cœur!

Après Mai (Something in the Air), is an eagerly anticipated film about the lives of young French leftists after May 68.

For some 1968 did not mark just a high-point of radical activism, but the beginning of something that was   unfolding not only in France, but across the rest of Europe and the world. As Le Monde said late last year,  ”le champ des possibles s’étendait à perte de vue, terrifiant et ‘exaltant.” (the range of what seemed possible unrolled further than you could see – it was both terrifying and exalting). It was the post-68 period that saw French leftist groups (as in the rest of the Contintent) grow into (sometimes transient) organisations with a genuine public presence.

It was during this period that Olivier Assayas , born in 1955, and “became an adult and artist.” Born in 1954 and having taken part of similar – at times identical – political and cultural movements I could not fail to be touched by this brilliant, if sometimes overflowing with references, picture.

The Guardian Reviewer Peter Bradshaw summarises the scenario.

Clément Métayer is Gilles, a politicised kid in high school and would-be artist who is angrily participating in the radical spirit of the times: he is the lover of Laure (Carole Combes), but the relationship is disintegrating because she is leaving for England, and Gilles is increasingly drawn to the beautiful Christine (Lola Créton). In the cause of consciousness-raising, Gilles and his comrades crank out agitprop zines on mimeograph machines and creep into the school at night to cover the walls with graffiti – the kind of graffiti that in 2013 has been reportedly wiped out by social media and Web 2.0. But it isn’t simply that: a concrete block is pushed over a walkway handrail, hitting a security guard below, putting him into a coma, and this serious act of violence – the one moment at which, in fact, the whole idea of violence is brought to a head – means Gilles has to leave town. He heads south to Italy and finds that the further south he goes, the more lenient and hedonistic the revolutionary spirit becomes, very different from the arguments and smoke-filled rooms of Paris.

The critics, like Bradshaw then remark that the main impression left by Assayas it that  there were plenty of good-looking people on the young French left, having sex and a whale of a time.

But there is a lot more, a lot more, in Après Mai

It shows not only the individual dramas of committed French school and university students, on the cusp of adulthood,but the rich interaction between post-68 European leftism and the ‘Counter-culture’.

Après Mai parallels the political history of the post-68 left, from lycèens with their ‘automomist’ demands, rebuffed by the PSU for using a rude Robert Crumb cartoon on their leaflets, Mao-spontexs fighting it out after a violent encounter with the CRS at Place de Chichy, a glimpse of Situationism, to the hard-line M-Lers, and the Ligue communiste révolutionnaire. To hammer home the point about the vast orbit of the French left of the time,  Gilles is shown stocking up at a news kiosk selling everything from Charlie Hebdo, Combat, l’Humanité to Hari-Kiri. 

You don’t need to know who these groups and papers  were (and are), but it helps.

Nothing shown – a kind of left-wing ‘product placing’ – is by chance.

As a three page article in Le Monde pointed out, early in the film Gilles is pictured reading Simon Leys (Pierre Ryckmans) book on China, Les habits neufs du président Mao (The Chairman’s New Clothes: Mao and the Cultural Revolution, 1971).

Leys exposed the Cultural Revolution’s murderous side, and the hyper-nationalism of Chinese Maoism. This was, apparently, a key text for Assayas himself – as it was for countless European leftists (myself included). One could say he marked a key moment in the evolution of the left groups listed above.

Gilles is also shown leafing through a copy of the Tibetan Book of the Dead (whether Timothy Leary’s version or not I could not see). Well, I grew out of that one by the age of 16, along with Aleister Crowley, but the text was around, a bit like the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers….

Politics as always are in command. Gilles is latter admonished  by older Marxist-Leninists, in an agit-prop film collective, for reading Leys, a “CIA agent” paid by the USA to slander the splendours of the Cultural Revolution.

Gilles  girlfriend Laure Carole Combes) shows him  Gregory Corso and the Beat poets (Gasoline) and then disappears off to London. Christine (Lola Créton),  his new petite anime (I fell half in love with her as well) becomes part of the M-L film-making group, and their heavy (even  lumping)  spirit of sacrifice to the Cause of the People, is portrayed with respect but not without the implicit criticism.

In Italy Gilles meets a wealthy American rousse Leslie (India Salvor Menuez), a would-be dancer. Her insufferable  American hippie companions (one of whom says he “hates communists”), consult the I Ching before taking decisions.

The flame of the Revolution – a heated image for something that cannot be fingered without burns – occurs throughout Après Mai.

Towards the end one of Gilles’s friends joins up with a hard-line LCR faction that lurches into armed struggle *. He is shown firebombing a car.

One can guess what happens to the copy of Gasoline.

Gilles’ own decision to concentrate on graphic design, and then assisting in film production, rather than a potential career through Beaux Arts, leads him to more encounters with the counter-culture. His graphics are published in a magazine which I thought was a stand-in for Actuel but apparently existed – Parapluie. After working for his television producer father (and making a well-placed put-down about Commissaire Maigret), he ends up in England, sells International Times, then works in Pinewood Studios, as a gofer on what looked like a Hammer Horror.

The soundtrack, including Syd Barret,  Tangerine Dream, Soft Machine, Kevin Ayers,  Captain Beefhart’s Abba Zabba,  is exclusively Anglo-American.

One may doubt if many 1970s young French leftists had exactly these tastes, or that they were as immersed in the English speaking ‘underground’  as the film’s characters.

But as someone who was a young British leftist of the time, in a milieu that came from both the counter-culture,  the anarchist and Marxist European new lefts, I savoured every minute of Après Mai.

I like Olivier Assayas‘ s Carlos, a telly-series, shown here as a film, about the traitor Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, as well.

Assayas is growing into a real chronicler of 1970s radical leftism.

* For the record nothing remotely like this ever happened, although there was a tiny group within the Ligue, around Mandel’s partner Gisele,  that veered very close to guerilla warfare (when Latin American revolutionaries were all the rage). They they never went (or succeeded in going) much beyond talking. See the biography of Ernest Mandel, Jan Willem Stutje, “Ernest Mandel: A Rebel’s Dream Deferred”, London 2009, Verso.

Solidarity with Turkish Protests in Brussels, backed by Yorum.

Yorum: Revolutionary and Socialist Music.

Brussels, Saturday.

Four hundred protesters, according to organisers,  demonstrated on Saturday evening at the Place du Luxembourg in Brussels to protest against police violence in Turkey.

Muharrem Cengiz Caner Bozkurt from the Turkish music group  Yorum talked about the events  at Taskim Square in Turkey, at Sazz n’Jazz.

Several musicians from Yorum have  participated in demonstrations in Gezi Park, close to Taksim Square in Istanbul.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan ordered the withdrawal of police on Saturday afternoon, after two days of police repression. ”This action to save the last green island in the ocean of what became concrete Istanbul has turned into a social movement against Erdogan’s policy.”  explained Bahar Kimyongür, a Belgian activist of Turkish origin.

Members of Yorum the  are regularly prosecuted for their alleged link with the Turkish extreme left group DHKP-C. Five members were arrested only this January.

The treatment of Yorum is is an important illustration of the limits of the Turkish Islamist government-state’s ‘liberalism’.

This is from Wikipedia:

Grup Yorum is a Turkish band known for their political song writing.  Grup Yorum (Yorum means interpretation or comment in Turkish) has released twenty albums since 1987. Some of the group’s concerts and albums were banned over the years, and some of the group members were allegedly arrested or tortured^] Yorum remains popular and their albums continue to sell well in Turkey and internationally. Yorum has also given concerts in Germany, Austria, Australia, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, United Kingdom, and Greece.

Then we have this, “70 journalists in Turkey are currently being prosecuted and kept in jail all over the country.”

We could go on but recommend reading this from Human Rights Watch,

Turkey’s Justice and Development Party government maintained economic growth in 2012 despite a slowdown and has taken a strong focus on developing a leading regional role. However, the government failed to take convincing steps to address the country’s worsening domestic human rights record and democratic deficit.  Prosecutors and courts continue to use terrorism laws to prosecute and prolong the incarceration of thousands of Kurdish political activists, human rights defenders, students, journalists, lawyers, and trade unionists. Free speech and media remain restricted, and there are ongoing serious violations of fair trial rights.

The Left and British Foreign Policy.

After the Woolwich killing there have been acres of commentary.

Perhaps we should concentrate on the reaction of the Left, and the influential voice of the Stop the War Coalition, (StWC).

It is impossible to ignore that this is riddled with contradictions.

Before we begin we should bear in mind three strains of different thoughts on the British left which co-exist uneasily.

• Firstly, that the War on Terror is a US-led, UK backed, strategy that has brought misery to countless countries  above all in the Middle East.
• Secondly, that the ‘Arab Spring’ has brought the possibility of democratic and social advance to the Middle East, notably Egypt,  and parts of North Africa (Tunisia above all).
• Thirdly, that this move forward is threatened not just by the way newly elected governments have adopted economic policies ts that favour business and finance over the people, but that Islamists represent a menace for their democracies.

On the last idea it was initially only the democratic left that worried about Islamism, but now apparently even those who stood “with” the Islamists against “the State’”are having second thoughts – on one country that is.

Such people are perfectly capable of holding to the opinion that Islamists can be ‘progressive’, that is fighting the War on Terror, and reactionary, fighting the Syrian regime.

Back to Woolwich,

According to Lindsey German there are “lessons to be learnt”.

The simple truth is that there were no such cases in Britain before the start of the ‘war on terror’ in 2001, which led to the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. The consequences of those wars have been devastating for the people of those countries and further afield. Up to a million died in Iraq and 4 million were made refugees. Tens of thousands have died in Afghanistan. Fighting still continues and in Iraq looks like descending into civil war in some parts of the country.

This reflects argument number One in its purest from.

But the StWC always add a corollary: their claim that ‘ending’ the ‘war’ (a pretty broad claim) will mean that this kind of violence will case.

The  basis of this claim is disputable :Islamism is perfectly capable of violence against those who have not joined the ‘war’, as inter-Muslim violence proves.

There is also more than a distasteful  hint  here: we should do what the StWC says or…..

German then observes,

Any rational balance sheet of the last decade and more would demonstrate that the war on terror has been a failure in its own terms. It has not prevented terrorism but caused it to spread.

It is not demonstrable that there is something  called – other than rhetorically -  the “war on terror” in the first place: there have been a series of different interventions by Western, NATO-led, forces, in countries ranging from Iraq (clearly wrong) to Mali (much less clear).

Furthermore, to repeat a previous point: is the development of violent Islamism simply a response to the war on terror?

Violent Islamism has, to say the least, deeper and more lasting roots, as anybody familiar with the history of Egypt, the Middle East and the Maghreb  could say.

And it is not reducible to the history of Western colonialism either.

German concludes,

In the end there has to be a political solution to terrorism. But it can only start with recognition of the disastrous effect of western foreign policy in the Middle East and South Asia for decades now, exacerbated by the consequences of 12 years of wars. That means acknowledging that those of us who said these wars were not the answer and would make things worse were absolutely right.

What exactly is the political solution?

We can agree that Western intervention is wholly wrong. It has stoked the fires of conflict in all the countries she cites.

But is removing it a solution to the rise of violent anti-democratic Islamism?

Perhaps we should be, as the left, giving some energy to supporting the democratic left in these lands who offer a real political alternative to Islamism, authoritarian, intolerant, or indeed jihadist.

That involves a genuine politics of human rights.

This is the way to start thinking of how a solution can come about.

The failure of much of the British left to back the Arab democratic left is part of the problem.

Update: just listening to France Culture to speakers who consider that Putin is the winner of the Syrian crisis.

What a thought!

Jean-Luc Mélenchon: for “une défense souveraine et altermondialiste.”

Is Jean-Luc Mélenchon going to way of the French ‘patriotic’ left of yesteryear?

His response to the Socialist-led Government cuts in military spending certainly indicates a drift in that direction.

This is what the leader of the Front de gauche writes on his Blog.

Austérité et atlantisme sont les maîtres mots du livre blanc de la Défense remis ce jour au président de la République. Ce sont deux dangers mortels pour la souveraineté et l’indépendance de la France.

Austerity and Atlanticism are the hallmarks of the Defence White Paper presented today to the President and of the Republic. These are two mortal dangers for the sovereignty and independence of France. 

Ce livre blanc est une nouvelle preuve de l’hypocrisie des solfériniens et de l’incohérence du gouvernement.François Hollande annonce qu’il ne touchera pas à la dissuasion nucléaire mais il a accepté d’inscrire la France dans le projet atlantiste de bouclier anti-missile en Europe.

This white paper is, yet again,  proof of the hypocrisy and inconsistency of the government. President Hollande has announced that he will not touch nuclear deterrence but has agreed to include France in the Atlanticist project of ‘ a ‘shield’ of missiles  in Europe. 
François Hollande annonce des moyens préservés pour le budget militaire mais le livre blanc prévoit des dizaines de milliers de suppressions d’emplois et la vente d’actions de l’Etat dans les industries de Défense.

Holland’s announcement means  that the military budget is maintained, but the White Paper envisages tens of thousands of job cuts and the sale of state-shares in the defence industries.

Ce livre blanc marque un nouvel étiolement de la puissance militaire de la France. Il prépare les grandes phrases selon lesquelles ”on ne peut rien faire sans les autres”. Air trop connu !

This paper heralds that the military power of France will again be sapped. It claims that we cannot act alone….a phrase with all too obvious implications.

Mélenchon then digs explicitly from the midden of nationalism.

Le renoncement à l’indépendance et à la souveraineté est toujours présenté comme une fatalité indépendante de notre volonté.

Presented  as inevitable, and wished for, we are being led to abandon our independence and sovereignty.

Je refuse cette liquidation de l’argument militaire de la France. Loin de l’atlantisme et de l’austérité, la France doit construire une défense souveraine et altermondialiste.

I reject this way of abolishing the argument in favour of France’s military. In place of Atlanticism and austerity, France must build a sovereign  and ‘other’ (or ‘anti’) globalisation defence force.

One can translate ”une défense souveraine et altermondialiste” in different ways.

But clearly any kind of ‘other’ or ‘alternative’ form of defence, that rejects cutting the military budget, to that offered by ‘globalisation’ is a highly contentious concept.

Not to say utterly confused.

How can we have a military power based on global justice?

And what exactly is this ‘sovereignty’ ’ Mélenchon is talking about?

In recent issues of Le Monde Diplomatique Régis Debray has argued (La France doit quitter l’OTAN March 2013) for France to leave (again) NATO.

He has been answered by Hubert Védrine – the former Socialist  Foreign Minster (L’OTAN, terrain d’influence pour la France. April 2013)

Both of their arguments on the assumption that ‘sovereignty - France’s - is a central value of the left.

Mélenchon seems to think that ‘Atlanticist’ policies - that is aligning France to the US –  are intrinsically  bad things.

Indeed it is well-known that  he considers the USA a very bad thing.

That’s as may be.

But is ‘France’  a ‘good thing’?

Is the French military something the left should defend to make it even better?

As a French Blogger says (other critics here)  here , if we follow this ‘argument’ for the military we,

“sombre dans le non-sens voire le ridicule. “

Here we fall into nonsense,  not to say the ridiculous.