Autonomy
A Lesson To Be Learnt
Migrations, deportations and wars are clearly linked to one another. It is enough to say that about five million refugees poured into the Mediterranean area soon after the first Gulf war. Similarly the link between the struggle against deportations and the resistance against the plans of controlling and submitting various areas in the world is obvious. It is not strange, therefore, that the Iraqi guerrilla is also treated in this issue of Tempi di guerra.
It is necessary to clarify a few points in order to understand the current situation in Iraq and give a different view to those who claim the withdrawal of all troops from Iraq. In the aftermath of the war that the western Coalition waged on Iraq in 1991 and that caused thousands of dead, a social uprising broke out in the country against famine and the regime of Saddam Hussein. Thousands of Iraqi soldiers deserted but kept the weapons, which they eventually used up against a system that had considered them as cannon-fodder. The uprising soon infected all the exploited and spread in a great number of towns, where self-organised structures, the shoras (committees), were created. The western States, quite concerned about the possible effects of this uprising, provided the regime with weapons, so that it could put down the generalised rebellion with bloodshed. It was what happened. The ‘weapons of mass destruction’, which have been the object of very ostentatious concerns, such as deadly chemical tear gas, were therefore largely used by Saddam Hussein’s army with the complicity of nationalist Kurdish parties in the north of the country. Meantime social instability discouraged the USA, their allies and their rivals to occupy directly the country.
After more than ten years of embargo, which caused one million Iraqi to die, the US decided that it was time they occupied the country, in the name of the ‘war against terrorism’. What the servant press carefully concealed is that the military occupation of Iraq in 2003 would never have been so fast if all the Iraqi proletarians, not at all willing to be killed for interests that were not theirs, had not deserted the army; and once again they kept the weapons, waiting for the right moment to use them. The rest is story of our time.
The regime has collapsed but the exploited, as they endure more and more miserable living conditions, are looting all the sites that belonged to the hideous State power. The repression of the allies is so brutal that it is stirring up an even bigger hatred against the ‘liberators’, which, with bombardment and embargo, were already responsible for a huge manslaughter. As a result, the Iraqi social guerrilla is achieving what no army could have done: to put in trouble the biggest military power in the world.
No one can by now believe that Iraqi people ‘love the American soldiers bringing them peace’; no one can believe such a lie, considering the many attacks against military tanks, embassies, headquarters, marines, the new Iraqi police, and the acts of sabotage against pipelines and oil refineries, not to mention the mass strikes. And it is impossible to believe that an uprising like this originates only from Islamic groups. In fact, when Saddam’s regime collapsed and Iraqi insurgents started looting his buildings, the ‘Supreme Committee of Islamic Revolution’ invited the looters to give their loot back to the government, but such claim was completely ignored.
Certainly, the Iraqi exploited are extremely isolated, clenched between the massacres brought about by the democratic armies and the Islamic mafia; as a result the latter, who belong to the class of the bosses, strengthen their power. And what about us?
The logic of war, with its indiscriminate and therefore terrorist violence, put the people who live in the warmongering countries under the menace of terrible reprisals, such as the bombing in Madrid (March 2004). It is no longer a TV show.
There exists one and only way out: to demonstrate, through the deeds, that the western exploited are not on the side of their bosses, on the contrary they are accomplices of their Iraqi brothers, those who have not been defeated by bombardment and repression. The current situation in Iraq shows that capitalism drips blood, but it is not at all invincible (in what a dreadful rush most troops of the capital are leaving Iraq!). This is a lesson we must learn when struggling against the enemy in our territory.
Let us nationalists shed hypocritical tears for the Italian mercenaries who died while working for the bosses, tears they have never wept for the Iraqi dead. Let us pacifists invoke UN, which are also among the main responsible for massacres in Iraq. Let us stalinists and neo-stalinists call for national liberation struggles, a lie that has always been used by want-to-be bosses willing to establish a new oppression. What is going on in Baghdad, Bassora, Falluja and Nassirya takes different forms, but has an old name: class struggle.
a few insurrectionists