[fse-esf] LFI Statement - Burmese Junta Massacres its own People

[ASt-LFI]

Burmese Junta Massacres its own People - worldwide action needed to 
expose its crimes and aid the resistance

 

More and more reports are emerging from Burma of the enormous scale of 
the massacres of unarmed protestors, including the young monks whose 
participation has been such a feature of the mass demonstrations of the 
last weeks. "Many more people have been killed in recent days than 
you've heard about. The bodies can be counted in several thousand", says 
a high-ranking intelligence officer for the junta, who defected to 
Thailand at the end of September. Photographs of the mutilated bodies of 
monks floating in the rivers have appeared on the internet. A blog by a 
pro-democracy activist describes a raid on a monastery by riot police. 
"They systematically ordered all the monks to line up and banged and 
crushed each one's head against the brick wall of the monastery. One by 
one, the peaceful, non-resisting monks fell to the ground, screaming in 
pain."

 

The military regime, which has held Burma in its iron grip for nearly 
twenty years, when faced with an unarmed and consciously peaceful 
revolution, reacted with wholesale and savage repression. It has taken 
for its model its own actions in September 1988, when the army and 
police slaughtered 3,000 people, drowning in blood the last great 
popular uprising. It also copies the "successful" model of its main ally 
and backer the Chinese Communist Party: the Tiananmen Square massacre of 
1989. This is not, as some say, simply mindless brutality but a 
calculated attempt to destroy an entire new generation of young 
militants and atomise and terrorise the great mass of the population. It 
must not be allowed to succeed. Its perpetrators and their international 
backers must be branded with infamy now, so that as soon as possible the 
Burmese people can deal with all those who ordered and organised it in 
the manner they so richly deserve.

 

United Nations useless and reactionary

Meanwhile the United Nations special envoy to Burma, Ibrahim Gambari, 
shakes the bloody hand of the military dictator, General Than Shwe, 
urging him to "engage in dialogue with the protestors". In fact the UN 
is a broken reed for the Burmese masses to rely on. Calls for UN "blue 
helmets" intervention are a reactionary diversion.

 

Even worse are calls on United States imperialism to intervene. In the 
person of Barbara Bush, it condemns the repression and offers words of 
support for democracy. But in reality it is only interested in seeking a 
democratic and humanitarian rehabilitation, discredited as it is by its 
invasion of Iraq and the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of its 
people. The US, European Union, Russian and Japanese imperialists, plus 
China and India are reactionary forces that would only act in pursuit of 
their own economic and strategic interests. They have no progressive 
role to play in Burma. All their talk of human rights and democracy is a 
cruel and cynical deception.

 

Condemnation of Burma for human rights abuses is also preparing the way 
for future pressure on China when cooperation turns to open rivalry for 
energy resources and markets. Indeed, the Russians and the Chinese have 
threatened to use their vetoes on the UN Security Council over any 
forthright criticism of the murderous junta precisely because their 
records in Chechnya and Tiananmen would hardly bear examination on this 
score.

 

Only the international working class, the antiwar and anticapitalist 
youth worldwide can render any active assistance to the Burmese people. 
What, then, can we do to aid the Burmese resistance and help it to 
ultimate victory?

 

Workers' solidarity

We must take immediate action to expose the crimes of Than Shwe and his 
butchers to the workers and youth of the world. We can and need to do 
this by organising our own demonstrations and pickets of Burmese 
embassies in every country. We must use the internet to spread reports 
of it in every language. We must demand that all support for the junta 
ceases, that it is isolated by workers' and popular sanctions, that all 
states that continue to support it are added to the list of outcast nations.

 

We must force our governments to demand the immediate release of all 
political prisoners, to stop the repression of the monks and 
demonstrators. Nothing that the regime does carries any legitimacy; it 
must be treated as an pariah by the international working class and all 
progressive activists around the world.

 

The International Trade Union Confederation has correctly called on 
workers to exert pressure on the great multinational corporations to 
stop propping up the Burmese dictatorship. Burma was already a target 
for international trade union protests. Its police state promotes the 
systematic use of forced and unpaid labour (a form of temporary slavery) 
on infrastructural projects for joint ventures with multinationals, 
notably in building pipelines for the gas and oil sector, the country's 
biggest source of foreign currency. International arms companies also 
service the murderous junta. The ITUC lists amongst the major traders 
with Burma: Caterpillar and Chevron (USA), GlaxoSmithKline (UK ),Total 
(France), Siemens (Germany), Swift (Belgium), Daewoo and Hyundai 
(Korea), China National Petroleum Corp and China National Offshore Oil 
Corporation (China), Gas Authority of India and ONGC Videsh Ltd (India).

 

But the ITUC calls only for public exposure and disinvestment. We appeal 
to dockers and stevedores, often in the forefront of progressive 
international causes, to take direct action, alongside seafarers, rail 
and airfreight workers, to halt all trade from and to Burma. Some 
commentators talk of Burma's economic isolation meaning that it is 
impervious to outside pressure. This is not true or, rather, is no 
longer so. India's trade alone has grown from some $341 million in 
2004-05 to $650 million the following year, with a target of $1 billion 
expected for 2006-07. Action by India's workers, alongside similar 
actions across the region, as well as in the imperialist countries, can 
hit the generals hard. All progressive forces must impose boycotts of 
Burmese companies and products, and imperialist multinationals that 
invest in Burma. Anything that generates revenue for the country should 
be targeted by a global campaign.

 

In addition we must demand that all states open their doors to political 
refugees from Burma, grant them full asylum rights, including the right 
to continue their struggle from their country of refuge. We must demand 
that countries, like Britain, that are still deporting Burmese refugees 
stop this loathsome practice.

 

Where next for the Burmese revolution?

Whether this horrific massacre will in fact drown the developing 
revolution in blood will depend on whether the Burmese working class and 
its illegal, but existing trade unions can take mass strike action, even 
under the conditions of repression. The underground Federation of Trade 
Unions - Burma, which has sections amongst factory workers, energy 
workers, civil servants, stevedores, post and telecommunications, rubber 
plantation workers, health workers, etc. declared; "We highly regard 
those monks and the students and youth who sacrificed their lives 
bravely confronting the military dictatorship." The FTU-B on 29 
September called a general strike and for workers to take any action 
they can to halt the repression.

 

Whether the repression succeeds will also depend to on whether the army 
ranks crack under the impact of the horrors they are being forced to 
commit. We, too, can play a significant role by showing that the whole 
world is watching and that we will not allow business as usual with this 
vile regime.

 

Above all what this carnage shows is that a capitalist army, led by its 
high command and officer corps, is a permanent, terrifying danger, first 
of all to its own people, those it is supposed to defend. It shows, too, 
in the most horrible manner, that hopes for peaceful revolutions, of 
non-violent direct action being sufficient to remove this, of leaving 
the working class and mass strike action out of the strategy are vain 
hopes. They are a strategy for defeat and for worse bloodshed than 
so-called violent revolutions, i.e. ones where the masses are prepared 
in advance to use force. If such armies are not disintegrated by winning 
over the rank and file soldiers, if such high commands are not 
overthrown and liquidated in the course of a revolution, then the tragic 
experience of Chile in 1973, of China in 1989 and of Burma itself in 
1988 will be repeated again and again.

 

Indeed, those, like Aung San Suu Kyi and the National League for 
Democracy, which urge restraint in front of the army, which call on the 
people to blunt their criticisms of the regime, which look to the United 
Nations to oversee a transition leaving the multinational corporations 
and even some of the generals and the army in a powerful position, are 
currently attempting to lead the protest movement into this trap.

 

Important, and indeed almost inevitable, as mass unarmed street 
demonstrations are at the beginning of any revolution, alone they are 
insufficient to win. Only mass workers' strike action, halting the 
wheels of the national economy, only workers and peasants' militias, 
culminating at a critical moment with an armed uprising, can destroy 
such regimes and replace them with one based on democratically elected 
councils of delegates of workers, peasants and the youth. In Burma, too, 
the oppressed nationalities, Karen, Kachin, Chin, Mon and others, whose 
resistance to military repression has been a permanent feature of 
Burmese politics, must play a vital role; working class and progressive 
forces must support their right to self-determination and independence 
if they wish it.

 

Above all, the vanguard of all these struggles needs urgently to create 
a revolutionary workers party.

 

In spite of the bloody "order" that reigns in Rangoon and Mandalay, we 
remain convinced that the Burmese people, workers and youth, will 
eventually overthrow this regime. The power of an awakened and mobilised 
working class ready to fight to the end for its social and political 
freedoms is unstoppable. Even if the present phase of the uprising has 
been defeated, yet more will come. The heroic youth of Burma alongside 
the workers, despite their present terrible sufferings will learn the 
necessary political lessons and learn them well.

 

League for the Fifth International

2 October 2007

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