Terror is always terror

--------------------------------------------
From: Communist Party of Sweden, Sun, 16 Sep 2001
http://www.skp.se , mailto:skp@skp.se
============================================================================================================
Terror is always terror:
Statement by the Communist Party of Sweden (SKP)

The Communist Party of Sweden (SKP) condemns the attacks against the US civil society that occurred on September 11, 2001. We grieve for the victims of this act of terror, and for the great human suffering it caused, just as we express sympathy and anger in connection with terror and injustice elsewhere in the world.

Terrorism targets innocent civilians in order to achieve political goals. SKP rejects terrorism as an unacceptable form of political struggle. The changes that are needed in our world in order to eliminate violence and war and achieve democracy and a society with justice for all can never be achieved though terrorism, only through active political struggle by the working class.

But condemning the recent terror attacks is not enough. They must be seen in a global context. The US is the world's greatest economic, political and military power. Alone or with its allies in NATO, the US has intervened continuously throughout the world. If an individual nation declares a policy that the US considers acceptable, it is immediately exposed to economic and/or military pressure. Hundreds of thousands of people throughout the world die every year as a result of direct or indirect intervention by the US. It is a historical fact that for decades the US has implemented state terrorism against people in Latin America, Africa and Asia.

The attacks against the World Trade Center are acts of lunacy, but the same applies to the bombing of civilian targets in Baghdad and Belgrade. What is the difference between the deaths of Americans and the deaths of Serbs, Palestinians or Iraqis?

SKP sees a connection between the Palestinians who offer their lives in suicide-attacks in Israel and the attacks on New York and Washington. Such desperate actions are a direct result of the growing antagonisms in our world and the powerlessness that is felt by many people. Two-thirds of mankind are forced to live in poverty and misery, in conditions that are determined by a handful of imperialist powers under the leadership of the US, supported by the Swedish government, among others.

In many demonstrations such as those in recent times in Gothenburg, Genoa, Seattle, Prague and Nice, hundreds of thousands of people have peacefully protested against the worldwide injustice of imperialism. But their voices have been ignored. The US relies what it considers to be its own invulnerability, and continues to bomb Iraq, boycott Cuba and support Is-rael's violence against Palestinians. The Bush government simply ignores the rest of the world, as shown by its rejection of the Kyoto environmental protocol, its plans for a new missile defense that will lead to another nuclear arms race, its development of new biological-warfare weapons, and most recently its walkout from the international conference against racism in Durban.

In the present international balance of powers, no country would even dream of a serious economic, political or military attack on the US. This situation breeds the type of terrorism that we have recently seen.

In this connection it should be pointed out that the US has been the major supplier of money and weapons to the Talibans in Afghanistan. It is quite possible that the US is now sowing the harvest of the seeds of violence that it has planted.

There is an evident risk that in order to demonstrate its power the US will strike quickly, indiscriminately and violently against all whom it perceives to be obstacles to
its hegemony. We therefore call on all progressive and democratic forces to work actively for peaceful political solutions for the conflicts throughout the world that are feeding the spiral of violence. The struggle against imperialism must continue.

In this situation, the Swedish government must do everything it can to prevent a further escalation of violence. And it must also oppose unilateral violence by the US -
with or without the approval of the EU. Sweden must act in the interest of long-term solutions under the leadership of the UN, which should include appointing an international UN commission to inves-tigate terrorism wherever it occurs.


*End*