Militant logic on Ireland
Socialist Organiser1981 1981-08-13Read it in the scan (PDF), scan page 12 →
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"THE military campaign has given the British ruling class the excuse to step up repression. The prisoners and the occupants of the Catholic ghettoes are the people who suffer most."
In terms like this the Militant justifies its dismissal of the Provisional IRA as "sectarian killers" , and its refusal to side with the Republicans against the British Army.
Yet for wars further away from home, Militant has been able to understand that socialists should side unconditionally with fighters for national liberation against imperialism despite our criticisms or even condemnations of some of their military tactics.
The forerunners of Militant supported _the FLN in its fight for Algerian independence against France from 1954 to 1962. Many differences can be drawn between Algeria and Northern Ireland, but also many similarities.
Like the Northern Ireland Protestants, the Europeans in Algeria fiercely opposed the national liberation struggle.
Many of them were working class, only marginally better off than the Muslims. (Indeed, before World War Il the main European working class area of Algeria had voted solidly Communist.
"To the saying 'All natives are the same' , the colonised person replies 'All settlers are the same' wrote the FLN's theorist WTOLe Frantz Fanon.
And sometimes - not always - the FLN acted on that principle. Its atrocities were far worse than anything the IRA has done.
In 1955 an FLN-led mob slaughtered 71 Europeans at random in Philippeville (in reprisal, Europeans and the Army killed some 12,000 Muslims).
In Algiers in 1957, FLN commanders told their squads to "kill any European between the ages of 18 and 54. But no women... " in FLN prisoners.
49 people were killed at random in four days. Later in the year, a campaign of cafe bombings killed 18 and injured over 150.
Yet Militant, like other Marxists, correctly supported the FLN against the French: not only because the atrocities of the French were ten times worse than the FLN's, but crucially because of the socialist principle of supporting oppressed nations against their oppressors.
Can Militant explain why the same principle should not apply in Ireland?
RAY SAUNDERS London