Real Support Needed in Namibia Struggle

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THIS WEEK the TUC will consider a resolution from the Tobacco Workers' Union calling for support for SWAPO in Namibia - the first time the TUC will ever have given official backing to particular national liberation movement by name.

An associated resolution calls for comprehensive sanctions against apartheid South Africa. At the end of the month, similar resolutions will be taken at the Labour Party conference.

What meaning does this have for revolutionary socialists? Against the background of the recent South African invasion of Angola, Ben Campbell, an activist in the Namibia Support Committee, looks at the issues.

THE TRADE union and Labour bureaucracy have of course developed the technique of resolution-mongering to a fine art. On Southern Africa this has meant, especially in the Labour Party, a long history of militant-sounding calls to support southern African liberation movement and for trade sanctions.

However, Labour in power has reneged on these policy decisions (as on so many others); and there is little evidence of official party mobilisation.

The best-known example is Zimbabwe. Even when pressured to pass legislation on sanctions, the Wilson and Callaghan governments kept the goods flowing, as the famous Bingham inquiry on oil to the Smith regime revealed.

Wriggled

The Labour cabinets wriggled out of prosecuting senior members of government, civil servants and directors of BP and Shell, all of whom had blood on their hands. The bourgeois press even talked of a British "constitutional crisis' should the prosecutions proceed.

: By burying the Bingham report in Parliamentary committees, the Callaghan Cabinet got off scot-free when the Tories arranged a back-dated amnesty as part of the 1979 Lancaster House settlement.

Namibia is now at the centre of the stage in the armed struggle against white supremacy in Southern Africa. Aş with Zimbabwe in the first stages of the liberation was, imperialist interests are threatened.

Plundered The need to protect the huge treasure-house of strategic raw materials (including the world's money commodcapital from the superstrategic interests. put London, Washington, Paris and Bonn firmly on the side of Pretoria against the rising tide of black worker and peasant mobilisation.

Namibia poses a special difficulty for imperialism. The black population is heavily proletarianised (more so than in Zimbabwe, and second in Africa only to South Africa). And state power in Namibia is held by South Africa through its increasingly massive and murderous army of occupation (the equivalent army in Britain would be six million troops!)

SWAPO has had to be based firmly among the Namibian workers, who are seeking wide-ranging social and economic changes following the expulsion of South African colonialism. And Namibia's white settlers are in a very weak position to maintain their domination if the South African armed forces leave.

Problems

So, for the imperialists, Namibia poses more probCarrington pressed in the UN to impose sanctions over the Namibian question, launched a diplomoffensive against SWAPO.

General ignorance on Namibia, narrow British chauvinism in the labour movement, and the lack of any democratic control over Labour's policies, made this task an easy one for David Owen, Ted Rowlands and co.

The Namibian question had twice been raised at the Labour Party conference, in 1973 and 1976. On both occasions there was an unanimous vote in favour of cancelling the Namibian uranium contracts. Tony Benn, as Minister of Energy, had signed contracts with RTZ (Lord Carrington's and HM's profit-winner) to deliver uranium from Namibia to the expanding British Heath nuclear power programme.

At both conferences, it was stated that, in view of South Africa's illegal occupation of Namibia, all trade was to be barred.

The scandalous story of how the Labour tops have helped make Namibia Britain's nuclear colony is recorded the book "The Rossing 'File' (85 p from NSC).

Annex

Owen, working with Vance, eventually produced (in 1978) an 'independence' plan for Namibia which allowed the South Africans to keep their police and administration in the whole territory, and army bases in the north, during the proposed UN-supervised elections, as well as to annex Namibia's only port.

Not a murmur of protest was heard from the Labour rank and file in Britain -most workers hadn't a clue where Namibia was, let alone that our Labour Party misleaders were conspiring against the Namibian people.

What's worse, since all the Namibian negotiations take place in the United Nations arena, and since there is virtually no informative socialist writing on this imperialist substitute for real world democracy, many British socialists thought that any plan with the UN stamp on it was somehow going to guarantee the right to self-determination.

The Labour leadership's narrow head-in-the-sand view continues.

It is British Centurion tanks, British Buccaneer aircraft and Plessey radar systems, fuelled by British BP and Shell oil and British Barclays finance, that are being used by the racists to butcher Namibians and Angolans demanding their rightful political independence. The Labour leadership has blood on its hands for allowing these deliveries.

However, the new military offensive goes hand in hand with a political one. The Reaganites and the Tory Right, following Pretoria, want the Namibian constitution drawn up with capitalist property guarantees so that it can be imposed in advance of any constituent assembly They want a future ban in Namibia on all forces "hostile" to South Africa.

We urge all militants and MINING:

Rio Tinto Zinc Charter Consolidated Ltd Selection Trust Anglo-American Corp. Consolidated Goldfields BANKS AND INSURANI Barclays International Standard Chartered Norwich Union Legal & General Royal Insurance Central Selling Organisati Diamond Trading Corp. Central Electricity Gent ing Board Tsumeb Sales Hudson's Bay & Annings Eastwood and Holt Clan And now, they want the Cuban troops withdrawn from Angola prior to limited South African troop withdrawal from Namibia.

The new French so-called 'Socialist' government acquiescing in this. And the Tories led by Carrington are active conspirators.

The Labour leadership do not even see these new moves as a danger. They denounce apartheid - as do most Tories (see Edward Heath in the Times) - but they fail expose the diplomatic offensive against the Namibian workers and peasants, or mobilise work.

ers Britain against imperialism.

At this time of intensify. ing armed struggle by SWAPO, the Labour Party cannot even make a serious material aid contribution No effort has been made tc Union Castle Shell Transport BP Princes Food OTHER Acrow Industries Babcock & Wilcox Blackwood Hodge British Leyland British Oxygen Metal Box and Thorn-El Taylor Woodrow Reed Internationai Lonrho Lead Industries Associated Engineering Associated British Food Stewards & Lloyds Michael Cotts George Wimpey Davey Ashmore Delta Metal Co.

pendent class , interests as a reactionary and brutai imperialist British state.

At present, the labour bureaucracy is having a field day in deadening the political development of workers in relation to southern Africa; and those Namibians who come into contact with Britain's official labour movement learn nothing to aid their This is the context in which one must view the TUC and Labour Party Conference resolutions. Empty rhetoric hiding the barrels of imperialism's guns - unless we do something to make them more than that.

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