No to the new Caucasian War!

A statement from the Workers Solidarity Alliance (USA/Canada) on the conflict between Georgia & Russia, based on the call sent out first by Polish Anarchists and then by the International Workers Association (IWA):

The eruption of military violence between Georgia and South Ossetia, despite the recent development of a shaky and tentative truce, threatens to develop into a large-scale protracted war between Georgia supported by NATO on the one hand, and South Ossetia supported by the Russian state on the other. Despite the relative brevity of the length of the war thousands of people have already been killed and wounded – principally, peaceful non-combatants; whole cities and settlements have been wiped out and their
inhabitants displaced. Hateful nationalist and chauvinistic hysteria is being whipped up by self-interested leaders on both sides of the conflict. The development of a full scale protracted war in the Caucuses would mean nothing but suffering and devastation on a mass scale for many more in the region, all so that statesmen, the military brass, and wealthy capitalist entrepreneurs can gain ever more wealth and power through the strategic control of the region and the control of marketable Caspian oil and gas.

As always and everywhere in conflicts between states for markets, as in the new Caucasian war, there is not and cannot be a truly good or bad side – as all sides have been making preparations to war over control of
regional marketable resources for many years, this no matter what the potential cost in lives and health to the civilian population of the region, as to these statesmen and capitalist entrepreneurs the control of
the market is more important then the lives and well being of the people affected. The competition for marketable gas and oil and control of the routes by which these can be transported to global markets has long fanned regional tensions between the various states and finally this competition for marketable oil and gas, wealth and power, has erupted into brutal wholesale violence.

The Saakashvili regime in Georgia keeps two thirds of the population in poverty in order to fund the regimes quest for the material means to help guarantee strategic control of the region, and the greater internal
discontent in the country this enforced poverty causes, the more the Saakashvili regime desires to find a way out from the deadlock in the form of a “small victorious war” in the hope, that it can write everything off.
Why? Because as a wise man stated nearly a century ago “War is the health of the state”, war unites and binds citizens to the state as peace can never do, war attempts to squash all dissent and protest to the will of
the statesmen and the aspirations of their wealthy financial backers, a fact not lost on ambitious statesmen. The government of Russia is full of determination to keep it’s hegemony in the Caucasus. Today they pretend to be the defender of the weak, but their hypocrisy is abundantly clear: in fact, the military methods of Saakashvili’s armed forces only repeats what the Putinist soldiery did in Chechnya 9 years ago, when Chechnya’s capital of Grozny was fire bombed and leveled to the ground without regard for the
well-being of it’s civilian population in order that the Russian states regional hegemony could be insured. Ruling circles of both Ossetias and Abkhazia aspire to strengthen their role as exclusive allies of the Russia
state and it’s hegemony in the region, and at the same time to rally the impoverished population in their spheres of influence around chauvinistic nationalist ideals in order to more easily facilitate their plans as
allies in conquest without the trouble of being opposed by popular opposition at home. Leaders of the USA, the European states and NATO, on the contrary, wish to weaken the influence of their Russian rivals in the
Caucasus as much as possible to provide themselves with control over Caspian oil and gas in order to bring wealth and power to Western based energy companies, who would market Caspian oil and gas at inflated prices wherever a market could be found. Thus, the working class of Georgia and South Ossetia have become witnesses and victims of the new “Great Game”, a deadly game for the poor being played out by wealthy market speculators, statesmen, and military officers of powerful nations and their weaker but no less responsible regional proxies.

This fight does not bring working class- Georgians, Ossets, Abkhasians or Russians – anything, except misery and violent death, incalculable disasters and deprivation. We express our deep sympathy to the surviving loved ones of the victims, to the people which have been left without a roof over their head and means of subsistence as a result of this war for control of markets.

We shouldn’t be so ignorant as to fall under the influence of nationalist demagogy which demands unity with “our” government, flying the flag of “protecting the homeland”, rhetorical tactics that have been used by all
sorts of self-interest despots looking to justify their endless quest for wealth and power from time immemorial. Nor should we be fooled by our leaders empty promises or the crumbs that they bestow upon their subjects in return for their subjects quiescent servility to the leaders plans for domination. The true enemy of working people and the poor everywhere is not their working class brothers and sisters on the other side of the border or the poor of another nationality. Instead the true enemies of all poor and working people are the rulers and bosses of all kinds, presidents and ministers, businessmen and generals, those who generate wars for the sake of multiplying their riches and power. We call on the working people of Russia, Ossetia, Abkhazia and Georgia to reject the bait of nationalism and patriotism that their leaders dangle in front of them and to turn the anger instead on the true cause of the violence, namely
the statesmen, military officers, and the wealthy on both sides of the border and the associations and institutions that they use to hold power over society, the state and the corporation.

Russian, Georgian, Ossetic and Abkhazian enlisted soldiers! Realize that the enlisted solider is simply a worker, a worker whose tool happens to be a gun. Refuse to be pawns anymore in the deadly games played by those who command you, stand in solidarity and begin organizing among your fellow enlisted men and workers in order to be able to resist the compulsion of your officers, remember ultimately that they are few and you are many. With the enlisted soldiers of your “opponent” – secretly fraternize and seek to mutually create “quiet fronts” on every front and organize mutual resistance to your leaders and their institutions of power, resistance to those in high office that ordered you out to murder, pillage, and die, ordered you to sacrifice your lives, health, sanity and humanity for the benefit of their aspirations at gaining ever more wealth and power.

Working people in the rear! Organize amongst yourselves. Organize together that you may have the power and numbers to successfully sabotage military efforts. Leave the factory to go to meetings and demonstrations against the war, strike against the state sponsored violence! Encourage your
enlisted men in the armed forces to do the same. Educate those that support the war of the true cause of the war, the control of marketable Caspian oil and gas, the control for capitalist markets, and of who truly
benefits from it, the rich. Shame and ostracize those of the working class and poor that support the war even after knowing of it’s true cause. Continue organizing working class power even after the current hostilities have ended so that you may stop dead in it’s tracks the next attempt by the rich and powerful to unleash war, devastation and terror on the region.

No to the war and to its organizers – rulers and rich men! Yes to solidarity of working people and the poor across borders and in the front lines

Posted: August 18th, 2008 under politrix.
Comments: none