US ASSAULT ON WORKERS’ PARTY OF IRELAND

An Attack On The Communist Parties Of The World

Anil Biswas

ON October 7, 2005, the British government arrested Sean Garland, 71, the president of the Workers’ Party of Ireland, formerly the Sinn Fein-Workers’ Party, at the behest of the Bush administration.  The United States likes to extradite Sean Garland to ‘face US justice.’  Yet, no criminal charges have been framed against Sean Garland. 

Sean Garland was in Belfast in Northern Ireland attending the Annual Conference (Ard Fheis) of the Workers’ Party.  An indictment was issued earlier this year in Sean Garland’s name by the District Court of Columbia and the US embassy in London asked the British government to help the extradition of Sean Garland.  The British government of Tony Blair readily acceded to the request.  This was followed by the Belfast arrest.

With no specific charges levelled against him, Sean Garland did not find it difficult to be released on bail from the Belfast County Court where he had been remanded.  Sean Garland waits the sending forth from Washington of particulars of the charge that the US government would frame against him for extradition to be performed.

TRUMPED UP INCRIMINATION

It is known now that the basis of the action taken by the US government against Sean Garland stems from the book written by one Bill Gertz called the China Threat.  Gertz has long been known to work at the behest of the CIA/FBI and has a vicious record as an extreme rightist, a violent fundamentalist, and a rabid anti-communist. 

In the book, Bill Gertz writes that Sean Garland and his Workers’ Party work in close liaison with the Communist Party of China (CPC) and the Workers’ party of Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK).  Gertz works for the Washington Times owned by a fundamentalist Christian sect based in South Korea. 

Allegedly, the US spy satellites have eavesdropped onto a conversation that Sean Garland is supposed to have had back in 1997 with Cao Xiaobing, member, central committee of the CPC where Cao allegedly told Sean Garland to help spread counterfeit $100 denomination currency notes in the USA with help from DPRK (the so-called ‘super-note’ counterfeits).

This article, and the BBC’s programme ‘Tonight,’ where Gertz spewed out his anti-communist ire in full measure, were apparently utilised by the US secret services to bring up an improbable and trumped allegation against Sean Garland.

In the programme and in his book, Gertz liberally quotes ‘information received from Vladimir Bukovskyi who is a notorious Soviet defector and known for his pro-US and anti-communist stance.

ANSWERING THE CHARGES AND ALLEGATIONS

The Workers’ Party (WP) has come up with a full and strong denial and an effective counter to the charges and allegations.  The response is in two sets.  First, the WP has refuted the allegations and the accusations.  Second, the WP has seriously questioned the way the US gone ahead to pressurise a kow-towing British government to threaten extradition of an Irish citizen.

In its two official notes released to the media on October 18, 2005, the WP has clearly pointed out that Sean Garland as president of the Party has had close links with the Workers’ Party of DPRK and the Communist Party of China and for a long period of time.

Chiefly because of Sean Garland’s groundbreaking work was the Republic of Ireland inclined towards establishing diplomatic relations with DPRK in 2004.  Sean Garland has visited DPRK to promote political-ideological contact between the two Workers’ Parties. He has also worked for the promotion of political, cultural, and social ties between DPRK and the Republic of Ireland.

The WP confirms that Sean Garland has visited China and he has also, during the course of his visits met leaders of the CPC and this includes the central committee member, Cao Xiaobing.  On his part, Cao has visited the Republic of Ireland and has had, besides sessions with WP leadership, open discourses with other politicians and with business leaders. Commerce between China and the Republic of Ireland has been going on for some time now.

To read conspiratorial exercises in these meetings with special reference to counterfeiting dollars is grotesque and is the product of a fevered anti-communist mind.

The WP totally and completely rejects the allegations being brought up against the Party president Sean Garland, a lifelong communist, and a fierce critique of US imperialism and its British sub-servers.

VIOLATION OF INTERNATIONAL LAW

The WP also questions fiercely the right of the US imperialists to extradite an Irish citizen who is entitled to the protection of Irish Constitution and Irish law.  The Extradition Treaty between the US and Great Britain makes it very difficult for anyone targetted by the US to escape extradition. A person can be extradited without showing any reason if the US administration so desires.

In the USA, Sean Garland as a socialist and a communist will be denied of justice.  He will not be afforded the protection against torture and degrading treatment that is available to him in Ireland. A fair trial for Sean Garland, a communist, and a vocal opponent of the US foreign policy is as unlikely as that for the Cuban Five. 

The decision by the sub-serving Blair administration to use the soil of Northern Ireland to take into custody Sean Garland with a view to getting him extradited to the US smacks of kow-towism, and is a clear instance of a case of violation of not just legal protection afforded to Irish citizens but an attempt to reinforce the role of the US as the self-appointed world policeman.

SEAN GARLAND: BRIEF DETAILS

Born in 1934 in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Sean Garland was a member of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and a socialist from his late teens. Penetrating British Army between April and June, 1954 and gathering vital secret information, Sean Garland was instrumental in leading two successful armed assaults on the Gough army barracks and Armagh and Brookeborough barracks in which several British soldiers and a few IRA comrades were killed in action.

Caught subsequently soon, sent to jail, and tortured, Sean Garland emerged from his jail sentence in 1962 to campaign relentlessly in favour of making the IRA a chiefly political rather than a terrorist organisation. 

Simultaneously, Sean Garland, an inveterate Marxist-Leninist, was involved in a successful attempt to make the Sinn Fein (of which he was a National Organiser) adopt a socialist programme leading to the Sinn Fein finally emerging as a socialist organisation. The group that continued to espouse terrorism called themselves the ‘provisional Sinn Fein’ and the ‘provisional IRA.’

During 1969-1970, Sean Garland commenced the ideological battle within the IRA and the Sinn Fein to oppose the sectarian nationalism that both organisations were prey to, and successfully mobilised the workers of both organisations to isolate the reactionary sections of the IRA and the Sinn Fein.  The Sinn Fein under Sean Garland adopted Marxism-Leninism as the political-ideological line.

It was under his leadership that both organisations adopted the slogan of “Peace, Democracy, and Class politics,” as the basis of its approach to the Northern Ireland conflict.  The new Sinn Fein was soon renamed the Sinn Fein Workers’ Party and then the Workers’ Party in 1982 when Sean Garland became its general secretary.

In 1992, as a continuing backlash of the debacle of socialism in the Soviet Union and the east European bloc countries, the Workers’ Party split with a small segment running away to join the Irish labour party.  Since then, Sean Garland has been engaged in rebuilding the WP and it was as a part of this process that he had gone to Belfast to address the Party’s annual conference when he was arrested.

THE POLITICAL- IDEOLOGICAL PROFILE OF WP

• The WP seeks, as a Marxist-Leninist Party, to change the political, economic, and social structure of Ireland and struggles for the establishment of a democratic, secular, socialist republic, a united Ireland. 

• The WP seeks also to change and transform the world that enslaves two-thirds of the people, and condemns them to a life of poverty under capitalism. 

• The WP also struggles for world peace, democracy, and most of all, socialism.

 Internationally, the WP has established links with communist, socialist, and Workers’ parties around the globe.  The key criteria of the relationship are: democracy, socialism, world peace and disarmament, and opposition to terrorism.

Nationally, the WP is a fierce critic of the lack of democracy and of the narrow economic vision of the European Union.  It has on this basis opposed the Single Europe Act (1986), the Maastricht Treaty (1992), the Amsterdam Treaty (1998), and the Treaty of Nice (2005).  It envisions a Europe that is politically and economically decentralised.

In its latest document, the WP sets out its ideological position thus: 

• It denotes socialism as the only way forward for the citizens of Ireland, Europe, and the world.  It rejects the notion that the role of communists and socialists in a government is to manage the free market economy better or in a more humane way than other bourgeois capitalist parties. 

• The WP as socialist party understands the individual as a citizen in society.  The capitalists understand the citizen as a mere unit of subservient production. The WP is of the firm opinion that socialism gives an individual an identity politically, philosophically, economically, socially, and culturally, which makes him/her superior to the crude economic reductionism of capitalism. 

• The ideological conflict and the core contradictions can never be reduced or resolved through the social fear that capitalism cultivates or through the horror story of ‘end of history’ and ‘end of ideology’ but through class struggle.

 RESPONSE FROM AROUND THE WORLD

A large number of communist, socialist, and workers’ parties of the world have signed in to register their rage at the arrest of and the threat of extradition hanging on Sean Garland.  The CPI(M) has condemned the attempt at extradition as a reflection of the imperialist and anti-communist perspective of the US.

Other communist, socialist, and workers parties have raised the following points while protesting US aggression on the rights of an Irish citizen and a communist:

• The attempt at extradition of Sean Garland is an attack not only on the WP but also on all the workers’, socialist, and communist parties of the world.

• Sean Garland has been targetted because he has been the instrumental figure in making the ORA and the Sinn Fein Marxist-Leninist organisations.

• Sean Garland as Party president has been a consistent opponent of the US foreign policy, has led, and supported peace movements in Ireland and elsewhere in the world.

• The cowardly action of the Blair government has been condemned as an example of the anti-communist hysteria currently sweeping the European ruling classes.

• The US act has been dubbed as an attempt by an imperialist power to throttle the resurgence of communism in Europe as elsewhere in the rest of the world.