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	Australasian Spartacist No. 206	Spring 2009

Down With ALP Government "War on Terror"!

Racist Dragnet in Melbourne

At 4.30 a.m. on 4 August, in a massive operation, hundreds of federal and state police raided houses in Melbourne and Colac in south-western Victoria, terrorising the neighbourhoods. The cops arrested four young men of Somali and Lebanese backgrounds under the pretence of thwarting a gigantic and sinister “terror plot.” The four, along with another man already in police custody, are charged with “conspiring to prepare for a ‘terrorist attack’ on the Holsworthy army base in Sydney” (Age, 8 August), amongst other things. With Murdoch’s Australian tipped off before these raids, the media whipped up racist hysteria with inflammatory headlines like “Somali extremists on a ‘fatwa order’ from God” (Australian, 5 August 2009).

Reflecting the justified outrage of Melbourne’s besieged Somali community, one of their leaders, Abdurahman Osman, remarked following the raids, “What do you call waking people up at four in the morning with guns? It is the police themselves that are the terrorists. They had 400 police and 19 raids, but they did not find anything. No guns, no ammunition, nothing. Now we have our kids being called terrorists at school” (Herald Sun, 7 August). The Somali community rightly fear a racist backlash in a climate of growing racism, which has seen vicious attacks on overseas students and others (see article below).

The “anti-terror” frenzy is designed to demonise the Muslim minority and whip up xenophobia to divide the working class and regiment the population into accepting gross violations of all our civil rights. The “war on terror” is not a war in the military sense, but a political weapon in the hands of the bourgeoisie. Using criminal terrorist attacks such as the attack on the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001 and the Bali bombings in 2002 as a pretext, capitalist rulers around the world have seized the opportunity to jack up state repression at home. Outrageously those arrested in this case have been refused bail and may not be put on trial for at least two years! They are being held in horrendous Guantánamo Bay-type conditions at Barwon prison. Rob Stary, lawyer for one of the defendants, said the prosecutors were “crying wolf.” He noted that the defendants are “supposed to have a presumption of innocence. Well, in these cases there’s a presumption of guilt” (Australian, 28 August). We condemn the latest raids: Down with racist “war on terror” government repression! Hands off the Muslim minority! Free the detainees! Drop the charges now!

These sinister raids are similar to those in Sydney and Melbourne in 2005 where 17 men were arrested and imprisoned as suspected terrorists. Subsequently their lives, and those of their families, have been torn apart by ongoing imprisonment. One of those arrested, Melbourne-based Muslim cleric, Abdul Nacer Benbrika, having already been imprisoned three years, was sentenced to a minimum of twelve years’ jail after being found guilty in February of “forming an Australian terror cell.” Six others also received jail sentences. Committing no terrorist act or even laying down plans for one, in truth, these men have been imprisoned for expressing opinions, for alleged thought crimes.

When Benbrika and the others were arrested in November 2005, we noted that the sinister raids were orchestrated to occur on the eve of the vote on the then-Howard federal government’s “anti-terror” legislation. They also occurred in the lead-up to mass union demonstrations against Howard’s anti-union laws. It is no accident that aspects of legislation targeting building workers, which gave the Australian Building and Construction Commission (ABCC) ASIO-style powers to spy on, secretly interrogate and prosecute militant workers, were modeled on the “anti-terror” laws. Currently CFMEU construction union member, Ark Tribe faces a jail sentence of up to six months for allegedly failing to attend a compulsory ABCC interrogation. We say: Defend the unions! Down with ABCC and all government union-busting! It is necessary to organise a proletarian-centred fight against all the reactionary “anti-terror” and anti-union laws.

One week after the recent raids the Rudd government unveiled a 450-page plan to consolidate and expand the existing “anti-terror” laws. A key purpose of this proposal is to avoid any repetition of the string of failed “anti-terror” frame-ups from that of Jack Thomas to Zak Mallah to Izhar Ul-Haque. The most spectacular of these was that of Indian doctor Mohamed Haneef. Haneef was arrested in a blaze of publicity on 2 July 2007 that falsely connected him with an attempted bombing in Scotland the previous month. He was detained for 12 days before being charged with giving “reckless support” to terrorism. But the government and cops’ story quickly began to unravel and less than two weeks after being charged the case ignominiously collapsed like a house of cards.

The federal Labor government is determined to avoid further such embarrassments. The government’s new proposal would entrench the far-reaching powers already handed to the state under the pretext of an “anti-terror emergency.” They also significantly expand the definition of terrorism to include acts that can cause psychological as well as physical harm. There would also be a series of new offences, including inciting racial or religious violence and carrying out a terrorist hoax. The new laws would give federal police the power to raid homes and workplaces without a warrant, and allow for detention without charge for up to eight days. Immediately following the August raids proposals were also floated to legally allow the Defence Signals Directorate to spy on Australian citizens at home and abroad, as well as vastly expand the powers of the ASIO secret police.

Police allege that the men arrested in the raids are supporters of the Islamic fundamentalist group, Al-Shabaab, in Somalia—even though a spokesman for Al-Shabaab has denied knowledge of the men. Al-Shabaab began as the youth wing of the clericalist Union of Islamic Courts which briefly ran Somalia until driven from power by Ethiopian troops in late 2006. Notably, the recent raids in Melbourne followed the indictment by the Obama administration in the U.S. of two young Somali-Americans, on terrorism-related charges, and came just before U.S. secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, visited Kenya to reaffirm the U.S. imperialists’ arming and funding of the current Somali rulers. The U.S. imperialists, along with their Australian imperialist lackeys are portraying Al-Shabaab as a significant new terrorist threat in order to justify and bolster their growing and bloody occupation of Afghanistan where under the banner of the “war on terror” thousands of civilians have been slaughtered. Imperialist troops out of Afghanistan and Iraq! Hands Off Pakistan!

Despite seven months of intensive surveillance of the suspect “terrorists,” the “evidence” is scant and circumstantial. Frame-ups and false charges are the stock-in-trade of the police so we have no reason to believe anything they say. At the same time it is important to be clear on the Marxist attitude to individual terrorism. Even when carried out by misguided leftists, it is counterposed to mobilising the social power of the working class. But Marxists also distinguish between indiscriminate attacks on ordinary people, e.g., on trains or airplanes, which are simply criminal, and those against institutions of capitalist class repression. The fact that innocent civilians are often killed in terror attacks, and that the end result only serves to increase capitalist state repression against the working class and oppressed, underlines the futility and stupidity of terrorism as a strategy for the liberation of the masses.

As our comrades in the U.S. wrote in regards to the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon:

“The attack on the World Trade Center was indeed a criminal act of terrorism that murdered nearly 3,000 everyday working people. However, unlike the World Trade Center, the Pentagon is the command and administrative center of the U.S. imperialist military, and being a military installation, the possibility of getting hit comes with the territory. That recognition does not make the attack on the Pentagon an ‘anti-imperialist’ act, nor does it change the fact that terrorism almost always gets innocent people––in this case, the passengers on the plane as well as the maintenance workers, janitors and secretaries at the Pentagon.”

—“Moussaoui Case: 9/11 Show Trial,” Workers Vanguard No. 870, 12 May 2006

Under capitalist rule democratic rights exist for the benefit of the bourgeoisie. The only rights to which the bourgeoisie are committed are their own rights to own the means of production and to maximise their profits through the exploitation of wage labour. At its core, the capitalist state consists of the cops, courts, prisons and military, which are instruments of organised violence to protect the class interests of the filthy rich capitalist exploiters against the workers. The capitalists would have us believe their state is all-powerful and their rule inviolable. But what they can actually get away with depends on the level of proletarian opposition. We fight to infuse the working class with the consciousness that it has the class interest and social power to eradicate the capitalist system of racist terror, exploitation and war through working-class revolution.