Down With Fortress Europe’s War on Immigrants and Refugees!

Refugees Drown as Imperialists Step Up War on Libya

MILANO—Among the main victims of the imperialist war against Libya have been nearly two million foreign workers in that country. Beginning with the low-level civil war that pitted the bourgeois government of nationalist strongman Muammar el-Qaddafi against an imperialist-backed opposition, up to 750,000 have fled Libya. While most went to Tunisia or Egypt, some 12,000, according to United Nations estimates, have tried to reach Italy or Malta by boat. This is in addition to several thousand Tunisians who had already reached the Italian island of Lampedusa following the downfall of the Ben Ali dictatorship.

The “humanitarian” code words that the imperialists mouthed to prettify their attack on Libya have been belied by the treatment they have meted out to the refugees. The United Nations—the body run by thieves and murderers that gave the green light to the bombings in the name of “defending civilians”—has been compelled to admit that an estimated 1,200 refugees are missing and presumed dead, with horrific eyewitness reports of death by drowning or starvation.

The London Guardian (8 May) reported that in late March, 72 people trying to get to Lampedusa died of thirst and hunger while their boat drifted under the eyes of NATO units, including a helicopter and an aircraft carrier. They simply were left to die despite their desperate pleas for help. On April 6, a boat with 350 refugees, including many women and children, sank between Malta and Sicily, killing up to 250. A month later, a vessel with 600 people fleeing Tripoli, which had come under intensified NATO bombing, also sank. In a small sea packed with NATO ships, vessels of the European Union (EU) border agency Frontex and of various Coast Guards and other forces, this cannot be called anything but mass murder. At the same time, NATO ships blockading Libya aid rebel forces transferring military supplies from one coastal city to another. As the captain of one rebel ship told the New York Times (23 May), “Nothing crosses without permission from NATO.”

Those fleeing North Africa who survive the trip and land in Malta or in southern Italy have been imprisoned under inhuman conditions. Italy’s right-wing Berlusconi government initially chose to let them rot for days in Lampedusa, sequestered in the detention center or simply abandoned in the village or on the rocky coast, with no shelter or food. Then it “solved the problem” by packing the immigrants off to military camps on the Italian mainland, mainly in the south.

The government went on to try to force the new Tunisian military regime to accept mass deportations from Italy. Finally, when it became clear that most Tunisians wanted to reach France, where they have relatives or friends, they were granted a temporary permit allowing them to stay for three months, in the hope that they would filter across Italy’s northern border. In turn, the Sarkozy government in France reintroduced controls at the Italian border town of Ventimiglia, compelling hundreds of immigrants to wait for days around the local train station. Those who made it to Paris or other parts of France were then targeted by police dragnets for deportation.

The Lega Trotskista d’Italia, along with the Ligue Trotskyste de France, demands: Close the detention camps! No deportations! For the right of asylum for all refugees from Libya! Full citizenship rights for all immigrants! In the latest escalation of the NATO war against Libya, France and reportedly Britain are preparing to deploy attack helicopters to step up pressure against Qaddafi’s regime and to bolster the sordid opposition. Together with our comrades throughout the International Communist League (Fourth Internationalist), we call for the military defense of Libya against the imperialists and the opposition forces that are acting as their ground troops, without giving any political support to Qaddafi’s bonapartist capitalist regime.

The relatively small influx of immigrants and refugees from North Africa into Italy in the wake of the Tunisian revolt and the war on Libya has been used by capitalist governments all over Europe to wage a hysterical racist campaign, with the aim of further tightening immigration controls in “Fortress Europe” and otherwise augmenting the powers of the bourgeois state. At a meeting in Rome on April 25, Sarkozy and Berlusconi demanded an “in-depth revision” of the Schengen Treaty, which is supposed to allow residents of EU countries to move freely among member countries. On May 12, a meeting of the EU interior ministers resolved to allow the governments to restore border controls, intensify surveillance of Europe’s frontiers and re-establish pacts with North African governments to control the flow of immigrants across the Mediterranean. On the same day, the Danish government unilaterally announced it was reinstating police checks at the borders with Germany and Sweden.

Italy, Greece, Portugal and Spain are among the poorer EU members that traditionally had been a source of cheap labor for more advanced capitalist countries. But in the last two decades, these states have had to import a huge mass of foreign workers to offset a declining birth rate. This has created a significant layer of the working class that is deprived of citizenship rights and is easy to deport when the economy slows down and jobs dry up. These workers are often victims of murderous racist attacks and are used as scapegoats by the bourgeoisie to derail popular frustration from the real enemy, the capitalist class. At the same time, these new layers of the working class provide a living link to the struggles of the downtrodden masses in the neocolonial world.

With the protracted world economic crisis, the capitalist rulers have pushed racist poison in order to further divide and weaken any resistance by the working class and its trade unions to the sweeping austerity that their governments have imposed (see “Italy: Unions Must Defend and Organize Immigrant Workers!” WV No. 961, 2 July 2010). Defense of immigrants against racist repression is a key component of the struggle to defend the lives and wages of all workers. The labor movement must organize immigrant workers and fight for their citizenship rights. But to carry out this crucially important task requires fighting against the chauvinist politics of the pro-capitalist union misleaders, who embrace the national interests of their “own” capitalists. Thus the Italian labor bureaucracy has pushed “Made in Italy” protectionism, which is poison to the class consciousness of the Italian proletariat and a weapon against its class brothers in East Europe and against the Chinese deformed workers state as well.

Rifondazione Comunista and the rest of Italy’s reformist left have been shedding crocodile tears over the fate of immigrants and refugees under the Berlusconi government and denouncing racist atrocities against immigrants perpetrated by the Qaddafi regime in Libya. What Rifondazione & Co. would like to hide is that the 2010 agreements between Qaddafi and Berlusconi to work together against immigrants effectively constituted a sanction of a previous agreement signed in December 2007 by the government of Romano Prodi, in which Rifondazione’s current Secretary was a minister. And slaughtering immigrants and refugees at sea is not the exclusive prerogative of right-wing governments. We do not forget the tragic sinking of the Kater i Rades, a boat loaded with Albanian refugees that was sunk in 1997 by the Italian military boat Sibilla, killing more than 100. This was when Italy was ruled by a popular-front government supported by Rifondazione.

The reformists also bear direct responsibility for the current imperialist massacre in Libya and for the mass murder of immigrants at sea, through their support to the UN/NATO attacks on Libya and/or their hailing of the Benghazi-based opposition that is acting as the imperialists’ ground troops. Ahmed Jibril, a spokesman for the National Transitional Council in Benghazi, told the TV program “Porta a Porta” that they are “totally in favor of and encourage” the joint patrolling of Libyan borders with EU troops, railing that “illegal immigrants came to Libya and remained for months and years, spreading diseases and provoking clashes with Libyan citizens.” Opposition forces have rounded up, tortured and killed people suspected of being Qaddafi supporters, especially black Africans alleged to be his mercenaries.

For the working class to take a stand in defense of Libya is particularly key in Italy, a country whose bourgeoisie has long sucked the blood of the Libyan people and is still among the main beneficiaries of their oppression. The only “human right” the imperialist masters truly recognize is their own “right” to exploit Libya’s vast gas and oil reserves. Before the war, Italy got 25 percent of its oil imports and 13 percent of its gas from Libya, and Italy’s biggest companies (headed by the Eni oil conglomerate) occupy leading positions there. This year marks a century of imperialist plunder of Libya by the Italian bourgeoisie, which occupied the country in 1911. After ousting the Ottoman army, Italian forces proceeded to wipe out any resistance. Using poison gas, concentration camps and mass murder, they killed more than 70,000 people and fully 80-90 percent of the livestock. Our defense of Libya against imperialism is in the best traditions of the Italian proletariat, which in 1911 rose in revolt in many towns against the bloody imperialist occupation.

To put an end to the imperialist system of war, neocolonial domination and racist oppression, the proletariat needs to smash the capitalist system and replace it with a collectivized, planned economy, on an international scale. Only through the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist ruling classes will the proletariat be able to rationally use and develop society’s productive resources, on the basis of its own state power, for the benefit of all. This struggle requires, as its necessary instrument, the reforging of the Fourth International, world party of socialist revolution.