By Christine Marie, Socialist Action, April 2011
 |
| UNAC conference in Stamford, Connecticut, March 23,25, 2012 |
On April 1 The New
York Times reported that the U.S. and the Gulf states, meeting as the “Friends
of Syria” in Istanbul, had moved dramatically closer to direct military
intervention against the Assad regime. The pro-U.S. Arab nations pledged $100
million to pay the fighters of the Free Syrian Army, and the U.S. pledged
satellite communications equipment and night vision goggles.
The Times said that
all this, combined with a call on the UN Security Council to set a deadline to
announce the “next steps” against Assad, had brought participants “to the edge
of a proxy war against Assad’s government and its international supporters.”
This proxy war and
the increasing threat of direct military intervention by NATO forces under the
auspices of a UN Security Council mandate was but one element of the new and
dangerous context in which the United National Antiwar Coalition (UNAC) held
its second annual conference, March 23-25 in Stamford, Conn. Five hundred
and seventy-five activists registered for the conference, a central goal of
which was the building of the May 20 mass protest in Chicago against the wars
carried out or planned by NATO.
Joe Iosbaker and
Pat Hunt, leaders of the CANG8 coalition organizing the permitted march on the
Chicago NATO summit, opened the conference by asking people to stand who were
going to be present in Chicago or who were going to help raise funds to get
others to the May 20 protest. A sizable proportion of the people in the room
rose to their feet.
UNAC’s program of
antiwar activity, dubbed the Action Plan, was presented to the conference by
Black Agenda Report Executive Editor Glen Ford. This plan, Ford said, “does
not shy away from condemning wars that are still acceptable to half of the
population because the real reasons for them are obscured by the rhetoric of
humanitarianism.” The conference approved the May 20 mobilization with the
lessons of NATO’s murderous “humanitarian intervention” into Libya fresh in
mind.
The UNAC conference
recognized that the U.S. government has placed Iran in its sights as a target
for disruption—and possible armed attack. During her March 31 visit to Saudi
Arabia, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned that Iran must yield to the
U.S. challenge to its nuclear program, and that the “window of opportunity will
not remain open forever” for a peaceful resolution of the crisis.
In the meantime,
she said, the U.S. and its allies would increase their economic pressure
against Iran.Clinton’s remarks closely followed President Obama’s announcement
that news of Saudi oil production goals had cleared the way for the
implementation of ever more extreme sanctions designed to hinder Iran’s ability
to export oil.
These overt
military activities are coincident with other economic measures designed to
hold back social transformation in Egypt, where the U.S.-led International
Monetary Fund has negotiated a new $3.2 billion loan that will further
impoverish and disempower the revolutionary-minded masses of that nation.
The UNAC
conference highlighted Afghanistan as a nation that is still suffering the
murderous rampages, night raids, and drone attacks that have accompanied the
U.S.-NATO occupation.
Plenary speaker
David Swanson reminded the audience that one week earlier Hillary Clinton had
told reporters that the war in Afghanistan could not be ended without first
winning women’s rights. However, “already we have set up a government that
endorses wife-beating,” Swanson quipped. “Perhaps once it mandates invasive
ultrasounds, we can leave with honor.” The UNAC Action Plan declares that the
Afghanistan war must end now, not in 2014 or after.
A key element of
the conference was education about the history and purposes of the U.S-led NATO
military alliance. The UN Security Council, whose resolutions authorize
NATO war-making, Professor Vijay Prashad reminded the crowd, meets under a
mural with scenes of everyday life in Northern Europe at the top, and a scene
at the bottom in which veiled women and turbaned men are targeted by a field
artillery gun. This image, he suggested, revealed much about the UN
Security Council’s role.
Prashad explained
that during the last 20 years the U.S. and its allies have worked to codify a
new public relations and legal framework for imperialist intervention. This
same UN Security Council, he pointed out, has adopted a mandate boosting
so-called humanitarian intervention called “The Right to Protect” (R2P).
NATO is now
explicitly understood to be the enforcer of R2P and the International Criminal
Court the juridical arm. In Libya, all three elements were orchestrated to
work together seamlessly for the first time and to ends that were the opposite
of humanitarian. Keynote speaker at the UNAC conference Andrew Murray, the
chief of staff for the British public services union UNITE and a leader of the
UK Stop the War Coalition, emphasized that the outcome was “a racist government
of gangsters” who have brought the Libyan people little freedom.
The “Shifting
Strategies of Empire,” the plenary that opened the conference, took up not only
the attempts by the global 1% to expand NATO’s reach, but also the Obama
administration’s decision to send combat troops to sub-Saharan Africa and to
boost the U.S. naval presence in seas around China. Bernadette Ellorin of the
Philippine solidarity organization BAYAN noted that Obama’s “return to Asia” is
only the refurbishing of a U.S. military presence that has dominated the region
for over 100 years.
The new buildup,
which includes the blasting of the pristine environmental wonder of the Korean
Jeju Island to build a new naval port, is designed to pressure nations to look
to the U.S. rather than China for trade alliances and economic partnerships.
Abayomi Azikiwe, who brought greetings from “the embattled city of Detroit,”
recounted the growth of the U.S.-backed multinational forces waging war in
Somalia and the U.S. combat troops recently sent to Uganda. For the Black
community, Azikiwe said, the relationship between the wars abroad and the war
at home could not be more apparent.
Racism and
Islamophobia
The degree to
which racism continues to be central to U.S.-NATO war efforts was dramatized by
the number of plenaries and workshops devoted to addressing this war at home on
Black, Latino, and immigrant people in the United States. Dr. Khalilah
Brown-Dean keynoted a lunchtime panel and highlighted the way in which mass
incarceration and the criminalization of the Black community was being used to
drive African Americans, one of the most antiwar sections of the U.S.
population, out of political life. Bruce Dixon described the way that mass
incarceration works to disenfranchise Black Georgians.
A workshop on
connecting Black community struggles and the fight against war was one of the
best-attended workshops at the conference. Another led by a board member of the
National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights connected the massive new
surveillance of border regions and immigrant communities in the U.S. with the
same in Egypt and other parts of the world where millions of displaced peoples
are victimized by the surveillance state. Another immigrant rights workshop
focused on how best to integrate immigrant rights and union rights with the
overall themes of the upcoming May Day “strike” called by the Occupy Movement.
Attendees also
celebrated the heroic strike effort of the Longview, Wash., longshore workers
by rising in a standing ovation for ILWU Local 21 rank-and-file striker Mike
Fuqua. Local 21, by standing up to the union-busting corporation EGT,
inspired and then helped to lead a West Coast outpouring of community
solidarity for their militant labor fight back.
At least 175
participants at the conference hailed from the Muslim American community. Abhorrence
at the use of Islamophobia and anti-immigrant prejudice to create war fever
permeated every aspect of the conference. Plenary sessions and workshops
featured activists and educators from a host of Muslim. South Asian, and civil
liberties groups—including the Muslim Peace Coalition, Desis Rising Up and
Moving, the Council on American Islamic Relations, the Muslim Solidarity
Coalition, Project SALAM, and the National Coalition to Defend Civil Freedoms.
A special dinner
plenary session introduced attendees to such leaders in defense of Muslim
rights as Imam Talib Abdurrashid of the Muslim Leadership Council of
Metropolitan New York, Cyrus McGoldrick of New York City CAIR, the victimized
Guantanamo chaplain James Yee, and Imam Abdul Malik Mujahid—whose decision to
found the Muslim Peace Coalition arose out of his desire to partner with the
United National Antiwar Coalition in this fight.
Conference meetings
with forces that included the Muslim Peace Coalition and Desis Rising Up and
Moving developed a proposal, passed unanimously by the UNAC group as a whole,
to hold a mass mobilization and demonstration in New York City on June 16 “to
protest against the violation of the civil and human rights of all people, the
undermining of the Bill of Rights, and the purposeful erosion of our civil
liberties.”
How to defend
Iranians?
The continued
threats of outright war on Iran and the growing impact of the war by sanctions
on Iran generated a passionate discussion about how best to organize on this
front. In the past, the antiwar movement has been divided on this
question.
Forces organized
around the International Action Center argue that when a country is under
attack by U.S. imperialism, all criticisms of the regime under fire by forces
in the U.S. should be muted. Our fire, they say, should be exclusively on the
U.S. government.
Others, including
those who attended the conference from the Iranian feminist collective Raha and
the new coalition Harvaar, argue that the U.S. antiwar movement, in order to
avoid being used politically by the Ahmadinejad regime, should clearly express
solidarity with those actively opposing that regime inside Iran.
Both views were
presented in talks at major plenary sessions, in workshops, and in resolutions.
All participants in the discussion agreed on absolute opposition to U.S.
threats of war against Iran. All sides were opposed to U.S. sanctions,
embargoes, and assassination plots. After a sometimes heated debate, the
conference voted to reaffirm UNAC’s traditional view that the best position for
an antiwar coalition that aspires to mobilize the largest numbers is to support
the right of the Iranian people to self-determination. The winning
proposal stated that UNAC has full confidence that the Iranian people, freed
from imperialist threats, can create a just society without the intervention of
U.S. forces.
Such a position,
ideally, will allow all political tendencies, no matter what their analysis of
the Green movement in Iran, to unify in the streets and create larger actions
than would be possible otherwise. As numerous speakers on the question
explained, such a stance must be coupled with a commitment to an open,
welcoming, and non-exclusionary coalition where all views can be freely
expressed on speakers’ platforms, on signage, and on flyers.
While the ability
of UNAC and other formations to mobilize really huge numbers against the
U.S.-NATO wars underway is limited by election-year politics and by illusions
that Washington is winding down its military engagement in the Middle East and
South Asia, the Stamford conference went a long way toward creating the broad
alliances that are indispensable to challenging the U.S. war machine.
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