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APSP
intervenes in “peace movement” opposed to anti-colonial resistance
ST. PETERSBURG, Fl — As
of this writing, U.S. forces have toppled the Iraqi government through
massive slaughter and treachery, and Baghdad is in flames.
The ancient city is currently
in a state of anarchy that is all too convenient for American imperialist
goals of re-colonizing the Middle East and the majority of the world.
Even as U.S. marines stand
by and watch impoverished Iraqis search for meager resources in Iraqi
cities after 13 years of U.S. economic sanctions, an impenetrable band
of military forces guard the Iraqi oil fields, the real loot that the
imperialist masters will guard at any price.
Over the past several months,
during the U.S. government’s buildup to the invasion of Iraq, a massive
anti-war movement has sprung up inside the U.S. and around the world.
Millions of people marched internationally and hundreds of thousands inside
this country. The clear message that masses of people did not want this
genocidal massacre against the Iraqi people was ignored by Bush and his
war cabinet.
For the first time since the
U.S. war against the people of Viet Nam, a mass movement emerged in cities
and towns inside the U.S. and across the globe, a movement aided this
time around by the internet and the heady sense of global communication.
Under the surface, though,
this emerging movement has been riddled with struggle and contradictions
that reflect the colonial realities inside the belly of parasitic capitalism.
As the current situation unfolds, the question facing the peace movement
is more critical than ever: peace for whom?
Struggle in the peace movement
Recent polls show that the African community is strongly opposed to the
U.S. military massacre of the Iraqi people. According to statistics, 78
percent of white people supported the war once the U.S. invaded, while
71 percent of African people in the U.S. were against it.
According to a column in USA
Today, “Though African-Americans have no love for Saddam Hussein,
a survey of chat rooms on black Web sites and discussions on black radio
talk shows suggest that many, if not most, disbelieve the reasons Bush
has given for ordering troops into Iraq. They think the war has more to
do with Iraq’s oil than with the weapons of mass destruction the
administration claims Saddam’s regime possessed.”
Several times a week, members
of the African People’s Socialist Party organize street rallies in
the African communities where we are located. These rallies elicit an
enthusiastic response from African workers. Nevertheless, African people
for the most part do not come out to the white-led peace rallies because
these rallies do not reflect the conditions that Africans suffer in this
country.
Around the country, wherever
organizations of African and colonized people attempt to work inside the
peace movement, similar struggles emerge.
A paper by a group of New York
“anti-racist” activists describes the “resistance by predominantly
white organizations to sharing leadership” with colonized organizations
— much less following their leadership. The New York forces cite
the failure of predominantly white organizations to endorse or participate
in anti-war activities sponsored by colonized people.
White peace groups consistently
control the programs at rallies, allowing only those African and colonized
speakers who would not challenge “mainstream” white America.
African movie stars and cultural workers are acceptable; people working
for African liberation are not, and our Party and members of the Uhuru
Movement are generally censored.
Pacifists, U.S. patriots, Democratic
party members, Zionists and the loyal U.S. opposition have attempted to
gain control of the peace movement. The view that “all violence and
all war is wrong” predominates, a line that maintains “a monopoly
of violence in the hands of the oppressor state,” as African People’s
Socialist Party Chairman Omali Yeshitela explains.
Peace on the plantation
versus national liberation
As colonized subjects, African people inside the U.S. experience the full
force of U.S. imperialism and imperialist violence every day. Twenty-eight
percent of all African men will go to prison in their lifetimes. Millions
of us are imprisoned by unjust laws; our children are doomed for failure
in hostile white school systems and poverty is ever rampant in our communities.
African people live under a militaristic containment policy as vicious
as any that the U.S. will impose on the Iraqi people.
Living in a country built on
slavery, genocide and colonialism, the white population sits on a pedestal
of the oppression of Africans and others. White people’s affluence
and well-being comes at the expense of African, Iraqi and all the other
oppressed peoples inside this country and around the world. These
two realities produce two different concepts of “peace.”
The peace sought by most of
the white peace movement is not that much different than the peace George
W. Bush is working for. As long as the Iraqi people are not in a state
of uprising there is “peace.” Chairman Omali describes it as
“peace on the plantation,” peace for white people through the
absence of anti-colonial resistance. This is why there are fewer participants
in the white peace rallies since the onset of the war and the subsequent
occupation of Iraq.
The essential question is not
the end of military action, but the fact that there can be no genuine
peace without national liberation of colonized peoples around the world
and inside the United States. It is the right of all African and colonized
peoples to struggle for our liberation by any means necessary, and the
peace movement must be based on that premise.
Party builds principled
peace movement
Just weeks after the events of September 11, 2001, our Party helped to
form the Florida Alliance for Peace and Social Justice in an attempt to
bring together as many peace activists from around the state of Florida
to stand against the U.S. government’s threatened attacks against
the people of Afghanistan, Iraq and other countries.
The Florida Alliance is unique
in that it has united a broad array of peace groups of all persuasions
in one organization, which has the Party and the American Indian Movement
in its leadership.
During 2002, the Alliance held
three highly successful statewide anti-war mobilizations at the MacDill
Air Force Base in Tampa, the central command of the U.S. war drive. All
the MacDill peace rallies were remarkable for their emphasis on national
liberation and social justice.
Those rallies featured speakers such as Vernon Bellecourt, National Director
of the American Indian Movement; Pam Africa of Friends and Family of Mumia
Abu Jamal; Dorothy Lewis, leader of the movement for Reparations to the
African community and Dr. Sami Al-Arian, the now-imprisoned University
of South Florida professor who was targeted by the U.S. government for
supporting the just cause of the oppressed Palestinian people.
Pacifists claim AIM, Uhuru
Movement potentially violent
Over the months, predictable contradictions emerged within the Florida
Alliance, including charges by some white peace groups that AIM and the
Uhuru Movement posed a potential for violence. These backwards allegations
flew in the face of the fact that oppressed people inside this country
are the ones who have endured genocide, slavery and colonial violence
for the past 500 years.
As a concession to white pacifists,
our Party is committed to tactical nonviolence in Florida Alliance actions.
Obviously we are not ready to go up against the military forces at MacDill
Air Force base during a peace rally! Chairman Omali Yeshitela led in creating
the principles of unity, which are based in nonviolent tactics, and he
has coordinated the nonviolent trainings before the marches.
Some white people in the Alliance
were more honest when they stated flatly that the organization spends
“too much time on black and Indian issues.”
These struggles culminated
when Mark Kamleiter, leader of the Florida Green Party, pulled out of
the Alliance and joined with others to form United Voices for Peace, a
new all white group which excluded AIM and the Uhuru Movement from participating
in their peace actions.
At the MacDill peace rally
in November, 2002, Kamleiter had angrily and rudely confronted Chairman
Omali Yeshitela after his presentation during which the Chairman stated
that it was the responsibility of the slave “to kill the slavemaster
and destroy the system of slavery.”
In an unprincipled and subjective manner, Kamleiter accused the Chairman
of using “violence of words,” even as Kamleiter routinely talks
about U.S. patriotism and the American flag, the symbol of the most violent
social system on Earth, responsible for centuries of genocide, slaughter,
terror and rape across the planet.
It is interesting that Kamleiter
and other white pacifists are never seen demonstrating against police
brutality and other forms of colonial violence that plague our community.
Nor do they seem to have a problem with the hundreds of white anarchists
and students who violently tore up the city of Seattle, Washington during
protests against the World Trade Organization.
The main concern of pacifists
is to protest African people’s right to speak out against our colonial
conditions and express our goal to liberate ourselves from the grip of
imperialism.
Omali Yeshitela censored
In Oakland CA, our Party
was also instrumental in pulling together the All People’s Coalition
Against the War (All Peeps), an organization with African, Mexican, Filipino
and Arab people in leading roles. All Peeps has held several successful
actions on the terms of colonized people, including the march last May
across San Francisco’s Golden Gate bridge.
At the same time All Peeps
and the Uhuru Movement have struggled for Chairman Omali Yeshitela and
other African People’s Socialist Party members to be able to speak
at the large Bay Area anti-war rallies, many of which have been coordinated
by A.N.S.W.E.R., a peace group formed by the white-led Workers World Party.
In the past months, A.N.S.W.E.R
has been red baiteded — a tactic of discrediting a group, person,
project or idea with the claim of communist involvement or association
— by pacifist, Zionist and patriotic peace groups. This attack was
a response to speakers supporting the African struggle of Mumia Abu Jamal
and for supporting the struggle of the Palestinian people at A.N.S.W.E.R
-sponosored peace rallies.
Despite the fact that A.N.S.W.E.R
has been attacked from the right, it has always arrogantly censored Chairman
Omali and prevented him from speaking at its rallies. All Peeps did succeed
in getting the Chairman to speak at the peace rally held in Oakland on
April 5. After weeks of intense struggle with organizers, the Chairman
was grudgingly granted three minutes at the end of the program. Nevertheless,
Chairman Omali’s presentation was clearly the most dynamic and profound
of the day and the crowd cheered in enthusiastic support.
Peace for whom?
To give leadership to these
struggles raging inside the peace movement, Party-led forces called together
forums entitled “Peace for Whom?” in St. Petersburg on March
8 and in Oakland on April 8. “Is there room for Africans, Arabs,
Indians, Mexicans and other non-white people in the peace movement?”
asked the fliers circulated for these events.
In St. Petersburg, about 90 people came out to enthusiastically participate
in this critical discussion, which was facilitated by Jim Harper, the
new editor of the Weekly Planet, the popular Tampa Bay free weekly paper.
Panelists included Sheridan
Murphy, Director of the Florida American Indian Movement; Beth Schrivener
of the Community Coalition Against War and Terrorism of Gainesville; Harry
Simon, Union del Barrio, San Diego; Bob Tancig, Florida Coalition for
Justice and Peace, Tallahassee; Omali Yeshitela, Florida Alliance and
Chairman of the African People’s Socialist Party and Mark Kamleiter,
co-chair of the Florida Green Party and member of United Voices for Peace. Needless to say, Kamleiter’s
white nationalist stance was clearly exposed in a principled way.
In Oakland, the event opened
with a salute to Stephen Funk, U.S. marine conscientious objector. Stephen
was followed by a lively panel featuring Noura Erakat, Arab Anti-discrimination
Committee; Quetzaoceloaciua, Barrio Defense Committee; Angelica Cabande,
Filipinos for Global Justice Not War; Penny Hess, African People’s
Solidarity Committee and Chairman Omali Yeshitela.
At both events, the majority
of the audience united with the struggles being made by the very unified
colonized forces that the only true peace is peace through national liberation
and social justice.
As Chairman Omali Yeshitela
summed up in St. Petersburg:
“It’s no secret that historically the peace movement has been
a white movement. It may be that I will not be able to participate in
the peace movement as it has historically been understood in this country,
because that is not the peace that I am looking for.
“When you talk about peace
you have to talk about national liberation. That is the fundamental question.
If you start with the question of national liberation — the right
of peoples to be free then you start off recognizing that the conditions
of existence for most people in the world, including Indians, Africans
and others inside this country are always violent.
“There is never a nonviolent
period when black people, Native people and oppressed peoples around the
world are not suffering from violence. Violence is not something that
just disturbs the peace of the white community.
“People invoke the names
of Gandhi and Martin Luther King. What is profoundly important to understand
about both Gandhi and King is that they were both participants in a struggle
for self determination of oppressed peoples. They weren’t just standing
above the fray.
“The question of peace
is not just some purely abstract question. It requires us to take sides.
If you know that you live in a country that constructed itself of the
oppression and blood of the masses of people around the world, then you
must take a stand on the side of the liberation of oppressed peoples.”
Peace through national liberation
and
self-determination!
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