The land mines treaty has nothing to do with humanitarian concerns or stopping military slaughter. Like all other "arms control" agreements, it can and will be violated as needed, and even includes a loophole for participants who "are engaged in a war." In practice, the treaty will be used as a club against those who stand up and fight or aren't compliant enough with imperialist dictates, the same way Washington uses the pretext of concern over chemical and biological weapons to justify its war threats against Iraq and Libya.
The world's biggest holder of weapons of mass destruction is Washington. It's only the U.S. government that has ever used nuclear weapons against human beings - twice against the people of Japan. Washington, with 37,000 U.S. troops occupying south Korea four decades after its military invasion divided the Korean peninsula, refused to sign the treaty because it did not include a clause allowing its 1 million land mines in Korea. What arrogance!
Even now the U.S. government has thousands of troops and a massive arsenal of warplanes in the Persian Gulf threatening to bomb the people of Iraq. Will a ban on land mines make Iraqi lives more secure? More likely they could use some land mines to halt any invasion of U.S. ground troops.
The heroic Vietnamese people made ample use of land mines
to defend their country's sovereignty, which helped defeat
Washington's war and finally ended the brutal slaughter of
millions of people in Indochina. Malcolm X praised the
Vietnamese brothers who had "nothing but sneakers on and a
rifle and a bowl of rice," who chased out the French
occupation forces. "The French aren't there anymore," he said.
"We don't care how they did it; they're not there any more."
That's the attitude working people should have when fighters
use the "weapon of the poor" to defend themselves against
imperialist aggression.
Front page (for this issue) |
Home |
Text-version home