World

On Nov. 16, the UN General Assembly
called for a political settlement in Cambo-
dia, warning against a return to the “uni-
versally condemned practices of the past,”
a clear reference to a return of Khmer
Rouge genocide which resulted in the
murders of more than two million people
between 1975-1979.

Opposition to the Khmer Rouge, whose
role is now obscured behind the so-called
Coalition Government of Democratic
Kampuchea (CGDK), led to collapse of
the 19-nation Paris conference last
August, when the Cambodian Hun Sen
government rejected a Khmer Rouge
return to power.

Since then, following withdrawal of
Vietnamese forces in September, and bol-

stered by military aid from China and the
U.S., Khmer forces have launched offen-
sives from sanctuaries on the Thai-
Cambodian border, in clear violation of
agreements to seek a political settlement
following Vietnam’s troop pull-out.
Washington, while publicly opposing
the Khmer Rouge, is playing a double
game. According to the Nov. 16 New
York Times, a secret war is underway,
financed and directed by a Bangkok-based
U.S. Working Group which “‘is a conduit
for all lethal, material and financial assist-
ance to the non-communist resistance. It
reviews battle plans, approves specific
weapons, disburses direct cash payments
... While Thailand and Malaysia provide
logistical support, Singapore provides the

Cambodia victim of U.S. secret war

weapons through a quasi-private com-
pany. And the U.S. pays for virtually ever-
ything.”

The Times reported that last month’s
Khmer Rouge “general offensive was
carefully planned and organized by the
Working Group.” The bill, it said, runs at
about $24-million a year. China, too, has
failed to keep its pledge to cease arming
anti-government groups. In concert with
Thailand, it is demanding a government
be set up headed by Prince Sihanouk, even
though the prince’s Nationalist Sihanou-
kist Army takes a poor second place to the
Khmer Rouge. China, Thailand and
Sihanouk himself are demanding the
Khmer Rouge’s inclusion in a new Cam-
bodian government.

The effect of these manoeuvres is to
increase pressures on Phnom Penh, forc-
ing it to fight alone on three fronts, the
New York Times stated. “We (the U.S.)
are redoubling our efforts to overthrow
Hun Sen even while we announce that
such a result would produce a Khmer
Rouge takeover .... From every objective
point of view, we are allied with the genoc-
idal Khmer Rouge.”

For Canada, whose policy mirrors
Washington’s on the issue, the conclusion
is the same. It’s time Ottawa condemned
outside interference and began working
for the political settlement UN is calling
for. A first step would be to stop backing
the so-called CGDK coalition’s bid once
again for a UN seat.

Chapter opens on socialis

LONDON — After more than four
decades of bitterness, brinkmanship and
division, it is finally time for the cold war to
end and for the people of the world to win it.

If the earthquake in Eastern Europe tells
us anything, it is that the passionate myths
by which we have lived and organized our
societies — both East and West — for the
past 40 years are passing into history. The
future looks suddenly, explosively unpre-
dictable, turbulent, alarming and ... hope-
ful. ;

At the focus of events in almost every
Eastern European country is the spectacu-
lar collapse of bureaucratic state socialism
as a viable socio-political model. No one
will ever again be able to argue — as some
did, even recently, in the pages of the
Tribune — that socialism without pro-
found and continuous democratization has
any conceivable future.

For that vast majority in the West who
take it as an article of faith that socialism is
dying, the coming course of events may

FROM
MOSCOW

provide a few startling twists. We have all
gotten so used to calling Stalinism “social-
ism,” that most have failed to remark the
demands being raised by Eastern European
protesters are profoundly revolutionary
and quintessentially socialist. The bizarre
fact that many of those protesters naively
think the levels of social justice, freedom,
democracy and popular prosperity they are
demanding for themselves already actually
exist in Western societies is quite beside the
point. That is a matter for working people
in the West to take up in their own time.

At the heart and centre of it all is Ger-
many, one nation but two states divided by
geopolitics and ideology. If socialism is to
find a new, self-assertive identity, we are
going to notice it first in the German
Democratic Republic.

As the historic street-party in Berlin beg-
ins to wind down, we find ourselves con-
fronting anew a crucial, almost forgotten
question: can an egalitarian society survive
in free and open competition with an inegal-
itarian one?

On the surface, depressingly, it would
seem not. The present crisis in the GDR was
precipitated by the flight of thousands of its
youngest and brightest. Let’s be clear about
this: these were not huddled masses yearn-
ing to breathe free but, for the most part,

highly-educated, self-confident yuppies seek-
ing an even higher individual standard of
living. As the GDR Liberal Democrat
leader, Manfred Gerlach, remarked, “In the
entire world there are no better-fed or
better-dressed refugees than the East Ger-
mans who have gone West. They arrive in
their own cars.”

The GDR’s excellent universal health
care system has been gutted by the exodus
of doctors and nurses, while much of its
industrial and service infrastructure has
been thrown into chaos by the disappear-
ance of trained personnel. Could the coun-
try stand this drain on a permanent basis?

All of this reminds us of why the division
of Europe, and the Berlin Wall seemed so
inevitable at the time. It is not as though the
leaders of the GDR sat down in 1961 to
think up the most evil thing they could do to
offend the world, and thus hit upon the
Wall. The dilemma that led to that agoniz-
ing decision is dramatically reappearing
today as the East German currency
plummets to 20:1 against the deutschmark
on the black market, and the GDR’s subsid-
ized food and consumer durables are
peddled for pfennigs on the streets of West
Berlin.

In early 1961 some 55,000 East Berliners
worked in the West but lived in the East.
This spectre lurks again in the greedy gleam
in the eyes of one East German interviewed
by Newsweek who said he could “live like a
king” in East Berlin if “I could get a job over
there and continue to live here. Housing is
cheap (in the GDR), and the benefits are
good.”

However, the Wall, as we can now clearly
see, was a shortsighted, brutal and ulti-
mately self-defeating solution. Bureaucratic
socialism never did out-build the West
behind all those barriers, and thus its claim
on the future has run out. Whatever it did
accomplish, it failed to win the confidence,
trust and allegiance of the people — pri-
marily because it treated them like children
and walled them in.

So, is socialism doomed? Not, it seems, in
the minds of the 99 per cent of East Ger-
mans who go West, then wander back
home with mixed feelings about what
they’ve seen. What can anyone possibly say
to that young woman who was accosted by
a BBC television crew as she strolled back
through the Wall after a weekend in West
Berlin: Why are you going back? they
asked. What is there for you? “Socialism, of
course,” she answered. “Socialism”.

It is extraordinary that virtually the entire
politically-active population of the GDR,
both within the Socialist Unity Party and
outside of it, have dismissed the seductive
nationalist appeal of German re-unification
emanating from the West German right,
and have hit the streets to fight for a
renewed and vigorous vision of democratic
socialism. That this can happen even after

without walls

FAMILY LEAVING THE GDR ... but many are returning and the future depends on

giving socialism back its democratic content.

all of the bitter disappointments of the past
two decades, and in the immediate presence
of some of the West’s most dazzling shop
windows, is a reality to be treated with the
deepest respect.

As one of the GDR’s greatest living wri-
ters, Stefan Heym, put it, ‘ta German
Democratic Republic, but a better one than
the one which exists, is necessary if only to
counterbalance the Daimler-Messerschmitt-
Bolkow-Blohm-BASF-Hochst-Deutsche-
bank Republic on the other side of the
Elbe”.

Across Eastern Europe party and non-
party activists alike are coming together to
find a “third way” out of the crisis. Neither
Stalinism nor capitalism, but a return to
socialist basics: popular grassroots demo-
cracy and control, human values placed
above the blind forces of the marketplace,
social justice and respect for environment,
community and culture.

With the cold war straitjacket disintegrat-
ing, socialists are speaking once again in
their authentic voice and pressing for a
social order in which profit, production and
consumption are not ends in themselves but
merely means toward expanding the realm
of human freedom.

And there is the dramatic reappearance
of socialist reformers of a previous genera-
tion, such as Alexander Dubcek, who force
us to acknowledge the fact that history went
tragically, destructively wrong 21 years ago
when socialist renewal in Czechoslovakia
was crushed by tanks. Seeing the ocean of
humanity covering Prague’s Wenceslas
Square, and the rivers of people surging
through the streets of Berlin, Leipzig and
Sofia last month, could anything be more
obvious?

For socialists in the West, the lesson to be
learned once and for all is that socialism is
not so much a definite territory or a particu-
lar regime as it is a living agenda, a set of

principles and commitments, a vision of a
humane future to be worked for by people
everywhere.

As for corporate monopoly capitalism in
the West, it is beginning to look as though it
has survived unchallenged for so long prim-
arily because it has been able to contrast
itself so starkly with an unappealing alterna-
tive. Everything about the present situation
is about to put the boots to all that.

As the cold war unravels, so will every-
thing built on its foundations: the perman-
ent war economy, the interlocking grid of
military, political and economic alliances,
the national security state together with all
its rationales, and the anti-communist con-
sensus that has dominated Western politics
for the past four decades.

This, as London’s New Statesman
pointed out, is “ ... a triumph for the new
Soviet leadership’s vision of ending the cold
war. The holes in the Wall threaten ‘actually
existing’ Western power, its bloated
national security apparatus, and its form of
manipulative rule from above.”

Though the corpse is still visibly twitch-
ing, the cold war had its funeral in Berlin
last month. We may rely on many in the
West’s ruling elite — and perhaps some
Eastern bureaucrats as well — to try to
breathe new life into it, but no decent person
should mourn its passing. The world now
opening up before us is one of infinite con-
structive possibilities, unimaginable a mere
two or three years ago.

In Washington, the smug, complacent
and astonishingly dim-witted power elite
have lately taken to nattering about “the
end of history,” the idea that the whole
trajectory of human development is coming
to a soft landing in a warm, mushy bath of
universalized liberal capitalism.

Actually, something very different. and
far more hopeful is happening: the curtain is
rising on a new age of revolutions.

Pacific Tribune, December 4, 1989 « 9