To mark the anniversary of Ireland’s Easter Rebellion, Fight Back! is circulating the following excerpt from Lenin’s article: The Discussion on Self-Determination Summed Up. Section 10: The Irish Rebellion of 1916

Our theses were written before the outbreak of this rebellion, which must be the touchstone of our theoretical views.

The views of the opponents of self-determination lead to the conclusion that the vitality of small nations oppressed by imperialism has already been sapped, that they cannot play any role against imperialism, that support of their purely national aspirations will lead to nothing, etc. The imperialist war of 1914–16 has provided facts which refute such conclusions.

The war proved to be an epoch of crisis for the West-European nations, and for imperialism as a whole. Every crisis discards the conventionalities, tears away the outer wrappings, sweeps away the obsolete and reveals the underlying springs and forces. What has it revealed from the standpoint of the movement of oppressed nations! In the colonies there have been a number of attempts at rebellion, which the oppressor nations, naturally did all they could to hide by means of a military censorship. Nevertheless, it is known that in Singapore the British brutally suppressed a mutiny Among their Indian troops; that there were attempts at rebellion in French Annam (see Nashe Slovo) and in the German Cameroons (see the Junius pamphlet); that in Europe, on the one hand, there was a rebellion in Ireland, which the “freedom-loving” English, who did not dare to extend conscription to Ireland, suppressed by executions, and, on the other, the Austrian Government passed the death sentence on the deputies of the Czech Diet “for treason”, and shot whole Czech regiments for the same “crime”.

This list is, of course, far from complete. Nevertheless, it proves that, owing to the crisis of imperialism, the flames of national revolt have flared up both in the colonies and in Europe, and that national sympathies and antipathies have manifested themselves in spite of the Draconian threats and measures of repression. All this before the crisis of imperialism hit its peak; the power of the imperialist bourgeoisie was yet to be undermined (this may he brought about by a war of “attrition” but has not yet happened) and the proletarian movements in the imperialist countries were still very feeble. What will happen when the war has caused complete exhaustion, or when, in one state at least, the power of the bourgeoisie has been shaken under the blows of proletarian struggle, as that of tsarism in 1905?

On May 9, 1916, there appeared in Berner Tagwacht the organ of the Zimmerwald group, including some of the Leftists, an article on the Irish rebellion entitled “Their Song Is Over” and signed with the initials K. R. It described the Irish rebellion as being nothing more nor less than a “putsch”, for, as the author argued, “the Irish question was an agrarian one”, the peasants had been pacified by reforms, and the nationalist movement remained only a “purely urban, petty-bourgeois movement, which, notwithstanding the sensation it caused, had not much social backing”.

It is not surprising that this monstrously doctrinaire and pedantic assessment coincided with that of a Russian national-liberal Cadet, Mr. A. Kulisher (Rech No. 102, April 15, 1916), who also labeled the rebellion “the Dublin putsch”.

It is to be hoped that, in accordance with the adage, “it’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good”, many comrades, who were not aware of the morass they were sinking into by repudiating “self-determination” and by treating the national movements of small nations with disdain, will have their eyes opened by the “accidental” coincidence of opinion held by a Social-Democrat and a representative of the imperialist bourgeoisie!!

The term “putsch”, in its scientific sense, may be employed only when the attempt at insurrection has revealed nothing but a circle of conspirators or stupid maniacs, and has aroused no sympathy among the masses. The centuries-old Irish national movement, having passed through various stages and combinations of class interest, manifested itself, in particular, in a mass Irish National Congress in America Vorworts, March 20, 1916) which called for Irish independence; it also manifested itself in street fighting conducted by a section of the urban petty bourgeoisie and a section of the workers after a long period of mass agitation, demonstrations, suppression of newspapers, etc. Whoever calls such a rebellion a “putsch” is either a hardened reactionary, or a doctrinaire hopelessly incapable of envisaging a social revolution as a living phenomenon.

To imagine that social revolution is conceivable without revolts by small nations in the colonies and in Europe, without revolutionary outbursts by a section of the petty bourgeoisie with all its prejudices, without a movement of the politically non-conscious proletarian and semi-proletarian masses against oppression by the landowners, the church, and the monarchy, against national oppression, etc.-to imagine all this is to repudiate social revolution. So one army lines up in one place and says, “We are for socialism”, and another, somewhere else and says, “We are for imperialism”, and that will he a social revolution! Only those who hold such a ridiculously pedantic view could vilify the Irish rebellion by calling it a “putsch”.

Whoever expects a “pure” social revolution will never live to see it. Such a person pays lip-service to revolution without understanding what revolution is.

The Russian Revolution of 1905 was a bourgeois-democratic revolution. It consisted of a series of battles in which all the discontented classes, groups and elements of the population participated. Among these there were masses imbued with the crudest prejudices, with the vaguest slid most fantastic aims of struggle; there were small groups which accepted Japanese money, there were speculators and adventurers, etc. But objectively, the mass movement was breaking the hack of tsarism and paving the way for democracy; for this reason the class-conscious workers led it.

The socialist revolution in Europe cannot be anything other than an outburst of mass struggle on the part of all and sundry oppressed and discontented elements. Inevitably, sections of tile petty bourgeoisie and of the backward workers will participate in it—without such participation, mass struggle is impossible, without it no revolution is possible—and just as inevitably will they bring into the movement their prejudices, their reactionary fantasies, their weaknesses slid errors. But objectively they will attack capital, and the class-conscious vanguard of the revolution, the advanced proletariat, expressing this objective truth of a variegated and discordant, motley and outwardly fragmented, mass struggle, will he able to unite and direct it, capture power, seize the banks, expropriate the trusts which all hate (though for difficult reasons!), and introduce other dictatorial measures which in their totality will amount to the overthrow of the bourgeoisie and the victory of socialism, which, however, will by no means immediately “purge” itself of petty-bourgeois slag.

Social-Democracy, we road in the Polish theses (I, 4), “must utilise the struggle of the young colonial bourgeoisie against European imperialism in order to sharpen the revolutionary crisis in Europe”. (Authors’ italics.)

Is it not clear that it is least of all permissible to contrast Europe to the colonies in this respect? The struggle of the oppressed nations in Europe, a struggle capable of going all the way to insurrection and street fighting, capable of breaking down tile iron discipline of the army and martial law, will “sharpen the revolutionary crisis ill Europe” to an infinitely greater degree than a much more developed rebellion in a remote colony. A blow delivered against tile power of the English imperialist bourgeoisie by a rebellion in Ireland is a hundred times more significant politically than a blow of equal force delivered in Asia or in Africa.

The French chauvinist press recently reported the publication in Belgium of the eightieth issue of an illegal journal, Free Belgium. Of course, the chauvinist press of France very often lies, but this piece of news seems to he true. Whereas chauvinist and Kautskyite German Social-Democracy has failed to establish a free press for itself during the two years of war, and has meekly borne the yoke of military censorship (only the Left Radical elements, to their credit be it said, have published pamphlets and manifestos, in spite of the censorship)—an oppressed civilised nation has reacted to a military oppression unparalleled in ferocity by establishing an organ of revolutionary protest! The dialectics of history are such that small nations, powerless as an independent factor in the struggle against imperialism, play a part as one of the ferments, one of the bacilli, which help the real anti-imperialist force, the socialist proletariat, to make its appearance on the scene.

The general staffs in the current war are doing their utmost to utilise any national and revolutionary movement in the enemy camp: the Germans utilise the Irish rebellion, tire French—the Czech movement, etc. They are acting quite correctly from their own point of view. A serious war would not be treated seriously if advantage were not taken of the enemy’s slightest weakness and if every opportunity that presented itself were not seized upon, the more, so since it is impossible to know beforehand at what moment, whore, and with what force some powder magazine will “explode”. We would be very poor revolutionaries if, in the proletariat’s great war of Liberation for socialism, we did not know how to utilise every popular movement against every single disaster imperialism brings in order to intensify and extend the crisis. If we were, on the one hand, to repeat in a thousand keys the declaration that we are “opposed” to all national oppression and, on the other, to describe the heroic revolt of the most mobile and enlightened section of certain classes in an oppressed nation against its oppressors as a “putsch”, we should be sinking to the same level of stupidity as the Kautskyites.

It is the misfortune of the Irish that they rose prematurely, before the European revolt of the proletariat had had time to mature. Capitalism is not so harmoniously built that the various sources of rebellion can immediately merge of their own accord, without reverses and defeats. On the other hand, the very fact that revolts do break out at different times, in different places, and are of different kinds, guarantees wide scope and depth to the general movement; but it is only in premature, individual, sporadic and therefore unsuccessful, revolutionary movements that the masses gain experience, acquire knowledge, gather strength, and get to know their real leaders, the socialist proletarians, and in this way prepare for the general onslaught, just as certain strikes, demonstrations, local and national, mutinies in the army, outbreaks among the peasantry, etc., prepared the way for the general onslaught in 1905.

#Ireland #Socialism #PeoplesStruggles #Lenin #Cat #Europe

Here in the U.S., the working class continues suffering from right-wing anti-worker policies – cutbacks and privatization of public services and education, giveaways to for-profit health care and insurance corporations, outlawing collective bargaining and unions, curbing voting rights, etc. Few of us among the working class would mourn the death of right-wing figureheads like ex-President George Bush, or Wisconsin Governor Walker, or Florida Governor Rick Scott. Nor should we mourn for Margaret Thatcher after what she did to the working class in Britain.

Under her rule, the coal miners were some of many victims, with Thatcher declaring the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) as “the enemy within.” In 1984, the NUM waged a militant strike for over a year, fighting Thatcher’s privatizations and the closing of coal mines. In Thatcher’s Britain, a militarized police force beat the miners and their supporters off the streets. At least six picketers were killed during the great miners’ strike of 1984-85. Thatcher’s domination of the National Coal Board meant no work agreement, numerous mines closed and more than 20,000 miners losing their jobs. The NUM was gutted.

This should stand as a stark reminder to workers here in the U.S., union and non-union, where we have such a deep-rooted history of militant labor unionism amongst coal miners. The government is in the hands of the wealthy, they will use whatever means necessary to serve the rich.

Thatcher’s policies overseas were even worse. In response to the decline of the British Empire, Thatcher revived a racist and colonial foreign policy. This is the other great tower of her ‘contributions’ to humanity. For example, Prime Minister Thatcher declared the African National Congress a terrorist organization, opposed sanctions on racist apartheid South Africa and, in 1987, Thatcher’s spokesperson said in responding to a reporter that anyone who believed the ANC would ever rule South Africa was “living in cloud-cuckoo land.”

Thatcher was unlikely to win a second term as Prime Minister until she launched a completely unnecessary, but bloody war against Argentina over the tiny Malvinas islands, thousands of miles from Britain and right next to Argentina. Thatcher revived jingoism, the extreme nationalism of British imperialism, and won big in the next elections. In terms of arrogance, she puts the American Republican Party to shame.

So too Thatcher amped up the war on the people in the occupied six counties of Ireland. She unleashed death squads and brought in the shoot to kill policy, but Irish Republicans adapted. It was Thatcher who forced the Irish Hunger Strike, soon broadening sympathy and support for the Irish Republican movement throughout Ireland and the world. Bobby Sands and his comrades are being remembered throughout the world, and especially in Palestine, today.

Due to her anti-worker policies in Britain and her colonial approach to the rest of the world, Maggie Thatcher leaves a legacy of repression, misery and bloodshed. There is no sadness in her death, only the feeling of a burden being lifted and giving new energy to our determination to organize working people and the oppressed to take control of our destiny.

#UnitedKingdom #Imperialism #Remembrances #Europe #Ireland #Argentina #britain #Apartheid #workersStruggle #coalMiner #MargaretThatcher #NationalUnionOfMineworkers

For the last two years the mainstream media has been painting a picture of the economic crisis in the euro-zone as one of governments spending too much on social welfare programs, leading to large budget deficits and debt. This reflects a right-wing, free market view that crises of overproduction under capitalism are because of ‘too much government intervention’ in the economy. The poster-child for this story has been Greece, whose large government budget deficit of about 15% of Greek GDP (total production of goods and services) and large government debt (which went as high as 160% of Greek GDP), triggered the crisis in 2010. In response, the big capitalists and their politicians called for more and more austerity in the form of tax increases, spending cuts and reduction in workers’ pensions and employment protection.

But Spain, whose economy is much larger than Greece’s, and which actually has a higher unemployment rate than Greece, is now the new center of the crisis. Spain has just had to take a 100 billion euro ($125 billion) bailout of its banks by the euro-zone. But Spain actually had government budget surpluses during the last economic expansion (2001-2007) so that its tax revenues were greater than government spending. In contrast, Germany, which is often portrayed as being ‘thrifty,’ also had government budget deficits (albeit about half the size of Greece’s). Spain also had one of the lowest levels of total government debt before the last recession and still had a government debt level lower than Germany, until it took out the bank bailout loan.

What Greece and Spain (along with Portugal and Ireland which have also had to impose austerity in exchange for more loans), had in common is that they all had large inflows of capital from Germany and other northern European countries. When the recession (or in a growing number of countries, depression) and financial crisis that began in the U.S. hit, these capital flows dried up. Thus the current euro-zone crisis is very similar to the 1997 Asian economic crisis, which also resulted from a boom and then bust in capital flows and led to a severe crisis of overproduction that spread to Russia and Latin America.

These booms and bust caused by international flows of capital are not accidents; rather they are a fact of life under modern monopoly capitalism. About 100 years ago, the Russian revolutionary V.I. Lenin pointed out that the concentration and centralization of capital led to a handful of huge corporations dominating industry after industry. Lenin called this monopoly capitalism to differentiate it from the more competitive capitalism of Marx’s time, where most capitalist firms were relatively small.

One of the features of monopoly capitalism pointed out by Lenin was that the export of capital, which is movement of money across borders, became more important than international trade, or the movement of goods and services between countries. Today capital flows, for both investment and speculative reasons, far exceed the value of trade. In 2010, world trade averaged about $75 billion per day. In contrast, the foreign exchange market, which trades money for trade, investment and speculation, averaged a whopping $4 trillion per day, or 50 times larger than the trade of goods and services.

While free market apologists for monopoly capitalism claim that these huge flows of speculative capital actually make capitalism more stable, the fact is that these flows can be the trigger for worldwide economic crises of overproduction. These huge international flows of capital go hand-in-hand with the growth of the financial sector, another characteristic of monopoly capitalism described by Lenin in his work Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism.

Some countries with capitalist economies, such as Malaysia during the 1997 economic crisis, turned away from free-market fantasies and introduced controls on capital flows. While free-market economists predicted disaster, these controls actually helped Malaysia’s economy to weather the storm.

But while controls on capital, like other Keynesian government policies such as government deficit spending, can help reduce the damage of an economic crisis, they do not prevent such crises. The more that such controls help limit the damage of crises, the more the capitalists want to reduce the government’s role in the economy to free big corporations and big banks to make the most profits. This is the policy of deregulation, imposed by politicians bought and paid for by the 1% for the last 30 years.

Only with a socialist economy can a country distance itself from the global monopoly capitalist financial whirlpool that is leading to one economic disaster to another. A socialist economy is one where the production is for people’s needs and not for profit and ownership is not concentrated in the hands of the wealthy 1% but instead collectively owned by the people.

#Europe #CapitalismAndEconomy #Ireland #capitalistCrisis #Greece #monopolyCapitalism #Spain #Portugal

Bogotá, Colombia – Tom Burke, a reporter for Fight Back! conducted the following interview with Agustin Jimenez Cuello, the president of the Committee in Solidarity with Political Prisoners, on Dec. 7. Agustin Jimenez is the lawyer who represents the Colombia Three – three Irish political activists imprisoned in Colombia on politically motivated, false charges. The three are awaiting the continuation of their trial.

Fight Back!: The Colombia Three, James Monaghan, Niall Connolly, and Martin McCauley were arrested and charged after visiting the Despeje, or Zone for Peace Dialogue, that the FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) legally controlled for a few years while negotiating with then Colombian president Pastrana. What were the Colombia Three doing in the Peace Zone and what are the government’s charges against them?

Agustin Jimenez: What the Colombian authorities say is the three Irishmen are accused by an ‘intelligence informant’ who claims to have seen several foreigners in the Peace Zone training the FARC in combat. The Colombia Three are charged with training guerrilla fighters in the use of cylinder mortars.

The Irishmen say they were witnessing the Colombian peace process, in particular the prisoner exchange between the FARC and the Colombian military – investigating what happens during conflict resolution and the reintegration of prisoners into society. The Three have a particular interest in this: James Monoghan works in a similar support group – the Committee in Solidarity with Political Prisoners in Ireland – and was involved in negotiations that led to the release of Irish prisoners and precisely the need to reintegrate prisoners into society. James has written several articles on this, including writing about FARC negotiations and other processes, so as to make comparisons and analysis. Martin McCauley is an ex-prisoner who came to the Peace Zone to share his experiences and Niall Connolly served as their interpreter and translator.

Another charge against the Colombia Three is that of using false passports. This is a pretense to their arrest. Everyone understands that many former political prisoners in Ireland use false passports, especially to enter the United States, where many of them travel and have friends and family. Because U.S. immigration law has an article essentially saying if you are detained as a political prisoner in Ireland, then you cannot enter the U.S. Other countries have followed the U.S. on this. Many famous people – authors, professors, musicians, etc. – travel with false passports.

Fight Back!: What is happening in the trial now?

Agustin Jimenez: In the Colombian trial, there are three phases. First, there is the interrogation of the accused, which has been completed. Second, the prosecution presents its case. This phase has stalled because the prosecution cannot bring their witnesses to testify. The Colombian government detains the witnesses, but claims one cannot be found and the other refuses to travel to the court. The third phase involves the defense presenting their case. The prosecutor attempted to get the defense to present first. This unusual step reveals that the government has no case. Still, the judge would not rule to dismiss the case. So the trial is a stalemate for now.

Fight Back!: Does the Colombian government have evidence against the Three?

Agustin Jimenez: So far, the Colombian government has produced four testimonies from witnesses. Two say that the Colombia Three had bad motives and one says they were there to teach mortar use. On cross-examination in the interrogation phase, this witness changed his testimony and said it was a German who he saw in Colombia.

Besides the two ‘eyewitnesses,’ the Colombian prosecutor has two forensics experts, one from the Colombian Security Administration, who tested the Irishmen’s clothing for explosives evidence and found nothing. The other forensics testimony is from a U.S. Embassy official, who supposedly found explosives residue on a later test. The U.S. Embassy’s evidence led to the trial. The U.S. Embassy evidence contradicts the Colombian Security Administration evidence.

Fight Back!: What are prison conditions like in Colombia? Where are the Colombia Three held now?

Agustin Jimenez: There is a grave situation in the prisons. Since 1995, the prison population has grown tremendously. The prisons are at 300% of capacity. The conditions are inhuman. There is great violence within the prisons. Many guards are corrupt and there are many weapons and murders. Health care is poor and the food is bad. Usually the prisoners have worked, but there is not enough work with all the overcrowding. The last three years have been much more complicated, with the paramilitaries in the jails. The paramilitaries align with the drug traffickers and since 1999 have declared a war in the prisons. The political prisoners demand separation from the paramilitaries, but this only happened following a June 2001 paramilitary massacre. The news showed the paramilitaries in the prisons with grenades, guns, and M-16 rifles.

The current president, Uribe, appointed a new head of prisons who is trying to end separation. The Colombia Three are held on the first floor with forty-three other political prisoners in Bogotá. Three floors of paramilitaries surround the political prisoners. It is very cramped; they get no sunlight, no outdoor activity, and have to be alert that no paramilitaries can get to the first floor. The Irishmen refused to attend the first stage of their trial, the interrogation. The guards tried to force them, but the Three resisted.

Fight Back!: People in Ireland and the U.S. say the Colombia Three cannot obtain a fair trial. Is this true?

Agustin Jimenez: The Irishmen protested by refusing to attend the first trial phase. This is their right. There is no chance of a fair trial in Colombia. The British, U.S., and Colombian governments have intervened politically in the procedure. Two North American lawyers, a British lawyer, an Australian lawyer, also Paul Hill – who spent 15 years in a British jail, wrongfully convicted in the Guilford Four case – and three Irish representatives, are in Bogotá this week to follow the trial process of the Irishmen.

#Bogotá #Interview #Colombia #Ireland #Interviews #RacismInTheCriminalJusticeSystem #FARC #IrishRepublicanMovement #NiallConnolly #JamesMonaghan #MartinMcCauley #Europe

New York, NY – Caitriona Ruane, the national chairperson of the Bring Them Home Campaign in Ireland, was here Sept. 5 to highlight the situation facing the Colombia Three. The Colombia Three, Jim Monaghan, Niall Connelly and Martin McCauley, all from Ireland, have spent over two years in prison in Colombia awaiting trail and sentencing. They are charged with training members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in guerrilla warfare.

The three men were arrested in August 2001, after visiting the demilitarized zone established as part of a failed peace process. Since then, they have been held in some of Colombia’s most notorious prisons.

The men have stated in open court that they traveled to the demilitarized zone to speak with people there about the peace process. At the time it was common for outsiders to travel into the demilitarized zone. Visitors to the zone included journalists and various international dignitaries and human rights activists.

Ruane, along with Colombian lawyer for the men, Pedro Mahecha Avila, talked about the case of the three and explained how the war in Colombia has seriously undermined the legitimacy of the country’s legal system. Of particular concern is the widespread use of false or fabricated evidence in cases concerning the insurgency, and the pressures from state and right-wing paramilitaries which impede lawyers and judges from carrying out their professional functions. Human rights organizations have unanimously condemned Colombian prosecutors’ common practice of relying on testimony provided by paid military informers.

Pedro Mahecha Avila explained how the justice system in Colombia is being used as a counter-insurgency tool in the case of the three men. The U.S. State Department, along with members of the British government, wants the men convicted, in an effort to lend legitimacy to the U.S. ‘war on terror.’ The U.S. in particular has vested interest in propping up the Colombian regime, due to its economic and geopolitical interests in the region. It has used military and economic aid to help the Colombian government wage war on its own population through Plan Colombia, which pumps billions of dollars in military aid into Colombia to prevent the FARC and other guerilla organizations from taking power.

After laying out how the case is a fame-up – with unreliable witnesses, perjured statements that put the men in Colombia at times when they were, in fact, in Ireland and false forensic evidence – Ruane talked about the prison conditions faced by the three. They are surrounded by right-wing paramilitaries, confined to a small cell with little room to move and allowed little exercise per day. She noted a very real threat to the men’s lives from the right-wing paramilitaries in the prisons, and spoke of how the men’s food was being poisoned at one point.

When brought to trial, the men faced a one-judge, no-jury court. At the trial’s end in August, the judge announced he wouldn’t deliver a verdict until December 2003. The case for their innocence is very strong, but due to the political situation in Colombia and pressure from the U.S. and British governments, it is unclear if the judge will be allowed to reach the right decision. If convicted, the men face up to 20 years in a Colombian prison.

Ruane ended her presentation by explaining how the campaign to free the three and bring them back to Ireland was growing. “As usual, it’s the working class in Ireland who have been the backbone of the Bring Them Home Campaign. Every mountain has been climbed, walks have been sponsored, concerts and benefits have been held and money raised to fight their case.” She went on to state that, “Unfortunately in Ireland we have had a lot of experience in fighting these cases, from the Guildford Four to the Birmingham Six and Ballymurphy Seven, and we have had many long years of experience in fighting miscarriages of justice. If the men are convicted, make no mistake, there will be a long, hard-fought campaign to see that justice is done.”

#NewYorkNY #Colombia #Ireland #IrishRepublicanMovement #ColombiaThree #Europe

The Colombia Three, Jim Monaghan, Niall Connelly and Martin McCauley, all from Ireland, were recently acquitted after having spent almost three years in prison in Colombia. The three men were found innocent of charges that they were in Colombia to train the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC-EP) in guerrilla warfare tactics aimed at overthrowing the Colombian government. They were arrested in August 2001 after visiting the demilitarized zone (established as part of a failed peace process) and have been held in some of Colombia’s most notorious and dangerous prisons since then.

Despite massive pressure from the Colombian, U.S. and British governments, Judge Jairo Acosta found that there was no evidence against the men other than that they were traveling on false passports. In a significant legal judgment, he ordered that the witnesses against the men be investigated for perjury. There is strong evidence that these witnesses had been coached by military intelligence into fabricating accounts of watching the three Irishmen training guerillas, when in fact they were proven to be in Ireland on the dates given.

The three had traveled to Colombia on false passports because of their role as prominent activists in the Irish Republican movement. Had they used their own passports, they most likely would have been denied access to the country. As participants in the peace process currently underway in Ireland, the three men had traveled to Colombia to study and share ideas about the Colombian peace negotiations that were going on at the time.

The declaration of the men’s innocence is a major victory for the grassroots campaign to free the men. It is also a source of deep embarrassment for the Colombian government and its backers in the U.S. government.

The U.S. State Department, along with members of the British government, wanted the men convicted in order to lend legitimacy to their international ‘war on terror.’ The U.S. in particular was seeking justification for its financial support of the Colombian regime under the auspices of ‘combating terrorism.’ In reality, this ‘war’ is driven by U.S. economic and geopolitical interests in the region. It has used military and economic aid to help the Colombian government wage war on its own population through Plan Colombia, renamed the Andean Initiative, which pumps billions of dollars of military aid into Colombia to prevent the FARC and other guerilla organizations from taking power and threatening U.S. interests.

The proven innocence of the Colombia Three is an important win for activists and campaigners concerned with justice, dignity and equality in Colombia and in Ireland. The pressure and commitment of the ‘Bring them Home’ campaign in Ireland focused international attention on the case of the Three, and forced elected representatives to take a stance. It played a vital role in the legal defense of the men and in producing evidence and observers at the trial. If it were not for this level of grassroots support and activism from the working class in Ireland and dedicated activists in the U.S. and elsewhere, a very different verdict may have been reached. While we should celebrate and acknowledge this victory, we also need to keep up the pressure on the Colombian government. Colombian prosecutors are appealing the case, and the three Irishmen cannot return home until the appeal issue is resolved.

#Bogotá #News #Colombia #Ireland #FARC #peaceProcess #IrishRepublicanMovement #Europe