LALIT calls for an immediate ceasefire, and for the Russian troops to leave Ukraine. We are with the working people of Ukraine against this invasion. We call for an end to this war. Russia has no right to invade Ukraine, a sovereign state. Indeed, international law declares it illegal for Russia to invade and/or occupy Ukraine. So, Russia must broker a ceasefire and withdraw. The stakes are high. Russia has 6,000 nuclear weapons, the largest arsenal in the world, while the U.S. has 5,600 nuclear weapons. The USA makes up for its short-fall by having allies with weapons (France, UK, Israel for a start) and by being the only country ever to have perpetrated the act of dropping one. The USA coldly dropped one on a beautiful city, Hiroshima, eliminating most of its civilian population in one poisonous go. And then dropped a second one, for luck, on another fine city, Nagasaki, killing nearly everyone there, too. So, as we take position, we warn of the dangers that NATO’s continued militarization of the world poses. And we call on NATO to back off, and stop hiding its aggression world-wide behind a facade of “freedom to join” a band of arms-producers and dealers in lock-step with war-mongers of pro-capitalist regimes.
This war is more terrifying than the other illegal wars of recent years. It is worth looking at the tradition of hideous illegal wars — since the end of the Cold War – where USA-controlled NATO in the past simply defied international law, invaded and broke up countries, just as Russia is now copying it and doing. It is a principled stand for us in LALIT to oppose the Russian invasion because we opposed these NATO invasions at the time. And we oppose the military occupation by the UK-USA of the Republic of Mauritius, too.
The US and NATO, remember, just bombed Belgrade from the air, and ripped Yugoslavia to bits – actually fragmenting the entire country, just as Russia’s President Vladimir Putin is right now doing with Ukraine. The US-led NATO suspended “international law” then, and kept on suspending it until they needed to oppose Russia. Watch how Putin now follows that NATO hand-book for doing this, as he justifies his invasion of Ukraine. Yugoslavia was a sovereign state, too. The US invented the oxymoron, “humanitarian war” to put a mask on the illegal aerial bombardment, and did not even bother to justify the fragmentation of that sovereign state. The US and UK bombed Baghdad from planes way up in the sky – did not Russia’s bad-enough attack on Kyiv dimly mirror the “shock-and-awe” of that awful night? Some ex-military USA “TV-guests” remembered it, licking their lips at the memory.
In Iraq the US-UK just bombed, went in, killed the head of state, toppled the Government and celebrated its act as if international law was so much moon-dust. This invasion and the deadly occupation that followed caused the death, direct and indirect, of over a million Iraqi people. The US and France went into Libya, bombarded it from the air, too, and assassinated the head of state, too, and overthrew the Government, too. Never mind the country is still in ruins. International Law was suspended.
The US and NATO just went in and bombed Afghanistan back to the stone age, as their spokesmen put it, and occupied it for 20 years, all but destroying a country, leaving it in ruins. All this was in flagrant contradiction with international law. The USA’s B-52 bombers took off from Mauritian territory that they illegally occupy – Diego Garcia, part of Chagos – in order to bombard Baghdad and Afghanistan.
Of course, the pro-USA and pro-NATO blatherers on TV and in the mainstream media, do not speak of these American play-books, even as Putin imitates them. He mocks them by following so carefully the USA rules-book for breaking international law on war and occupation.
So, it is time for US-led NATO to disband its aggressive military expansion, once and for all. This is, of course, difficult because the capitalist system depends now, on permanent war, in particular the USA does. So the US-led NATO “military industrial complex” hungers and thirsts for more war. As soon as NATO withdrew from Afghanistan last year, this put an abrupt end to what drives the Western capitalist economy: armament production and military spending. The USA’s “military industrial complex” immediately began to thirst for a new bloody war, to set the contracts going, to open the flood-gates for new tenders, to issue new orders for steel and other metals, for planes, helicopters, tanks, machine guns, canons, bombs – and every part of each of these from spark-plugs by the hundreds of thousands of dozens, screws and bolts by the million to electronic devices on the panel in front of the drivers, for fuel and lubricant and batteries to run all this, as well as the hamburgers and military boots, the Coca Colas and uniforms that get produced to keep the war going, and to again and again kick-start the waning USA economy. In short, NATO demanded a new war, and has got it.
This constant NATO expansion has continued, long after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact in 1991. It was originally set up to counter NATO’s expansion, was disbanded, supposedly ending the Cold War, when the USSR broke up. Instead of disbanding NATO, the USA and Europe expanded it.
So, Ukraine being attacked is the predictable result of this aggressive NATO expansion. And a war of pro-NATO propaganda is what we are fed every day by press outlets like CNN and the BBC. Just as Ukraine, with reason, did not like to have Russian troops massing on its borders, so Russia has gradually felt “contained” and “encircled” by the US-led NATO. While Russia is the rump of a huge empire run by corrupt oligarchs with little thought for the Russian people, the USA is a sick and waning empire, its economy floundering under the weight of its 700 military bases outside of its territory, and another 700 inside its territory. Even as the American people do not have maternity leave or free pre-school education. Even as the American people have no proper free health care. Even as the American people now have different schools for children of different social classes, which now solidify into near castes. Even as inequality increases.
Because of this constant growing NATO militarism, countries as different as China and India have abstained in the vote against the UN Security Council Resolution against Russia, which Russia vetoed. Together these two countries make up over one-third of the world’s population. Other countries’ Governments, like Mauritius’, have also taken a neutral position. The United Arab Emirates also abstained on the Security Council vote. South Africa has called for Russian withdrawal, while calling on both sides to “compromise”.
When LALIT denounces the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we are proud to have had the same stand, and to maintain our stand, against other invasions and occupations, against NATO expansion, too. It is thus a principled stand against wars of aggression and against military occupation.
We seize this moment to call for the UK-USA to withdraw from part of Mauritius that they dismembered from the sovereign country that Mauritius is, that they end their illegal occupation — illegality confirmed by the UN’s highest court, the ICJ. Which is why we call also on Israel to withdraw from Palestine, and Syria that it occupies illegally. This way, the discourse of the UK-USA would not sound so ridiculously hypocritical.