THE assassination of the Russian ambassador to Turkey, Andrei Karlov, on Monday by an ex-policeman Mevlut Altintas – who was sacked after the failure of the last Turkish coup attempt – was a planned and calculated murder.
Altintas was able to make his way unhindered into a photo exhibition called ‘Russia as seen by Turks’ which Karlov was to address. He was able to stand behind Karlov, shoot him in the back at leisure and then sloganise before he was killed – after all, dead men tell no tales.
There is no doubt that this was the response by terrorists and their backers to the great victory of the Syrian people over terrorism in Aleppo. It was calculated to immediately end any cooperation between Turkey, Russia and Iran to achieve a solution to the Syrian crisis acceptable to the Assad government and the Syrian people that would end the war and be a great victory over the imperialist powers.
Who would gain from this calculation – clearly the western imperialist powers. There is no doubt that an investigation that includes Russian experts will uncover who was behind the murder. Immediately after the killing there was a real fear expressed by sections of the media that the world is on the brink of another crisis such as that which erupted on June 28, 1914, when a Serbian nationalist killed the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austrian throne, igniting the great slaughter of the First World War.
Russia has shown once again that it is not an imperialist power by its decision to investigate the outrage before deciding responsibility and consequences. It does not take a very great imagination to grasp just what would have happened if the ambassador was that of the US – the bombs would already be flying!
However, there is not the slightest doubt that it is the US and its British ally that have helped create the scenario for this assassination to take place. First of all, the US, the UK and its Gulf brigand allies launched the war in 2012 to overthrow Assad and put an end to Syria. With the intervention of Iran, Hezbollah and Russia the plan has come unstuck.
This has led to an extraordinary disorientation and collapse of morale in the US and UK ruling classes that has seen both humbled by the Brexit revolution and the destruction of the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party, and also menaced by the crisis of the capitalist world economy.
Their absurdity has reached the stage of lunacy where President Obama has accused President Putin of rigging the US presidential election on behalf of Trump – as if the US was a banana republic – pledging that Russia will pay a price for this.
At the same time in the Middle East, it is the Nusra Front tail that is wagging the US dog. In the last weeks the US has boosted the terrorists by predicting that hundreds of thousands of Syrians will be killed in Aleppo, and that the people there must be rescued from Assad and the Russians.
This is the call that has been taken up by Boris Johnson the British Foreign Secretary, and the mass of Labour MPs who have been saying that intervention is needed to bomb Assad to save the Syrians. This whipped-up hysteria has paved the way for the assassination of Ambassador Karlov to ‘revenge the Syrian people’.
Meanwhile, May and Johnson are supplying the Saudis with weapons of mass destruction to slaughter Yemeni men, women and children! UK workers must react to the murder of ambassador Karlov by stepping up the struggle to bring down the Tories to go forward to a socialist revolution that will bring in a workers government that will lead the fight for a Socialist United States of Europe and for a free and independent Middle East with the Palestinian state as its centre point.
2017 is the centenary of the issuing of the Balfour Declaration in which the British government promised somebody else’s country, Palestine, to the Zionists. It is also the hundreth anniversary of the great October Revolution in which workers overthrew Tsarism and began the wordwide socialist revolution. We must make 2017 a great revolutionary year. Victory to Syria! Forward to Palestine! Forward with the British socialist revolution!
