BRITAIN is sending ‘vital military assets’ (in Cameron’s words) to be part of the NATO force that will be intercepting refugee boats seeking to cross the Med to safety, and returning the refugees to Turkey, whose government has killed thousands of Kurds, has been engaging in an oil trade with ISIS, and is still sending hundreds of terrorists into Syria to seek to overturn the government of President Assad.
The same Turkish government has been conducting a war against the democratic rights of its own citizens, and its militarised police have just stormed the offices of the Zaman newspaper to force its staff at the point of bayonets and machine guns to produce a newspaper that supports the Turkish government.
Turkey is obviously a very worthy and prized ally of British, EU and US imperialism. The NATO operation is to send the refugees, who have been forced westwards, back into the tender mercies of the Turkish government and into the arms of the terrorist forces that have been mobilised by Saudi Arabia and Qatar to overthrow the Syrian government. The Saudis or Qataris will not accept even one refugee!
The cynical Cameron described the NATO-EU operation to return refugees to the conditions that they have fled from in the following terms. He said the migrant crisis was ‘the greatest challenge facing Europe today’ and added: ‘We’ve got to break the business model of the criminal smugglers and stop the desperate flow of people crammed into makeshift vessels from embarking on a fruitless and perilous journey.
‘That’s why this NATO mission is so important. It’s an opportunity to stop the smugglers and send out a clear message to migrants contemplating journeys to Europe that they will be turned back.’
Defence Secretary Michael Fallon commented that ‘What’s essential is to work out where this people smuggling is done from and then to get a policy in place of returning people which in the end will stop people making this very, very dangerous crossing.’
To this end, while NATO supplies the muscle, the EU has pledged £2.3bn in blood money to Turkey to traffic the refugees back and use the power of the Turkish state to stop the further movement of refugees westwards.
However, the issue is not the business model of any smugglers, but destroying the business model of the imperialist powers that have set Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and then Syria ablaze and created the conditions for the emergence of ISIS and the movement westwards of millions of refugees.
In fact the casting of refugees as the enemy is creating the conditions for the emergence of fascist movements all over Europe. As the razor wire goes up the fascists and other counter-revolutionaries come out into the open.
In the just-concluded Slovak elections the Slovak National Party (SNS) gained 13 seats with eight per cent of the vote, followed by the far-right LS-Nase Slovensko (Our Slovakia) party. Both support the puppet state that was set up by the Nazis in 1940 and took part in the attack on the USSR and on imposing the ‘final solution’.
The issue is that as the capitalist crisis deepens the imperialist powers are driven to wars to reorganise the planet, regardless of their cost, and unleashing the most counter-revolutionary forces to fight these wars in the process.
This is why the workers of Europe must welcome all refugees, oppose the anti-refugee and anti-working class policies of the EU and NATO, and fight to bring down the European Union and replace it with the Socialist United States of Europe.
In the UK this means voting ‘out’ in the June 23 EU Referendum, and moving from it to bring down the Cameron government and bring in a workers government and socialism. This will immediately quit the NATO alliance, welcome all refugees and promote the struggle to replace the bankrupt EU with the Socialist United States of Europe.
Capitalism is an out of date disaster for the modern world. It must be replaced by the World Socialist Republic that will tear down all of the frontiers and make the issues of origin or nationality irrelevant.
