tragedy
The following article is from the September 9 issue of Rouge, the paper of the
(LCR), French section of the Fourth International. It has been somewhat shortened for reasons of space.
What happened on August 31 over the
Japan sea? The only thing that is absolutely certain is that a Korean
Boeing carrying 269 passengers was shot
The Western capitals have failed so far to offer a convincing explanation of why could fly for two and a half hours in a strictly forbidden zone.
A navigation error is improbable. The 747 had a three-tiered system, a sort of
All the instruments would have had to fail at the same time for the pilots not to realize what was happening.
At the same time, it is incomprehensible why the Japanese military radar stations and the civilian air controllers
Facing this offensive, the Kremlin bureaucrats have responded simply by increasing their own military potential with the aim of forcing the enemy bloc to sit down to negotiate. They have gotten involved in a game of bargaining
The Soviet response to the perspective of the installation of Pershings was to threaten to deploy intermediate-range missiles on the borders of Western Europe. And they have supported the anti-war movement that has developed on this side of the Iron Curtain only to the extent that it suited their immediate objectives.
This deadly logic promotes a race into the abyss, in which at any moment the down after penetrating into Soviet air- - who never lost contact with the air-
Obviously an action with such terrible and revolting consequences was an excellent pretext for launching a wave of anti-Communism. Ronald Regan did not waste any time in issuing a blast against "a society that denies the rights of the individual and continually seeks to dominate other nations."
This is one way of trying to get people to forget that not so long ago the U.S. was nd that today it is trying to strangle the lumping tons of napalm on indochin Central American revolution. But cynicism is standard operating procedure for
Every day that goes by, the « reports » and « explanations » provided by the propaganda services of both blocs make the background to this incident more murky.
The Western sources - U.S. and Japanese - have been careful not to make public all the data in their possession. three main questions raised by the destruction of the South Korean plane remain unanswered.
THE UNANSWERED QUESTIONS
Why did the USSR do something like this ?
It is hardly likely that the Kremlin decided to shoot down an airliner simply to put pressure on Washington in the present nuclear arms negotiations, as the cold war pundits have peremptorily claimed.
This unjustifiable action in fact put the Soviet Union in a difficult position in the eyes of world public opinion, and gave aid and comfort to the imperialists. It gravely disrupts the diplomatic maneuvers in which the Soviet Union engaged with the aim of extricating itself from a situation of confrontation that it f'nds economically very costly and of restoring detente.
How could the South Korean Boeing get so far off course?
craft and were in communication with it - did not intervene to get it to correct its course. This leads to the third question raised by this tragedy.
Did this incident come in the context of a game by the secret services on
Moscow accuses the Boeing crew with deliberately violating its air space in order to carry out an intelligence mission or test its defense mechanisms. Despite the natural horror at the Soviet action, this expla nation is perfectly credible. The Western services have resorted frequently to such practices since the onset of the cold war.
Marcel Le Roy-Finville, a former officer of the French air service CDECE has told of assigning such missions to certain Caravelle pilots on the Paris-Moscow line in the 1950s.
« What I asked was very risky. Under whatever pretexts seemed plausible, pilots were at certain times to leave the air corridors and overfly an objective designated by the Americans. We knew that the Russians did not play around with Western aircraft wandering around over their territory. »
A DEADLY LOGIC
Whatever the real explanation may be for this air tragedy, it indicates threats posed to the peoples of the world by deteriorating East-West relations.
The military budgets of the Atlantic alliance states are skyrocketing. The new generation nuclar missiles are due to be installed in Europe by the end of this year. All the conventionnal forces are being reorganized to fight a « limited war » on the old continent.
The imperialist military strategists are not even looking for pretexts anymore in so-called advantages held by the Warsaw Pact. In a recent article in the Air Force international tension may touch off an uncontrollable situation. airliner is only the spectacular illustration of this.
THE ROLE OF THE PEOPLES
The shooting down of the South Ko. rean airliner is a stab in the backs of all those who are fighting the imperialist's super arms buildup. The Western governments are going to take advantage of this brutal action to justify their aggressive
The blood of the victims was hardly cold before Reagan called on the U.S. congress to think long and hard about « the Soviet aggression when they study the security of our people, and in fact, of all peoples who believe in liberty». This already foreshadows a new increase in the
So, mass action is more necessary than ever. If there is a lesson to be drawn from these recent events, it is that no real progress can come out of the stacked-deck negotiations between the two blocs. It is the peoples themselves that have to step in to put an end to a process that can lead humanity to destruction. They have to force universal disarmament.
The only way to achieve this is to create the conditions for building an independent mass movement both East and West. The best way to do this for us is to put a stop to the war course that the capitalist powers have set and mobilize to achieve unilateral disarmament of these states. Every advance in this struggle against an enemy that is in the system of alliances to our country belongs and in our country itself will be a vital encourage. ment to the struggles of peoples in other parts of the world
In the context of such a perspective, the Fourth International will support the antiwar demonstrations scheduled for October throughout Western Europe. And in France, the LCR will try to make the planned demonstrations as broad as possi-