Anti-Imperialist Coalition of Auckland

Helen,

Congratulations on scoring an invitation to meet George Dubya Bush in the near future. It must be exciting, looking forward to games of hangman and computer golf with the global village’s village idiot. (Will you get a signed baseball, like the lucky leader of Japan? Will George spell his name right this time?)

One of the games that George will ask you to play is called Gulf War 2. The original was designed and developed ten years ago by the village idiot’s Daddy – graphics came courtesy of CNN. Like the original, Gulf War 2 will involve the bombing and invasion of Iraq by a coalition of nations led by America. Gulf War1 killed 250,000 Iraqis, and the new model offers George jnr the chance to score even more points.

We’re writing to you, Helen, because most New Zealanders don’t want to play Bush’s game, and we want you to tell him that.

We’re aware that saying no to Bush would put you in a tricky situation. After all, not joining in the big boys’ war would mean missing out on ‘free’ trade deals with world Sheriff Bush and Deputy Sheriff John Howard.

Frankly though, Helen, we don’t want Bush’s ‘free’ trade deals any more than we want Bush’s war. As the 100,000’s of brave protesters in Seattle and Genoa said, ‘free’ trade is trade that suits Uncle Sam. We think that if you were serious about helping people with trade, then you would buck the sanctions imposed on the Iraq for eleven years now by a succession of American Sheriffs. Because of these sanctions, Iraq has been unable to buy the medicines its people need.

According to a 1999 report from UNICEF, Iraq had lost over half a million kids – that’s an average of two hundred fresh corpses a day - as a result of shortages of medicines caused by the sanctions you support. Meanwhile you mourned the ‘accidental’ death of Major McNutt who was killed in ‘practice’ for ongoing daily bombings of Iraq.

Maybe, though, you’re not too worried by reports of kids dying without decent medicine in understaffed hospitals. After all, as the Health Minister in the Rogernomics Labour government of the 80s you were only too happy to wreck New Zealand’s hospital system, sacking elected health boards and cutting funding for essential services.

And, let’s remember, your latest government cut real health spending in its budget for 2002 – we guess the spare dollars came in handy when you sent the army off to help Dubya make Afghanistan safe again for warlords. (Who cares about little things like the Auckland District Health Board’s $72 million dollar budget deficit, when you’ve got fully equipped SAS action model figurines to play with?)

If New Zealand is dragged into a new war on Iraq, then it is poor and working class people who will be made to pay the consequences. They will be the ones dying in understaffed hospitals, while million-dollar bombs drop on their brothers and sisters in Baghdad. They will be the ones who are told to ‘tighten their belts’, as war is used as an excuse to cut wages. They will be the ones travelling home in body bags. Poor and working class New Zealanders have already suffered economic war, at home, courtesy of you and your National Party friends. Faced with a massive new war designed by the class that gave them Rogernomics and capitalist globalisation, working class and poor people will fight, not for Bush and Clark, but for their own class interests. (Do you remember the Vietnam War, Helen?)

You and your ‘Labour’ Party scoff at words like ‘working class’: you say that we are ‘all middle class now’, and that capitalism rules OK. Your good friend in Argentina, former President de la Rua, liked to say just the same things, until last December the working class and poor rose up and threw him and his ‘left’ government out of power. Now the Argentinean working class is occupying factories and setting up its own organisations to run hundreds of suburbs and towns liberated from a corrupt ruling class. The Argentinean revolution is a glimpse of New Zealand’s future.

Right now, we are demanding that you tell Bush that New Zealand will not support either a new war against Iraq or the continuation of the sanctions that have killed more than half a million kids.

We await your reply with extreme interest.

Sincerely,
Anti-Imperialist Coalition of Auckland

email anti_imperialist@hotmail.com Phone 025 2800080
http://www.geocities.com/anti_imperialist_coalition/

What you can do to get Helen Clark and her Government out of Bush’s War on ‘Terrorism’

If you are a member of a trades union put forward resolutions on your worksite:

“That, this worksite calls on the CTU to write to the Prime Minister Helen Clark demanding that she recalls both the combat SAS troops from Afghanistan and the so-called peacekeeping troops, and channels material aid to that country through the grassroots organisations of the Afghan people.”

“That, this worksite calls on the CTU to demand that the Labour-Alliance Government sends the armoured personnel carriers back, and puts all of its military budget into nurses and teachers wages, low cost affordable housing and job creation, and that failing this the Government should resign.”

“That, this worksite calls on the CTU to suspend financial contributions to all political parties that militarily or financially support any US/UN war, sanctions or embargoes, and demand that any government that does so without a full public debate and referendum must resign.”

“That, this worksite calls on the CTU to withdraw ALL support for the Terrorism Suppression Bill currently before parliament and that it be scrapped.”

But whether you are a unionist or not, you should not wait on any reply from Helen Clark, or rely on any success in getting union resolutions passed. If you agree with us that none of this will be enough to get NZ out of Bush’s wars, join the AIC and fight to build an anti-imperialist movement to put an end to the root cause of war, the drive of the big capitalist firms to profit from world domination of oil and other minerals, agriculture, water etc while expropriating the wealth of workers all over the world.

The AIC meets weekly on Wednesdays @ 7.30pm at Trades Hall, 147 Great North Road, Grey Lynn.

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