Another international conference this month did not get much coverage, however. The fifty-two-member Organization of the Islamic Conference met in Casablanca, Morocco, in North Africa, December 13–15. While we were being deluged with dispatches about other world gatherings, I only saw one mention of the Islamic Conference—a short item in the "World News Briefs" column of the New York Times.

This is hardly an organization of firebrand revolutionaries. It is made up of the heads of state of bourgeois regimes—from the king of Morocco to the prime minister of Pakistan. But these figures rule in the name of hundreds of millions of people who are convinced, with good reason, that racist and xenophobic attitudes toward their religion and culture are being promoted by the governments and leading politicians in the imperialist countries—France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States, and elsewhere.

I was struck by two decisions of this conference. First, the heads of state adopted a resolution condemning the "ferocious campaign to tarnish Islam" and associate it with terrorism. And they also voted unanimously to urge military aid for the embattled Muslims in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

I do not raise this because I expect these governments to start supplying substantial material aid to Bosnia. I do not—although we will see stranger things happen before this century is over. I raise it because class-conscious workers in the United States and other imperialist countries need to start paying more attention to the imperialists' aims in fanning the flames about "Islamic fundamentalism" or "Arab fanaticism" or whatever they choose to call it.…

For the past three years, we have watched the first large-scale war take place in Europe in almost half a century. There has been massive, sustained artillery shelling. Air power has been used to bomb civilian populations in Europe for the first time since the bombings of Dresden, London, and other cities during World War II. Altogether U.S. jets, together with warplanes from the United Kingdom, France, and Holland, have carried out five bombing operations in Yugoslavia since February 1994.

All this has been happening in Yugoslavia. It is a war that has brought to the surface the deepest conflicts among the imperialist powers in Europe and North America since the collapse of the Stalinist apparatuses at the opening of the 1990s. It is a war that has exposed the increasing contradictions in what continues to be called the NATO alliance.

And what do we find right at the center of this European war? We find that one of the combatants, the Bosnian government, presides over a majority Islamic population. We find the terror squads of Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic agitating against "Islamic fundamentalism" as the pretext to promote murderous "ethnic cleansing" along national and religious lines among working people who had lived and worked alongside each other for decades since the Yugoslav revolution in the aftermath of World War II.... ¹  
 

Moscow's bloody assault on Chechnya

Then you turn to the news about what is going on in Russia. The New York Times recently featured two photographs accompanying an article headlined, "Russian General Halts His Tanks As Qualms Over Rebellion Grow." One was of women from Chechnya on the road leading to the capital city of Grozny. They were appealing to Russian troops to refuse Moscow's orders and halt their advance. In this case, as in several others, the Russian soldiers and their officers were won over and refused to move their tanks any further.²

The other photograph was of U.S. vice president Albert Gore and his wife Tipper the same day with big smiles on their faces at the fancy GUM department store in Moscow. I guess this scene was supposed to be suggestive of budding capitalism. They were there to show Washington's backing for their man Boris Yeltsin. The Russian president has been having a hard time of it lately and evidently needed a public display of support.

To justify his bloody onslaught and imperial designs in Chechnya, Yeltsin is raising the specter of "Islamic fanaticism." And what did the grinning Gore have to say about all this while in Moscow? He repeated the assertion of his commander-in-chief, William Clinton, that Chechnya was "an internal affair" of Russia. The Clinton administration supports the suppression of any secessionist or other moves that would further destabilize the weak Bonapartist regime in Moscow.³

We should note that Gore and Clinton get no quarrel on this score from ultrarightist Patrick Buchanan, who has warned in his syndicated column about the dangers of the "nationalist virus" in places such as Chechnya "spreading to the West." "Look homeward, America!" Buchanan writes. "With the multinational empires torn apart, are the multinational nations next?" And in Russia itself, the most prominent voice rallying to the defense of Yeltsin's war against the Chechens has been that of the fascist Vladimir Zhirinovsky.

From the Caucasus and all along the Silk Road,⁴ national groupings and minorities who are predominantly Muslim chafe against subordination to the Great Russian overlords and their agents. This chauvinist course makes a mockery of Moscow's claims of normalization and stability, let alone its hypocritical championing of the inviolability of borders.  
 

Bolshevik appeal to Muslim toilers

This anti-Islamic crusade in Russia is not an innovation of the Yeltsin government, however. It is a product of the Stalinist counterrevolution in the Soviet Union some seventy years ago. Previously, under Lenin's leadership, the course of the Bolshevik-led workers and peasants government had been guided by one of its very first decrees, the "Appeal to All Toiling Muslims of Russia and the East," issued in early December 1917. Without lending an iota of credence to the progressive character of any religious beliefs or institutions, the Soviet republic declared:

All you whose mosques and shrines have been destroyed, whose beliefs and customs have been trampled on by the tsars and the Russian oppressors! Henceforth your beliefs and customs, your national and cultural institutions are declared free and inviolable. Build your national life freely and without hindrance. It is your right. Know that your rights—like those of all the peoples of Russia—are defended by the full force of the revolution and its organs, the soviets of workers', soldiers', and peasants' deputies.

And a few years later, at the 1920 Baku Congress of the Peoples of the East, leaders of the Communist International joined with other revolutionary fighters—from inside the borders of the old tsarist empire and beyond—in calling on all Muslim toilers in the region to join in a "holy war for the liberation of all humanity from the yoke of capitalist and imperialist slavery, for the ending of all forms of oppression of one people by another and of all forms of exploitation of man by man!"⁵

Three quarters of a century later, we can confidently assert that for communist workers in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere, reaffirming this clear pledge to oppressed and exploited toilers who may be Muslim, or who hail from parts of the world that are predominantly Muslim, is not a remote or external matter.

It comes directly into the fight against imperialist war in Europe.

It comes directly into the fight by the workers and peasants of Russia to defend the political space they carved out with the collapse of the Stalinist apparatus there.

It comes directly into the fight for democratic rights in the United States, where federal prosecutors will soon begin the first open sedition trial in many decades, this time against an Islamic cleric from Egypt and ten other defendants—a frame-up trial built around agents provocateurs.⁶

Communists and other class-struggle-minded workers combat every vestige of imperial arrogance and prejudice. We approach fellow toilers as equals who—through experience combating oppression and exploitation, and irrespective of beliefs they start out with—can be won to a scientific world outlook and communist organization. This conviction is a touchstone for those building a proletarian party and world movement. 

¹ Among the major activities of the U.S.-organized NATO "Implementation Force (Ifor)" in Bosnia in 1996 was pressuring Bosnian Muslim authorities to deport volunteer fighters from Iran and other countries with large Islamic populations and to cut off further military aid and training from the Iranian government. The first widely publicized NATO military operation was a February 1996 raid on what Washington labeled an Iranian-run "terrorist train-ing camp" near Sarajevo.

² In December 1994 the government of Boris Yeltsin dispatched an invasion force of 30,000 Russian troops to crush the independence movement of the largely Islamic people of Chechnya in the northern Caucasus mountains, bordering Georgia. During the first year and a half of relentless Russian army bombing and shelling, an estimated 35,000 people were killed and the capital city of Grozny and dozens of Chechen villages were laid to ruin. The war was unpopular from the outset among broad layers of working people and others in Russia.

³Standing beside Yeltsin at a news conference during an April 1996 summit meeting in Moscow, U.S. president William Clinton responded as follows to a question about the U.S. government's position on Moscow's assault against Chechnya and the death toll it has taken: "I would remind you that we once had a civil war in our country in which we lost, on a per capita basis, far more people than we lost in any of the wars of the 20th century, over the proposition that Abraham Lincoln gave his life for, that no state had a right to withdrawal from our union." The U.S. government, Clinton added, "has taken the position that Chechnya is a part of Russia, but that in the end, a free country has to have free association, so there would have to be something beyond the fighting, there would have to be a diplomatic solution."

⁴ The part of the world from Iran through Central and East Asia. The term derives from an ancient trade route for silk, spices, and other goods linking China with the eastern Mediterranean.

⁵ Both documents are contained in To See the Dawn: Baku 1920, First Congress of the Peoples of the East (New York: Pathfinder, 1993). See pages 251 and 231–32.

⁶ In 1995 Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and nine others were convicted in a federal court of violating a Civil War–era seditious conspiracy statute. The prosecution case, linking them to the 1994 World Trade Center bombing, rested on testimony by an informer who admitted in court that he had lied under oath and had received more than $1 million from the FBI. The defendants were not convicted of carrying out a criminal act, but of conspiring "to overthrow, or put down, or destroy by force the government of the United States." Rahman and one other defendant were sentenced to life in prison; eight others received from twenty-five to fifty-seven years.  
 
 
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