GENERAL Alexander Haig got himself into a tizzy last week at his press conference in Brussels. Called to outline the US's case for collective Western sanctions over Poland, Haig's press conference turned into near debacle when the Guardian's European Palmer asked if the US's position on Poland wasn't a bit hypocritical.
Wasn't it a bit hypocritical asked Palmer to make a big fuss about Poland when the US was supporting a military dictatorship in Turkey and backing up brutal repressive regimes like that in El Salvador. Haig nearly blew a gasket. 'Haven't you forgotten', assurances of the Turkish regime of a rapid return to democracv? nalists were too polite to laugh.
Haig's discomfiture only highlights the utter and complete hypocrisy of the United States Soviet Union editor, John said Haig, 'the The assembled jourover the Polish events. Reagan and his cohorts have just seen the Polish events as a mechanism for whipping up Cold War hostilities, and attempting to mobilise the Western governments behind the US's increasingly strident line.
It is particularly appropriate that Alexander Haig should be publicly confronted with the double standards of his government, because it is Haig himself who has been the most strident US spokesperson in threatening to take military action against countries in Central America, like Cuba and Nicaragua with which the United States is in conflict.
During the last year over 30,000 people have been killed in El Salvador, most of them victims of the US equipped and trained military forces Thousands more have been killed by the US. backed regime in Guatemala.
General Haig vividly outlined in his press conference the complicity of the Sovet Union and the Warsaw pact in the Polish events, pointing to the presence of Soviet Marshal Kulikov in Warsaw before and during the military's move. On this Haig was absolutely correct — directly involved.
for all they the one true thing that he said in the whole press conference. But Haig could also have pointed to the role of NATO in planning the military coup in Turkey, a move in which the US was Just as when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, the US will play the Polish events are WOlLI to whip communism. The criminal actions of the Polish and Soviet bureaucrats not only deal a blow against the Polish workers and the working class internationallv. but in the last analvsis strengthen the hand of imperialism it easier for the United States to justify its international gangsterism by pointing to 'agressiveness' of the Soviet Union. In defending the Polish workers, we must not associate the workers movement in any way with the false friends of the Polish workers.
In reality, the United States and other Western governments will have breathed a sigh of relief when the Polish army moved against LA LIBERTAO' Roy ine guettillas 50 km Alexander Haig the Solidarity. The and the Pentagon. ported by its real friends ment of the whole world.
actions of Solidarity, demands for workers control, workers veto and the use of direct action of the organised working class to win victories, will not for one moment have endeared them to the White House Solidarnose must be sup - the labour moveHONDURAS teresting from the point ot