REVOLUTION

How the guerrillas came to town

MICHAEL WYNN JONES

Into the ranks of the token words of our language, whose effect is to obscure rather than clarify the issues they are applied to, has now been recruited the word 'guerrilla'. It seems at times that this ambivalent word can be employed to caption almost any photograph of gun-waving, slogan-mouthing nationalists that comes in over the wires. Any insurgent, terrorist or saboteur can be accommodated in its embrace, any dark- spectacled intellectual or fanatical female. So far removed is the current stereotype from Mao's concept of the guerrilla, living, opera- ting and disappearing amongst his people 'like a fish lives in a pond', that it suggests that perhaps we need new definitions of this type of activity as badly as we need new means of dealing with it.

The identification of guerrilla movements with 'liberation' is as old as war itself. Hardly an army of occupation in history has known complete freedom from them. The Romans defended their German frontiers from them. The Spanish partido.c of the Peninsular War (who originated the word) made life a misery for Napoleon's invading army. Ameri- can irregulars harried Cornwallis after Charlestown with great success. Russian partisans contributed largely to Hitler's failure on the eastern front. In each case the main targets were the enemy's over-extended lines of communication or vulnerable supply- trains. The effectiveness of the disruption by individual raiding units depended on three requirements: mobility, anonymity and sanctuary.

In many of the guerrilla campaigns of this century. these requirements have remained, but have been based on a revolutionary ideology. Guerrilla warfare was translated, in Mao's words, into 'the war of the weak against the strong'. Its emphasis became poli- tical rather than military; a war for the hearts of people, recognising the fact that a struggling revolutionary movement could not expect to overcome a government at one blow by a Soviet-style urban insurrection. It was, in effect, politics taking to the hills and demanding the encirclement of the cities from the countryside. Time after time, it provided the model for countries where com- munications were difficult, the peasants were in the majority and the administration of government far removed from the people. It has been a slow, often seemingly unreward-

ing process of political attrition, of swift mili- tary strikes and equally swift disengagement. It has been resolved only, as in Cuba, by a Castro at the head of a liberating army or, as in Bolivia, by a Guevara in a coffin. By such tactics the Vietcong transformed 3,000 armed guerillas in 1955 into 35,000 regulars by 1961. The Frelimo guerrillas of Angola went through ten years of this anonymous struggle before commanding vast areas of the country in the face of relentless Portu- guese pressure.

In Latin America, where the social and economic conditions still survive for this form of revolution, rural guerrillas flourish: in Peru there is the MIR• (movement of the revolutionary left) whose heroes Ricardo Acosta and Hugo Blanco are serving mas- sive gaol sentences, and which operates in Venezuela under Enriquo Ball organising demonstrations among oil-workers which in- variably end in violence. In Guatemala MR-13 (13 November revolutionary move- ment) specialises in ambush and assassina- tion; in Columbia Ricardo Lam Parada has taken over the struggle after the death of the guerrilla priest, Camillo Torres. This is still the stuff that myths are made of; these wars can still foster our romantic notions of the guerrilla hero. But even in those same Bolivian mountains where Guevara died, a new breed of guerrilla is emerging: recently they kidnapped two German mining engineers as hostages for ten political prisoners (about the going rate in South

America). Their cousins in Uruguay, the Tupamares, have an even keener sense of the dramatic and exemplify the new, sophisti- cated, and possibily more dangerous, brand of guerrilla.

The Tupamares are much closer in their structure to the resistance movements of the last war. They need the towns, where their underground groups obtain arms, money and ammunition. It is in the towns that their con- frontations occur; to their credit they already have several bank raids, the seizure of a number of communication centres last year, and innumerable kidnappings. They have even contrived to occupy an entire provincial town and hold it for two weeks before the arrival of the army. Although they have the same local political objectives as their pre- decessors, they have already involved the world in their cause. Their kidnapping of foreign consuls (and their ruthless disposal of them when their demands are not met) has put such diplomatic pressure on the gov- ernment that merely to mention the word Tupamara nowadays in Uruguay is forbidden by law.

A similar rural-urban dichotomy can be observed in the diverse Palestinian liberation organisations. Some traditional elements remain: Al Fateh, for instance, under Yassir Arafat runs training camps for young guer- rillas recruited from the refugee camps (all movements are made on the double, meals taken standing up, live ammunition used), and carry out classic guerrilla strikes across the Israeli border. But the aims, by neces- sity, are different. The 'peasants' in this case are already dispossessed and scattered throughout several countries. There can be no indigenous 'army of liberation'. Guer- rilla tactics can only be the means to a political, not a military, end; towards bring- ing pressure on Arab governments not to let the war atrophy and, above all, towards in- forming world opinion of their cause by any means at their disposal.

It follows that the tactics to this end must be violent, dramatic and extreme. The Popu- lar Front for the Liberation of Palestine, led by Dr George Habbash and strongly coloured by his own personal philosophy (to him Al Fateh is a right-wing organisation), grasping this fact, has set up armed attacks on El Al planes at European airports. The internal weakness of such a guerrilla move- ment, springing from an intellectual radi- calism rather than a purely nationalist in- spiration, is that its extremism breeds further extremism. It is breakaway groups of the PFLP—leaning in some cases to Trotskyism —who are responsible for the so far unre- solved kidnapping of fifty airline passengers and, earlier in the year, the quite deliber- ate rocket attack on an Israeli schoolbus which killed eight children and four adults.

Under the old Maoist distinctions, Africa, Asia and Latin America comprised the 'village of the world' (still recognised in Cuba by the existence of ospAtiu—organisation of solidarity of the peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America), Europe and North

America 'the city of the world', and there- fore inappropriate to the application of

guerrilla principles. The rise of the urban guerrilla in the us (and to an extent in France and Italy) in the 1960s has proved this to be false. Indeed, the Black Panthers of America have shown themselves, ideolo- gically and structurally, to be very akin to a

nationalist liberation movement. They have, as all guerrilla movements have needed, the active support of large sections of their (black) population and the passive support of nearly all. They have their 'liberated areas' in the heart of the ghettoes, and their territorial bases. Their propaganda is couched M the language of liberation movements (Point One: we want freedom). They talk of a black colony and themselves as colonials. The only difference is that the targets of their guerrilla activities are not occupation troops but the symbols of their repression by the established order, the police (pigs as they are otherwise known). Like their rural counterparts they will go to any lengths to rescue imprisoned comrades (Point Nine: we want freedom for all black men held in federal, state, county and city prisons and jails). If the Black Panthers are the urban counterpart of guerrilla nationalism, then the Weathermen are the equivalent of break- away groups of the intellectual radicals. A splinter of the left-wing Students for a Democratic Society, these militants are dedi- cated to a revolution within the very fabric of American society. Their organisation into operational groups of six or seven coordin- ated by a 'weather bureau', their methods (even to the extent of wearing a uniform of sorts: helmets, goggles, boots and chains) and operations are up to the best guerrilla stan- dards, as the four-day battle of Chicago last October showed. Their targets are institu- tional: the successful taking-over of schools in slum areas, and industrial sabotage against —though no one can prove it—the head- quarters of firms involved in the Vietnam war.

The aims of the Weathermen, to open up a revolutionary front within the United States, may seem utterly remote. But then it has been the lesson of all successful guerrilla movements in history that often the very remoteness of the victory is the spur. There is another lesson, which we are painfully and only over the last few years coming to learn, that is just how vulnerable our increasingly technological society is. Airliners, we have desperately discovered over the past few months, are the easiest of prey for guerrilla hawks. What, then, of the computers with which so much of our lives are involved? A million insurance policies blotted from memory by one guerrilla's bomb? What, in the final analysis, of our nuclear establish- ments? Is it too fanciful to conceive of the whole world being held hostage by a hand- ful of guerrillas?

The dangerous implication of guerrillas forsaking their mountains and underde- veloped countries (where they could be heroes) for the richer and quicker spoils of our cities ... is that counter-guerrilla groups will be formed or hired to protect our pre- cious hardware. Already vigilante groups in America are better armed than—and prob- ably as fanatical as—their opposition. Already there is talk of armed guards on air- lines, in spite of the terrifying risks this involves. It is perhaps a reflex action born of panic, but it clouds the real issue. Who is responsible? Them or us? That is the ques- tion all guerrillas are ultimately posing to the rest of the world. Is it responsible to make them fight for an answer?