People's Democracy

DURING the first week of January, 1996, Havana the symbol of popular determination in the fight against predatory US imperialism, will play host to delegates from more than eighty countries and organisations representing the revolutionary movements in Asia, Africa and Latin America. The Tricontinental Conference is a natural development of the first Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung in 1955 when Cuba was in the throes of its struggle for national liberation.

The idea of the Tricontinental Conference came from Fidel Castro in 1961, the year which saw the fiasco of the Yankee aggression confronted with the heroic determination of the Cuban people in defence of their socialist fatherland. The Executive Committee of the Afro-Asian Conference accepted the generous invitation and, in acknowledgement of the leading role of the victorious Cuban Revolution and its effects on the liberation movements of the three continents, decided to hold the first Afro-Asian-Latin American Conference in Havana.

Coinciding with the seventh anniversary of the Cuban Revolution, the holding of the conference will be fitting homage to the heroic Cuban people.

The Tricontinental Conference is being held at a time when revolutionary movements are sweeping through the three continents and violent attacks against the national independence, sovereignty, progress and peace of countries like the Congo, the Dominican Republic, Vietnam and others are being launched by the forces of imperialism, colonialism, led by the common enemy of people fighting for peace and freedom – North American imperialism.

The conference is an expression of the need to unite and co-ordinate the struggles of the peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America and to carry on these struggles until the final defeat of imperialism, colonialism and neo-colonialism. The conference will mark a new stage in the struggle for national liberation, social progress and world peace.

A common bond unites the peoples of the three continents. All of them face the same problems, are threatened by the same dangers of oppression, exploitation and armed intervention. But there is no force greater than the united strength of peoples determined to become free and independent and attain peace.

India, which was one of the sponsors of the Bandung Conference, will send representatives to Havana. Here is a golden opportunity for the Indian delegates to retrieve India’s declining prestige among the nations and peoples, fighting against imperialism, colonialism and neo-colonialism. Will they express unqualified support for struggles of the peoples of the three continents against imperialism, colonialism and neo-colonialism led by the US imperialists or will their voice be muted at the prospect of an unqualified condemnation of the role of US imperialism in Vietnam, the Congo and Dominican Republic?

The touchstone of genuine anti-imperialism today is one's attitude to US imperialism. What better testing-ground can there be than Havana, the capital of the Cuban Republic, the existence of which, 90 miles away from the American coast, in defiance of the might of US imperialism, is a demonstration of the superior strength of anti-imperialist united front of the peoples of the world.

The disappearance under mysterious circumstances of EI Mehdi Ben Barka, the great Moroccan patriot and president of the International Preparatory Committee for the First Afro-Asian-Latin American Conference, keeping an assignment in Paris, demonstrates clearly how franctically the imperialists are trying to exterminate the leaders of anti-imperialist movements and organisations.

Ben Barka is a universally respected revolutionary and lived as an exile from King Hassan's Morocco, though his party represents the largest single political organisation in Morocco.

There had been several attempts on his life in the past, and his kidnapping on October 29 is likely to be connected with a plan to sabotage the Tricontinental Conference. The circumstances suggest a US-Moroccan plot.

Ben Barka was picked up at Champs Elysees by two plain-cloths French policemen and was driven to a villa, belonging to an ex-criminal, Georges Boucheesciche, where he was held captive for some time to be flown to Morocco.

It is believed that Outkir, the Moroccan minister of interior, personally supervised the kidnapping of Ben Barka. He is known to have flown to Paris and back in a few days after the disappearance of the Moroccan Left-wing leader. Boucheesciche is also believed to have flown to Morocco with the prisoner. He has not been heard of since.

It is being said that the CIA organised the kidnapping of Ben Barka from Paris and engaged two French policemen in order to embarrass President De Gaulle before the presidential election. The French president broke diplomatic protocol by sending a personal message of sympathy to Ben Barka's mother over the head of the Moroccan ruler. A French court also issued a warrant for interrogation of the Morrocan minister of Interior, but the Moroccan government refused to entertain it.

Both Moroccan reactionaries and their Washington patrons found in Ben Barka an implacable enemy of their policies of oppression and exploitation, and would be glad to see him put out of action. It is now clear that the plan to kidnap Ben Barka had been planned carefully and extends farther than the French frontier via Rabat to Washington.

The Cuban Preparatory Committee for the Tricontinental Conference has condemned this dastardly crime and called upon governments and revolutionary organisations "to conduct an intense campaign for the life and freedom of Ben Barka, whose fate is not known and who can be, if not already, a victim of criminal and obscure designs of the kidnappers."

---People's Democracy, December 26, 1965