FIRST USE OF IRISH TROOPS IN
“EU PEACE MISSION” IN AFRICA:
The despatch of the first of 350 Irish troops to Chad in Central Africa as part of an EU Battle Group being deployed under a UN resolution raises once again the debate about the function of the Irish Defence Forces and its deployments abroad. This is the first occasion that our forces are going out under EU Command rather than direct UN Command as in all previous cases. While this mission is basically humanitarian assistance in its content under UN Resolution 1778 which proposes to keep the peace and defend the refugees from conflict in the Darfur province of Sudan who have fled across the border to Chad, the question of mission control and policy matters has not been debated or outlined in any fashion available to the public or Dáil Éireann.
The rank and file representative body, PDFORRA, has also raised the question of funding of this operation as the EU does not pay for individual countries supplying troops like the UN does. Thus the question arises as to whether the Department of Defence is going to fund this from current budgets or whether the Government will provide a supplementary budget for the purpose. Although this endeavour is being promoted as an EU operation “under mandate of the United Nations” it is for all practical purposes a NATO operation as EU military affairs were allocated to NATO under the Nice Treaty of 2003. As pointed out by Susan George, the distinguished US political scientist, at a meeting in Liberty Hall, Dublin, last Saturday, 03 Samhain/November 2007,
NATO is not an EU institution but is run by the USA.
The EU Command is headed by Javier Solana, former Secretary General of NATO and currently EU “Security” Commissioner. Solana, a complete imperialist stooge and a$$-lick of Buckfush and Blairschmuck, supports the illegal war in Iraq and the war in Afghanistan and is the prime agitator of further militarisation of the EU as outlined in the so-called “Reform Treaty”, the rejected EU “Constitution” under another name. Solana was also a leading shriek-owl in the illegal and barbaric bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 in which hundreds of civilians were killed and thousands forced from their homes in massive destruction of Yugoslav cities and towns. Hospitals, schools and working public transport were indiscriminately bombed in an unprecedented onslaught on a European country by NATO air strikes in an effort to intimidate Yugoslavia into compliance with NATO diktat.
In 2001, Solana bullied and intimidated the Macedonian Government into accepting completely unjustified demands by the KLA terrorist organisation for concessions for “ethnic” Albanians living in Macedonia. Solana threatened to withdraw EU aid from Macedonia and block its application for EU membership unless it complied with NATO’s diktat. Intimidation, murderous violence, blackmail, bribery, mafia gangsterism, all used in NATO’s plan to establish military bases in all the former Eastern Bloc countries bordering Russia.
This unelected, despicable parasite Solana, is the individual to whom Irish troops in Chad must now report and with whose instructions they must comply. The Irish Government has agreed to send our troops overseas without any public debate and on a mission whose parameters have been decided behind closed doors by unelected officials.
This is an example of what we may expect as routine under the so-called EU “Reform Treaty” which was accepted by the Council of Ministers without debate in Lisbon last month. Ireland is now the only EU member which must hold a referendum on this monstrous bureaucratic assault on European Democracy and Citizens’ Rights and it is vitally important that it be decisively rejected by the Irish people.
If this “Treaty” is ratified then large areas of decision-making will be removed from democratic control and scrutiny. EU bureaucrats we don’t elect can make laws we can’t change or challenge and our parliament, Dáil Éireann, will have no say in it. EU Officials will be immune from prosecutuion, but, Europol Police will be able to travel here and arrest anyone on their own warrants without any hearing in an Irish court. This is the worst attack on civil liberties in Europe since Hitler’s Nazi regime!
The despatch of the first of 350 Irish troops to Chad in Central Africa as part of an EU Battle Group being deployed under a UN resolution raises once again the debate about the function of the Irish Defence Forces and its deployments abroad. This is the first occasion that our forces are going out under EU Command rather than direct UN Command as in all previous cases. While this mission is basically humanitarian assistance in its content under UN Resolution 1778 which proposes to keep the peace and defend the refugees from conflict in the Darfur province of Sudan who have fled across the border to Chad, the question of mission control and policy matters has not been debated or outlined in any fashion available to the public or Dáil Éireann.
The rank and file representative body, PDFORRA, has also raised the question of funding of this operation as the EU does not pay for individual countries supplying troops like the UN does. Thus the question arises as to whether the Department of Defence is going to fund this from current budgets or whether the Government will provide a supplementary budget for the purpose. Although this endeavour is being promoted as an EU operation “under mandate of the United Nations” it is for all practical purposes a NATO operation as EU military affairs were allocated to NATO under the Nice Treaty of 2003. As pointed out by Susan George, the distinguished US political scientist, at a meeting in Liberty Hall, Dublin, last Saturday, 03 Samhain/November 2007,
NATO is not an EU institution but is run by the USA.
The EU Command is headed by Javier Solana, former Secretary General of NATO and currently EU “Security” Commissioner. Solana, a complete imperialist stooge and a$$-lick of Buckfush and Blairschmuck, supports the illegal war in Iraq and the war in Afghanistan and is the prime agitator of further militarisation of the EU as outlined in the so-called “Reform Treaty”, the rejected EU “Constitution” under another name. Solana was also a leading shriek-owl in the illegal and barbaric bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 in which hundreds of civilians were killed and thousands forced from their homes in massive destruction of Yugoslav cities and towns. Hospitals, schools and working public transport were indiscriminately bombed in an unprecedented onslaught on a European country by NATO air strikes in an effort to intimidate Yugoslavia into compliance with NATO diktat.
In 2001, Solana bullied and intimidated the Macedonian Government into accepting completely unjustified demands by the KLA terrorist organisation for concessions for “ethnic” Albanians living in Macedonia. Solana threatened to withdraw EU aid from Macedonia and block its application for EU membership unless it complied with NATO’s diktat. Intimidation, murderous violence, blackmail, bribery, mafia gangsterism, all used in NATO’s plan to establish military bases in all the former Eastern Bloc countries bordering Russia.
This unelected, despicable parasite Solana, is the individual to whom Irish troops in Chad must now report and with whose instructions they must comply. The Irish Government has agreed to send our troops overseas without any public debate and on a mission whose parameters have been decided behind closed doors by unelected officials.
This is an example of what we may expect as routine under the so-called EU “Reform Treaty” which was accepted by the Council of Ministers without debate in Lisbon last month. Ireland is now the only EU member which must hold a referendum on this monstrous bureaucratic assault on European Democracy and Citizens’ Rights and it is vitally important that it be decisively rejected by the Irish people.
If this “Treaty” is ratified then large areas of decision-making will be removed from democratic control and scrutiny. EU bureaucrats we don’t elect can make laws we can’t change or challenge and our parliament, Dáil Éireann, will have no say in it. EU Officials will be immune from prosecutuion, but, Europol Police will be able to travel here and arrest anyone on their own warrants without any hearing in an Irish court. This is the worst attack on civil liberties in Europe since Hitler’s Nazi regime!
Photo: FFML.FearFeasa Mac Léinn
Áth Cliath/Dublin, 07 SAMHAIN /NOVEMBER 2007.
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