Workers' Party of Belgium
by Nadine Rosa-Rosso

In the name of the Central Committee of the Workers' Party
of Belgium, I thank the Communist Party of Greece for
having invited us for advance the unity of the
international communist movement.

Upon its foundation in 1979, the Workers' Party of Belgium
elaborated the relation between the building of the
communist party and the united front policy.
First of all, we affirmed the necessity to accord an
all-time priority to the building of the communist party as
the motor of every untied front policy and as the main
venue for organising the most conscious and determined
workers and youth to fight for the end of capitalism and
the exploitation of man by man. At the same time, we
defined the major orientation of a united front policy,
which we further detailed during our Second Congress, in
1983. At that time, Europe was engulfed by an anticommunist
wave, initiated by intellectuals such as Andre Gorz in
France. In his book �Goodbye to the proletariat� he defined
other motive forces for radical societal change, such as
the environmental, feminist and cultural movements. At that
time, we had to fight a liquidationist current within the
party, which negated the vanguard role of the communist
party and encouraged our members to renounce their task of
building the communist party and develop instead a militant
work in those movements, or even to join the ranks of
social-democracy in order to �fight from within�. While
combating these tendencies, and while reaffirming the
primacy of the building and strengthening of communist
party, we insisted on the necessity for communists to form
united fronts in order to win over the largest masses to
the democratic, anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist ideas
and demands.

In our united front policy, we assigned the priority to
work of the communist militants within the two major union
organisations in Belgium. During the last trade union
elections, one month ago, many members of our party and
other leftist trade unionists whom we supported, have
clearly progressed in the votes of the workers. We also
declared the necessity to work with different political
forces in the course of the struggle for particular
demands. I will return to this point later on. However, at
that time already we estimated that there was no
possibility to form fronts that would include the
leadership of the traditional parties. In our opinion,
social-democracy had completely betrayed the camp of the
workers on the occasion of the First World War, when they
appealed to the workers of the countries at war to defend
their motherland. After the war, social-democracy
participated fully in the ideological and military crusade
against the first socialist State, the Union of Socialist
Soviet Republics. From then on, social-democracy has never
ceased to be the guarantor of the continued existence of
capital and of the imperialist plunder of the Third World.
We also find that the leaders of the ecological or �green�
parties, by defending the market economy in a principled
way, have quickly averred themselves to be candidates for
power-sharing in the Europe of capital. The fall of the
Berlin Wall has reinforced this analysis. In Belgium, all
parties represented in the Parliament, from the extreme
Right to the ecological parties, welcomed the collapse of
socialism as a stage in the liberation of the entire
mankind. It didn't take long before the consequences of
such a choice became evident. In 1990, the allied
imperialist forces installed a murderous embargo against
Iraq, that until this day continuous to cause deaths every
day. In 1991 they went to war oil. This was a warning to
any Third World country that would attempt to demand a fair
price for its raw materials or to engage in a process of
development, independent from imperialism. All traditional
parties supported the embargo. The Belgian ecological
parties were opposed to the war, but this opposition to
imperialist military intervention was short-lived. A few
years later, they didn't show any restraint in supporting
the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. Today, the ecological
parties in our country participate in government, in an
alliance with social-democracy and the liberals. The
government's objective is to rapidly install the American
model in Belgian society. The first concrete measures of
this socialist-liberal-green government had to do with
strengthening the repressive apparatus, with the football
tournament �Euro 2000� providing the ideal pretext.

Notwithstanding the absence of political forces susceptible
to engage in genuinely democratic, anti-capitalist and
anti-imperialist fronts, the Workers' Party of Belgium has
always worked for building of fronts, in some cases
obtaining remarkable successes. Limiting ourselves to our
experiences since the collapse of the Berlin Wall - which
fundamentally changed the correlation of forces in the
world and in our country in favour of reaction, fascism and
militarism - we would like to dwell briefly on a few
successful experiences. In November 1991, the extreme Right
realised a spectacular score in the legislative elections,
getting 475,917 votes on their various lists. The very
evening when the results were made known, the leadership of
our party decided to launch an anti-racist and anti-fascist
front initiative. For a radical anti-racist and
anti-fascist front initiative. For a radical demand, the
automatic granting of citizenship to migrants who had
resided in Belgium for at least five years, we wanted to
get as many signatures as the number of votes gathered by
the extreme Right. I Personally contacted several
progressive personalities and three days after the
elections, we launched the movement �Objective 479,917�.
The success was immediate. A green senator co-operated with
us and submitted a project of law to concretise our demand.
As her party wouldn't go along with her, she quit. We had
given ourselves one year to obtain our objective. And
indeed, exactly one year after the elections we were able
to announce a major victory, having gathered 538,731
signatures (while Belgium has only 10 million inhabitants).
This victory was the result of a great united front work,
mobilising thousands of trade unionists, teachers,
anti-racist personalities and youth in revolt against
rising fascism. We pursued this campaign until we had
obtained 1 million signatures, which was the case after
three years; it was the biggest signature campaign that
Belgium has ever known. The government was forced to
receive a delegation of Objective 479,917. Thanks to this
mass campaign, several parliamentarians were likewise
forced to submit projects of laws, and today, the access to
citizenship is greatly facilitated for migrant citizens,
even if automatic citizenship has not yet been achieved.

Our Anti-Imperialist League has likewise been at the
inception of a large front against the embargo against Iraq
in 1990 and against the war in 1991. The front against the
embargo and the Gulf War took the initiative for the major
demonstrations that took place in Belgium. Anti-War
committees were put into place in numerous schools, trade
unionists came out openly against the embargo and against
the war. We renewed this initiative on the occasion of the
NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. But this time, conditions were
much more difficult, with the green parties, which had
originally become known largely as anti-militarist parties,
now supporting war. We committed the mistake of
underestimating the changes in the situation, and we
refused to participate in fronts whose position, while
correctly advancing the demand �Stop the war�, contained an
implicit support to an European presence in Yugoslavia
rather than a NATO presence. This at first isolated us, but
we rectified our position by taking up a dialogue with all
non-governmental forces, based on a self-criticism of our
sectarian errors. At the beginning of this working year, we
put much emphasis on the need to work and dialogue with all
anti-capitalist, anti-fascist and anti-imperialist forces
in our country. But we refuse to form anti-fascist
alliances with government parties, because we are of the
opinion that the greater danger today is the fascisation
and the militarisation of Europe rather than the direct
coming to power of the extreme Right. Social-democracy is
in power in most of the European Union countries, while the
green parties are taking part in several of them. We also
participate in front campaigns against globalisation, in
the spirit of Seattle, where in December last year a large
mobilisation caused the disruption of the summit of the
World Trade Organisation and helped cause its failure. This
June 10, with more than a thousand youth, third world
activists and trade unionists we mobilised against the
summit of UNICE, the federation of European employers
organisations. We also support the call of the Czech
communists to organise activities against the annual
meeting of the International Monetary Fund and the World
Bank in Prague, at the end of September.

The front we have to build is a front opposed to the
Americanisation of our society, a front against the
construction of a Europe of the multinational corporations,
a Europe of the police, a militarist and imperialist
Europe. By identifying fascism and communism as two equally
dangerous enemies of democracy, the bourgeois parties hope
to prevent the building of such a front. The political and
ideological struggle against fascism and the fascisation of
our society thus goes hand in hand with the convincing
defence of the achievements of the socialist countries, of
the communist ideas and of all parties and organisations in
the world that courageously continue on this road. We are
convinced that by exchanging experiences and proposals,
this meeting will help in the building of such a front. We
are convinced that the communists will be capable to bring
the largest popular masses into the struggle against
imperialism, capitalism and fascism, as they have done in
the past, both during the Second World War and in the
struggle for national liberation in the Third World.

Socialism is the future of mankind.
Thank you very much.