In a statement marking the 70th anniversary of the end of World War Two, and listing Nazi war crimes, the WFTU declares:
'Winter
of 1941. In Katyn (Belarus) under the control of the German Nazi,
thousands of Polish Military Officials were executed and buried in mass
graves. In April 1943, the Nazis tried to turn their
crime into a provocation against the Soviet Union by claiming that they
discovered graves from people killed by the Red Army. This provocation
is still utilized by some today. '
Amongst those who must be included as 'still using this provocation' has been, since 1990, the Russian Government, including its President, Vladimir Putin. For a detailed account of this Soviet massacre, see Wikipedia,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_massacre.
The statement provides evidence that the WFTU is not simply a Communist organisation - for which ample evidence and argument exists - but a Stalinist one.
This is, however, unlikely to lead to disaffiliation by either the the affiliated Indian AITUC or CITU union centres, the Peruvian CGTP or various South African COSATU unions which have recently affiliated to the WFTU. Nor, for that matter, is it likely to lead to any public or even confidential complaints to the General Secretary of the WFTU, the prominent Greek Communist, George Mavrikos.
The CGTP has long provided the WFTU with its Deputy General Secretary, Valentin Pacheco. And South African affiliates - which are simultaneously affiliated with the social-reformist International Trade Union Confederation - are likely to feel (or even privately state) that they are in the ITUC for practical reasons, in the WFTU for ideological ones.
Such ideological reasons themselves amount to the WFTU's rhetorical anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism - a rhetoric which does not extend to the capitalism developing in Communist Vietnam or the imperialism exhibited in Tibet by Communist China.
Peter Waterman, The Hague
Disclosure: I worked in the Education and Solidarity Department of the WFTU in Prague for two years or so in the later-1960s, leaving after the Soviet invasion of Prague, 1968. This invasion was initially condemned by the WFTU Secretariat, a position later buried by a WFTU Council Meeting, Berlin, late-1968. I have written on the WFTU and the Soviet invasion. Most recently this has been in my 'Itinerary of a Long-Distance Internationalist: From Coldwar Communism to the Global Emancipatory Movement' (2014), available online and free here:
http://www.into-ebooks.com/book/from_coldwar_communism _to_the_global_emancipatory_movement.
