That the political content of Fatah doctrine remained vague was no mere accident. The ideologists of Al-Fatah declared that the aim of the movement was to bring together all the revolutionary forces engaged in the struggle for liberation, and that "Byzantine discussions " about the social structures to emerge after liberation were to be eschewed. Unless there was ideological neutrality, the patriotic effort would be dissipated and the Arab masses alienated: in a battle for survival ideological differences had to be put aside.83 Other Palestinian organizations, such as the two factions of the "Popular Front of the Liberation of Palestine" (PFLP and PDFLP) refused to accept such ideological neutralism. This group, originally known by the name ANM (Arab National Movement, Kau- miyun el arab) was founded in Beirut in the 1950s. Among its slogans, the concept of "vengeance," with its connotations of Arab tribal vengeance, featured prominently, and it was also known as the "fire and iron" group. In the words of its historian, the ANΜ gradually gave up these slogans under the pressure of charges of Fascism and fanaticism.84 They supported Nasserism at first but later many members announced that they had embraced "scientific socialism." In 1969 the group split into two factions — one led by Dr. Habash (PFLP), the other headed by Naif Hawatme. The doctrinal differences between the two factions were insubstantial, but Hawatme's PDFLP did place greater emphasis on political rather than terrorist activity; it also regarded itself as the more Marxist of the two groups, stressing its affinity with Cuban and Vietnamese socialism. In actual fact the cause of the split was not a clash of political views so much as a clash of temperaments between the leading figures. Both factions agreed on certain theoretical formulations, such as the necessity to conduct the war under the leadership of a revolutionary Marxist-Leninist party, and to transform the guerrilla war into a "people's war of liberation." In contrast to Fatah, they inveighed against Arab "reactionary circles," threatening to blow up installations in the oil-producing countries. On several occasions they even threatened that a revolution in the Arab world was the prerequisite for the liberation of Palestine. The leadership of the Palestinian resistance, as they saw it, had to be taken out of the hands of "petty bourgeois elements"; only the working class, in coalition with poor peasants, would safeguard the revolution.85
As so often, however, guerrilla practice was by no means coincident with guerrilla doctrine: the PFLP did not carry out its threats against Saudi Arabia or Kuwait, and no attempt was made to put working-class cadres at the helm of the guerrilla movement. If the PFLP spokesmen proclaimed that they did not fear the prospect of a third world war for they had nothing to lose, this assertion also has to be taken with a pinch of salt. Of all guerrilla movements in history, the Palestinian resistance groups appear the richest by far; the annual contributions by Arab governments were estimated in 1973 as being in the range of fifty to a hundred million dollars.86 The Arab guerrillas have more to lose than their chains. Neither PFLP nor PDFLP showed any intention of forming a Marxist-Leninist party, or of cooperating with the existing Communist parties.
There were many unique elements in the history of the Palestinian organizations. They became involved in large-scale fighting in their host countries (Jordan and Lebanon) which felt threatened by the emergence of a "state within a state." The Palestinians showed great aptitude in the conduct of propaganda warfare abroad; it was a major political victory that by the mid-1970s there was growing acceptance of the fact that the Palestine issue was not just a refugee problem but involved the restoration of a people's legitimate national rights. This achievement was not however the result of a successful guerrilla war but of the oil weapon and the increasing weight of Arab governments in international politics.
Nkrumah, Nasution, Grivas
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s guerrilla warfare was a topic of the greatest interest; one U.S. Marine Corps officer called the sixties "the decade of the guerrilla."87 Those recently engaged in guerrilla warfare were asked to make their thoughts and their experiences more widely known. Others like Kwame Nkrumah who had no obvious expertise in the field, practical or theoretical, nevertheless volunteered obiter dicta on the subject. Nkrumah wrote his book during his Conakry exile, shortly before his death.88 On the basis of various diagrams, he tried to show that colonialism was "primitive imperialism," Fascism was "extreme capitalism," that revolutionary warfare was the key to African freedom, and that a new African nation ought to be established within the continental framework. His blueprint envisaged the establishment of an All African People's Revolutionary Army (AAPRA) under the command of an All African People's Revolutionary Party. The main enemy was neo-colonialism, and though Nkrumah called for its unmasking, he finally restricted himself to innuendoes about certain, unnamed regimes. Nor did he elaborate in his Handbook on the fact that the guerrillas, in all probability, would haye to fight Africans rather than foreign neo-colonialists. Since Nkrumah had no firsthand knowledge of guerrilla warfare, the military sections of his book are not original; he borrowed quite indiscriminately from Mao, Castro, the Algerian and other guerrilla leaders. The resulting admixture was so vague that it could be applicable to every country and none. The Communists were ambivalent towards Nkrumah: they welcomed his attempt to apply Marxist-Leninist ideas to Africa, but were dismayed by his ideological pretensions, his claims to have established an original system ("Conscientism," "Nkrumahism"). In addition, there were differences on matters of substance; to give but one example — neo-colonialism for Nkrumah was "collective imperialism," whereas the Communists always emphasized the contradictions between the various imperialist powers.
Abdul Harris Nasution was not among the trailblazers of guerrilla warfare either, but he commanded more respect as a military authority, in view of his personal involvement. He was twenty-three years of age when the Japanese invaded his native Indonesia and had just been commissioned in the Netherlands Indies armies. He then served in the Civil Defense Forces established by the Japanese. In the war against the Dutch he first commanded a division and was later made chief of the operational staff of the Indonesian armed forces. Subsequently, as Indonesian minister of defense, he had considerable counterinsurgency experience. His guerrilla handbook, written in 1953, reminds one of Mao with the politics left out. As a precondition of success in guerrilla warfare, according to Nasution, the guerrilla's roots must lie in the people. The counterguerrilla had to try to sever the guerrilla from this base, not only by military operations but by political, psychological and economic action.89 He is not an uncritical admirer of guerrilla warfare, and time and again stressed its limitations: "How great were the setbacks and how great the amount of confusion and difficulty that befell us because we played the role of the guerrilla too long." In his view, guerrilla-mania (the lack of discipline, planning, the belief that everyone could fight as he wished) was the most dangerous enemy of the guerrilla movement, having the effect of a counterguerrilla movement. Like Mao, Nasution accepted the general fact that guerrilla warfare alone could not ensure victory; hopefully, it weakened the enemy by draining his resources. Final victory, as he saw it, could only be achieved by a regular army in a conventional war.90
An axiomatic statement of this kind might have been true with regard to China. But it certainly did not apply to Indonesia where resistance against the Dutch never proceeded beyond sporadic acts of violence. General Grivas's experience in Cyprus is further proof that generalizations about guerrilla warfare are of doubtful value; according to the classics of guerrilla warfare, it should never have happened because the territory was too small. Yet a handful of combatants, variously estimated between sixty and two hundred, who never had more than a hundred automatic weapons and five hundred to six hundred shotguns between them, sustained a fight against several divisions of British soldiers for four years and eventually ousted the British.91 Conditions were not propitious for a variety of reasons: EOKA was right wing whereas many Cypriots gravitated towards Communism; the Turkish minority needless to mention saw in the EOKA fighter the enemy par excellence.
Metaphorically, EOKA was anything but a fish in a friendly ocean. One unique feature of guerrilla warfare in Cyprus was the smallness of the units involved, which only rarely exceeded eight to ten men. Grivas's original plan had been to concentrate his units in the Olympus and Pentadactylos mountains where the terrain seemed most suitable. But he soon changed his plan; most of the fighting proceeded in the lowlands, and eventually in the towns and the suburbs. On the basis of his experience, Grivas wrote that leadership was more important than terrain. Some of his best results were achieved in fiat and nearly treeless terrain: "It remains axiomatic that in guerrilla warfare, with able and courageous leadership, one can take on any undertaking, whatever the nature of the terrain."92 Most of his observations are in the mainstream of guerrilla doctrine: there is not set, textbook approach and no universal tactics, each case is special. Attacks should be sudden blows of short duration, boldly executed, and followed by instant and rapid withdrawal. The entire territory should be a single field of battle, without distinction between front and rear. The enemy should never know where one might strike. The overall strategy should be to wear the opponent down by prolonged attrition. All this was unexceptional but it is most unlikely that Grivas would have made any progress had he faced an enemy more resolute than the British forces in Cyprus. Britain was about to liquidate the last outposts of its empire in any event and, given these circumstances, even very slight armed resistance was bound to precipitate the process. General Grivas's experience shows that guerrilla operations can be launched in the most unlikely conditions, but they are likely to succeed only if the enemy is either weak or refuses to take drastic action. There are no universal lessons to be drawn from the Cyprus experience. The political constellation was auspicious and this more than compensated EOKA for the adverse topographical conditions. Guerrillas trying their luck in similar conditions against a different enemy would have been destroyed.
Guerrilla Warfare and Communist Doctrine
Contrary to widespread belief there is no specific Communist guerrilla doctrine. Communists have of course been concerned with the seizure of power, be it as the result of armed insurrection, civil war, or political process. Soviet and European Communists assumed that more probably than not this would involve the use of military force, but they have never argued that it was the only possible way to power. Guerrilla warfare for the Russians was just one manifestation of the revolutionary process, which ought to be utilized in the fight for the worldwide victory of Communism. For the Chinese it was one specific stage in an armed struggle which would inevitably lead to national and social liberation in the Third World and thus prelude the triumph of Communism in the industrially developed countries.
Such general observations do not, however, suffice for an interpretation of Soviet and Chinese policies vis-à-vis guerrilla movements. For the approach towards individual groups depended upon a great many factors, doctrinal considerations being only one of them. The Soviet policy of détente did not in principle preclude support for movements of national liberation in Asia and Africa. On the contrary, the Soviet leaders had a genuine interest in their success for they assumed that as a result there would be a shift in the overall global balance of power in their favor. They knew, furthermore, that unless they supported these liberation movements the Chinese would appear as the champions of national liberation. On the other hand detente, or to be precise, Soviet reluctance to become involved in a world war in the nuclear age, did inhibit to a certain extent the amount of help that could be given to the proponents of armed struggle in various parts of the world. For the Soviet leaders assessed, quite correctly, that it would be difficult in the long run to prevent a major war unless some control was exercised over the conduct of small wars outside their own immediate sphere of interest. This assessment gave rise in Latin America, and to a certain extent in the Middle East, to complaints about "Soviet betrayal." Most guerrilla movements would have instinctively turned to China but for the unfortunate fact that China could be of much less help as a supplier of arms and money, and could not lend them much political support either. They also did not like certain aspects of Chinese theory and practice which were thought too primitive for Latin America or simply inapplicable to other parts of the world.
On the whole, Soviet leaders took a dim view of guerrilla warfare in developed countries. In their book it was the task of the Communist parties in these countries to make the revolution; meddling petty bourgeois elements only caused trouble. More likely than not their endeavors would fail, bringing harm upon the Communists too. On the other hand Communist spokesmen justified an armed struggle in Third World countries and, on certain conditions, else-where;* Communist parties have on occasion engaged in guerrilla warfare not only in Asia but also in Greece, Venezuela and the Philippines. But more often than not the initiative seems to have come from the local leadership. During the last decade Moscow appears to have counselled prudence and caution: more than a spark was needed to kindle the flame in countries in which the working class was weak and disorganized. The main problem facing the newly independent nations was, in the Soviet view, to overcome backwardness and poverty and to consolidate their political and economic independence. The leaders of the main Communist parties in Latin America, such as Prestes, Corvalan and Arismendi, have echoed these warnings against "adventurism." Only mass movements led by the experienced vanguard party of the working class, armed with Marxist-Leninist theory, could guarantee the victory of the revolution. Or to quote the leader of the Peruvian Communists, Jorge del Prado: international experience has shown that "revolutions are made by the masses" and though "the majority of our people feel the need for radical changes . .. the masses have not yet come to see the need to fight for political power."93 Venezuela in 1962 was the one major exception to the rule in Latin America but the leaders of the party soon had second thoughts there too and discovered that an armed struggle was after all only an "auxilary form" of the general fight. Orthodox Communists quite justifiably suspected the loyalty of pro-guerrilla elements for the very same Venezuelan leaders who had been most enthusiastic about guerrilla warfare (Bravo, Petkoff, Marquez) were later to display a disturbing lack of loyalty, criticizing Soviet policy in Czechoslovakia, for instance. Eventually they all left, or were excluded from, the party.
The Soviet leaders faced problems whenever they had to deal with radical elements who had come to power after a successful guerrilla war. In both Cuba and Algeria the Communist parties had stood aside initially or had even opposed the struggle. In Cuba the problem was solved, after some minor altercations, by the merger of Fidel's supporters and the local Communists. The Algerian FLN, on the other hand, did not wish to transform itself into a Marxist-Leninist party, and the Soviets had to desist from giving open support to the Algerian Communist party. In Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau there were no Communist parties of standing and, for that reason, no complications arose in the relationship between the Russians and the local guerrillas. In the Arab world the Communist parties supported the Palestinian guerrillas in principle without however actively participating in the fighting. There was political rivalry but it did not reach a critical stage.
Ideological reservations quite apart, their own experience with the Yugoslavs, the Albanians and the Chinese has taught the Soviet leaders to view the guerrillas with concern. One only had to scratch these self-styled Communists to discover that they were fiercely nationalistic underneath. Worse still, they disputed Soviet hegemony over the Communist camp and even pursued policies contrary to Soviet interests. There was a real danger that victorious guerrillas elsewhere would prove no more amenable. On balance, Soviet policymakers found it much easier to cooperate with non-Communist military dictators than with radical revolutionaries unwilling to accept guidance, let alone control.
Soviet spokesmen did stress that they favored the armed struggle provided conditions were right. But this raised the question as to what "ripeness" really meant. According to the orthodox interpretation guerrill
a war in Malaya and the Philippines, in Burma and in Greece had failed because the mass base of the insurgents was too narrow. It was admitted, in retrospect, that in Malaya and the Philippines a revolutionary situation had not existed, and the hope that it would come about under the impact of a guerrilla war had been misplaced: "The maturity of the national liberation struggle had been overestimated."94
The Chinese were not plagued by such doubts and reservations; if a guerrilla struggle failed it simply meant that the guerrillas had not tried hard enough. Violent revolution, as they saw it, was the universal law. This approach found its extreme formulation in Lin Piao's famous article of 1966 on the international significance of Mao's theory of People's War. Lin Piao wrote that to despise the enemy strategically was an elementary requirement for a revolutionary, for without the courage to despise him and without daring to win, no revolution could be made. All over Asia, Africa and Latin America, where the basic political and economic conditions resembled those of old China, the people were being subjected to aggression and enslavement. Only the countryside provided the broad areas in which revolutionaries could maneuver freely and proceed to final victory: "Taking the entire globe, if North America and Western Europe can be called 'the cities of the world' then Asia, Africa and Latin America constitute the 'rural areas'. . . . The contemporary world revolution presents a picture of the encirclement of the cities by the rural areas."95
Pronouncements of this kind are closely studied in the West without, however, sufficient attention being paid to the fact that there is no greater congruence of theory and practice in China than in the Soviet Union, and that, furthermore, theories change as do the fortunes of those who enunciate them: Lin Piao did not survive his famous article for long. Though the Chinese are committed to support the forces of revolution all over the world, they also have a solemn commitment to coexist peacefully with the countries of the Third World. Chinese experience has shown that guerrillas can create a mass base while fighting an enemy, but this happened in very specific circumstances, during a full-scale war against a foreign invader. With all their belief in voluntarism the Chinese leaders never stated that everyone could start a revolution. Only a truly popular revolutionary movement, with a mass base, would stand a chance of prevailing over its enemies, and therefore a secretly organized coup could be successful in the Third World only in exceptional circumstances.96 Chinese willingness to support revolutionary movements was not unlimited; it did not, for instance, extend to "urban guerrilla" groups.
Guerrilla Warfare Page 50