The following remarks on the campaign against Julian Assange were made by Roxanne Baker of
the International Bolshevik Tendency at a debate with the Alliance for Workers Liberty in London on
9 October 2012 hosted by the Anticapitalist Initiative.
The persecution of Julian Assange, which is presented as an issue centring on questions of rape,
sexual assault and the rights of women, is in fact essentially an attack on democratic
rights—in particular, freedom of the press. Differences on the left over the Assange case do
not revolve around ‘taking rape seriously’, but rather subservience to ruling-class
pressure and the willingness of some ‘revolutionaries’ to act as mouthpieces for
imperialist propaganda.
Everyone knows that Assange and WikiLeaks antagonised the leaders of the ‘free world’
by publishing hundreds of thousands of classified documents and pieces of diplomatic correspondence
that laid bare the inner workings of imperialist diplomacy and exposed the monstrous crimes
committed in the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. Of particular concern was a video entitled
‘Collateral Murder’, released by WikiLeaks in April 2010, that showed American soldiers
in an Apache helicopter gunning down Iraqi civilians (including children and journalists).
The savage persecution of Bradley Manning, the young soldier who is accused of providing
WikiLeaks with documentation of the crimes of the US military, stands as an object lesson in how
‘enemies of the state’ are treated in ‘the world’s greatest
democracy’. Manning has been held in solitary confinement for more than two years without a
court hearing, a blatant violation of the supposed right to a speedy trial. Socialists demand the
immediate release of Bradley Manning.
The attack on Manning and Assange provides dramatic evidence of the erosion of democratic rights
in the American security state and its partners in Sweden, Britain and elsewhere. I believe we
should applaud the decision by the Ecuadorean government to grant asylum to Assange and I note with
pleasure that [British Foreign Secretary] William Hague has had to backtrack on earlier threats to
invade the embassy to seize him. Assange, as everyone knows, has not even been charged with a crime.
The Swedes ostensibly want him for questioning in connection with accusations attributed to two
women with whom he had sex during a visit to Sweden in August 2010. Assange is willing to answer
questions from Swedish authorities, but not to be extradited to Sweden, from where he could be
whisked to the US to face charges under the Espionage Act that could result in life imprisonment or
even execution.
It is impossible to know with certainty what, if any, legitimacy there is to the allegations
against Assange. But there are many indications that the whole case is essentially a stitch up. The
two women supposedly originally approached police in an attempt to compel Assange to get tested for
sexually transmitted diseases. The lead complainant, Anna Ardin, who had invited Assange to Sweden
and organised his trip, proposed to the other alleged victim, Sofia Wilen, that they go to the
police after they compared notes about their sexual encounters with Assange. Ardin accompanied Wilen
to the police station, having already set up an appointment with a policewoman who was a personal
friend. Ardin herself was subsequently interviewed by telephone.
When Wilen learned that Assange was going to be charged with rape on the basis of her statement
to the police, she terminated the interview and refused to read or sign the transcript. The officer
who uploaded the transcript to the police data system apparently amended it subsequently at the
request of her superior. Despite Wilen’s objections to the whole proceeding, the Swedish
tabloid press immediately began publishing lurid allegations that Assange had been accused of double
rape.
A senior prosecutor who reviewed the case declared that there was not enough evidence to go
forward, and dropped it. In a very unusual move, this decision was reversed through the intervention
of Chief Prosecutor Marianne Ny. There have been plenty of suggestions that this resulted from
political string pulling from on high.
Ardin has connections with an anti-communist Cuban group called Ladies in White, which has
received funding from the US government and is supported by Luis Posada Carriles, a CIA asset
convicted of killing hundreds of people in terror attacks. Ardin’s brother ‘works in
Swedish intelligence, and was a liaison in Washington to US intelligence agencies’, according
to an account that appeared in Counterpunch on 7 December 2010.
Unfortunately, several socialist groups in this country have lent legitimacy to the campaign
against Assange. The Socialist Workers Party [SWP] proposed that: ‘if the Swedish authorities
were serious about investigating [the charges], they would guarantee that Assange would not be
extradited to the US. That could clear the way for him to face his accusers’ [Socialist
Worker, 21 August 2012]. Such a ‘guarantee’ is not on offer, but if it were, it
would not be worth the paper it was printed on, and Assange would be a fool to accept it.
The naiveté of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty [AWL] is even more breathtaking:
‘The Swedish state’s legal system is independent and does not simply deliver verdicts at
the whim of Swedish politicians or, still less, Washington. Swedish law requires evidence showing
“probable cause” for believing the crime was committed, before any extradition request
can be made. In other words we have every reason to believe Assange has a serious case to
answer’ [Solidarity, 22 August 2012]. The AWL claims ‘to argue both against
extradition to the US and at the same time for a fair trial in Sweden on the rape charges’
[Solidarity, 11 July 2012]. They might want to consider the fate of Ahmed Agiza and
Muhammad Alzery, two asylum-seekers who were immediately sent back to Egypt from Sweden in December
2001 following a request from the CIA. In that case, the magnificent machine of impartial Swedish
justice sent these two unfortunates to Mubarak’s torture chambers without even bothering to
notify their lawyers.
Assange has no chance of receiving a ‘fair trial’ (in Sweden or any other US ally).
The sensationalist and prejudicial press coverage of the allegations against him reflect the
implacable hostility of the ruling elites of Sweden, Britain, America and all their imperialist
allies towards the man behind the WikiLeaks revelations. A leaked memo from the American private
strategic forecasting firm, Stratfor, includes a comment by a former deputy chief of the US
Department of State’s counterterrorism division for the Diplomatic Security Service on how to
go after Assange and his friends:
‘Ferreting out [Assange’s] confederates is also key. Find out what other
disgruntled rogues inside the tent or outside. Pile on. Move him from country to country to face
various charges for the next 25 years. But, seize everything he and his family own, to include every
person linked to Wiki.’
—http://wikileaks.org/gifiles/docs/1056763_re-discussion-assange-arrested-.html
Another Stratfor analyst casually remarked: ‘Charges of sexual assault rarely are passed
through Interpol red notices, like this case, so this is no doubt about trying to disrupt WikiLeaks
release of government documents’. So you do not have to be left-wing to understand what is
underway here.
Much of the discussion around this case has swirled around questions of what constitutes rape.
Leaving aside the politically motivated character of the charges and the virtual impossibility of
determining exactly what transpired, on a more general level the key issue in cases of rape and/or
other forms of sexual assault is that of informed consent. It is, for example, clearly criminal to
engage in unprotected sex when consent has been made conditional on the use of a condom.
As there is no chance of Assange getting a fair hearing in Sweden on these allegations,
socialists must oppose all attempts to extradite him. To do so is not to downplay the seriousness of
the crime of rape or any other sort of sexual abuse. In an article headlined, ‘We are Women
Against Rape but we do not want Julian Assange extradited’, published in the Guardian
on 23 August 2012, two experienced anti-rape campaigners correctly pointed out: ‘The
authorities care so little about violence against women that they manipulate rape allegations at
will, usually to increase their powers, this time to facilitate Assange’s extradition or even
rendition to the US’.
Assange is being hunted by America for daring to shine a light on some of the crimes of
imperialism, a capital offense in the eyes of the oppressors. He is no Marxist—he is a liberal
who considers himself a realist, and he has serious illusions. Speaking from the Ecuadorean embassy
on 19 August [2012], he said: ‘I ask President Obama to do the right thing: the United States
must renounce its witch-hunt against WikiLeaks’.
Assange is certainly aware that the US ruling class will not cease its attempt to make an example
of him. The reason he is reduced to calls on bourgeois authority figures to reform themselves is
because any notion of the potential of class struggle lies outside his political framework. We must
defend Assange because he is an advocate of freedom of the press whose revelations have helped the
working class and other victims of capitalist rule. Only by defending the rights and liberties won
through the difficult struggles of past generations—which the capitalist class often tries to
reverse during times of reaction—will it be possible to go forward to win new gains and lay
the basis for overturning the entire system of global oppression and mass murder that imperialist
rule entails.