Against this background the VPK held its congress from May 23 to 26. As the result of a meeting held earlier this spring with representatives of the VPK, the SP, the Workers' List and independent trade unionists, the party leadership proposed that the congress support an electoral alliance. The proposal also had the purpose of achieving a compromise within the VPK between the "renewers" who want to change the party's name, omitting the "K" for communist, and who in general want to accelerate the rightward turn of the party, and the so-called "traditionalists" who want to keep the "K" either because they do not want to cut links with because mey do not want to cut miks will Stalinism or because they oppose social democratization. This proposal was, however, sacrificed at the congress in order to preserve party unity. The VPK chairperson, Lars Werner, in his opening speech decided to back down on the leadership compromise and opt for a more rapid "renewal" changing the party's name. With the support of a minority of the congress (136 for, 133 against with 4 abstentions) the party decided to follow his line and took the name "The Left Party". And, in the process, the idea of seeking broader alliances and electoral unions was dropped and forgotten. After the congress leading VPK members — who however did nothing during the congress — are trying to minimize the importance of that decision and are not ruling out an electoral alliance. Common left front difficult to achieve This decision, as well as the decision of the Workers' List, will make it more difficult for all those who would like to see common action on the left in the coming period. It is a fact that broad mass activity has been held back during the last years not out of satisfaction with the policies being pursued, but because there has been a total lack of positive examples of class struggle and because of the lack of real, credible alternatives to social democracy. Today we can see a small upsurge in the struggles, but there is still an imperative need to strengthen all forms and forums of unity - a task that is going to be central to the Socialist Party in the coming period.
It is a task that must be undertaken, whether within the framework of the Dala rebellion, in united action against racist attacks on refugee homes, in coordinated campaigns against entering the Common 16 Market or in continuing the fight for a / united left slate in the elections. * International Viewpoint #188 • July 2, 1990
Step forward in fight for abortion rights THE framing of the new abortion law in Belgium caught the attention of the world's media when the king refused to sign it. After getting a majority in the Senate, the law was passed with 61% support in the Chamber of Deputies. After a short delay the law came into force on April 3, 1990. This is the first time that the 1876 abortion law, which is based on the French penal code of 1810 and which absolutely forbids abortion, has been amended - and in a fundamental fashion. IDA DEQUEEKER
W OMEN decide: Accord-
Wing to the new law, women can legally obtain an abortion up to 12 weeks after conception if they find themselves in a situation of distress. All they have to do is inform a doctor of their situation, which they define for themselves. The abortion must be carried out by a doctor in a medical institution. This means that in practise it is the woman who decides whether or not to have an abortion. This is all the more true in that a network of abortion clinics already exists where abortion is carried out according to these principles. Abortions that are carried out without reference to these regulations remain an offence, except in cases where the health of the woman is seriously endangered or the foetus has an incurable disease.
This partial, but important decriminalization of abortion is without doubt a belated - and therefore unacknowledged - recognition of 20 years of actions by the women's movement and the left. At the same time it is the result of the development of the political relation of forces, and the decline in the power of the Christian party, the CVP, which has historically tried to reconcile the different social classes in Belgium and has been the main political instrument of the Belgian bourgeoisie. A parliamentary breakthrough: The text of the new law is dated 1985, when a proposed liberal/socialist law was presented to the Senate. Despite the fact that at the time the government was a liberal/ democrat/Christian coalition, the proposal got onto the parliamentary agenda. Previously, even much less radical proposals had not got this far. The CVP always managed to block any debate, forbidding any questioning of the ideological basis of the Christian workers' allegiance to the CVP.
Why was there this breakthrough in 1985? This is a long story. While in 1973 a doctor from Liege, Dr. Peers, spent 33 days in preventative detention for openly stating that he carried out abortions at the request of the women concerned, by the end of the 1970s such a thing could no longer happen. Several university clinics were openly carrying out abortions, and there are abortion centres in Wallonia [French speaking Belgium] and Brussels. Another centre was opened in Gand in Flanders in 1980. In other words for some years the law has been openly flouted. Starting in 1974, against a background of big mobilizations on the abortion issue, a series of Belgian governments, always including the Christian Democrats, tried to avoid confronting this explosive question. In 1974, abortion was referred to an "Ethical Commission" which came up with a split verdict - 13 for a change in the law, 12 against. Several attempts by the Liberals to introduce into parliament slight changes in the law ran up against the opposition of the CVP. For a whole period the courts, while waiting for the law to change, had adopt-
ed a tolerant attitude to the developing pro-abortion network. However, in 19823 judicial attacks recommenced. These attacks were arbitrary, introducing a situation where rights were not secure. In 1985 there was a monster trial of 52 helpers and patients in the abortion centre in Gand. Marijke Colle, a member of the Belgian Socialist Workers Party (POS/ SAP - Belgian section of the Fourth International) was among the accused, as president of the centre. Nonetheless, a survey found that in 1985, Belgian citizens underwent 15,940 abortions, of which some 5,000 were carried out in the Netherlands and the rest in Belgium itself.
Thus, even from the point of view of a bourgeois democratic state, an intolerable situation was developing. Nonetheless, the CVP maintained its totally uncompromising attitude, while from the other side the notion of a minimal compromise became increasingly less acceptable under the pressure of the way that the real situation was developing.
This polarization was the background to the liberal/socialist alternative that was to form the basis of the new law with the support of the Greens. This alternative had the merit of corresponding to the practise of abortion as it really existed, which was felt by much of the population to be a gain, as well as matching the conceptions of an important part of the population. Furthermore the bill had a good chance of getting passed given the electoral decline of the CVP. At the same time the CVP, the eternal party of government and the incarnation of the austerity policy, was facing a growing degree of autonomy on the part of the Christian workers' movement. On top of this, since the 1987 reform of the state, the CVP, the majority party overall, has had to confront the Socialist Party (PS) which is the majority party in Wallonia.
With its traditional "nyet" against any movement on the abortion question, the CVP ended up clearly in a minority, supported only by the extreme right. Its efforts to use the advice of the State Council to block the liberal/socialist proposal, or to arrive at a more moderate consensus, ended in failure. This left the CVP in a cleft stick, expressed in contradictions within its own ranks. One position, put across by the prime minister Martens, concerned with the stability of the government, supported a "realistic" approach, another, represented by the party president Van Rompuy, upheld ideological purity.
The fundamentalists, who had threatened to bring down the government if the law was adopted, had in the end to bend to the realists, after a further effort to find a compromise - permitting abortion in cases where the health of the woman was in danger and in cases of rape or incest -came to nothing. Even the declaration with which the CVP tried to console itself
- pointing to its majority position in
Flanders - vanished into thin air after the vote, when it turned out that a majority of the Flemish deputies had voted for the law. The king: With hindsight we can perhaps identify another reason why the CVP maintained its rigid attitude for so long. The court made it known in a discreet fashion that the very Catholic king was opposed to the proposal. But in vain. When the law was passed, the king renounced his constitutional duties. He refused to sign the law, referring to insurmountable problems of conscience.
Was this just a caprice of the "melancholic" king? No. In the Belgian political context, with growing centrifugal forces expressed by the State reform, the austerity policy and the resistance to it and so on, we have to understand the initiative of the king - the symbol of, and a factor in, the unity of the country — as a conscious attempt to intervene in an authoritarian fashion, using problems of conscience as a pretext. The parliament unanimously let the king off, recognizing his temporary inability to govern. Thus as the ministers signed the law in his place, the king could address the nation as its just and principled father. Some 55% of the citizens were found to "understand" this attitude. Could this be a precedent allowing in other circumstances a royal intervention from above the parliamentary melée? All the parties, including the socialists and the Greens, covered up this intervention by the king — who according to the constitution, as king, does not have the right to freely express his political opinions — with moralizing about the king, as a human being, having the right to a personal conscience. Socialists: Throughout the whole history of abortion legislation in Belgium, the Socialists have not shown much initia-
BELGIUM tive, either inside or outside parliament. A Socialist bill introduced in 1974 to change the abortion law while taking into account the sensibilities of the CVP, had the merit, together with the first public statements by doctors, of launching the public debate on abortion.
But even in those days the new women's movement, as well as a part of the traditional women's movement, found the proposals unsatisfactory. They wanted the recognition of a woman's right to choose. It was only in 1978, after the big mobilizations by women in the 1970s around the slogan "abortion out of the penal code, let the woman decide" that the Socialists put forward a bill to decriminalize abortion. The women's movement and the revolutionary left supported this proposal. But the SP itself did not mobilize: there was no attempt to arouse a broad social movement to support the bill and no policy was developed towards the Christian workers' movement — for example demanding that it would, for democratic reasons, not place obstacles in the way of a parliamentary vote. The party hid behind the fact that there was not at the time a majority in parliament for the proposal. Having more or less regilded its banner, the SP put the abortion question off indefinitely.
When now at last a satisfactory change in the law no longer appears ruled out in the parliamentary arena, the Socialist parties, who have just re-entered the government are doing everything to limit extra-parliamentary actions of support, which they cannot control. The argument is that we must not upset the delicate balance in the parliament and government. The Greens think in the same way, from fear of negative electoral repercussions. The women's movement and the left: But nothing can change the fact that the parliamentary victory was preceded by 20 years of extra-parliamentary action in which the women's movement and the revolutionary left were the irreplaceable driving force. They played this role in the big united mobilizations of the 70s (abortion out of the penal code; the abortion committees and their constant struggle for a broad united front; the actions to raise awareness such as the national women's day in 1976 around the theme abortion, let the woman decide"; the foundation of the illegal abortion centres, which work according to the principle of a woman's choice; and the mobilizations against the trials of patients and helpers at abortion clinics.
All this activity produced the profound change in people's thinking which created the conditions under which women can with dignity demand a fundamental democratic right that has been so long denied them by the patriarchal ideology of the family — the right to control their own bodies. kid at rationally. Ted ab ore ox to ce 17 looked at rationally. Thus, the existence July 2, 1990 • #188 International Viewpoint
BELGIUM / EL SALVADOR of means of having an abortion has not increased the number of abortions. On the contrary. The number of abortions in Belgium varied between 18,000 and 34,000 between 1968-1972 but was 13,000 to 15,000 per year in 1978 to 1982. The ending on the ban on distribution of contraceptives in 1973 seems to have led rapidly to their generalized use. In Flanders at the start of the 80s, three out of ten pregnancies were unwanted. Some half of these pregnancies were voluntarily terminated. The evolution in social attitudes has surely also had its impact in the Christian milieu.
Only this can explain the silence of a whole series of Christian base organizations when the CVP stated its positions on the recent legal changes. The Bishops' rejection of the new law has also had no impact on the population, who have for a long time been putting the new law into practice. Ideology: The separation of the parliamentary and extra-parliamentary fields of action, the fruit of the Socialists' efforts, has had a negative effect on the terms of the debate. The keystone of the new law is the right of the woman to decide — her right to self-determination. The supporters of the new law restricted this idea in liberal terms of "personal liberty", that is as a conflict of interests between woman and embryo, a conflict of values between the right of the woman to dispose of her own body and the "right to life". This leaves open a space for the right to step forward as the defenders of the rights of the unborn child, weak and defenceless. This approach also skirts round the issue of the problems of maternity under capitalism, tied to the specific oppression of women within the family. The right to abortion implies both the right to refuse maternity in general and to reject specific oppressive form of maternity. This latter poses the problem of alternative, nonoppressive forms of maternity. All this was certainly not on the parliamentary was certainly not on ine parnamentary agenda — even despite the fact that abortion is one of the crimes "against the family order and public morality". Inside the women's movement this has always been an integral part of the discussion on abortion.
Let us return to everyday political reality in Belgium. Despite the fact that Belgium has just adopted the new law, the parliamentary debate is far from over. To console the CVP, parliament has voted to set up an Evaluation Commission. This commission is to assemble statistics and also give its advice on further legislation.
On the basis of this commission's reports, there will be a parliamentary debate every two years. Thus the next parliamentary session on abortion will be in the winter of 1992-93. Even if the CVP and its allies will find it difficult to 18 reverse the gains made, it is still necessary to be vigilant. * International Viewpoint #188 • July 2, 1990
Peace is still a long way off INTRODUCTION THE FIRST YEAR of the government of the extreme right National Republican Alliance (ARENA) of President Cristiani reveals a bloody balance sheet - 3,285 deaths, 2,074 detainees and 249 disappearances. According to the Salvadoran Human Rights Commission, the armed forces were responsible for 2,868 murders.
The electoral defeat of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua has impelled the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FLN) to give serious consideration to the question of negotiations. It has succeeded in imposing the mediation of the United Nations on the Salvadoran government, which implies an international recognition of the Salvadoran conflict and above all of the belligerent role of the FLN. In these negotiations, the FMLN is demanding early elections and, drawing on the experience of Nicaragua, that certain conditions are met for its participation in the political life of the country - above all, it is demanding the purging of the army.
But the FMLN, as always, is maintaining its military pressure; thus It attacked the residence of President Cristiani on the same day as the discussions opened in Geneva, and it subsequently launched a broad offensive in the mountainous region of Morazan. It has shown the Salvadoran government and masses that it has maintained its military capacity and that it has not abandoned its revolutionary objectives, belying those who sought evidence of capitulation in its participation in the negotiations.