Apologist for killers

Mr Howells's abject political lurch from left to right has been stunning even by new Labour standards.

From being, in the mid-1980s, a research officer for the South Wales area of the National Union of Mineworkers and a member of the Communist Party to his current status as an apologist for imperialist wars and privatisation is shameful enough.

But his thick-skinned ability to cosy up to a Colombian army unit that specialises in wiping out trade unionists seems to be taking new Labour degeneracy too far.

But not for Mr Howells. In the wake of the demand by Unite Wales regional secretary Andy Richards, supported by the Wales TUC, for his union to end sponsorship of Mr Howells's constituency, the former class warrior has claimed, without any evidence, that JfC supports the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).

He must know that the main concern of JfC is to build solidarity with Colombia's oppressed trade unions, hundreds of whose leaders have been slaughtered by death squads associated with new Labour's friend President Alvaro Uribe.

JfC, which is backed by 40 British trade unions, calls for an end to violence in Colombia, for a reconciliation process and for progress towards democracy.

It supports humanitarian projects to assist victimised trade unionists, to help imprisoned women and children and to raise the curtain that shrouds events in Colombia by sending trade union delegations there.

It also lobbies Mr Howells's government to persuade it to stop providing training and military equipment to Mr Uribe's death-squad regime.

JfC and its trade union supporters have no reason to apologise for their principled activities.

What a pity that the same cannot be said for the wretched MP for Pontypridd.

War crimes

THE blood-soaked governments of the US and Britain are responsible for the deaths of around a million people in Iraq in the five years since they launched their illegal invasion.

By coincidence, they also insist on the right to arraign people from various countries on war-crime charges at the International Criminal Court, despite Washington not even having signed up to the ICC.

Gordon Brown believes that five years after the fact is too soon to have an inquiry into the Iraq war.

But what he and those implicated in the invasion decision really want is to delay judgement until such time as such questions will be regarded as academic and passed off as of historical interest only.

That cannot be allowed to happen. There has, justifiably, been no statute of limitation on the nazi war crimes and neither should there be for those arrogant imperialist leaders who rode roughshod over international law, destroying Iraq and its people.

Today's vigils to mark the fifth anniversary of the onset of invasion should remind people that, no matter how the rich and powerful may wish to sweep these crimes under the carpet, justice still awaits their perpetrators.