Emma Clancy

On the 30th anniversary of the May 5, 1981 death on hunger strike of Irish republican prisoner Bobby Sands MP, Green Left Weekly spoke to Sands close friend, former prisoner in the Long Kesh H-Blocks along with Sands and leading Belfast Sinn Fein activist Séanna Walsh about the man who has become a revolutionary icon around the world

The publication of the Saville Report, the inquiry into the British army massacre of 14 civil rights protestors in Derry in the north of Ireland in 1972, confirmed what the victims’ families had always known — that those shot had been unarmed and posed no threat to the British Parachute Regiment.

A massive protest was held on October 17 in Donostia/San Sebastian in the Basque Country to protest against the Spanish government’s new wave of arrests against the Basque pro-independence and labour movement.

A humanitarian catastrophe has been escalating over the last three months in the internment camps in which 285,000 Tamil civilians have been imprisoned in the north of Sri Lanka.

More than 100 people attended a conference in Belfast on August 8 on political persecution in the Basque Country organised by the Don’t Extradite the Basques Campaign as part of Feile an Phobail (Festival of the People).

The Don’t Extradite the Basques Campaign was formally launched on June 10 against the extradition to Spain of Belfast-based Basque pro-independence activists Inaki de Juana and Arturo “Benat” Villanueva at a press conference in west Belfast.

Arturo Villanueva Arteaga, a 32-year-old Basque activist who has lived in west Belfast for four years, was arrested in a raid on April 21.

A largely defenceless people struggling to survive and hemmed in on a narrow strip of land, facing indiscriminate airstrikes, assault from gun boats and cluster bombs by a well-equipped army, conjures up the image of the recent Israeli invasion of Palestine’s Gaza Strip.

In the regional elections held on March 1 in the south-west Basque region (Bascongadas), the Spanish state banned left-wing Basque nationalist parties from taking part.

Hundreds joined a march in Belfast on April 8 in support of the 210 Visteon workers sacked on March 31, who have been occupying their plant since.

Basque nationalist Inaki de Juana Chaos voluntarily appeared in court in Belfast on November 17 following the issueing of a European arrest warrant by the Spanish authorities to the Police Service of Northern Ireland on November 13.

The British Ministry of Defence (MoD) on July 10 agreed to a payout of £2.83 million to ten Iraqi victims tortured in custody by British soldiers in Basra in 2003.