BY MARIA VOUKELATOS
MELBOURNE - Anti-war student and community activists met at the University of Melbourne on December 2-3 to discuss the challenges facing the anti-war movement.
The conference, organised by the National Union of Students (NUS) and Act Now to Stop the War and End Racism (ANSWER), provided 100 attendees the opportunity to analyse world events since the September 11 attacks.
Conference participants discussed the link between the corporate drive of neo-liberalism and the imperialist drive for war. One of the aims of the US's "war on terrorism", several activists noted, is to break the powerful identification by the people of the First World with the resistance movements of the Third World.
Melbourne Resistance organiser and anti-globalisation activist Kylie Moon told Green Left Weekly, "Already the right-wing commentators are attempting to link the attacks on September 11 with the anti-corporate movement. This is because the anti-corporate movement has been growing in size and strength. The imperialist powers want to use the terror attacks to destroy this movement. We have to stop this war."
Alex Kouttab of the Australian Arabic Council informed the conference of a move by Zionist students at the coming NUS conference to condemn the independence aspirations of the Palestinian people. He asked progressive students to oppose this and explained the discrimination and oppression Palestinians are subjected to under Israeli occupation.
A plenary session drew out lessons from the movement to end the Vietnam War in the 1970s. The Democratic Socialist Party's Mary Merkenich, an activist against the Vietnam War while at high school, spoke of the need for the current anti-war movement to also adopt political demands and concentrate on a strategy of mass protests.
To the disappointment of many, the final session of the conference missed an opportunity to discuss and decide on goals for the student movement in 2002.
Unfortunately, the conference did not vote on policy. It therefore failed to give clear direction to anti-war delegates at the NUS national conference which began on December 9.
From Green Left Weekly, December 12, 2001.
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