A spirited demonstration of 200 people marched to state parliament on March 9 to protest the poisoning of Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan, who is imprisoned in Turkey. Waving Kurdish and Australian flags and holding pictures of Ocalan, the founder of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), the protesters chanted “Freedom for Ocalan, long live Kurdistan” and called for an end to the war in Kurdistan.
Issue 702
News
On March 7, 60 people joined with three comfort women survivors Jan Ruff OHerne AO, Hsie Mei Wu and Gil Won Ok, from Australia, Taiwan and Korea outside the Japanese Consulate in Martin Place.
Kevin Rudd made a point of letting everyone know which side the Labor Party is on when he went and had a friendly meeting with war criminal Dick Cheney while slandering the peaceful protesters outside as violent ferals, student anti-war activist Simon Cunich told Green Left Weekly.
During May-June this year, Queenslands Shoalwater Bay will host tens of thousands of Australian and US troops engaged live-fire, large-scale military exercises that will pose grave risks for the environment and peoples health. The Shoalwater Military Training Area (SWMTA) is located inside the Great Barrier Reef National Park.
Every week since February 3, around 60 people have gathered outside the office of federal Liberal MP Kerry Bartlett to call for Guantanamo Bay detainee David Hicks to be brought home. The initiator of the vigils, Kevin Hardwick, told Green Left Weekly that the vigils would continue until the Hicks issue is resolved.
In an out-of-court settlement, which became public on March 4, Victorian Labor Premier Steve Bracks’ government agreed to pay compensation to 47 protesters injured at the “S11" blockade of the World Economic Forum in Melbourne in September 2000. The settlement awards $700,000 in compensation, although $600,000 will go to legal fees.
The Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU) voted to affiliate to the ALP at the union’s March 2-4 national governing council meeting. The enabling motion, heavily amended during the course of the meeting, passed by 42 votes to 12.
Several NSW unions have decided to endorse the March 17 Sydney rally against the war in Iraq, organised by the Stop the War Coalition. They are the Maritime Union of Australia (MUA); the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union; the NSW Fire Brigade Employees Union; and the National Tertiary Education Union.
The organisers of the Latin American and Asia Pacific International Solidarity Forum, Fighting and organising globally against neoliberalism, are calling on all activists, organisations and communities who are committed to building a better world to join together in Melbourne on October 11-14.
Some 40 Sydney University students held a speak-out outside the army recruitment stall during orientation week on February 28, drawing attention to campus anti-war sentiment. Sydney University anti-war activists passionately poured their knowledge of the wars criminality into the megaphone and the action was a spectacle of peaceful dissent.
Analysis
Adelaide backpacker David Hicks will be arraigned before an illegally constituted military tribunal at the Guantanamo Bay concentration camp on March 20 and face the retrospective and ill-defined charge of “material support for terrorism”.
With global warming increasingly dominating mainstream political discussion, the debate about solutions has intensified. While PM John Howard has thrown his weight behind the lie of “clean, green” nuclear power, the ALP has maintained its opposition to this deeply unpopular option.
In the run-up to the NSW elections both major parties are claiming to be able to run the economy better. But the release of the Australian Bureau of Statistics December quarter figures on March 7, which revealed that NSW is not technically in a recession, is likely to help the state ALP governments lead over Peter Debnams Liberals on March 24.
The Blue Team appeared to regain some advantage after the leader of the (mislabeled) Red Team was forced to admit hed made an error of judgement in meeting up three times last year with convicted fraud and former WA premier Brian Burke (now a professional lobbyist).
A tiny group dominates Australian politics and Labor leader Kevin Rudd recently met them. He knows very well that the key to Labors electoral success later this year is an accommodation with the Australian oligarchy.
A satirical website created by climate action group Rising Tide Newcastle (RTN) has twice been shut down by the powerful coal industry lobby group, the NSW Minerals Council.
In Green Left Weekly #693, we published an article broadly in favour of George Monbiot’s call for carbon rationing. Below, Gar Lipow critiques this as a strategy for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
World
Commenting on the natural disaster that has left large swathes of Bolivia’s lowland east underwater after months of flooding, and much of the Andean region covered in ice, in late February Bolivian President Evo Morales called for a global debate on the effects of climate change and environmental destruction on poor nations.
The situation remains tense in East Timors capital, Dili, in the wake of the Australian Defence Force-led operation on March 4 to capture renegade East Timorese army officer Major Alfredo Reinado.
International Womens Day (IWD) March 8 was marked by marches protesting the recent acquittal of former assistant police commissioner Clint Rickards and two other former police officers on charges of rape.
“At Iran’s request, the UN Security Council condemned the deadliest terrorist attack in the country in years and extended ‘sincere condolences’ to the Iranian people, but not to their government, at US insistence”, Associated Press reported on February 15.
A general strike that shook the African state of Guinea ended on February 27 with the appointment of a new prime minister acceptable to the trade unions and the political opposition.
Four years after the US-led invasion of Iraq, the country is wracked by ongoing and escalating violence. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis have died, according to a study published in the respected British medical journal The Lancet in October.
On March 4, hundreds of armed right-wing militia, calling themselves the Indonesian Anti-Communist Front (FAKI), attacked the East Java regional conference of the National Liberation Party of Unity (Papernas) at Hotel Selekta in Batu City. The same militia group attacked Papernass founding national conference in January.
It is year six of the UN-backed NATO occupation of Afghanistan, a joint US-European Union mission. On February 26 there was an attempted assassination of US Vice-President Dick Cheney by Taliban suicide bombers while he was visiting the “secure” US air base at Bagram (once an equally secure Soviet air base during an earlier conflict). Two US soldiers and a mercenary (“contractor”) died in the attack, as did twenty other people working at the base. This episode alone should have concentrated the US vice-president’s mind on the scale of the Afghan debacle. In 2006 the casualty rates rose substantially and NATO troops lost 46 soldiers in clashes with the Islamic resistance or shot-down helicopters.
On January 30, 2003, as Washington assembled its military forces for the long-planned invasion of Iraq, US magazine Business Week explained to its corporate readership the expected benefits of the coming US-led occupation: “Since the US military would control Iraq’s oil and gas deposits for some time, US companies could be in line for a lucrative slice of the business”, and thus they could “feel just as victorious as the US Special Forces”.
After promising during his 2000 inauguration not to push for Taiwanese independence, a commitment reaffirmed after his 2004 re-election, President Chen Shuibian reversed his stance hours before Chinas annual parliamentary session the National Peoples Congress started on March 5.
On March 4, police arrested 33 women and charged them with endangering national security, propaganda against the state and taking part in an illegal gathering. The women were demonstrating outside Iran’s Tehran Revolutionary Court to demand a fair trial for five prominent women’s rights activists arrested in June 2006 during a peaceful protest.
More than 120 branch delegates and a substantial number of visitors attended a conference in Glasgow on March 3 to finalise the Scottish Socialist Party’s manifesto for May’s Scottish Parliament elections.
On the eve of Chinas annual parliamentary session the National Peoples Congress (NPC) on March 5-16, Beijing announced plans to increase its military spending for 2007 by 17.8% to 350 billion yuan (US$45 billion), provoking immediate concern from Washington.
The revolutionary left in the Philippines has deep roots in the mass movement but its influence has been weakened by disunity. The left began overcoming these divisions through a May 2005 Democratic Left Conference.
“Our experience of Venezuela is of a mass people’s revolution. It was something completely different from anything I had experienced in my life … simply the feeling of a mass revolution is something fantastic. It is reminiscent of [Russian revolutionary V.I. Lenin’s] phrase that ‘a revolution is the festival of the oppressed’.”
On March 5, the International Federation of Chemical, Energy, Mine and General Workers’ Unions (ICEM), the global union federation for oil workers, issued a call for “strong condemnation” by supporters of workers’ rights of US-led military raids on union offices in Baghdad on February 23 and 25. During the raids, targeting the General Federation of Iraqi Workers (GFIW), a member of the union’s security staff was arrested and office equipment was destroyed. On February 19, the Iraq Syndicate of Journalists was raided and computers and membership records were confiscated.
Culture
Arguably Australia's best band to hold a riot to, Melbourne-based The Nation Blue, released their highly anticipated third album Protest Songs on March 3. As the bio/release notes put it: "The Nation Blue mount the horses of the apocalypse with their
The Unknown Terrorist
By Richard Flanagan
Picador, 2006
RRP $32.95
By Richard Flanagan
Picador, 2006
RRP $32.95
Letters
Women's day
Happy Women's Day, health minister Abbott. Just a reminder that undermining the independent choices of women has alienated nearly half the voting population. And, as a parent of an autistic child, whose expensive therapy is not
Resistance!
PM John Howard and US President George Bush are in trouble over their war on terror. Two things help illustrate why this is the case, and how we can hasten them both into the dustbin of history.
One of Resistances main campaigns is to strengthen the movement across Australia to end the occupation of Iraq. As well as building the biggest possible protests on March 17-18, the fourth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, we are helping to organise contingents from around the country to join the mass convergence in Sydney when US President George Bush comes to the APEC meeting in September.
Becoming socially aware in Townsville, a city of One Nation voters, was not ideal. It was politically isolating and hard to find information that shed any light on the pressing questions on my mind: why is the world so screwed up and how is this sustainable?