World

Green Left Weekly’s Bronwyn Jennings, spoke with Vaughan Gunson, an activist with Socialist Worker (Aotearoa), which actively participates in the Residents Action Movement, about RAM’s activities in defence of peoples’ rights and against corporate greed.

Indonesian activists in the National Liberation Party of Unity (PAPERNAS) continue to face government-sponsored thuggery and have appealed for support from Australian activists to help them defend their democratic rights.

The split in the English anti-war party, Respect — The Unity Coalition, which has scored the most successful electoral results for forces to the left of Labour since World War II, saw two conferences by the different sides of the split held simultaneously on November 17. One side are those backing Respect MP George Galloway, including some left-wing Muslim leaders and other independent socialists. On the other is mainly the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), the largest socialist group in England, which has played a leading role in the anti-war movement and been a key component of Respect from its inception.

On November 22, Pakistan’s Supreme Court ruled that General Pervez Musharraf’s re-election as president (by his hand-picked National Assembly in October) was legitimate, despite his role as head of the armed forces. This ruling is hardly surprising given that, after declaring “emergency rule” on November 3, Musharraf sacked the judges then in the Supreme Court, putting them under house arrest and stacking the court with his stooges. Musharraf has stated that once his puppet Supreme Court had legitimised his re-election, he would resign from the armed forces to become a “civilian” president.

Day seven passed without my arrest despite several attempts by the police. During the last three days, we were able to hold a meeting of the leading members of Labour Party Pakistan (LPP), gave interviews to private television channels and to a private team working for CNN. We were able to fax daily news to most of the newspapers in Pakistan.

On July 29, three leaders of a 29-month factory occupation in the city of Chongqing, in China’s southwest Sichuan province, were each sentenced to suspended prison sentences of 18 months.

Farooq Tariq is the secretary general of the 3000-member Labour Party Pakistan (LPP). The following is an abridged version of an interview with Tariq conducted by Ron Jacobs. Tariq is currently operating underground, being hunted by the regime. THe full version of this interview was posted on the Counterpunch.org website on November 11.

The US-backed right-wing campaign to destabilise the democratic revolution in Venezuela, lead by socialist President Hugo Chavez, is escalating again. The upcoming December 2 referendum on proposed amendments to the constitution is prompting a new drive from US-backed capitalist elite to undermine the elected Chavez government. Crucially, the international corporate-owned media’s distortion of events is reaching new heights, with false allegations of government repression of opposition protesters a key component of the campaign to demonise Chavez and the process of change his government is leading.

On November 9, two days after Mikheil Saakashvili, the former Soviet republic of Georgia’s pro-US president, ordered riot police to club and tear-gas anti-government protesters in the capital Tbilisi, Georgian officials issued arrest warrants for two opposition leaders on charges of “espionage”. Hospitals reported that nearly 600 protesters sought medical treatment after the police assault.

Local battalions of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) have been meeting every weekend since August, aiming to organise the 5.7 million aspiring members who enrolled between April and June to join the party-in-formation. Spokespeople and heads of commissions elected by the more than 14,000 battalions have gone on to form socialist circumscriptions, grouping 10 battalions in a given local area, to elect delegates to the party’s founding congress.

This month marks the third anniversary of the massive US military assault on the rebel Iraqi city of Fallujah, 55 kilometres west of Baghdad. A year after the US assault, the New York Times described Fallujah as “virtually a police state”. Little has changed in the two years since. The October 14 Chicago Tribune described Fallujah as a “place under 24-hour lockdown, surrounded by berms and barbed wire”.

The 17th Ibero-American summit, held in Santiago, Chile, on November 8-10 brought together Latin American nations as well as Spain and Portugal. It was also the scene of a diplomatic incident that gave fresh fodder to the current campaign in the international corporate media aimed at demonising the government of Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chavez.