World

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.

A strike of 12,000 writers in Hollywood under the jurisdiction of the Writers’ Guild of America (WGA) is resisting the corporate greed of the large film and television studios. The strike is now in its second week, and is continuing to gain momentum.

Striking French rail workers voted on November 16 to extend the open-ended strike begun three days earlier, according to a Reuters report that day. This continues the campaign begun one month earlier, when strikes across France on October 18 paralysed the country’s rail, bus and subway systems for 24 hours in the first major confrontation between unions and President Nicolas Sarkozy.

Hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans took to the streets of Caracas on November 4, in a massive sea of red, to support the proposed constitutional reforms adopted by the National Assembly that will be put to a referendum on December 2. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has explained that the reforms aim to deepen the Bolivarian revolution that his government is leading, which has already achieved significant gains in redistributing wealth and power to the poor majority.

The following statement was issued by the Australia-Venezuela Solidarity Network (AVSN) on November 8.

Venezuela’s vice-minister of foreign affairs for Asia, the Middle East and Oceania, Vladimir Villegas, lead the Venezuelan delegation to the 38th Pacific Islands Forum (PIF — formerly the South Pacific Forum) meeting in Tonga on October 16-17. The PIF is the coordinated annual meeting, organised along a concensus model, of the heads of states of the 16 PIF members — Australia, the Cook Islands, Fiji, Nauru, NZ, Tonga, Samoa, the Federated States of Micronesia, Kiribati, Niue, Republic of the Marshall Islands, Palau, PNG, the Solomon Islands, Tuvalu and Vanuatu, with New Caledonia and French Polynesia being associated members, and Tokelau, Wallis, Futuna, the Commonwealth and the Asia Development Bank having official observor status. East Timor has had “special observer” status since 2002. With 33% of the world’s total surface and 46% of its ocean area, the 25000 Pacific Islands comprise 17 independent nations – all of whom have a vote and representation in the United Nations (11 have achieved this status only since 1960). Green Left Weekly’s Lara Pullin spoke with Villegas during the forum about Venezuela’s plans to increase cooperation, on the basis of solidarity, with the region.

Over the last few weeks, thousands of intellectuals from different political, philosophical, and religious backgrounds from around the world have mobilised to speak up in defence of Cuba.

“Taliban insurgents have captured a third district in western Afghanistan, local officials said on Monday [November 5], defying Western assertions the rebels are unable to mount large military offensives”, Reuters reported that same day.

General Pervez Musharraf would have not expected the political scenario that has emerged after five days of martial law, imposed on November 3. His hopes for achieving normality have been dashed, despite using the most vicious repression against the advocates (lawyers) and political activists. More unpleasant surprises are still to come for the military regime, which was used to relatively stable political control until now.

On November 4, Mikhail Saakashvili, the pro-US president of the former Soviet republic of Georgia, accused Russia of fomenting mass protests against him. Saakashvili’s remarks were his first response to three days of protests in the capital Tbilisi in which some 100,000 people — a tenth of the city’s population — demanded his resignation.