World

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.

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 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.

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.

Following Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s call to not “leave the streets for one single day” of the campaign to approve the proposed constitutional reforms in a referendum on December 2 that would significantly deepen Venezuela’s transformation towards socialism, the “Yes” campaign has kicked into gear.

The Metropolitan police commissioner Sir Ian Blair is under severe pressure to resign after a court found the police force guilty of violating health and safety legislation in the shooting of innocent Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes in July 2005.

While Pakistan’s dictator General Pervez Musharraf has justified his November 3 imposition of emergency rule with the supposed threat of Islamic terrorism, the brunt of the crackdown has been felt by students, trade unionists, the left, the mainstream opposition parties, civil society and the movement of advocates (lawyers) — who have been in the forefront of resistance to the regime since March.

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.

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.