World

The outcome of Timor Leste’s parliamentary election could be seen as a political victory for former president, and now prime minister, Xanana Gusmao.

During the last week of August, more than 3000 workers at the state-controlled Chengdu Power company went on strike at their diesel engines producing plant in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, and protested at the city government offices. The action was a bid to pressure the factory management to honour the original agreement under which working conditions would be changed while the company is restructured for privatisation.

The United States government has almost perfected a method of intervention that is able to penetrate and infiltrate all sectors of civil society in countries that it deems to be of economic and strategic interest. In the case of oil-rich Venezuela — in the middle of a process of transformation led by socialist President Hugo Chavez that is adversely affecting the interests of US corporations — this strategy began to take form in 2002.

Delegates at the Trades Union Congress (TUC) in Brighton gave Gordon Brown a frosty reception during his first speech to the TUC as Britain’s new Labour PM on September 10. Brown used the speech to underline his demand that pay rises in the public sector be limited to no more than 2% over the coming year.

On September 7, the weekly demonstration in the Palestinian West Bank village of Bilin against Israel’s apartheid wall became a celebration. Protesters danced and sang as they marched to the wall. Three days earlier, the Israeli Supreme Court had ordered the Israeli defence ministry to re-route 1.7 kilometres of the 703-km wall, which has been declared illegal by the International Court of Justice.

Throughout the week, some people in Cochabamba had worried about how September 13, a date expected to involve confrontation between the supporters of the government of left-wing, indigenous President Evo Morales and the right wing, would turn out. People at work talked of a coup. Others remembered the protest on January 11 when three people were killed and some buildings burnt, worrying that the same would happen again. Some of the most right wing spoke of a campesino “invasion”.

Eighty mostly young Cambodians and a smattering of resident foreigners gathered on September 12 for the opening of the House of Friendship with Cuba (Casa Cuba). Casa Cuba is the initiative of the Association of Cambodians Graduated in Cuba.

“The innovative offer by the government of Ecuador to refrain from exploiting its largest oil reserve, in exchange for international compensation for nature conservation, is attracting increasing support”, according to an August 23 IPS article. The initiative relates to the untapped Ishpingo-Tiputini-Tambococha (ITT) oil reserve, which is located in Yasuni National Park in the Amazon. According IPS, the park is one of the world’s most biodiverse regions. It was created in 1979 and covers 982,000 hectares.

Twenty-five years ago this September — after its 1982 invasion of Lebanon had achieved its military objectives by forcing an evacuation of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) to Tunisia — Israel unleashed the Lebanese Christian Phalangist militia on the defenceless civilians of Beirut refugee camps Sabra and Shatila. Under the Israeli occupation of West Beirut, the Phalangists, armed by and in liaison with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), carried out a three-day spree of killing and rape, massacring an estimated 3000 Palestinian and Lebanese civilians.

For Bolivia’s indigenous majority there is no going back. The election in 2005 of Bolivia’s first indigenous president, Evo Morales, marked a watershed — a before and after in Bolivia’s history — after more than 500 years of struggle against imperialism and colonialism. It marked a conscious step forward by Bolivia’s indigenous majority in its struggle for justice and equality.

Violent police repression mixed with President Michelle Bachelet’s bizarre assertion that the right to protest still exists in Chile has been the government’s response to the national Unitary Worker’s Council (CUT) day of protest against neoliberalism, held on August 29. Claims by the governing Socialist-Christian Democrat alliance to be politically “centre-left” now look weaker than at any point in its 16-year reign, given its incapacity to address the underlying political and economic causes that lead to the CUT protest.

Over the course of more than 10,000 years, the rich biodiversity of the Andes-Amazon region has created a culture that is closely interlocked with Pachamama (Mother Nature). This culture is marked by deep knowledge of nature and is highly agricultural. Ours is one of the seven zones of the world to have originated agriculture. It has yielded the greatest variety of domesticated species. This has given rise to a cosmic vision different from the Western outlook that views the creator as a superior immaterial spirit who created man in his image and likeness and created nature to serve him. For the indigenous cosmic vision, humanity is a daughter of and part of Mother Earth. We must live in her bosom in harmony with her. Each hill or peak, each river, each vegetable or animal species has a spirit.