World

Tayad is the Association of Solidarity with the Families of Prisoners and is part of the Front for Rights and Liberties (HOC) in Turkey. Both organisations were instrumental in supporting Turkish “death fasters”, who recently had a significant victory against the abusive regime. Green Left Weekly’s Rachel Evans spoke to Mesut Eroksuz, an Australian representative of Tayad.

With 80 million inhabitants, West Bengal is the fourth most populous state in India. It has been ruled by the Communist Party of India (Marxist)-led Left Front (LF) coalition for three decades. This government, however, has regularly used police repression against workers and peasants to defend big-business interests.

The six cabinet members loyal to Iraqi Shiite cleric Moqtada al Sadr quit the 37-member cabinet of US-backed Prime Minister Nuri al Maliki on April 16. The Sadrists had headed the ministries of agriculture, health, tourism and transportation.

On April 15, Ecuador voted overwhelmingly to ratify President Rafael Correa’s proposal to convoke a Constituent Assembly with the power to re-write the constitution with the intention of weakening the stranglehold on the country of the traditional wealthy elite.

The Israeli journalist Amira Hass describes the moment her mother, Hannah, was marched from a cattle train to the Nazi concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen. “They were sick and some were dying”, she says. “Then my mother saw these German women looking at the prisoners, just looking. This image became very formative in my upbringing, this despicable ‘looking from the side’.”

As the regime of President Hosni Mubarak regime in Egypt faces a growing crisis of legitimacy, expressed by protests, boycotts and industrial strikes, the government has pushed through a referendum to amend the constitution and enshrine the country’s police-state laws. On March 25, Amnesty International said the amendments will cause “the greatest erosion of rights in 26 years” in Egypt.

An authoritative opinion poll for the Scotsman newspaper indicates a strong increase in support for the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP) in the run-up to the Scottish Parliament elections on May 3. The April 6 Scottish Socialist Voice reported that “in both the constituency and regional list vote, 5 per cent of Scots voters plan to vote Scottish Socialist”, according to the ICM poll. This represents a 3% rise in the regional vote and a 4% increase in the constituency ballot — the biggest increase in support in the previous month for any political party in Scotland.

“The Women Workers Help Line is a member-based, voluntary, non-profit making, non-governmental organisation, struggling to create legal, political, democratic and trade union awareness among women for a socially just, economically equitable, politically aware and gender sensitive society”, explains the WWHL’s vision statement. Green Left Weekly’s Jim McIlroy visited Bushra Khaliq, the WWHL’s general secretary, at the organisation’s Lahore headquarters in late March.

“A preliminary US military investigation indicates that more than 40 Afghans killed or wounded by Marines after a suicide bombing in a village near Jalalabad last month were civilians”, the April 14 Washington Post reported it had been told by the US commander who ordered the investigation.

Returning once again to Venezuela — having last spent four months here in 2005 — I recalled a refrain that had been constantly repeated by Venezuelans: “After we re-elect Chavez in 2006, the real revolution will begin.” It took very little time for me to realise exactly what they meant.

Indonesian police have named two new suspects in the murder of human rights activist Munir, who died of arsenic poisoning on a Garuda flight from Jakarta to Amsterdam on September 7, 2004.

The streets of downtown Los Angeles became a sea of red shirts stretching for many city blocks on April 7 when at least 20,000 people turned out for one of the largest immigrant rights demonstrations since the big marches last year.