World

The 19th Arab League (AL) summit, held in the Saudi Arabian capital of Riyadh on March 28-29, voted to re-affirm support for the “Arab peace initiative” proposed by Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah five years ago.

In his first two articles in the Cuban Communist Party’s newspaper, Granma, since becoming ill last year, President Fidel Castro lashed out at the recently signed ethanol deal between Brazil and the US. In an April 3 article he described it as “the internationalisation of genocide”.

On April 6, notorious Cuban-born terrorist Luis Posada Carriles was granted freedom on bail in the El Paso Federal Court, which will allow him to return home to his family in Miami after the payment of US$250,000. Posada, a former CIA operative, was the mastermind of the deadly bombing of a Cuban airliner in 1976, and has been involved in other terrorist acts and violent campaigns against popular movements in Latin America. Washington has denied requests to extradite him to Venezuela, where he had been imprisoned until he escaped in 1985.

“The PST has increased its vote slightly on its results in 2000", Avelino Coelho da Silva, secretary-general of the Socialist Party of Timor, told Green Left Weekly by telephone from Dili. Coelho was the PST’s candidate in the country’s April 9 presidential election, the final results of which will be officially announced by the National Election Commission (CNE) on April 16.

Nearly 700,000 people have signed an international online petition in solidarity with Vietnam’s victims of Agent Orange, which was sprayed extensively by the US military during the Vietnam War. The petition, which was launched in 2004, will be presented to the judges of the US Court of Appeal on the eve of an expected June ruling on a victims’ lawsuit against the nearly 40 chemical companies that produced the deadly chemical for the US military.

In actions that have echos of the struggle in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, teachers and their union have installed themselves outside the governor’s office in the southern province of Neuquen, calling for better salaries and governor Jorge Omar Sobisch’s resignation.

Official British government figures released on March 27 revealed that in the past year, the number of children in Britain living in relative poverty increased by 200,000. According to the March 27 BBC News, in 2005-06 the total number of children who satisfied the official definition of relative poverty — living in households with incomes equalling less than 60% of the national average when housing costs are included — rose from 3.6 million to a staggering 3.8 million.

“Wrapped in the Iraqi flag and chanting anti-American slogans, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Shia snaked into the holy city of Najaf yesterday for a protest rally to mark the fourth anniversary of the toppling of Saddam Hussein and to demand the ejection from Iraq of US and British troops”, the April 10 British Guardian reported.

Organisers from the Philippines’ biggest left trade union centre, Bukluran ng Manggagawang Pilipino (BMP — Solidarity of Filipino Workers) spoke to Green Left Weekly’s Sue Bolton about the repression that they encounter from the state and their efforts to unify left-wing trade unions.

In late March, Green Left Weekly’s Jim McIlroy spoke to Farooq Tariq, general secretary of the Labour Party Pakistan, in Lahore. The LPP is a revolutionary socialist organisation working with other forces to end the dictatorship of General Pervez Musharraf, and seeking to unite workers, peasants, women and youth in the struggle to bring about socialism in Pakistan. The interview took place amidst the campaign by lawyers and their supporters to reinstate the suspended Chief Justice of the Pakistan High Court, Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry.

An April 4 Survival International article reported that a decree by Venezuela’s socialist president, Hugo Chavez, had banned the planned construction of new coalmines on the land of the Wayuu, Yukpa and Bari indigenous people in the state of Zulia, which is governed by a leader of the pro-capitalist opposition.

Four years ago, I walked through Melbourne’s CBD holding a placard that read: “No blood for oil”. I was an idealistic university student, intent on letting my government know that it’s not okay to launch an invasion in pursuit of so-called “black gold” in a country that was no threat to mine.