World

Suciwati, the widow of Munir, the prominent Indonesian human rights activist killed by arsenic poisoning aboard a plane in 2004, visited Australia in February to call on the Australian government to help pressure Jakarta to resolve the case. Accompanying her was Usman Hamid, the executive director of Kontras — the Indonesian Commission for the Disappeared and Victims of Violence — an organisation set up by Munir.

International Women’s Day (IWD) — March 8 — was marked by marches protesting the recent acquittal of former assistant police commissioner Clint Rickards and two other former police officers on charges of rape.

The situation remains tense in East Timor’s capital, Dili, in the wake of the Australian Defence Force-led operation on March 4 to capture renegade East Timorese army officer Major Alfredo Reinado.

Commenting on the natural disaster that has left large swathes of Bolivia’s lowland east underwater after months of flooding, and much of the Andean region covered in ice, in late February Bolivian President Evo Morales called for a global debate on the effects of climate change and environmental destruction on poor nations.

On January 30, 2003, as Washington assembled its military forces for the long-planned invasion of Iraq, US magazine Business Week explained to its corporate readership the expected benefits of the coming US-led occupation: “Since the US military would control Iraq’s oil and gas deposits for some time, US companies could be in line for a lucrative slice of the business”, and thus they could “feel just as victorious as the US Special Forces”.

“Our experience of Venezuela is of a mass people’s revolution. It was something completely different from anything I had experienced in my life … simply the feeling of a mass revolution is something fantastic. It is reminiscent of [Russian revolutionary V.I. Lenin’s] phrase that ‘a revolution is the festival of the oppressed’.”

A general strike that shook the African state of Guinea ended on February 27 with the appointment of a new prime minister acceptable to the trade unions and the political opposition.

It is year six of the UN-backed NATO occupation of Afghanistan, a joint US-European Union mission. On February 26 there was an attempted assassination of US Vice-President Dick Cheney by Taliban suicide bombers while he was visiting the “secure” US air base at Bagram (once an equally secure Soviet air base during an earlier conflict). Two US soldiers and a mercenary (“contractor”) died in the attack, as did twenty other people working at the base. This episode alone should have concentrated the US vice-president’s mind on the scale of the Afghan debacle. In 2006 the casualty rates rose substantially and NATO troops lost 46 soldiers in clashes with the Islamic resistance or shot-down helicopters.

On the eve of China’s annual parliamentary session — the National People’s Congress (NPC) — on March 5-16, Beijing announced plans to increase its military spending for 2007 by 17.8% to 350 billion yuan (US$45 billion), provoking immediate concern from Washington.

The revolutionary left in the Philippines has deep roots in the mass movement but its influence has been weakened by disunity. The left began overcoming these divisions through a May 2005 Democratic Left Conference.

“At Iran’s request, the UN Security Council condemned the deadliest terrorist attack in the country in years and extended ‘sincere condolences’ to the Iranian people, but not to their government, at US insistence”, Associated Press reported on February 15.

On March 4, hundreds of armed right-wing militia, calling themselves the Indonesian Anti-Communist Front (FAKI), attacked the East Java regional conference of the National Liberation Party of Unity (Papernas) at Hotel Selekta in Batu City. The same militia group attacked Papernas’s founding national conference in January.