World

Late last year, Green Left Weekly’s Kerryn Williams spoke to the assistant secretary of the Sudanese Communist Party (SCP), Suleman Hamid El Haj, in Khartoum about political developments in Sudan since the January 2005 signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA). The CPA ended the two-decade-long war between Sudan’s central government in Khartoum and the south.

Around 200 pick-up trucks and cars comprised the long snake of a protest caravan making its way along Jakarta’s main thoroughfare, Jalan Thamrin, after a rally outside the Presidential Palace, where speakers called on the people to “withdraw the mandate” of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. The occasion for the protest was the anniversary of the mass protests and riots against the Suharto government that took place on January 15, 1974.

On December 29, 2006, the 176-member standing committee of the National People’s Congress (NPC — China’s law-making body) lent its support to the draft of the proposed Property Law. Many fear this controversial law will help launder the enormous state wealth already appropriated illegitimately by corrupt Communist Party officials and their hangers-on, as well as encourage more such activities.

Testifying to a January 12 US Senate hearing on President George Bush’s new Iraq war strategy, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice warned Nuri al Maliki, Washington’s puppet Iraqi prime minister, that he was “living on borrowed time”.

When supporters of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez rallied in the Teresa Carrena theatre in Caracas on December 15 to celebrate their presidential election victory, “there were cheers in the back half of the theatre”, wrote Caracas-based Marxist writer Michael Lebowitz in Venezuelanalysis.com, “but few in the high-priced seats”.

After months of pressure following the debacle of the July-August war in Lebanon, Israeli defence chief Lieutenant General Dan Halutz announced his resignation on January 16, prompting thousands of Lebanese to take to Beirut’s streets in celebration.

On January 10, US President George Bush unveiled his government’s new plan for prosecuting Washington’s almost four-year-old counterinsurgency war in Iraq, which in a December 20 interview with the Washington Post he for the first time acknowledged the US was “not winning”.

Saddam Hussein was rushed to the gallows as 2006 ended — a former dictator put to death under instructions from his one-time supporters in the US government.

On December 5, after weeks of speculation, the commander of the Republic of Fiji Military Forces, Commodore Voreqe Bainimarama announced that he had overthrown the government of Prime Minister Laisenia Qarase in Fiji’s third military coup in the past 20 years. On January 4, the military restored the powers of President Ratu Josefa Iloilo, so that he could swear in an interim government with Bainimarama as PM.

Parliamentarians from the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP), the Dutch Socialist Party, the Greens and the Welsh nationalist Plaid Cymru party were arrested on January 8 following a protest at the Faslane nuclear submarine base on the River Clyde. The protest was organised by Faslane 365, which is promoting a year-round blockade of the base.

Mision Vuelvan Caras, literally “about-face”, is a social project — or mission — launched by the revolutionary government of Venezuela in 2004 to train and offer employment to thousands of people. It is changing the lives of a large number of the country’s citizens, many of whom previously had no formal education or jobs to rely on.

It seems like an overly cliched script with a plot so tired that even Hollywood’s dross-marketing machine might think twice about touching it: a Mid-East nation led by an aggressive regime with a record of violating human rights whenever it feels like (which turns out to be often) threatens countries in the region with its arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. But, in a twist unlikely to make it into the next blockbuster, according to a January 7 article in London’s Sunday Times, it’s the Israeli military that’s planning to use nuclear weapons, not the “mad Arabs” that are the more conventional WMD-toting movie villains.