World

“The atmosphere in the early evening has been a big celebration already, with fireworks and loud music in the city streets, and a large crowd already gathering near Miraflores Palace”, according to Jim McIlroy and Coral Wynter, correspondents for Green Left Weekly’s Venezuela bureau who were in Caracas on the day of the December 3 presidential election.

Sunday, November 26th, 2006 Friends, Tomorrow marks the day that we will have been in Iraq longer than we were in all of World War II.

Nicaragua’s Sandinistas will never forget the night of November 5 and the four days of street celebrations that followed. The first official results of the election came in around 11pm. They foretold that Daniel Ortega, presidential candidate of the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), would win on the first round. Partisans of the Sandinista movement, which led the popular revolution of 1979, had waited 16 long, trying years for this day, ever since the Sandinista government went down to bitter defeat in February 1990.

New York City police pumped 50 bullets into a car carrying three unarmed African-American men in the early morning hours of November 25, killing one man on his wedding day.

Manuel Rosales faces almost certain defeat in Venezuela’s elections but he has told his supporters: “It is true, we are winning.”

Early morning on September 5 security guards burst into the sleeping quarters of Colnbrook immigration detention centre in west London. The guards had come to take 32 Iraqi Kurdish men away. Barefoot, handcuffed, with the guards swearing at them, the 32 were taken to RAF Brize Norton airforce base. Their threatened forced deportation to Arbil in northern Iraq was imminent.

Final approval at the UN General Assembly of the declaration on indigenous peoples’ rights was blocked on November 28 by a group of African countries led by Namibia, and supported by Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Russia.

As was widely expected, the year-long Cole inquiry, while finding that Australian monopoly wheat exporter AWB Ltd deliberately concealed from the UN $290 million in bribes it paid to Iraq in 2000-03 to secure wheat contracts, cleared PM John Howard and his ministers of any wrongdoing.

On December 1, up to 2 million people attended a rally in Beirut called by Hezbollah and its allies to demand the resignation of US-backed Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Siniora’s government.

Pakistan’s south-western province of Balochistan has been the site of an intense struggle for self-determination against the federal government. In its efforts to counter the Baloch struggle, Pakistan’s government has employed summary executions, disappearances, torture and indiscriminate bombing and artillery attack.

A Gaza ceasefire was negotiated by Israeli and Palestinian officials on November 26. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said it is aimed at ending the firing of Qassam rockets into Israel by armed Palestinian resistance groups, and providing the basis for negotiations regarding the release of captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. Palestinians, for their part, hope the ceasefire will provide some relief for the people of the sealed Gaza Strip, who have faced a relentless Israel Defense Forces (IDF) campaign since late June.

Marta Harnecker is the Chilean-born author of Understanding the Venezuelan Revolution (Monthly Review Press, 2005) and other books dealing with revolution and Latin America. She has been an active participant in Venezuela’s Bolivarian revolution and an adviser to that country’s socialist president, Hugo Chavez.