World

At its first conference to be held since Tommy Sheridan and his supporters split from the Scottish Socialist Party to set up a rival organisation, SSP national convenor Colin Fox said that the party had been through a “real-life horror movie, a nightmare so acute that it would have broken other parties completely”, but “with every passing week, more and more people are overheard saying that it was the SSP that was telling the truth all along”.

Moments after hearing about North Korea’s nuclear test, I thought of Albert Einstein’s statement that “there is no secret and there is no defence; there is no possibility of control except through the aroused understanding and insistence of the peoples of the world”.

The popular movement in the southern state of Oaxaca has called for solidarity, fearing a massive wave of repression because of a recent step-up in numbers of police and military in the state. Since a strike by Local 22 of the National Teachers Union began in May, the conflict has escalated to a national issue. At its centre is governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz, whose repressive methods have sparked a movement to remove him.

In April 2000, the people of Cochabamba captured the imagination of anti-corporate campaigners the world over. Only months after the US transnational Bechtel took control of the regions water supply — forcing citizens to pay for rainwater they collected — the people of Cochabamba, organised through the Coalition in Defence of Water and Life, rose up and booted out the corporation.

In a September 25 appeal to the international community to act to end the humanitarian disaster in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, the UN envoy on Palestinians’ human rights, John Dugard, pointed out: “In effect, the Palestinian people have been subjected to economic sanctions — the first time an occupied people has been so treated.”

On October 4, Jim Gilchrist, a leader of the racist anti-immigrant Minutemen group, came to speak at Columbia University. Gilchrist’s hate speech was met with a peaceful demonstration in which students came on the stage unfurling banners reading “No human being is illegal” and “No to racism”. The Minutemen responded with force, punching and kicking protesters. Footage of the assaults can be seen at <><http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N41eXtVK7hA>.

On October 11, a team of Iraqi physicians, whose work was overseen by US epidemiologists at the Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health, published a study in The Lancet, a prestigious British medical journal, estimating that the US-led occupation of Iraq has cost the lives of 655,000 Iraqis.

George Bush’s administration claims it is waging a “war against terrorism”. But since April 2005 Luis Posada Carriles, who worked for the CIA and engaged in brutal terrorist acts including the bombing of a Cuban airliner, has resided in the US, and Washington has resisted pressure to deport him to Venezuela, where he escaped from jail, to face justice. Posada Carriles is currently in “immigration detention” for entering the US illegally. Even a court filing by the US Justice Department described him as “the admitted mastermind of terrorist plots and attacks”. The following letter, among the signatories of which are four Nobel laureates, was issued on October 6.

“A strong majority of Iraqis want US-led military forces to immediately withdraw from the country, saying their swift departure would make Iraq more secure and decrease sectarian violence, according to new polls by the State Department and independent researchers”, the September 27 Washington Post reported.

Claire English, a former National Union of Students queer officer, attended the August 3-13 Queeruption convergence in Tel Aviv. Below is her account of some of her experiences.

Although still three years away, citing the need to prevent Indonesia’s 2009 general elections from becoming “overly fragmented” by a plethora of new political parties, legislators are seeking to limit the number of parties that can participate.

On September 12 Venezuela’s left-wing President Hugo Chavez announced the expansion of the Development Bank for Women — Banmujer — during a meeting in the Teresa Carreno Theatre to celebrate five years since the bank’s founding. Chavez offered another 100 billion bolivares (A$65 million) in resources to the bank.