National liberation

Imagine the aircraft of the president of France being forced down in Latin America on “suspicion” that it was carrying a political refugee to safety — and not just any refugee but someone who has provided the people of the world with proof of criminal activity on an epic scale.

The Network of Intellectuals and Artists in Defense of Humanity express their indignation at the criminal attack perpetrated in the afternoon of Tuesday July 3 against Bolivian President Evo Morales Ayma, by the government of the United States and with the clear complicity of various European states.

Protests by local people forced the abandonment of a plan to train Sri Lankan military officers at India’s Defence Services Staff College in the Nilgiris district of Tamil Nadu, a state in southern India. The Times of India said at least two towns in Nilgiris were shut down by a strike on June 24 in protest at the plan. The Indian government then offered to train the Sri Lankan officers elsewhere in India, but the Sri Lankan government turned the offer down.

Faced with several days of overt threats from the Obama Administration and top senators threatening to revoke a key US-Ecuador trade pact if they dare to grant asylum to Edward Snowden, the Ecuadoran government has told the US what they can do with their frozen broccoli and fresh cut flowers, and has cancelled the pact themselves.

Stephen Murney is a political and community activist who lives in Newry in the north of Ireland. He is also a member of Eirigi (“Arise”), a legal, registered Irish socialist republican political party. Murney has frequently documented, photographed and recorded incidents of harsh Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) stop and searches of people, house raids and other rough treatment in the Newry area. Murney regularly highlighted these issues in local newspapers and on the internet.

Brazil is in revolt. What started as a protest about a R$0.20 rise (about $0.10) in bus fares has turned into a mass nationwide movement against corruption, the rising cost of living, starved public services and money squandered on sporting mega-events. Events are moving fast with protests growing and spreading to new cities each day, and it is far from clear when or how it will end.

Minetu Larabas Sueidat is a young Saharawi woman living in refugee camps in Tinduf in the south-west of Algeria. Western Sahara, the land of the Saharawi people, has been occupied by Morocco since 1975. In 1991, the United Nations brokered ceasfire between Morocco and the pro-independence Polisario Front that supposed to include a referendum on self-determination, which has still not occurred.

Sireen Khudiri is a 24-year-old Palestinian teacher, human rights activist and political prisoner. She studied computer science at the Open University in Tubas, on the West Bank. Khudiri is an advocate of the rights of children in the Jordan Valley in the West Bank to have a decent education and has been active in non-violent campaigns against the abuses imposed by the Israeli occupation authorities. Khudiri also writes to publicise the struggle of the Palestinian people for their rights.

It took 76 years and one day since his abduction on the orders of Stalin during the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), but on June 17 all parties of the Catalan left came together in Barcelona to recognise the contribution to the Catalan and Spanish working people of revolutionary fighter Andreu Nin. At midnight on June 16, 1937, Nin, the general secretary of the Workers Party of Marxist Unification (POUM), was abducted by Stalinist agents outside the POUM’s headquarters.

Greens Senator Richard Di Natale questioned foreign minister Bob Carr on June 5 during a senate hearing on human rights abuses in West Papua.

During the early days of the Gezi protests, researchers from the University of Istanbul surveyed 3000 activists in the heart of the struggle around Taksim Square. Seventy-one percent of respondents described themselves as “pro-freedom” with no affiliation to any organisation, most of them first-time activists. Only 7.1 % said they were a member or supporter of any group. Barricades on the streets are nothing new to Turkish people. Barricades have been put up against the authorities many times.

Northern Ireland: The Reluctant Peace Feargal Cochrane Yale University Press, 2013 368 pp, $38.00 Reginald Maudling, the Tory Home Secretary who oversaw the 1972 Bloody Sunday massacre in Northern Ireland, perfectly expressed the British ruling class’s blend of condescension and indifference towards Ireland when he blurted out to his staff: “For God’s sake bring me a large Scotch — what a bloody awful country.” As his policies created mayhem on the streets of Ulster, he coined the cute phrase “acceptable level of violence” to describe what was going on.