On February 23 and 25, US and Iraqi forces raided the head offices of Iraqs national trade union centre, the General Federation of Iraqi Workers (GFIW). One of the unions security staff was arrested and later released. The soldiers destroyed furniture and confiscated a computer and fax machine. The union has condemned the attacks as unprovoked and is demanding a written apology from the occupation forces, the return of seized property and compensation for damages. Messages of protest can be lodged at: .
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In Venezuela, after decades of class polarisation, neglect of the needs of the majority, corruption on a massive scale and unbridled bureaucracy, the magnitude of problems that Venezuelas Bolivarian revolution led by socialist president Hugo Chavez is attempting to tackle is enormous.
Hicks has spent five years, mainly in solitary confinement, at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp, which the US set up on illegally occupied Cuban territory to ensure independence from the legal system of any country, including the US itself.
As right-wing death squads reassert their presence and gangs and organised crime with links to the highest levels of government operate freely, campesinos (peasants) and organised youth are being persecuted and beaten in the streets. On February 27, while holding a peaceful and legal protest against the regional free trade agreement CAFTA and the governments crackdown on civil liberties, 27 young activists were detained, charged with civil disobedience and brutally beaten by the civil police. Meanwhile the Popular Youth Bloc is awaiting information on the fate of Edwar Contreras Bonifacio, who was forcibly disappeared when he left college on February 7. An international solidarity campaign is underway and people are urged to write to the nearest Salvadoran consulate or embassy demanding his safe return, as well as the release of the 27 arrested youth. The youth and popular organisations are responding to this campaign of state-sponsored intimidation with the call to Answer more repression with more struggle!
Pot calls kettle black
"Their [the Islamists] goal in the broader Middle East is to seize control of a country, so they have a base from which they can launch attacks against governments that refuse to meet their demands." — Lord Darth Cheney,
China’s much increased economic activities in Africa in recent years — investments in energy and natural resources extraction and loans to African governments — have provoked accusations that it is becoming a new neocolonial power in the continent.
On February 28, Major Michael Mori, David Hicks’s US military lawyer, addressed a packed Founders’ Hall at the University of Ballarat. The mixed crowd of at least 600 learned a whole lot more about how Hicks is the Australian government’s sacrificial lamb in the “war on terror”.
Pot calls kettle black
"Their [the Islamists] goal in the broader Middle East is to seize control of a country, so they have a base from which they can launch attacks against governments that refuse to meet their demands." — Lord Darth Cheney,
Since the Howard Coalition government was elected in 1996 record numbers of women have entered parliament, yet womens rights are under massive attack without so much as a murmur of opposition from the female Coalition MPs and very little outcry from the ALP.
Underneath the enormous conveyor belts at the back of the Yallourn power station, 49 metalworkers from MEC Engineering, which is part of the Eliott group, have maintained a six-month “protest embassy” to win their jobs and entitlements back.
Strange times
What strange times we live in. In the 1970s, I disagreed with Malcolm Fraser's ideas and opposed his conservative government's policies. In the 1980s and '90s I agreed with Peter Garrett on a range of political and environmental
In her 1993 book, The End of Equality?, Anne Summers admits to being puzzled by the Howard government’s concern about Australia’s low birth rate and its call for women to reproduce more while, at the same time, it refuses to provide inexpensive and quality childcare to help this happen.
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