LL:INDEX: WORKERS POWER GLOBAL WEEK
WORKERS POWER GLOBAL WEEK E-newswire of the LRCI 9 June 2000 Subscribe to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.workerspower.com WELCOME TO ISSUE #9 Workers Power Global Week is the English language e-newsletter of the LRCI. To unsubscribe mail to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Please forward this to a comrade. IN THIS ISSUE: ARGENTINE GENERAL STRIKE, ZIMBABWE, BANGLADESH, UKRAINE, PRAGUE PROTEST UPDATE HOW CAN WE IMPROVE THIS BULLETIN? WRITE AND TELL US: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ARGENTINA: GENERAL STRIKE As we hit the =93send=94 button, the biggest general strike for decades is u= nder way in Argentina. Hundreds of thousands of workers have joined today's protest against the higher taxes and spending cuts demanded by the IMF as part of its austerity plan. Hospitals are on emergency only, the transport system is at a standstill, and many factories and shops are shut. Protesters have blocked the roads into Buenos Aires with burning tyres while there are reports of sporadic fighting with police and strike-breaking taxi-drivers. The austerity package is designed to guarantee further bail-out loans from the IMF. President de la Rua has also called for sharp cuts in state workers' wages and pensions. CGT union federation Hugo Moyano threatened further strikes if the austerity plan is not withdrawn. =46or more in Spanish see: http://www.pts.org.ar WORKERS POWER GLOBAL WEBSITE UPDATE The June 2000 issue of Workers Power (Britain) is now online at http://www.workerspower.com/wpglobal/wpbritain244.html Articles include: SWP INTERNATIONAL IN FACTION STRUGGLE http://www.workerspower.com/wpglobal/ISOvSWP.html EURO2000 SOCCER: A QUESTION OF CLASS? http://www.workerspower.com/wpglobal/euro2000.html SIERRA LEONE: THE NEW IMPERIALISM http://www.workerspower.com/wpglobal/sierraleonejune2khtml BRITAIN: WHERE NEXT FOR THE LSA? http://www.workerspower.com/wpglobal/Isa244.html BRITAIN: SCRAP SECTION 28 http://www.workerspower.com/wpglobal/s28June2k.html BRITAIN: LABOUR'S RACIST ASYLUM OFFENSIVE http://www.workerspower.com/wpglobal/asylum44.html FOCUS - ZIMBABWE: ZANU-PF CONTINUES PRE-ELECTION RAMPAGE Zimbabwe's parliamentary elections planned for 24/25 June will be conducted in a climate of fear and intimidation. It is not white farmers but black members of the opposition movement, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), who have been bearing the brunt of attacks by gangs supporting Mugabe's Zanu-PF ruling party. Zanu-PF supporters threatened candidates as they registered at the start of this month. Candidate Thadeus Rukini was beaten to death. In March, Mugabe was trailing in the opinion polls. Sixty three per cent of voters said they wanted a change of government. Zimbabwe's workers and peasants were disillusioned with a ruling party and leader which presided over 50 per cent unemployment and 60 per cent inflation. The MDC was gathering support on a wide scale. Since then Mugabe has launched a counter attack using both carrot and stick. The stick is political violence and intimidation. MDC rallies are broken up. The MDC has virtually no access to the air waves. The carrot is the promise of land redistribution. First Mugabe unleashed the "war veterans" to lead land occupations. When the white farmers caved in and promised not to support the opposition, the leadership tried to rein in the squatters. At the end of last month the ZANU-PF government finally decreed the land occupations legal, and promised to resettle 100,000 landless peasants by the end of June. This is too little, too late. The country's 4,400 white farmers own the most fertile 34 per cent of Zimbabwe's land while one million black peasant farmers subsist on the remainder. Yet for 20 years, Mugabe only managed to "resettle" a few of his closest friends and ministers. As one popular opposition t-shirt puts it: "Land to the people, not the politicians". =46ar from being the scourge of the capitalist farmers, Mugabe wants to do business with them. That is why he left the white landowners alone to build up their wealth for two decades and even now has allowed them to bank 20 per cent of their income, from the lucrative tobacco trade, in foreign currency accounts Mugabe has only encouraged land occupations now to save his political skin. After the elections he hopes to call off the occupations and strike a deal with the reactionary Commercial Farmers' Union (CFU). Unfortunately, the leadership of the MDC - which was formed by the trade union movement in September 1999 and quickly attracted over a million members from the workers and the rural poor - has bent over backwards to support the white farmers and the Western capitalists. On the land question, the MDC supports the retention of the big plantations in the hands of the landowners, allowing only unutilised and marginal land to be redistributed. Even then, the black peasant farmers will have to mortgage their land to attract investment while the white capitalist farmers will enjoy rich compensation. The
LL:PR: Anti-war Statement
The following is a statement on the war in the Balkans from the Leagure for Revolutionary Communist International (LRCI), of which Workers Power Australia is a member. Stop the NATO bombing now! Stop the genocide in Kosova! No a ground war in Kosova or beyond! Victory to the Kosovar national liberation struggle! LRCI International Secretariat, 16 May 1999 1. The present war over the fate of Kosova has a dual character; the first, that waged by NATO against Serbia to enforce a reactionary peace has been carried out by means of missile attack and bombing of a large part of Serbia's military capacity and economic infrastructure; already over 1000 Serb civilians have been killed. The second, that waged by. the Yugoslav army and Serbian paramilitaries inside Kosova to drive out its ethnic Albanian population has led to the displacement or external exile of nearly one million, at least 5000 executions and the unaccounted disappearance of 100,000 of Kosovar men. Both NATO and Serbia's aims and methods in these wars have a thoroughly reactionary character. On the other hand, the resistance of the Kosovar Liberation Front (U=C7K) to the rump-Yugoslav state's attempts at genocide, and the resistance of the Serb population and the Yugoslav armed forces to NATO, have a progressive character despite the fact that the Serbs link their war to the ethnic cleansing of Kosova and the U=C7K their resistance to support for NATO bombing and calls for it to invade and occupy Kosova. It is contrary to the interests of the Serb and Kosovar peoples that either reactionary objective should be realised -and it is in the interests of the world working class and anti-imperialist struggle that both justified defensive struggles should succeed. 2. This can only be achieved if the Serbian people break from Milosevic and all the reactionary greater Serbian nationalists (Seselj, Draskovic et. al.) and if the Kosovar Albanians break from the counterrevolutionary leadership of the U=C7K who in turn lean upon NATO . What is urgently needed is the fighting unity of the workers and peasants of all nationalities, which respects the national existence and democratic rights of all peoples. Such a strategy must take power out of the hands of the corrupt bureaucrats and criminal "businessmen" who have set the peoples of former Yugoslavia at one another's throats and place it firmly in the hands of councils and militias of the urban and rural workers and poor peasants. In short this is a programme of permanent revolution, which combines the fight for self-determination for all Balkan peoples (i.e. to state independence) with the struggle to realise a voluntary socialist federation of Balkan states. 3. The regime headed by Slobodan Milosevic is not waging a principled anti-imperialist struggle. Milosevic moved from systematic repression of the democratic rights of Kosovar Albanians to outright war against them in 1998. Its aim was to destroy the U=C7K guerrillas. It evolved into a plan to ethnically cleanse the strongest areas of U=C7K support and the major cities= =2E Behind it lies a "final solution" to the Kosova problem which involves the displacement --by methods of mass terror --of a majority of the provinces population, the seizure of its main economic assets and the historic sites of Serb nationalism, and the settlement in these areas of the population displaced from the Krajina, Bosnia and Slavonia in 1995. This is a continuation and attempted completion of the project to create an ethnically homogeneous Serbian state. 4. The starting point for the any progressive outcome must be the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of the mass murder squads of Serbian paramilitaries, Interior Ministry troops and regular Yugoslav army forces. from Kosova. This would be in accord with the wishes of the majority of its people. It is the sole basis for establishing the minority rights of the Serbian inhabitants and would remove a major obstacle to the development of the class struggle in Serbia which alone can bring to power a government which can solve the national antagonism of the former Yugoslavia on the basis of equal rights and end to privileges for minorities. 5. But NATO can play no progressive role in this conflict. Its war aim are not --as Clinton and Blair proclaim --to defend the human rights of the Kosovars. Rather, by using Kosova as a pretext, they aim to establish a new world order based on NATO, under the hegemony of the sole world superpower --the United States of America. The USA fears the disorder unleashed both by the destructive restoration of capitalism in the former Stalinist world and by the effects of recurring capitalist crises. To deal with this the USA demands full freedom of action to act as the world's policeman --behind the facade of the institutions of the "international community" if possible, unilaterally if necessary. Just as through the IMF and the World Bank it supervises the world economically, so through
LL:DDV: Anti-Inperialist United Front
After an intial meeting on Monday may 10, representatives of Workers Power, the Democratic Socilaist Party, Freedom Socialist party an other individuals, have decided to inititate an Anti imperialist United front around the war in the Balkans. The preliminary basis of the united form is: Stop the US/Nato war on Serbia Self determination for Kosova Let all refugees in Full citzenship rights for all refugees. A meeting has been called to finalise the slogans and the basis of the united front on Thursday 27th May, 6:30pm, Meeting room 2, RMIT City campus. All those who want to get involved in a campaign against the war in the Balkans are invtied to attend. LL.VE -- Leftlink - Australia's Broad Left Mailing List mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.alexia.net.au/~www/mhutton/index.html Sponsored by Melbourne's New International Bookshop Subscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?Body=subscribe%20leftlink Unsubscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?Body=unsubscribe%20leftlink
LL:DDV: Kosova, East Timor and UN intervention
A public meeting on Kosova and east Timor is being held on Tuesday May 18. Workers Power well be presenting the case for independence for East Timor and Kosova and why we call for no Nato or UN intervention. All are welcome to attend the meeting. 7:30pm, International Bookshop meeting room, Trades Hall Melbourne. LL.VE -- Leftlink - Australia's Broad Left Mailing List mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.alexia.net.au/~www/mhutton/index.html Sponsored by Melbourne's New International Bookshop Subscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?Body=subscribe%20leftlink Unsubscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?Body=unsubscribe%20leftlink
