Solidarity 128, 6 March 2008

After the Pakistan election

At an AWL meeting in London on 28 February, Faryal Velmi spoke about Pakistan after the recent elections. In those elections the two main opposition parties — the Pakistan People's Party (PPP) and the Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) (PML-N) — topped the poll and will have a dominant presence in the next parliament. They may form a coalition. Whether they can, or will even attempt to, pressurise General Musharraf, who has now lost many of his supporters in Parliament, into resigning as President is quite another matter. One good thing was that the Islamic party alliance, the MMA, lost control of...

Sentenced to death for reading about women’s rights

A student in Afghanistan downloads a report on women’s rights from the internet; he is arrested and sentenced to death for blasphemy by an Islamic court. This happened not under the Taliban but in October last year, under the pro-Western regime of Hamid Karzai. Sayed Pervez Kambaksh, a 23 year old who was studying journalism at Balkh University in Mazar-i-Sharif in northern Afghanistan, downloaded a report from an Iranian website which stated that Islamists who claim the Koran justifies the oppression of women are distorting the teachings of Islam. When he circulated it to his fellow students...

Egyptian workers step up

The class struggle in Egypt, rising since 2006, has reached a new pitch in the last few weeks. On Sunday 16 February, more than 10,000 workers from the Misr (Egypt) Spinning and Weaving Company textile mill in the Nile Delta city of Mahalla el-Kubra, north of Cairo, staged a mass demonstration against prices rices, low wages and the regime of Hosni Mubarak, joined by thousands more working-class people from the town. The Mahalla workers’ action was followed by similar, smaller-scale actions and protests by workers across Egypt. The Mahalla factory, which employs 27,000 people, has been the...

Iraq is still prey to the militias

The brief Turkish invasion of the autonomous Kurdish north on Iraq at the end of February is evidence, above all, of how far Iraq is from a liveable political settlement five years after the US/UK invasion of the country. Turkey has some 15 million Kurds, mostly living in the south and east of the country, near the borders with Iraq and Iran. Although repression of the Kurds in Turkey has slackened recently, Turkey has a longstanding hostility to Kurdish self-assertion, and especially to Turkish-Kurdish guerrillas who base themselves in remote mountain areas of Iraqi Kurdistan. In late 1990...

Anti-gay terror by Islamists

Iraqi LGBT have recently obtained new video evidence highlighting the brutality of the Badr Corps and police treatment of LGBT people in Iraq. It shows LGBT people being arrested, held in custody and having their heads shaved and taunted with songs of hate and revenge. The first video shows two gay men celebrating a wedding ceremony when they are stopped at a checking point between Al-Kut and Baghdad and violently pulled out of their car. The second video is of Ali, a trans woman — a member of Iraqi LGBT, he was living in a Basra safe house supported and run by the group. Many LGBT people face...

“Stop war” = “back Hezbollah”?

Hezbollah were among the organisations represented at the “World Against War” rally in Friends’ Meeting House, London on 25 February, with the Stop the War Coalition seeing fit to give a platform to the clerical fascist Lebanese militia. Reflecting the StWC’s eclecticism, this utter reactionary was speaking alongside Tony Benn, who gave his usual upper-class liberal speech about why the United Nations should be stronger and why we should learn from the Bible’s lessons of contrition. Introduced by Communist Party of Britain member Andrew Murray to rapturous applause from the 250-strong audience...

LOOKING LEFT: SWP +Left Convention

SWP: bad times If you believe the official SWP and Respect reports, everything is going swimmingly, with both groups marching steadily from one triumph to the next. But what about debacles like the defection of one of their councillors in Tower Hamlets to the Tories? And the recent Respect rally in Leeds (19 February), considered “big” enough for both John Rees and Oliur Rahman to travel up from London? The total turnout was 12 including the two speakers and interveners from other groups. Meanwhile, in many big cities such as Leeds, Sheffield, Nottingham and Manchester, SWP full-timers, once...

For an NUS that fights — vote Education Not for Sale!

The National Union of Students conference is taking place on 1-3 April, with the right wing threatening to close down all of the union’s remaining democratic structures with their ‘Governance Review’. The Education Not for Sale network, which has played a prominent role in the fight for a democratic union, is standing candidates for four positions in the full-time elections as well as one for the part-time ‘Block of 12’ posts. Daniel Randall (President) I’m a second-year university student and part-time bar worker in Sheffield. I’ve been an activist since I was about fourteen and have been a...

Sussex Uni is not for sale!

In the last month, Sussex University (in Brighton) has seen hundreds-strong meetings of students and education workers to oppose the anti-democratic, pro-business “reforms” being pushed by the university’s management team. The first mass assembly of the Sussex Education Not for Sale campaign was attended by over 160 people; the second, by more than 300. The management’s “Green Paper” seeks to transform Sussex into a business school, oriented to receive more government funding to research areas like “international security” (ie militarism). It seeks to transform the university into an...

Climate change, middle class activism and the media

Louise Gold spoke to Graham Thompson from Plane Stupid, whose recent action on the rooftop of the Houses of Parliament was widely reported. LG: Were you pleased with the media coverage? GT: Pleased in quantity terms. You have to work with the media you have. In terms of quality it’s not always everything you might hope for. Overall we think our message did get through and has been heard. Some of the coverage was unhelpful and some of it dishonest, but overall we’re quite happy. That said, it’s annoying that they always tend to focus on the security angle — we tend to think that climate change...

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