What is happening in the Middle East?

Revolt in the Middle East

 Reference points for a discussion on the events in North Africa and the Middle East

 The current events in the Middle East and North Africa are of historic importance, the consequences of which have yet to be entirely clear. Nevertheless, it is important to develop a discussion about them that will enable revolutionaries to elaborate a coherent framework of analysis. The points that follow are neither that framework in itself, still less a detailed description of what has been taking place, but simply some basic reference points aimed at stimulating the debate.  

1. Not since 1848 or 1917-19 have we seen such a widespread, simultaneous tide of revolt. While the epicentre of the movement has been in North Africa (Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, but also Algeria and Morocco), protests against the existing regimes have broken out in Gaza, Jordan, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, Bahrain and Saudi, while a number of other repressive Arab states, notably Syria, have been on high alert. The same goes for the Stalinist regime in China. There are also clear echoes of the protests in the rest of Africa: Sudan, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Swaziland.... We can also see the direct impact of the revolts in the demonstrations against government corruption and the effects of the economic crisis in Croatia, in the banners and slogans of student demonstrations in the UK and workers’ struggles in Wisconsin, and no doubt in many other countries as well. This is not to say that all these movements in the Arab world are identical, either in their class content, their demands, or in the response of the ruling class, but there are evidently a number of common features which make it possible to talk about the phenomenon as a whole.

IROM AND THE IRON IN INDIA'S SOUL

                    (Presented by SHOMA CHAUDHURY in TEHLKA Magazine)

    

      

       IROM SHARMILA’S STORY SHOULD BE PART OF UNIVERSAL FOLKLORE. IN THE TENTH YEAR OF HER EPIC FAST, SHOMA CHAUDHURY TELLS YOU WHY

                                           

                           

    SOMETIMES, TO accentuate the intransigence of the present, one must revisit the past. So first, a flashback.

     The year is 2006. An ordinary November evening in Delhi. A slow, halting voice breaks into your consciousness. “How shall I explain? It is not a punishment, but my bounden duty…” A haunting phrase in a haunting voice, made slow with pain yet magnetic in its moral force. “My bounden duty.” What could be “bounden duty” in an India bursting with the excitements of its economic boom?

     You are tempted to walk away. You are busy and the voice is not violent in its beckoning. But then an image starts to take shape. A frail, fair woman on a hospital bed. A tousled head of jet black curls. A plastic tube thrust into the nose. Slim, clean hands. Intent, almond eyes. And the halting, haunting voice. Speaking of bounden duty.

     That’s when the enormous story of Irom Sharmila first begins to seep in. You are in the presence of someone historic. Someone absolutely unparalleled in the history of political protest anywhere in the world, ever. Yet you have been oblivious of her. A hundred TV channels. An unprecedented age of media. Yet you have been oblivious of her.

    

Punish the Guilty of the 1984 Anti-Sikh Carnage

 “As soon as we entered Block 32 we were greeted by a strong stench of burnt bodies

which were still rotting inside some of the houses. The entire lane was littered with burnt

pieces of furniture, papers, scooters and piles of ash in the shape of human bodies – the unmistakable signs of burnt human beings. Dogs were on the prowl. Rats were nibbling at the still recognizable remains of a few bodies.”

 From Who Are The Guilty?

First fact-finding report ( PUDR and PUCL) released on 10 November 1984 In this manner 2733 Sikhs were killed in Delhi, houses and goods destroyed in the first week of November 1984. The team of democratic rights activists that investigated these incidents, found it to be a massacre organised primarily by the Congress party. It also declared the names of Congress leaders, police officers and others who were identified by the survivors as inciting and participating in the mobs.

Today, 25 years later, most of these murders remain unprosecuted. In the over 300 FIRs filed on murder charges, barely 10 persons been convicted. This outcome is only to be expected, given that the ruling Congress party prevented FIRs from being filed, refused to institute a commission of enquiry. The judiciary lent a helping hand by rejecting every petition demanding the same. No political party came out in aid of the victims or even to oppose the murders.

Committees were set up only six years later to identify the accused. Even then they received sufficient witness testimonies to recommend launching of cases against Congress leaders Sajjan Kumar, Jagdish Tytler, HKL Bhagat and Dharam Das Shastri. As years passed, witnesses died and other witness’  accounts lost their clarity and still others preferred silence in the face of threats. Either no charges were

presented or else courts acquitted the accused. The government did not care to challenge in the High Court and victims’ families were forced to file appeals. The Nanawati commission reopened some of these closed cases. Thus finally, one case each remained against Sajjan Kumar and Tytler. The filing of the final report by the CBI on 28 March acquitting Tytler marks the end of the road for justice to the victims.

The 1984 carnage thus represented a turning point in India’s political scene. It sent a message that powerful political parties could organise killings of thousands and get away scot free. Thus we were to witness many similar pogroms during Advani’s Rath Yatra, Modi’s Gujarat genocide, in Mumbai in 1993 and against Christians in Orissa, Gujarat and Karnataka. The reference to 1984 occurs now at times of election when victim’s grief becomes political football, and political parties trade charges as to who has committed greater crimes against humanity and to compare their communal credentials.

Ultimately the denial of justice does not become just an abandoned orphan. The pogrom and subsequent administrative and judicial apathy leads to festering wounds that find expression in a mindless cycle of revenge and further violence. For, the 1984 carnage contributed more to Sikh militancy through the eighties and nineties than any other factor. Similar analogies can be seen for Gujarat and the crimes by security forces in Kashmir.

It is high time we reject the vicious cycle of these murderous games and those who play them; to demand that those who use their positions of power to commit heinous crimes against innocent people should face jail and punishment; and that such criminals shall hold no office in our institutions of democracy.

People’s Union for Democratic Rights, (PUDR)

Delhi , April 2009

The Chhattisgarh Special Public Safety Bill, 2005

                     A Memorandum to the President of India

                       Peoples Union for Democratic Rights (PUDR)

In its session in December 2005, the Chhattisgarh Legislative Assembly passed the Chhattisgarh Special Public Safety Bill, 2005. The Chhattisgarh Vishesh Jan Suraksha Vidheyak, 2005 was introduced by the ruling party (the Bharatiya Janata Party) and some of the members of the main opposition party, the Indian National Congress, claim that the Bill was intentionally passed by the House during a walkout by Congress legislators.

1.     1. The Bill is believed to have been sent to the office of the President of India for assent by the Governor of Chhattisgarh, despite it not being made available for public discussion and debate. Notably there was no detained deliberation on the contents of the Bill in the Chhattisgarh assembly, neither was there any public suggestion or expert committee opinion sought with respect to the implications of this legislation. The little public outrage seen so far has been in the context of the statement that journalists would not be excluded by this legislation.

2.      

Manifesto of the HSRA

MANIFESTO OF THE HINDUSTAN SOCIALIST REPUBLICAN ASSOCIATION*   [ Prepared by B.C. Vohra, it was widely distributed at the time of the Lahore Session of the Congress in    1929.] “The food on which the tender plant of liberty thrives is the blood of the martyr.” FOR DECADES THIS LIFE BLOOD TO THE PLANT OF India’s liberty is being supplied by revolutionaries. There are few to question the magnanimity of the noble ideals they cherish and the grand sacrifices they have offered, but their normal activities being mostly secret the country is in dark as to their present policy and intentions. This has necessitated the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association to issue this manifesto.

Our alternative:resist the capitalist regime!

As the government rains attack after attack on our living standards – whether through cuts in health, education, benefits and local services, through redundancies in both the private and public sector, through tuition fee increases or the abolition of EMA, or through the steadily rising price of basic necessities – the TUC has for months now been telling us to fix our gaze on the Big Demo on the 26^th March. 

The bosses of the trade unions have argued that a very large turn-out on the day will send a clear message to the Lib-Con government, which will start carrying out its spending review at the beginning of April, involving even more savage cuts than the ones we have seen already. It will show that more and more working and unemployed people, students and pensioners, in short, a growing part of the working class, are opposed to the government’s programme of cuts and are looking for an “alternative”.

Maintaining imperialist control over its backyard: Mission Impossible for the Russian bourgeoisie - A comment on Russia's invasion on Georgia.

The impression that Russian imperialism is making more and ground in its immediate sphere of influence has been strengthened by a number of spectacular events recently: the rapprochement with the Yanukovych government in Ukraine and the signing of a an accord allowing for long-term Russian military bases there; the signing of a deal with Ankara for the construction of a Russian nuclear plant in Akkuyu in the south of Turkey; Medvedev's ‘brotherly' visit to Syria in May and the rumours that the elimination of the Bakiyev government in Kyrgyzstan was entirely to the advantage of Moscow. But is this actually the case?

Class struggle in Ukraine: A requiem for nationalisation Submitted by ICC in August 2009

We are publishing an article from the Alliance of Revolutionary Socialists, a group in Russia and Ukraine, the product of a recent split in the Internationalist Union of Proletarian Revolutionary Collectivists. 
The Alliance condemns participation in bourgeois elections and democracy as a disguised form of the dictatorship of capital. It rejects any support for the existing trade unions, which it sees as instruments in the hands of the bourgeoisie whose function is to subject the working class to the interests of capital. It also rejects the idea of creating new radical trade unions, It pronounces itself in favour of workers’ general assemblies and of the necessity for world revolution. 

Genocides being organised by gangster ruling class of Kyrgyzstan against Uzbek minorities.

    Since the fall of the Kyrgyzstan president Bakayev, exiled from the country following violent riots in the capital city Bishkek, the country has become even more unstable, culminating in a number of horrific pogroms, centred round the town of Osh, where the Uzbek minority was subjected to murder, rape, robbery and arson. 

What lay behind these pogroms?

The majority of the people carrying out the attacks were recruited from among the most lumpenised elements of a very poor population. But the operation was directed by a well-oiled machine, involving at least a part of the armed forces - many witnesses testified to the supportive presence of military vehicles

Egypt: The class struggle takes centre stage Submitted by ICC

The tide of rebellion in North Africa and the Middle East shows no sign of abating. The latest developments: demonstrations and clashes with the police in the Libyan city of Benghazi following the arrest of a lawyer involved in a campaign demanding an investigation into the brutal massacre of hundreds of prisoners after a protest in 1996. Qaddafi’s regime again displays its ruthless brutality – there are reports of snipers and helicopters firing into crowds, killing many; in Bahrain, thousands of demonstrators occupy the Pearl Roundabout in Manama, hoping to emulate the occupation of Tahrir Square. They raise slogans against sectarian divisions (“No Shia, no Sunni, only Bahraini”) and against self-appointed leaders (“We have no leaders”). At the time of writing, riot police have now cleared the area with considerable violence – many demonstrators have been injured and some killed. In Iraq, there have been new demonstrations against the price of necessities and the lack of electricity.  

A Referendum for Peace

The larger Sudan region will continue to face many challenges even after the referendum on South Sudan.

A referendum held in the province of Southern Sudan between 9 and 15 January to decide on secession saw voters overwhelmingly endorsing the formation of a new nation state. Southern Sudan has been a semi-autonomous ­region after the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (cpa, also called the Naivasha agreement) that ended the civil war ­between Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir’s National Congress Party (NcP)-led forces and the Sudan People’s Liberation Army/Movement (SPLa/M).

Assam’s Nationality Question

By: No Author 

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Vol XLVI No.9 February 26, 2011

When will the largest surviving multinational state learn to resolve its nationality question?

Severe military repression over a long period of time does weaken one’s resolve, leading to repudiation of the very raison d’être of one’s existence in a national liberation ­organisation. Finally, after 30 years, an important faction of the leaders of the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA), the one headed by Arabinda Rajkhowa, the organisation’s chairman, now out of prison on bail, initiated talks with the government on 10 February, in effect dropping the question of the sovereignty of the people of Assam from the agenda. Surely the union ­government views this development as a breakthrough of sorts. It seemed to be in a great haste to flag off the talks before the coming state assembly elections. But what will all the talk of autonomy – yet to be articulated in concrete terms – mean if the Indian state continues to be undemocratic as far as the ­nationality question is concerned? Is the government genuinely interested in reaching an honourable settlement in Assam? And with ULFA ­itself divided over the question of giving up its original raison d’être, is an “honourable settlement” in storefor it?