Peace talks in the Philippines slated to begin soon
Below are 3 articles from the press in the Philippines on plans to start formal peace talks in early 2011 in Norway between the Government of the Republic of the Philippines (GRP) and the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP), which includes the Communist Party of the Philippines and the New People’s Army.
Interview with Jose Maria Sison on GRP-NDFP Peace Negotiations
Philippine Daily Inquirer, October 25, 2010
1. How do you see Alex Padilla and his team? Are they acceptable to the NDFP panel?
JMS: PNoy [President Benigno Aquino] has made an excellent choice of Alex Padilla as the chair of the GRP Negotiating Panel. Alex has an understanding of the Filipino people’s struggle for national independence and democracy. He was a human rights lawyer and was once with Bayan. I also know Pablito Sanidad personally. He is also an excellent choice by PNoy. He is known as a man of integrity, a human rights lawyer, a patriot and progressive. I do not know the three other GRP panelists personally.
PNoy as GRP principal has the prerogative of appointing his own panelists . His panel appears to be so composed as to encourage the belief that there will be serious peace negotiations towards mutually satisfactory agreements. Through NDFP negotiating panel chairperson Luis Jalandoni, the NDFP has already publicly welcomed and accepted the new GRP panel.
2. What should be a good starting point for the renewal of the talks?
JMS: The chairmen of the GRP and NDFP Negotiating Panels should start immediately to communicate with each other. It is possible that by the time you go to press they shall have started to communicate and try to arrange preliminary talks between teams of the panels as soon as possible in Oslo. The preliminary talks are intended to pave the way for the resumption of formal talks in January or February. Read more »
Indian government backs off on filing charges against Arundhati, Geelani
Writer and activist Arundhati Roy addresses a seminar ‘Whither Kashmir: Freedom or enslavement', organised by the Coalition of Civil Societies, in Srinagar, on Sunday. Photo: Nissar Ahmad
The Hindu
New Delhi, October 26, 2010
Siddharth Varadarajan
The Union government has no intention of filing criminal charges against Hurriyat leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani, writer Arundhati Roy and others who spoke in favour of ‘azadi’ for Jammu and Kashmir at a seminar here last week, highly placed sources told The Hindu on Tuesday.
The Opposition Bharatiya Janata Party is taking a strident position, insisting that a case of sedition be lodged against those who spoke at the seminar, but the Centre believes that acting on this demand will undermine the fragile dialogue process the government’s three interlocutors have begun in Srinagar.
With Dileep Padgaonkar, Radha Kumar and M.M. Ansari urging those Kashmiris raising slogans in favour of ‘azadi’ to put their thoughts down in writing, the irony of criminalising a mere speech has not been lost on New Delhi.
“We knew the BJP would try and make the holding of the seminar an issue,” the sources said, adding police permission for the public event was given because the organisers could easily have gone to court had the authorities tried pre-emptively to gag them. The meeting was thus videographed, and the proceedings were scrutinised.
The sources said permission of the Ministry of Home Affairs was not needed for the police to file a case of sedition, but added that North Block did not believe that charging or arresting Mr. Geelani and Ms. Roy made sense. Read more »
Pakistani-American Adnan Mirza framed by FBI
October 25, 2010
By Shireen M Mazari
After the farcical trial of Dr Aafia Siddique in a US court, another Pakistani has fallen victim to the US through yet another travesty of justice. This time it is a student, Adnan Mirza, who has been jailed for 15 years ostensibly for “conspiring to provide material support to the Taliban and illegal gun possession.”
However, the reality is totally different and shows how the FBI deliberately traps young Muslims through fabrication of evidence. Some local FBI agents secured their careers in the war on terror, but this young man has lost five precious years as a student and the only breadwinner for his mother and three younger brothers. In jail for nearly five years on flimsy evidence – audio tapes recorded by undercover FBI agents during a hiking trip talking to a young Muslim student about his views on America’s Iraq and Afghan wars – this Pakistani young man’s case, someone who is well-known in Houston’s poor districts for helping the needy on the streets on Christmas and Sundays, is a clear illustration of how unscrupulous local US law enforcement agents used the war on terror to promote their careers and create unnecessary panic among Americans by arresting and humiliating Pakistanis on trumped up charges.
Some historical background on the struggle for self-determination in Kashmir
The division of Kashmir, dating back to the India-Pakistan war of 1947--a legacy of British colonialism
This is an excerpt from an article by a World to Win News Service dated October 25, 2010.
Kashmir lies on the northern borders of India and Pakistan. Its more than 12 million people are mainly involved in farming or work in workshops and small factories making shawls, rugs and carpets. Kashmir’s population is multi-ethnic and multi-religious, with a Moslem majority but also many Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs and Christians.
After World War 2, before British imperialism ended its formal rule and left the subcontinent, the colonialists deliberately aggravated the differences between various nationalities and religions, as they did in other parts of the world.
This policy resulted in the partition of the former colony of India and the creation of the country of Pakistan after a bloody war between Hindus and Moslem that led to millions of deaths and several millions refugees. It was the biggest displacement history had ever seen until then.
After partition and the creation of Pakistan, the subcontintent’s small states that had never been under direct British colonial rule were not allowed to choose whether or not they wanted to be independent. In practice, they were forced to choose to be part of India or Pakistan. Read more »
The right to dissent in India, and for a plebescite in Kashmir: Please endorse
Statement from the Concerned Citizens of India on Kashmir
We are deeply concerned at the recent media reports of possible cases of ‘sedition’ to be levelled against some of the speakers at the public convention on Kashmir held in New Delhi on 21 October 2010 titled “Azadi: The Only Way” organized by the Committee for the Release of Political Prisoners(CRPP) with sections of political forces fomenting jingoistic feelings. We are appalled to find how impatient sections of the Indian society have become, and how attempts are consistently being made to silence voices of dissent by the Indian government by branding such voice crying for justice as ‘seditious’—a term the new Indian state borrowed from the days of the British raj.
We strongly believe that freedom of speech and expression is an in-alienable fundamental right guaranteed under the Indian constitution which can never be curbed in a country which boasts of ‘having the largest democracy in the world’.
We also strongly feel that the Kashmir issue is a political issue which has a history since the late 1940s and that history makes it amply clear that the future of the State of Jammu and Kashmir would have to be decided through a plebiscite under the supervision of the United Nations as testified also by the existence of a UN office at Srinagar since then.
We strongly demand that instead of trying to gag the voices of sanity and justice through violent means, the Government of India should come forthwith in addressing the most vital political issue—the issue of exercising the right of self-determination and openly invite the people of all parts of Jammu & Kashmir to come forward and decide their own future through plebiscite under the supervision of United Nations as accepted by the Nehru-led Indian government itself.
Kolkata, 27 October 2010
New York City: 2.8 million police stops from 2004-2009, driven by racial profiling
Police stop and frisk in New York City
New York Times, October 27, 2010
Many Police Stops in New York Unjustified, Study Says
By AL BAKER and RAY RIVERA
Tens of thousands of times over the past six years, the police have stopped and questioned people on New York City streets without the legal justification for doing so, a new study has found.
And in hundreds of thousands of more cases, city officers failed to include essential details on required police forms to show whether the stops were justified, according to the study written by Prof. Jeffrey A. Fagan of Columbia Law School.
The study was conducted on behalf of the Center for Constitutional Rights, which is suing the New York Police Department for what the center says is a widespread pattern of unprovoked and unnecessary stops and racial profiling in the department’s stop-question-and-frisk policy. The department denies the charges.
The study examined police data cataloging the 2.8 million times from 2004 through 2009 that officers stopped people on the streets to question and sometimes frisk them, a crime-fighting strategy the department has put more emphasis on over the years. Read more »
ANC’s South Africa is like Obama’s USA in some ways
Black Agenda Report, October 19, 2010
One should not overstretch the similarities between Black South Africa and Black America. But both communities have been in denial about their nominal leaders. “After all these years of believing that labor – Black labor – was on the inside of power in South Africa, the unionists of COSATU are forced to a different realization.” The same realization looms for African Americans.
A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford
“All we have done is to change the skin color of the driver.”
In the words of Zwelinzima Vavi, the president of the Congress of South African Trade Unions, COSATU, “All we have done is to change the skin color of the driver, but in terms of economic policy the direction remains the same as the one the apartheid regime was traveling, which was inspired by Margaret Thatcher.”
Thatcher was, of course, the right-wing British Prime Minister who had a political love affair with U.S. President Ronald Reagan. Their policies, with minor alternations, remain in place in the United States and Britain, today. And, according to union leader Zwelinzima Vavi, the same is true in South Africa, despite 16 years of nominal Black rule.
On the face of it, COSATU is in a much better position to influence South African government policy than unions in the United States. The struggle to overthrow apartheid was led by a triumvirate of the ANC – the African National Congress – COSATU and the South African Communist Party. With the Left comprising two legs of the stool, and the ruling ANC Party enjoying overwhelming majorities, one would think that the Left would be in an unchallenged position to transform South African society. Yet, again quoting trade union leader Vavi, “This road we have travelled has not only reproduced but deepened inequalities and unemployment…. Various measures indicate that income inequality has widened.”
In the United States, income inequalities have been widening for the past 30 years. Republicans have held national power for 20 of those 30 years, but unions exercised virtually no strategic influence in the eight years of Democrat Bill Clinton’s reign, when corporate free trade became law and Wall Street was liberated from the rule of law through deregulation. President Obama did not lift a finger for labor’s number one priority: a bill that would have made it easier to replenish depleted union ranks. Instead, he bailed out Wall Street to the tune of $12 to 14 trillion. Read more »
Mapuche communities in Chile: Not underground, still fighting for their ground
Freedom for all Mapuche Political Prisoners, 2010 march
Upside Down World, October 26, 2010
Jeremy Tarbox
This year Chile celebrated the bicentennial year of its independence, 20 years since the return of elections, and its first transition of power during this democratic regime. These events received worldwide attention, but events underground have dominated international news coverage: the devastating earthquake in February; and the successful efforts to free the miners who were trapped underground since early August.
However, there is another deeper wound in Chile that has not healed, and is on the surface. The miners were trapped underground, but in southern Chile, indigenous Mapuche communities are still fighting for the right to their own ground.
Days before the bicentennial celebrations, the streets of Temuco echoed with shouts of “Free them; free the Mapuche who are fighting back!”. The protest march started outside the jail where many Mapuche were on hunger strike. The setting of the jail is steeped in symbolism. Firstly, it is right below Cerro Ñielol, the hill where the Mapuche signed a treaty with the Chilean Government in 1881 to stop what newspapers of the day called the ‘war of extermination.’ Secondly, a block away is a memorial to the detained (tortured), disappeared and murdered during the Pinochet 1973-90 military dictatorship. Many are Mapuche names: one of the events that precipitated the coup was Salvador Allende’s land reform program to return lands stolen from Mapuche communities. Read more »
Mexico: Indigenous activists murdered in Oaxaca
Demonstration of the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO) in 2006
Weekly Update on the Americas, October 26, 2010
Two unidentified men shot and killed Catarino Torres Pereda, general secretary of the Citizen Defense Committee (Codeci), at the indigenous rights group’s office in Tuxtepec in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca on the afternoon of Oct. 22. The murderers escaped in a car waiting for them nearby.
In the evening members of Codeci and other organizations protested the assassination with a demonstration at the Alameda de León plaza in the city of Oaxaca, the state capital.
Codeci was part of the protest movement against Oaxaca governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz that shut down much of the state for five months in 2006, and Torres was one of the first activists to be detained in the wave of repression Ruiz Ortiz used to fight the movement. Federal and state police arrested Torres on Aug. 6, 2006, and he was held in the Almoloya de Juárez federal prison until his release on bail on Mar. 8, 2007.
Torres continued his work for indigenous rights, and this year he participated in the Free Oaxaca State Democratic Convention, which supported coalition gubernatorial candidate Gabino Cué Monteagudo, who defeated Eviel Pérez Magaña, the candidate of the centrist Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and Gov. Ruiz’s chosen successor. According to Tania Santillán, a Codeci leader, the assassins were wearing shirts with election propaganda for Pérez Magaña. (La Jornada (Mexico) 10/23/10) Read more »
Ecuador: Indigenous movements challenge Correa government
President Rafael Correa
Upside Down World, October 26, 2010
Benjamin Dangl
The recent right-wing coup attempt in Ecuador shed light on the rupture between President Rafael Correa and the country’s indigenous movements. This rocky relationship demonstrates the challenges of protesting against a leftist leader without empowering the right.
When Correa took office in January of 2007, he moved forward on campaign promises including creating an assembly to rewrite the country’s constitution, using oil wealth for national development, and confronting US imperialism. However, once the electoral confetti stopped falling, Correa began to betray the indigenous movements’ trust on many fronts, pushing for neoliberal policies, criminalizing protests against his administration and blocking indigenous movements’ input in the development of extractive industries and the re-writing of the constitution.
Indigenous movements protested a right wing coup attempt on September 30th while criticizing the negative policies of Correa, a president widely considered a member of Latin America’s new left who is working to implement modern democratic socialism. How did it come to this? The history of the dance between Correa and the indigenous movements offers insight into the current political crisis in the country. Read more »
Stalemate in Nepal: Which way forward for the UCPN(Maoist) and the Nepali people’s revolutionary struggle?
Soldiers of the People's Liberation Army during the People's War (1996-2006)
by the MLM Revolutionary Study Group, April 4, 2010 (www.mlmrsg.com)
The central question facing the Unified Communist Party of Nepal(Maoist) (UCPNM) is whether it can develop the political line, strategy and tactics to conquer state power and wield it in the service of the vast majority of the people of Nepal and the world.
This question has become the subject of discussion and debate throughout the world, ever since the Maoists in Nepal signed an agreement in 2006 to end their 10-year old people’s war. Over the years of the people’s war, the revolutionary forces had inspired people the world over, winning wave upon wave of victories and building both guerrilla zones and liberated areas which were beginning the work of a new society. The Peoples War in Nepal, it must be said, rekindled the spirit and hopes of revolution around the world. Their successes, winning nearly 80% of the territory of Nepal, had drawn such attention and acclaim that ending of the people’s war with the peace agreement of 2006 came as a great surprise and shock to many.
The course which has been followed since has been discussed and debated–and denounced or embraced–by various forces, because the Maoists had achieved so much prior to the 2006 agreement, and had seemed to be approaching nationwide victory. Why this change of course? Was this a departure from a new democratic revolutionary strategy, or was this a sophisticated move toward successfully winning the revolutionary struggle for power?
To answer this question, it must be determined whether Prachanda and the majority of the UCPNM leadership are leading the party and the masses of Nepal to complete the new democratic revolution and build socialism, or they are implementing a disorienting strategy— leading to a political “package deal” in the next few months–that will result in a major setback for the Nepali people’s revolutionary struggle.
I. Moving Towards a Package Deal in May 2010
After signing the Comprehensive Peace Agreement in November 2006, Prachanda and his allies in the party leadership argued that winning a majority or a large plurality of the seats in the 2008 Constituent Assembly elections would allow them to start restructuring the state by peaceful means—by parliamentary politicking backed up by periodic street demonstrations called by the party. Read more »
