El Salvador: Stop political killings!

Below is an abridged sign-on statement initiated by the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador, http://cispes.org. To add you organisation, please email sistercities@gmail.com The context for the violence is the increasing likelihood of a victory in the elections for early next year of the left-wing Farabundo Marti Liberation Front.

We denounce the assassination of Hector Antonio Ventura, committed on May 2, in the community of Valle Verde, Suchitoto in Cuscatlan department. According to preliminary information, Ventura was stabbed to death in the heart and received blows to the head from assailants who entered the house where Ventura was staying with a friend. The second young man was also attacked but survived.

Ventura was one of 14 people who were prosecuted by the Salvadoran government for “acts of terrorism” after participating in a peaceful protest against water privatisation in Suchitoto on July 2, 2007. Their case caused tremendous national and international outcry against the grave misuse of anti-terror statutes against legitimate political expression.

Ventura’s murder was committed just weeks after all 14 of the prosecuted were granted definitive liberty. The court decision proved false the accusations that the government made against the group of activists throughout the ten months prior.

The murder was also committed just two days after Ventura had agreed to give testimony of his experience at a public “Day Against Impunity” event planned for July 2 by the mayor of Suchitoto. Although we still await a full investigation of the crime — one that investigates not only the assailants but also the intellectual authors of the crime — these circumstances, including the fact that Ventura was a young social activist, and particularly the fact that he was a recently released political prisoner, create grave concerns that his assassination was committed for political reasons, with the intention of destabilising and intimidating members of the political opposition.

As members of the international community concerned with human rights in El Salvador, we join the Salvadoran social organisations in denouncing this atrocity, and express our profound anxiety regarding several other murders of social activists and opposition political leaders in the last two years.

The Salvadoran Archbishop’s Legal Defence Office investigated 26 homicides in 2006 that suggested the participation of death squads reminiscent of the Salvadoran civil war.

In the 2007 report of the Archbishop’s Legal Defense Office, 113 of 169 investigated violent deaths were extrajudicial executions: executions committed by organised crime structures reminiscent of civil war-era death squads, met with tolerance or participation by the state, and committed with the intent of generating terror in the population, social cleansing, or elimination of political opposition members.

We call upon our own, international governments to urge the Salvadoran authorities to thoroughly investigate these cases; and urge the office of the Salvadoran ombudsperson for Human Rights to ensure provision of protection and safety for witnesses in these trials, as well as to opposition members who receive politically motivated threats.

From: International News, Green Left Weekly issue #752 28 May 2008.

HARI GINI, MASIH PERCAYA JANJI POLITIK ARTIS KE RAKYAT?

Edisi: 126 Tahun IV - 2008
Sumber: www.prakarsa-rakyat.org


Oleh Fitri *

“..hari gini kalau tidak punya uang jangan berkecimpung di dunia politik..” (ucapan wakil bupati Tangerang, Rano Karno di tayangan SILET RCTI 21 Mei 2008)
!

Di tayangan infotainment itu diperlihatkan pula bagaimana hegemoni yang menciptakan pencitraan di kesadaran orang banyak bahwa hanya yang banyak uang lah yang bisa melenggang di percaturan politik Indonesia. Baru-baru ini pula kita lihat di tayangan televisi beberapa artis akan mengikuti jejak Rano Karno dan Dede Yusuf yang melenggang menjadi bagian dari antek kapitalis. Keberhasilan 2 aktor film ini dalam memenangkan kursi pemerintahan, menunjukan bahwa sebenarnya kepercayaan rakyat terhadap kandidat yang berasal dari kalangan birokrat dan militer semakin memudar dan cenderung untuk memilih kandidat yang sama sekali belum masuk ajang pemilihan pemimpin daerah, seperti yang terjadi di Jawa Barat. Tak akan lama lagi Saipul Jamil (si penyanyi dangdut), Ikang Fauzi (seorang rocker dan pengusaha), Wanda Hamidah segera menyusul. Hanya bermodalkan ketenaran dan punya uang saja mereka, k! arena untuk pencalonan saja -hanya sekedar mengambil formulir ! dibutuhk an biaya sebesar 15 juta- begitu penuturan seorang artis yang akan mencalonkan menjadi walikota Serang.

Pertanyaannya adalah mengapa partai politik yang ada sekarang menggunakan para artis untuk menjadi wakil-wakil rakyat di parlemen ataupun menajadi pemimpin rakyat di daerah? Masyarakat harus tahu bahwa cara “jualan artis” tersebut adalah bagian dari strategi partai borjuis. Kemunculan artis sebagai calon dalam berbagai pilkada tidak akan mensejahterakan rakyat, karena mereka berasal dari lingkungan yang borjuis, glamour, dan bukan berasal dari rakyat pekerja yang menderita tapi sebenarnya menopang perekonomian Negara. Rakyat diajak untuk melupakan masalah yang menimpa diri mereka karena disajikan seorang pemimpin yang berasal dari kalangan entertainer. Padahal permasalahan yang terjadi tidak akan pernah selesai walaupun berganti pemim! pin tetapi masih berada di ranah sistem kekuasaan modal (kekuasannya kaum borjuis) yang selama ini membelenggu rakyat.

Media infotainment menyihir pikiran rakyat pekerja yang menontonnya (karena gak ada kerjaan dan semua TV melakukan hal yang sama) dan menjadi raung propaganda kapitalis, yang menyatakan bahwa uang adalah segala-galanya. Pilkada dan menjelang pemilu 2009 lagi-lagi rakyat harus ditipu agar tidak bangkit merebut kekuasaan. Maraknya artis yang menjadi politisi adalah taktik yang sedang diuji keefektifannya, tetapi sudah pasti tidak akan membawa perubahan bagi kehidupan rakyat Indonesia. Sudah bukan saatnya rakyat menitipkan agendanya ke tangan-tangan elit politik borjuasi, ke tangan-tangan artis yang hanya bermodalkan ketenaran untuk merebut simpatik masyarakat.

Pe nderitaan rakyat hanya dijadikan untuk berkampanye elit politik borjuis. Penderitaan rakyat hanya dijadikan rayuan gombal untuk meraih kekuasaan negara, tapi ketika memerintah justru untuk menindas rakyat. Apakah para artis akan menolong rakyat melalui partai-partai borjuis? Jawabannya jelas, semua itu bualan saja dan sudah sering didengar oleh rakyat. Dalam status sosial kemasyarakatan posisi artis hari ini adalah sebagai kaki tangan kapitalis untuk mencekoki rakyat dengan berbagai tayangan di media, baik melalui iklan, sinetron, dan berbagai sandiwara lainnya yang membuat rakyat semakin hanyut dalam khayalanya untuk pemenuhan ekonomi yang nyatanya kian hari semakin mahal.

Yang Tidak Dibicarakan Para Artis
Para artis yang bermain di Pilkada sesuai pesanan para penguasa modal tidak akan pernah bicara caranya melepaskan belenggu! rakyat dari kemiskinan dan penghisapan. Artis bicara hal-hal lain yang mengalihkan perdebatan soal mengapa kehidupan rakyat diisi dengan berbagai kebijakan yang terus menghisap darah rakyat. Ketidakpastian kerja, upah murah, sistem kerja kontak dan outsourcing adalah bentuk dari penindasan kaum kapitalis. Sekarang lihat, apakah Rano Karno bicara bagaimana menghapus itu semua di Kabupaten Tangerang?

Dengan masuknya para artis menjadi elit-elit politik dan kaki tangan kapitalis jelas tidak akan menyelesaikan masalah. Rakyat bukan butuh hiburan semu yang akan memanjakan nasib rakyat tapi sekaligus dijadikan taruhan dalam perjudian kapitalisme. Nasib rakyat bukan untuk spekulasi gerak modal yang diakumulasikan oleh pemilik modal. Agar rakyat tidak digadaikan, tidak jadi taruhan, maka rakyat pekerjalah yang harus berkuasa. Rakyat pekerja lah yang harus memimpin dan merubah! segala kebijakan yang anti rakyat yang selama ini menjadi keb! ijakan p emerintah yang bertekuk lutut di bawah ketiak kaum pemilik modal dan tidak bisa membawa rakyat ke taraf hidup yang layak. Jangan biarkan perlawanan rakyat hari ini dimanfaatkan oleh segilintir orang yang ingin menjadi pahlawan kesiangan di tengah-tengah massa rakyat yang sedang mulai membangun kekuatan.

Ayo bersatu lawan penjajahan bentuk baru, penjajahan kaum modal!


* Penulis adalah anggota Federasi Serikat Pekerja Karawang (FSPEK), sekaligus anggota Forum Belajar Bersama Prakarsa Rakyat dari Simpul Jabodetabek.

**Siapa saja dipersilahkan mengutip, mengganda! kan, menyebarluaskan sebagian atau seluruh materi yang termuat dalam portal ini selama untuk kajian dan mendukung gerakan rakyat. Untuk keperluan komersial pengguna harus mendapatkan ijin tertulis dari pengelola portal Prakarsa Rakyat. Setiap pengutipan, penggandaan dan penyebarluasan sebagian atau seluruh materi harus mencantumkan sumber (portal Prakarsa Rakyat atau www.prakarsa-rakyat.org).

Don’t wait until 2010 – Abolish the ABCC now!

Since it was set up in 2005, the Australian Building and Construction Commission (ABCC) has operated as an all-powerful secret police in the building industry, attacking unions, unionists and the right to organise. The ABCC has been handed dictatorial power to secretly interrogate and intimidate workers, to jail and levy huge fines, all in the interest of defending profits in the building industry. The new Rudd government must honour its commitment to abolish the ABCC, not in 2010 but now! Any proposal to introduce a new “tough cop on the beat”, as proposed by deputy PM Julia Gillard in the lead-up to the 2007 federal election, must also be dropped.

The ABCC was set up as the Howard government's special weapon against the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union, especially after its critical role in defeating Howard's attack on the Maritime Union of Australia in the 1998 Patrick's dispute. It was formed out of the Cole Royal Commission into the building industry – a trumped-up kangaroo court, which failed to find any evidence of any corruption by building unions. It aims to intimidate union members, bankrupt and split unions, and destroy all workplace solidarity. $32 million a year of taxpayers' money goes to keeping this special cop shop running.

The Commission’s extraordinary powers allow it to operate in secrecy, deny workers the right to silence and impose hefty fines and prison sentences for non-cooperation. No other group of workers in Australia has been singled out to face the draconian and unjust force of the law to such an extent. Already three reports by the International Labour Organisation have been issued outlining how the Building and Construction Industry Improvement Act, the Howard government legislation which formed the ABCC, is in breach of international labor law.

The ABCC has been involved in around 38 prosecutions targeting workers and unions who have taken industrial action over occupational health and safety concerns, in particular, including life-threatening workplace issues. Under the current laws the building industry is defined so broadly that it also includes transport and manufacturing workers, making them targets for the building industry’s attack dog. The ABCC’s target list includes the CFMEU, the Electrical Trades Union, the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union and the MUA.

Since the election of the Rudd government in November, the ABCC has been pursuing building workers with an increased frenzy. This points to a broader campaign by big business to create the impression of “industrial chaos” in the building industry in order justify the ABCC’s existence beyond Labor’s stated end-date of January 1, 2010. In particular, the charging in Geelong of CFMEU delegate Craig Johnston–former state secretary of the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union – is a cynical attempt to revive anti-union hysteria by stirring memories of "unionists on the rampage" (when Johnston's "crime" as a union official was trying to defend unjustly sacked AMWU members!).

The bitter truth is that–contrary to election promises and much empty rhetoric–the Rudd Federal government wants to keep most of the previous Coalition government’s anti-worker laws. While promising to abolish the ABCC, Labor will replace it with a special section of its “Fair Work Australia”, which may have similar powers to the ABCC. This is an outrage. The ABCC needs to be completely abolished and discrimination against building workers ended once and for all!

No secret police for the building industry!

No more kangaroo courts – abolish the ABCC now!

Defend the right to organise!

Defend the right to strike!

Afghanistan — an unjust war

Tony Iltis

Despite the April 27 death of Lance Corporal Jason Marks, the fifth Australian soldier killed in Afghanistan since the 2001 US-led invasion, and subsequent allegations of the mistreatment of Afghan prisoners of war by Australian troops, the there are no plans to withdraw any of the 1000 Australian troops from Afghanistan.

Since being elected in November, the Rudd ALP government has downsized the Australian contingent of the US-led occupation forces in Iraq. While most troops deployed to Iraq remain, the removal of 550 front-line soldiers was an acknowledgement that anti-war sentiment was a factor that helped the ALP government get elected.

While opposition to having troops in Iraq is greater, a majority of Australians also oppose the presence of Australian troops in Afghanistan.

However, ALP policy reflects a myth that is widespread in the Western “liberal” media, and likely to influence a future Barack Obama administration in the US. The myth is that while the invasion of Iraq was a mistake, and the bloody war there a “policy failure” by the US and its allies, the war in Afghanistan is part of a real fight against anti-Western terrorism that has also liberated the country from the nightmare of rule by the theocratic Taliban regime.

This myth obscures a military occupation that has caused at least as many civilian deaths as that of Iraq — and possibly a lot more.

Australian military and political leaders, including foreign minister Stephen Smith, have said that allegations that four Afghan prisoners of war were stripped and beaten by Australian troops, in apparent revenge for the combat death of Marks, are being taken seriously. On May 10, however, the head of the defence forces, Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston, announced that the military had already found there to be no truth in the reports.

The May 11 Sunday Age reported that there were also allegations that Australian forces regularly handed prisoners of war to Afghan forces who tortured them.

Allegations of prisoner abuse, many proven, have been consistent throughout the occupation. However, a far greater human rights catastrophe is the occupation forces’ reliance on air strikes.

While the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan was ostensibly a response to the killing of about 3000 civilians in the September 11 terrorist attacks in the US, by December 31, 2001, ABC Radio National was reporting that Western bombing had already taken a higher toll of Afghan civilians.

Since then civilian deaths have not been counted: some are reported as deaths of Taliban fighters while others are not reported at all. In addition to air strikes, civilian deaths are also caused by crossfire and arbitrary violence and terrorism by both pro- and anti-occupation militias. Some estimates put the number of civilian deaths in the millions.

The direct intervention of the US-led forces in 2001 was not the start of Western involvement in Afghanistan. Following a leftist revolution in 1978, whose social base was in the small urban population, the US began arming an Islamic fundamentalist insurgency based on the rural tribal aristocracy, as part of a covert Cold War strategy to draw the neighbouring Soviet Union into an unwinnable war.

The strategy was successful. The Soviet Union invaded in December 1979 and for 10 years was militarily held down by the Mujahideen — as the coalition of rival Afghan Islamist militias were known — and a Saudi-led multinational Islamist force headed by Osama bin Laden. Both forces were run by Pakistani military intelligence (the ISI) under the direction of the US.

This operation, which was financed by the US and Saudi governments and by Afghan heroin exports, directly contributed to the collapse of the Soviet Union and US victory in the Cold War.

The leftist government of Afghanistan outlasted the Soviet Union, however in 1992 it was overthrown by the Mujahideen warlords, who then turned on each other in a devastating civil war. Murder, looting, abduction, torture and rape were combined with an ultra-violent version of religious law that actually owed more to local traditions and the brutalising effects of intergenerational war than to Islamic theology.

In 1996 the Taliban, a religious militia created by the ISI, took control of the capital, Kabul, and 80% of the country. At first people welcomed them for reducing inter-warlord violence but their corrupt and brutal theocracy rapidly alienated the population.

Initially, the Taliban was seen as close to Pakistan and the West, while the rival warlord coalition, the Northern Alliance, was closer to Russia and Iran. The West turned against the Taliban because of the presence in Afghanistan of Osama in Laden, who — in response to the US deciding that his international terrorist network was no longer needed as a proxy — attacked US targets in the Middle East and Africa.

The 2001 invasion of Afghanistan was motivated by the now discredited neo-conservative agenda to use the September 11 attacks to justify direct military control over the oil-rich areas of Central Asia and the Middle East.

Despite the stated war-aim being the capture and elimination of Osama bin Laden, the US-led forces allowed the Pakistani military and ISI to disentangle themselves from the Taliban, which enabled bin Laden and the leadership of his network to escape.

The invaders bought the loyalty of the Northern Alliance and some previously pro-Taliban warlords with arms, money and a free hand in the heroin industry.

While the Western media makes much of Taliban involvement in heroin production and trafficking, only US$20 million goes to the Taliban from an industry which creates an estimated $4 billion profits annually.

However, drug eradication campaigns by the occupation forces — which ignore the warlords and criminals who control the trade but target farmers with no other source of livelihood — have been politically exploited by the Taliban, who have been arming farmers to defend their crops.

Before the invasion, the Taliban had actually eliminated the drug industry in the 80% of the country they controlled in the mistaken belief that this would return their regime to favour with the West.

Because of their reliance on air strikes and local warlords, the occupation forces have kept their own casualty rate lower than that in Iraq. Since 2001, 816 Western soldiers have died in Afghanistan, 505 of them from the US. However, 300 of these casualties have been since January 2007. The occupying powers do not have the capacity, or any strategy, to militarily control the country but their withdrawal — which would probably see the allegiance of most of the warlords revert to the Taliban — would be a political defeat.

For the Afghan people, the occupation has in no way diminished the depredations of religious fundamentalist and criminal militias. It has simply added the horrors of aerial bombardment.

The withdrawal of the occupation forces would not end the violence in Afghanistan. However, it would end the greatest cause of civilian casualties and, if combined with the cessation of military support for all the warlord forces and financial reparations to facilitate reconstructions, may allow space for the secular and democratic forces who, although decimated since 1992, have never been entirely wiped out.

Socialism is the future — build it now

Michael Lebowitz

Ideas become a material force when they grasp the minds of masses.

This is true not only of ideas that can support revolutionary change. It is also true of those ideas that prevent change. An obvious example is the concept of TINA — the idea that “there is no alternative”, no alternative to neoliberalism, no alternative to capitalism.

Certainly we know that there have been significant changes in the terrain upon which the working class must struggle — changes that are a challenge because of a new international division of labour and because of the role of states in delivering a passive, docile working class to international capital.

It is not only changing material circumstances that affects the working class, however. It is also the loss of confidence of the working class that makes these material changes a deadly blow. Even the Korean working class, which has demonstrated so clearly in the past its militancy in the struggle against capital, has been affected.

But it does not have to be that way — because things are changing.

Look at Latin America, where the effects of global restructuring and neoliberalism took a very heavy toll. People said ultimately — enough! And they have said this not only to neoliberalism but, increasingly, they have moved further and say no to capitalism.

For many, it came as a great shock when Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela, said at the World Social Forum in January of 2005 in Brazil that “we have to reinvent socialism”.

Capitalism, he stressed, has to be transcended if we are ever going to end the poverty of the majority of the world. “We must reclaim socialism as a thesis, a project and a path, but a new type of socialism, a humanist one, that puts humans and not machines or the state ahead of everything.”

That statement, however, did not drop from the sky. It was the product of a spontaneous rejection of neoliberalism by masses in 1989, the election of Chavez with a promise to change things in 1998 and the response to the combination of the domestic oligarchy and imperialism in their attempt to overthrow Chavez in 2002 and 2003.

The embrace of this new socialism, in short, was the product of struggle.

The struggle continues. And we can see that out of struggle comes creativity. In particular, the struggle in Venezuela has stressed the importance of a revolutionary democracy — a process in which people transform themselves as they directly transform circumstances.

Through the development of communal councils representing 200 to 400 families in urban areas and as few as 20 in the rural areas, people have begun to identify their needs and their capacities and to transform the very character of the state into one which does not stand over and above civil society but rather becomes the agency for working people themselves.

“All power to the communal councils” has been the call of Chavez. “The communal councils must become the cell of the new socialist state.”

Ideas can become a material force when they grasp the minds of masses.

In Latin America, the idea of a socialism for the 21st Century is beginning to move the masses, with its emphasis upon Karl Marx’s concept of revolutionary practice — the simultaneous changing of circumstances and self-change.

At its core is the concept of revolutionary democracy. In contrast to the hierarchical capitalist state and to the despotism of the capitalist workplace, the concept is one of democracy in practice, democracy as practice, democracy as protagonism.

Democracy in this sense — protagonistic democracy in the workplace, neighbourhoods, communities, communes — is the democracy of people who are transforming themselves into revolutionary subjects.

Here is an alternative to capitalism — the concept of socialism for the 21st Century with its emphasis upon struggle from below, upon solidarity and upon building the capacities of working people through their own activities. It is an idea that a working class with a tradition of struggle against capital should have no difficulty in grasping.

Socialism is the future — build it now.

[This the preface to the forthcoming Korean edition of Michael Lebowitz’s Build It Now: Socialism for the 21st century, which as available through Monthly Review, . Lebowitz is professor emeritus of economics at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. He is also a member of the Miranda International Centre (CIM), a left-wing Venezuelan institute. Green Left Weekly journalist based in Caracas, Federico Fuentes, who also works for the CIM, will be a special guest at the national Resistance conference in Sydney, June 27-29, to discuss the struggle for socialism in revolutionary Venezuela.

Indonesia: Growing fuel price protests meet repression

The report below is based on accounts posted to the blog of the Indonesian National Liberation Party of Unity (Papernas). Visit http://papernas-international.blogspot.com.

Waves of protests against the national government’s plan to raise fuel price are intensifying. They have spread to and involved almost all popular sectors (workers, students, peasants and the urban poor).

Actions across Indonesia occurred on May 21, coordinated by the People Accuse Front (FRM) and the National Students’ League for Democracy (LMND) to protest the planned fuel price increase and to commemorate a decade since the fall of the dictator Suharto in a mass uprising.

In Jakarta, 150 FRM protesters camped on the Proclamation Monument continued their action to reject the fuel price rise, marching to the State Palace where thousands of others were already demonstrating. Police attempted to block the FRM demonstration from protesting right in front of the palace, leading to a confrontation. At the time of writing, 18 FRM activists are still detained by police.

In Bundung, in West Java, 50 LMND activists staged a protest. An LMND spokesperson stated that the government had no reason to raise fuel prices, arguing that if the world’s fuel price rocketed, Indonesia should be able to reap the windfall profit as an oil producer, if not for the fact that its oil and gas fields are controlled by foreign companies.

The spokesperson argued that the government should nationalise the mining industry for energy security and as the basis for national industralisation. Police violently dispersed the protest, injuring five LMND activists.

In Makassar, South Sulawesi, thousands of people from the FRM demonstrated in front of the house of Vice-President Jusuf Kalla. In Toraja, South Sulawesi, 600 protesters from Tana Toraja Students’ Alliance occupied the local parliament to reject the fuel price rise. Paskah Linting, LMND Tana Toraja executive member, stressed that the government must have the courage to nationalise foreign-owned mining companies and reject the payment of foreign debt.

Actions also occurred in cities across Indonesia. LMND national executive member Rudi Hartono reported on May 22 that dozens of LMND and other activists had been arrested around the country at demonstrations, with dozens wounded in clashes with police.

Activists are calling for solidarity and support. Please send messages of protest demanding the detainees be released to Indonesia National Police headquarters: fax +62 21 721 8144, SMS +62 818315 703, or email . Send messages of solidarity to Rudi at .

Venezuela condemns US, Colombian violations of its territory

Stuart Munckton

According to a May 19 report by Latin American TV station Telesur, Venezuela’s defence minister Gustavo Rangel Briceno, denounced the fact that a US fighter jet violated Venezuelan airspace — around the La Orchila island, which houses a Venezuelan military base — two days earlier.

This violation occurred just one day after Caracas had condemned an incursion into Venezuelan territory by 60 Colombian soldiers.

Rangel read out an excerpt of the conversation between the Venezuelan control tower and a US pilot, explaining that the latter was not aware he was in Venezuelan territory, according to the Telesur report.

Telesur reported: “At the same press conference, the Venezuelan Minister of Foreign Affairs, Nicolas Maduro, announced that he talked with his Colombian counterpart, Fernando Araujo, about the incursion of the Colombian military into Venezuelan territory. He said they both agreed on activating diplomatic mechanisms in order to settle cross-border conflicts via diplomatic means.”

According to a May 19 Venezuelanalysis.com report, Venezuelan information minister Andres Izarra had confirmed on May 18 that the government has proof that 60 Colombian troops made an illegal incursion into Venezuelan territory — in the border state of Apure — on May 16.

Colombian defence minister, Juan Manuel Santos, had initially denied the claims the following day. “We have photos and other materials that demonstrate the military incursion into our territory”, Izarra said.

Venezuela labelled the incursion “an act of provocation” that “aims to deliberately destabilise the region” and called on Colombia to immediately “cease these violations of international law and the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Venezuela”, according to Venezuelanalysis.com

According to Telesur, at his press conference, Maduro announced he would arrange a meeting with US ambassador to Venezuela, Patrick Duddy, to demand an explanation of the violation of Venezuelan airspace.

Venezuelanalysis.com reported on May 21 that the meeting occurred the previous day and that Maduro had declared that Venezuela was not satisfied with the explanation given by Duddy.

Maduro stated that the Venezuelan government was not satisfied because “they had no justification, Venezuelan airspace and maritime territory is sacred”, according to Venezuelanalysis.com.

Duddy argued that the violation was the result of a navigation error and assured the Venezuelan government that it would not occur again.

‘Guest workers’ or modern slavery?

Peter Boyle

A pile of bags and clothing on an old shopfront verandah on Cuff Road in Singapore’s Little India is “home” to a group of about 50 migrant workers who have been spat out by an economy that relies heavily on so-called “guest workers”.

All are men from the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, lured to Singapore by shady labour agents who had extracted heavy fees from them.

“When they landed, some found there were no jobs waiting for them. Others, unaware of regulations here, were tricked into entering on social-visit passes, which do not allow them to work. A few workers even claimed they were met at the airport by ‘agents’, who took the return portion of their air tickets and disappeared”, the local Straits Times reported on March 18.

Others worked legally for a while, but were tossed out by their boss after incurring work injuries.

Jobless, desperate, homeless and hungry, some of them tried to work illegally and were arrested, jailed and flogged. Corporal punishment, like the death penalty, still remains a feature of modern Singapore law.

To cap it off, some of these men are not allowed to leave Singapore because the labour ministry — which administers the approximately 900,800 transient migrant workers that comprise more that 40% of the island state’s total labour force — requires them to stay to appear as witnesses in a string of court cases.

“They find themselves in a debt trap, having borrowed money to pay agency fees and plane tickets, many continue to borrow money to pay for basic necessities now”, explains Sha Najak from Transient Workers Count Too (TWC2), a small charity which is helping feed the men and championing the cases.

Receiving no funds from the Singaporean government and struggling to stay afloat, TWC2 () was formed out of outrage following the 2001 killing of 19-year-old Indonesian domestic worker Muawanatul Chasanah, following months of brutal assault by her employer. Chasanah’s autopsy revealed some 200 caning, scalding, punching, kicking, and burning injuries at the time of her death.

Some 170,000 of the nearly one million transient workers work as domestics and one of TWC2’s current campaigns is for these migrant domestic workers to be guaranteed at least one day off in a week!

Model program

Yet Singapore’s “guest worker” scheme is presented as a model for the world by some right-wing forces. An article in the January edition of the right-wing “libertarian” US magazine, Reason, supported US President George Bush’s call for a guest worker scheme that would partly legalise the exploitation of “illegal” migrant workers in the US, without ending the vulnerability and super-exploitation that arise from being denied the right to legally settle in the US.

Similar arguments are now being raised by advocates of the Rudd Labor government’s plan of continuing in substance (though under another name) the former Howard government’s notorious 457 visa regime for temporary overseas workers.

Singapore is seen as a model because it is a relatively wealthy island in South East Asia, with average incomes (adjusted for price parity) only slightly below that of the tiny oil-state of Brunei. The Reason article, by Kerry Howlett, argued that its guest worker scheme is a win-win solution.

According to a 2008 report from the Asian Development Bank: “The Singapore government estimates that foreign labour contributed 3.2 percentage points of its annual growth rate of 7.8% in the 1990s.” Singapore gets the hard and dirty jobs done and workers from poverty stricken countries like Indonesia, the Philippines, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh get to send money home to their families.

Across the causeway in Malaysia, the situation for “guest workers” is a lot worse, as Newsweek conceded in a March 15 article entitled “Bottom of the barrel”.

Captives

Malaysia is one of the “most notorious” host countries, according to the Newsweek article. It has an estimated 2.5 million foreign workers, many of whom fit the UN’s definition of forced laborers.

“Malaysian law effectively makes every foreign worker a captive of the company that hired him or her. In the name of immigration control, employers … are required to confiscate guest workers’ passports and report any runaways to the police.”

Newsweek cited the case of a local computer component manufacturing company — which probably made the casings for hard drives in many of the top-brand computers used around the world — which exploits a virtually enslaved migrant workforce. The article quotes a company executive pitying these workers who were “fooled hook, line and sinker” by sleazy labour brokers. They had tricked the workers into paying huge placement fees for jobs that yield a net income close to zero.

“This is the dark side of globalization: a vast work force trapped in conditions that verge on slavery. Most media coverage of human trafficking tends to focus on crime, like the recent scandals involving migrant laborers who were kidnapped and forced to work at brick kilns in China.

“And forced prostitution, of course, which accounts for roughly 2 million people worldwide, according to the United Nations’ International Labor Organization … The ILO reckons the worldwide number of forced laborers today at some 12.3 million. It’s a conservative estimate; other approximations rise as high as 27 million.”

[An article in a future issue of Green Left Weekly will look at the situation for guest workers in Australia.]

Fidel Castro

Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz (born August 13, 1926) is a Cuban revolutionary leader who served as the country's 22nd president and led the country from January 1959 until his retirement in February 2008. Castro began his political life with nationalist critiques of Batista, and of United States political and corporate influence in Cuba. He gained an ardent, but limited, following and also drew the attention of the authorities.^[2] He eventually led the failed 1953 attack on the Moncada Barracks, after which he was captured, tried, incarcerated and later released. He then traveled to Mexico^[3][4] to organize and train for the guerrilla invasion of Cuba that took place in December 1956.

He came to power in an armed revolution that overthrew the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, and was shortly thereafter sworn in as the Prime Minister of Cuba.^[5] In 1965 he became First Secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba and led the transformation of Cuba into a one-party socialist republic. In 1976 he became President of the Council of State as well as of the Council of Ministers. He also held the supreme military rank of Comandante en Jefe ("Commander in Chief") of the Cuban armed forces.

Following intestinal surgery from an undisclosed digestive illness believed to have been diverticulitis,^[6] he transferred his responsibilities to the First Vice-President, his younger brother Raúl Castro, on July 31, 2006. On February 19, 2008, five days before his mandate was to expire, he announced he would neither seek nor accept a new term as either president or commander-in-chief.^[7][8] On February 24, 2008, the National Assembly elected Raúl Castro to succeed him as the President of Cuba.^[1] Fidel Castro remains First Secretary of the Communist Party.