BY SUE BOLAND
It is getting harder and harder to organise international conferences of the left these days. Rich imperialist governments have taken to routinely denying visas to delegates from Third World countries, even when those delegates have official invitations from conference organisers.
It happened again to the Democratic Socialist Party's January 3-7 congress: government visa decisions denied delegates the chance to hear from several representatives of Asian left parties.
It's not the first time: the April 1998 Asia-Pacific Solidarity Conference and Marxism 2000 were both marred by visa rejections and invited guests for the last three conferences of Resistance have also been knocked back.
Usually, the visa denials are not based on the person's involvement in left politics in their country but are simply a result of the Australian government's racist policy of only granting visa applications to people from certain Third World countries if they are rich.
Visas to attend the DSP congress were denied to Antonio Lopez, the deputy secretary of the Socialist Party of Timor, Antonio Raymundo from the Resource Centre for People's Development in the Philippines and representatives of the Saraiki National Party from Pakistan and the Afghanistan Labour Revolutionary Organisation.
The Afghan representative, who fled his home country for Pakistan fearing death at the hands of the funamentalist Taliban, was even told that he should have applied for a visa in Kabul, the Afghan capital.
Funnily enough, international gatherings of capitalists never experience these difficulties — there wasn't a single visa refused to any of the corporate chieftains who attended the September summit of the World Economic Forum in Melbourne, for instance.