The deputy president of Swaziland’s People’s United Democratic Movement (Pudemo) Sikhumbuzo Phakathi was arrested on September 6 at the Phongola border post.
The arrest came as Swazi police and soldiers were deporting a delegation of South African activists from the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) and the Swaziland Democracy Campaign (SDC).
Pudemo president Mario Masuku was detained before the start of a protest march on September 7 to mark the global day for democracy in Swaziland. He was “escorted home” by police to prevent his participation.
Norm Dixon
The Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) ruled on June 28 that the 2001 conviction of Libyan citizen Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi — sentenced to 27 years’ jail for allegedly bombing Pan Am flight 103, which exploded over the Scottish town of Lockerbie on December 21, 1988, killing 270 people — “may have suffered a miscarriage of justice”. The SCCRC referred al Megrahi’s case to Scotland’s appeal court.
After several days of intensive, sometimes heated, discussions and membership consultations, public-service unions voted on June 28 to end their national strike and accept the South African governments settlement offer. The strike, which began on June 1, was the longest and largest public-sector strike in South Africas history, with more than 700,000 workers on strike and another 300,000, for whom it was illegal to strike, taking part in militant marches, pickets and other forms of protest.
Nigerias combative working-class movement has shown its strength and militancy. An overwhelmingly observed four-day nationwide general strike, which began on June 20, succeeded in rapidly forcing the countrys new president to back down on an announced doubling of value-added tax and increased fuel prices. The degree of popular support for the strike revealed that the 23-day-old regime of President Umaru YarAdua is already thoroughly discredited and despised.
As the national strike by more than 700,000 South African teachers, nurses, health workers and other public servants entered its fourth week on June 22, the African National Congress (ANC) government steadfastly refused to seriously revise its miserly pay offer. President Thabo Mbeki knows that if his neoliberal, pro-big business regime relents and grants the public-sector workers a much-needed above-inflation pay increase, it will embolden the country’s private-sector workers to fight for a similar rise.
Up to 2 million workers have hit back at the African National Congress (ANC) governments sacking of striking health workers, its deployment of army strikebreakers and increasing police violence against strikers. On June 13 the more than 700,000 teachers, nurses, health workers and other government workers on strike for higher pay were joined by hundreds of thousands of other unionists and supporters in a nationwide solidarity strike. Hundreds of thousands of people marched across the country.
More than 1 million public servants across South Africa have embarked on the largest public sector industrial campaign in the countrys history. On June 1, more than 700,000 workers downed pens and clipboards for an indefinite stoppage, while another 300,000 essential workers, who are prohibited from striking, joined huge nationwide marches, pickets and other protest actions. While the immediate demand is for a significant pay increase, an important undercurrent of the mass action is working-class and poor peoples growing dissatisfaction with the pro-rich policies of the African National Congress (ANC) government.
May 27 marks the 40th anniversary of the overwhelming victory of the 1967 referendum, in which almost 91% of the Australian people voted to give the federal government the constitutional power to override the brutal, degrading racist laws of the states under which Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders were tormented. The federal government now had the power to make specific laws in respect to the Indigenous people. The Australian people had sent a clear signal that it was time for Canberra to make laws, introduce programs and provide the necessary resources to end the racial oppression of Indigenous Australians.
Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth has helped dramatise the enormity of the global environmental crisis. The scale of the threat posed by industrially induced global warming, and the short time in which to take meaningful action to prevent catastrophic consequences, makes the question of how to combat global warming arguably the most urgent one facing humanity.
A Congolese prosecutor has called for three former managers of the Perth-based Anvil Mining corporation to be indicted for complicity in war crimes involvement in the massacre of up to 100 people in the village of Kilwa in October 2004. The slaughter, committed by Congolese Armed Forces soldiers ferried to the scene by Anvil-chartered planes and company-owned trucks, took place 50 kilometres from the companys Dikulushi silver and copper mine in the south-east of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
A Congolese prosecutor has called for three former managers of the Perth-based Anvil Mining corporation to be indicted for "complicity in war crimes" - involvement in the massacre of up to 100 people in the village of Kilwa in October 2004. The slaughter, committed by Congolese Armed Forces soldiers ferried to the scene by Anvil-chartered planes and company-owned trucks, took place 50 kilometres from the company's Dikulushi silver and copper mine in the south-east of the Democratic Republic of Congo.
"We have got to demand that all foreign troops leave Iraq certainly, but let's also demand that the troops come back from the US bases around the world, not just the war zones..."
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