Month: May 2009

By Meenakshi Ganguli

If there were a chessboard to demonstrate the war between Sri Lankan forces and the LTTE, the pawns would be wearing sarongs and saris. These individuals — civilians, not soldiers — are the war’s ‘collateral damage’. Human rights groups are despised by both for they don’t understand this mathematics and mourn over the increasing number of corpses.
The LTTE is responsible for human rights abuses — forcibly recruiting people, turning schoolchildren into combatants, indiscriminate killings, using landmines and human bombs. Successive Sri Lankan governments, in order to appease the Sinhalese population, have failed to address the grievances of the Tamils, thus, building support for the Tigers.
To ensure its success, the government has chosen to silence the dissidents. Those who criticise its actions or policies are accused of being closet LTTE supporters; they are either shot down by unknown gunmen or men in vans prowling the streets of Colombo makes them ‘disappear’. Journalists and human rights defenders live in constant fear.
The military has made gains in reclaiming virtually all of northern Sri Lanka previously under the LTTE. The withdrawing Tigers have taken with them civilians to be used as combatants, provide labour to build trenches or serve as human shields. These are the people that the LTTE claims to represent and protect, and yet, it is deliberately putting them in danger.
For over two years, the Sri Lankan government knew that civilians were being forced to accompany the retreating Tigers, yet it did nothing about their safety. Instead, the detention camps house around 60,000 of those who managed to escape the
LTTE’s writ. They now feel that they will be persecuted when the war is over.
Even with reports of civilian casualties pouring in, the government has denied that it is targeting civilians. Credible reports, however, prove it’s a lie. The military says that those killed are not necessarily civilians. A senior Sri Lankan diplomat has reportedly said, “A fighter doesn’t become a civilian when he dons a sarong.” Health Secretary Athula Kahandaliyanage had stated, “It’s been found that terrorists fight in civil clothes and when they get wounded they can be mistakenly considered as civilians”. He added that there could be accidental injuries to non-combatants if they were in the line of fire.
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By B. Muralidhar Reddy

No political solution is in sight even as the prolonged war spells misery to hapless citizens caught in the crossfire.
Reuters

An injured Tamil girl at a temporary hospital in Trincomalee on March 28.

FOR the Sri Lankan government, the final phase of the war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) is proving to be tougher, trickier and nastier than anticipated. None had thought the Tigers would last long after the fall of their main garrison town, Mullaithivu, on January 25. But 10 weeks later, they are still fighting, much to the agony of the civilians trapped in the war zone, and the rest of the world.
The presence of a large number of civilians in the war zone is one of the main reasons for the prolonged war. Estimates of their number vary from 70,000 to 150,000. Besides, it reflects the bravado of the Tigers, which has meant unimaginable consequences for the hapless citizens caught in the crossfire. According to the Ministry of Disaster Management and Human Rights, between January and March more than 57,394 civilians, including women, children and the elderly, had fled the LTTE area to the safety of government-held areas.
The LTTE is now boxed into an area of one and a half square kilometres in addition to the 20 sq km demarcated as no-fire zone (NFZ) by the government. It is a precarious situation as the military believes that the Tigers are not only hiding among the civilians in the safe zone but have also set up gun positions in the NFZ.
The consequences of the delay in the complete defeat of the Tigers as a conventional force are felt in different quarters in and outside Sri Lanka. The immediate victims are the trapped civilians, whose unending plight is pricking the conscience of the world community, particularly the Tamil diaspora. A section of political parties in Tamil Nadu are attempting to make political capital out of the miseries of the people in Sri Lanka’s war theatre.
The concerns, and pulls and pressures at various levels have had an impact on Colombo from time to time. In an obvious bid to address these concerns, President Mahinda Rajapaksa convened a meeting of all Tamil and Muslim parties on March 26.
The invitees to the interactive session included the representatives of the pro-LTTE Tamil National Alliance (TNA). However, the TNA boycotted the meeting, citing the humanitarian crisis triggered by the war as reason. In a letter sent to Rajapaksa hours before the meeting, it maintained that utmost priority must be given to the resolution of the humanitarian crisis before it assumed catastrophic proportions and that such action was necessary for any political discussions to be purposeful and meaningful. “Since you have hitherto consistently followed a policy of ignoring the TNA in regard to all political issues in the north-east, we are glad that you now wish to engage in discussions with us, recognising, even though belatedly, that we represent the Tamil people. We will extend our cooperation to any credible political process that seeks to evolve an adequate, acceptable and durable political solution to the Tamil question. We would strongly urge that you take necessary steps to address forthwith the grave humanitarian crisis pertaining to the displaced Tamil civilian population,” the letter said.
The invitation was a first of its kind by the President to the TNA after the abrogation of the Norwegian-brokered 2002 Cease Fire Agreement (CFA) in January 2008 and the imposition of a ban on the Tigers in January this year. Ironically, the TNA’s stand is in contrast to the LTTE’s repeated assertions in recent months about its willingness for unconditional talks with the government. Signs of differences among pro-LTTE outfits over the ongoing war recently had given rise to speculation that a section of the TNA might respond to the presidential invitation.
In the second week of March, Vinodharadhalingam, a Member of Parliament of the TNA, had surprised everyone with his comments in support of the government’s efforts towards the welfare of the displaced in areas that had come under military control in recent weeks. He told Parliament that he had visited the Kadiragamapuram welfare camp and had seen the manner in which the government was taking care of the displaced persons. His absence at the presidential meeting showed that the TNA had either won him back into its fold or had silenced him effectively.
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London (IANS) The Sri Lankan government has been able to disregard international concern over its civil war with Tamils because of financial and military backing by China, a senior former Indian intelligence official was quoted saying on Saturday.
The Times newspaper said China has replaced Japan as Sri Lanka’s biggest foreign donor giving the island-nation nearly a billion US dollars last year.
By comparison, the US gave $7.4 million last year, and Britain 1.25 million pounds.
“That’s why Sri Lanka has been so dismissive of international criticism,” B. Raman of the Chennai Centre for China Studies, a former additional secretary in the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), India’s external intelligence agency.
“It knows it can rely on support from China,” he added.
The Times said strategic experts believe a billion dollar commercial port that the Chinese are building in the southern Sri Lankan town of Hambantota will eventually become a base for its navy.
“Ever since Sri Lanka agreed to the [port construction] plan, in March 2007, China has given it all the aid, arms and diplomatic support it needs to defeat the Tigers, without worrying about the West,” the paper reported.
“China has cultivated ties with Sri Lanka for decades and became its biggest arms supplier in the 1990s, when India and Western governments refused to sell weapons to Colombo for use in the civil war. Beijing appears to have increased arms sales significantly to Sri Lanka since 2007, when the US suspended military aid over human rights issues,” it paper said.
The Times said many US and Indian military planners regard the port as part of a “string of pearls” strategy under which China is also building or upgrading ports at Gwadar in Pakistan, Chittagong in Bangladesh and Sittwe in Myanmar.
The strategy was outlined in a paper by Lieutenant-Colonel Christopher J. Pehrson, of the Pentagon’s Air Staff, in 2006, and again in a report by the US Joint Forces Command in November.
Stepping in after India’s insistence on selling only defensive weapons to Sri Lanka, the Chinese gave six F7 fighter aircraft to Sri Lanka last year – apparently free of charge.
The paper quoted unnamed Indian security sources as saying China has encouraged Pakistan to sell weapons to Sri Lanka and to train Sri Lankan pilots to fly the Chinese fighters.

In V V Ganeshananthan’s thought-provoking and moving first novel Love Marriage, Kumaran, a dying former Tamil Tiger, triggers a series of reactions in his last days that provoke some people close to him to examine their political and family heritage.

Yalini, the daughter of Sri Lanka [Images]n immigrants who left their war-torn country and married in America, is caught between the history of her ancestors and her own little world. As she looks after Kumaran in Toronto, she begins to see that the violence that has been consuming Sri Lanka for over two decades is very much a part of her present. Slowly, she traces her family’s roots and the conflicts facing them through a series of marriages. Adding tension to her investigation is the impending politically motivated wedding in the family.

As the British newspaper The Independent pointed our recently, Michael Ondaatje visited Sri Lankan brutality in Anil’s Ghost, a story about a forensic pathologist returning home to investigate abuses. Romesh Gunesekera dealt with its pain obliquely in Reef and The Sandglass. And Ganeshananthan focuses on the journey of one family, in the process painting a broader truth.

A 2002 graduate of Harvard College, Ganeshananthan, who was born and raised in America, received a Master of Fine Arts in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. In 2007, she graduated from the new master’s programme at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. She has written and reported for The Atlantic Monthly, The Wall Street Journal, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. She is the vice president of the South Asian Journalists Association.

She spoke to rediff India Abroad Managing Editor (Features) Arthur J Pais.

What are some of the things that the world does not understand about the war in Sri Lanka?
I don’t know if people understand how hard it is to have a conversation about Sri Lanka, which has a complicated population and history. If you don’t acknowledge those nuances, the conversation isn’t inclusive and can’t move forward.

What are some of the most important things you are conveying through this novel?
I intended to write about the love of families, morality, and how war affects civil life. We reduce things: Arranged marriage versus love marriage, good versus evil. Very little actually works that way.

What kind of stories about the Sri Lankan civil war did you grow up listening to?
It’s hard to remember. The war technically started after my parents were in the United States, so I suspect that a lot of what I originally heard was from the news. It wasn’t something relatives would have offered to me directly — I was young. Of course, I heard people’s various stories of immigration after 1983, and eventually I was able to put those into context.

You wrote the novel over a period of several years. How did it change from the first draft to the last?
The version I turned in as my Harvard thesis was missing a character, Kumaran. He showed up the year after I graduated. The book became more political as the world did.

To what extent did your perspective change following the research?
I became more aware of the complexity of Sri Lanka’s population, history and politics. The standard line about Sri Lanka says simply that the Tamil Tigers are fighting the Sinhalese-dominated government. But that leaves out the histories of both groups — not to mention the other people who are involved, including civilians. In recent years, I have read a lot about Tamil civilians, journalists and aid workers disappearing. Investigations of these disappearances are never concluded. The people who are left live with a high degree of uncertainty. What could happen to them? Who would be responsible? How is this happening in areas under government control? The Tigers and the Sri Lankan government have both been criticised for human rights violations.
I also began to learn how the war had affected other minority populations. For example, in 1990, the Tigers expelled some Muslims in the northern areas from their homes. That displaced group has suffered tremendously. And I started to understand more about upcountry Tamils, whom the British brought from India to work on tea plantations. This population’s history is different from that of the Tamils who were there before them. I also learned more about how caste functions in Sri Lanka. It’s different than it is in India. I’m still studying all these things now. Not all of them ended up in the book, but it’s important for me to know.
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(Reuters) – The foreign ministers of Britain and France urged Sri Lanka on Wednesday to implement a humanitarian cease-fire with Tamil Tiger rebels in order to allow tens of thousands of trapped civilians to escape the battle zone.
Sri Lanka earlier in the week promised to stop using heavy weapons in its fight to finish off the rebels and to concentrate its military efforts on freeing the civilians, but both sides report continued fighting and casualties.
Following are some key events in the 25-year conflict between Tamil separatist rebels and the Sri Lankan government.
1983 – Tiger attack in north kills 13 soldiers, triggering anti-Tamil riots in capital, Colombo. Hundreds die, thousands flee. Start of what Tigers call “First Eelam War.”
1987 – Having earlier armed Tigers, India sends troops to enforce truce it brokered. Tigers renege, refuse to disarm and begin three years of fighting that kills 1,000 Indian soldiers.
1990 – India withdraws. Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) control northern city of Jaffna. “Second Eelam War” begins.
1991 – Suspected Tiger suicide bomber kills former Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in southern India. Two years later, Sri Lankan President Ranasinghe Premadasa assassinated in separate suicide attack. LTTE blamed in both.
1995 – President Chandrika Kumaratunga agrees to truce with rebels. “Eelam War 3” begins when rebels sink naval craft. Tigers lose Jaffna to government forces.
1995-2001 – War rages across north and east. Suicide attack on central bank in Colombo kills around 100. Kumaratunga wounded in another attack.
2002 – Landmark cease-fire signed after Norwegian mediation.
2003 – Tigers pull out of peace talks, cease-fire holds.
2004-2005 – Tamil Tiger eastern commander Colonel Karuna Amman breaks away from LTTE and takes 6,000 fighters with him Suspected Tiger assassin kills foreign minister. Anti-Tiger hardliner Mahinda Rajapaksa wins presidency.
2006 – Fighting flares in April-July, raising fears of start of “Eelam War 4.” New talks fail in Geneva in October.
2007 – Government captures Tiger’s eastern strongholds.
2008 – Government annuls cease-fire in early January and launches massive offensive.
January 2, 2009 – Troops seize Tiger’s de facto capital, Kilinochchi.
April 5 – Military says it has confined the rebels to a no-fire zone measuring just 17 square km (6.5 sq miles).
April 17 – Rebels call for a truce after two-day government fighting pause expires. Government rejects the call as a ruse.
April 20 – Sri Lanka gives the rebels 24 hours to surrender as tens of thousands of civilians flee battle zone.
April 26 – Tigers declare a unilateral cease-fire. Sri Lankan government dismisses cease-fire and says they must surrender.
April 27 – Sri Lankan government says it ceases combat operations with heavy weapons and operations will be confined to using only small arms and rescuing civilians trapped in the war zone.
April 29 – British and French foreign ministers urge government to implement a humanitarian cease-fire, as both sides in the war report continued fighting and casualties.
(Writing by Ranga Sirilal; Editing by Jerry Norton)
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By Koththa-Malli

My dear Mahinda Aiya,

Ayubowan, vanakkam and assalamu alaikkum as we enter May with the once vibrant May Day being downgraded or degraded while ‘May day, May day’ alerts are ringing loud on several fronts. The ruling UPFA, this year, did not hold the May Day rally but instead there was a meeting of political and trade union leaders at Temple Trees. Analysts say the rally was called off apparently because of physical exhaustion after the long campaign for the Western Provincial Council elections or perhaps because the government feels there is no need to rally the people any more with millions already whipped up by the war mentality if not hysteria.

The main opposition UNP also did not hold a May Day procession or rally. Instead we saw a front page picture of party leader Ranil Wickremesinghe with Ranil the worker acting as a May Day painter at a Children’s Home in Kotte. The JVP was the only major party that conducted a rally at Campbell Place but there was no procession. JVP leaders, charged at the rally,that the UNP was now so bankrupt or broken down that it would never be able to draw a large crowd for a May Day rally. But party politics like all factors in life is transient and impermanent. Within months the balance of power or public support could swing dramatically.

With May Day going to the back pages like an obituary notice, the news headlines were again dominated by what is happening or not happening on the northern battle front. Though battles in the five-kilometre conflict zone appeared to be less intense than in the weeks before, Sri Lanka last week came under its heaviest political bombardment from the international community. Sri Lanka’s giant neighbour or big brother India harbouring dreams or aims of becoming the super power of the continent, continued to play a double or treble game on the Sri Lankan crisis while Tamil Nadu blew hot and cold with a fast on one side and a farce on the other. The Congress government’s position was also muddled in a political mystery.

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One is unsure whether to laugh or cry at this week’s literally ‘flying visit’ of the Foreign Ministers of Britain and France carrying the White man’s burden as it were to ensure that all was well in these uncivilized parts of the world. They suddenly descended, and left even faster, like bats fleeing out of hell. So much so that one is reminded of the wisecrack of yesteryear about the ‘foreign experts’ who came to Sri Lanka to find out – and left before being found out.

No doubt there is an orchestrated ganging-up of the Western powers — the so-called ‘International Community’. They say they are concerned about the humanitarian problem in the Wanni, the plight of thousands trapped due to the fighting between Sri Lankan Security Forces and what is left of the LTTE’s fighting cadres.

Consider not only the fire-bombings of civilians in Dresden and the atom-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to bring a speedy end to World War II and thereby Fascism in Europe, but also what’s happening right now in Eastern Afghanistan and Pakistan’s Waziristan tribal area? In the circumstances, do these Western powers have the moral right to talk of combating terrorism without collateral damage to civilians?

By all accounts, it would seem that the British Foreign Minister was particularly offensive. India too has found him so. He had disregard to protocol, been obtrusive quite unlike his French counterpart so much so that one wondered whether he thought himself to be the Secretary of State for the Colonies of Great Britain rather than the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs of plain Britain.

One might concede some portion of this coordinated effort by the Western world is prompted by genuine humanitarian concerns. No-one can deny the humanitarian crisis that has arisen due to the advances made by the Security Forces and LTTE guerrillas holding these civilians as a ‘human shield’ for their own protection. But the overwhelming fact of the matter is that there is an element of domestic pressure as well for these Western politicians. But genuine concern and electoral compulsions aside, the Government’s own handling of this sensitive issue leaves much to be desired. The misunderstanding with the Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt – a one-time Prime Minister – flippantly asked to come another day without joining his British and French colleagues was totally unnecessary.

Nuisance value apart, as these visits may be, Sri Lanka must avoid looking in the eyes of the impartial world like a blinkered Taliban-style regime, suspicious of every foreigner. We really can’t afford to do this if our economy and the well-being of our people is so tied to the world economy, begging as we are for loans from the International Monetary Fund and pleading for duty-free concessions from the EU etc.,

There is a well-known quip about what the fine art of diplomacy is all about; it is how to tell someone to “go to hell” in such a way that the person actually looks forward to the trip. We seem to be telling the world to ‘go to hell’ in the bluntest possible way. While some argue that this is the only language the West understands, it is not without its repercussions. A snubbed British Foreign Minister is now suggesting that Sri Lanka be elevated to the UN Security Council agenda, where noises are being made against this country. By this approach what has happened is that the Rajapaksa administration has inadvertently internationalised Sri Lanka’s internal issue, the very thing they accuse their political rivals of having done. Only worse, that this time, the so-called IC is ganged up against Sri Lanka.

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By Nick Paton Walsh

Channel 4 News reports from a camp in the northern Sri Lankan city of Vavuniya, where Tamil refugees have been taken.

Shocking claims have emerged of shortages of food and water, dead bodies left where they have fallen, women separated from their families, and even sexual abuse.

This programme obtained the first independently filmed pictures from the internment camps set up by the Sri Lankan government to house Tamils who have fled the country’s civil war.

Channel 4
Watch
(Submitted by SANSAD)

By Mumia Abu-Jamal

As these words are being written, the G20 meeting is taking place in the world’s second major banking city (London), and US president Barack Obama has arrived with a retinue not seen since an imperial king visited his dominions in the hinterlands, to impress upon the rabble the power and splendor of Empire.

But, as always, looks can be deceiving, for the true princes wear no diadems, and sport no trains. They are the princes of Capital, and as Marx has aptly observed, they occupy the ‘commanding heights’ of economic power, and thus, the political leaders meet to kiss their rings, in private and in silence.

But, for the last 5 months or so, those ‘commanding heights’ don’t seem so commanding any more.

As banks crumble overnight, and as long-term businesses and firms dissolve; as foreclosures gather speed, and unemployment rises like a thermometer in hell, capital’s place hasn’t seemed this insecure in several lifetimes.

If we lived in a world ruled by logic and reason, it would appear that this should be the time of left ascendancy, when socialist ideas stormed the barricades of capital, sending their stone idols crashing to the earth.

Yet, this is hardly our reality.

Why, we wonder?

It seems to me that some fundamentals need recounting here, as they’ve been no doubt through days of your panel and workshop meetings.

Capital is like a vampire; it has many faces and many lives.

In the last several decades, we’ve seen the erection of so-called think tanks, the well-capitalized repositories of court scholars, whose jobs it is to defend capitalist ideas and promote all manner of retrograde, anti-social and indeed, repressive ideas. Because of their wealth and influence, they have ready access to the mikes of media, and are thus able to amplify their volume and influence, and achieve the status of ubiquitous expert — on all matters, big and small. Such figures such as these proved pivotal in the 2001 and 2002 selling of the Iraq War, and their voices peppered the aural universe like wallpaper, with claims that now seem quite ridiculous: “Americans will be greeted like liberators”: “They’ll toss flowers at our feet”: “A garden of democracy will spring from our efforts”, and the like.

Now, of course, this was bull-manure, but the point is, it doesn’t matter. They’re back. Many are out of government, yet thanks to billions socked into the think tanks, they are a kind of shadow government, who still are able to bum rush the mike, now as think-tankers, immune from failure, for they have lifetime sinecures from capital.

Not surprisingly, there is no left counterpoint (as far as I know).

In part, I think, because the left doesn’t possess the right’s resources, or alternatively, such resources aren’t utilized in this fashion.

Thus, at a time when capital has come under serious question, few are the voices primed to offer any mass alternative, or if present, (as in this conference) how does it reach a mass audience? Or does it?

We just saw a general election several months ago in which one party repeatedly tried to accuse the other of being “socialist.” Of course, to a forum such as this, that’s hardly a slur; but didn’t you wish that the candidate really was a socialist?

Of course, if he were, he could hardly have enjoyed the corporate largesse that made his candidacy possible (not to mention the support of the party apparatus).

But, ultimately, it matters little what’s at top, as long as folks at the bottom are mobilized and organized and militant in defense of their class and social interests.

In a nutshell, there is no alternative to social movements.

People should be crowding the streets in protest of the present economic situation, when bankers get hundreds of billions in public monies, and people get foreclosure notices, as well as lay-off slips, amid the terror of homelessness.

But, as [Freidrich] Engels opined in the introduction to Marx’s The Civil War in France (1871), “[T]he state is nothing else than a machine for the oppression of one class by another, and indeed no less so in the democratic republic than in the monarchy” (26).

In the Communist Manifesto,(150 anniversary edition (1998:Kerr Publ.) Marx reminds us that “The executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing…the whole bourgeoisie” (14-15). That is, a democratic state is but an instrument of the bourgeoisie – nothing more, nothing less.

Seen from this light, why should they not squander public wealth for private ends? Are they not tools of private wealth and influence?

Social movements, movements of the masses of the people, break those links by forcing them to serve public needs with public resources – and to at least give a better show of serving their interests.

We live in an era where wars are waged in the name of democracy, yet few institutions are as profoundly undemocratic as financial ones.

The wealthy, in fact, the architects of economic ruin and failure, are [seen as] inherently worthy of multi-billion dollar bailouts – while the poor and unemployed deserve, at best, our sympathy; and at worst; our contempt.

Those ways of thinking taint and poison our consciousness, and influence not only our thinking, but foreclose avenues of alternative resolutions.

All around us, in the failing businesses, the joblessness, and the foreclosures which gave rise to homelessness, are proofs of capitalism’s crises, which are growing as we speak.

This is the essence of the business cycle – boom and bust; bust and boom. Wars in defense of corporate greed and industrial acquisition.

More for the millionaires and billionaires – nothing for the many.

What social condition could be better for our purposes?

What more is needed to show that the present status quo is a recipe for more failure?

This is a great opportunity that may not come again for generations – let us not waste it.

Let us organize our movements with an eye towards the seriousness of the hour.

For we live in an hour not seen since the 1930s, in a time when politicians owe their offices to the very forces of speculative capitalism that wrought this epic disaster, and thus are loath to go against their paymasters, even in a time of crisis.

The epicenters of this economic earthquake are in New York and London, where the mortgage-trading scams originated and matured into new ways of creating great wealth.

And in the capitals of both economic empires, the elected leaders, American President Barack Obama, and British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, fear the claim that they are socialists, and are thus hesitant to exert more than symbolic dominance over the banks that have demonstrated their inability to manage their own assets, not to mention the wealth of nations.

Now is the time to organize, to expand our movements, to protest in our strength and our diversity, for if history teaches us anything, if the left fails to organize, the right will do so.

I don’t say this lightly, but as a result of my reading of a set of lectures delivered by the brilliant Marxist historian and revolutionary organizer, C.L.R. James, in Trinidad, during the summer of 1960. These were collected years later in Modern Politics (1973). James, speaking to Trinidad Public Library’s Adult Education Program, discussed the pivotal turning point facing Germany in 1931-32. It was a period, he explained, in which the future of Europe would be decided. Here now, a direct quote from James:
The German Communists got instruction from
Moscow to let Hitler come into power. These things
are very difficult to say to an audience that is not
familiar with the material and cannot go to town
tomorrow morning and buy books. I have brought
here my own book, written in 1937. I have 52 pages
(the Chairman will corroborate) on Germany in those
days, and the title of the chapter is, “After Hitler
Our Turn.” That was the slogan of the German
Communist Party in Germany from 1930 -1931 right
up to the time that Hitler came into power in 1933.
Let him come in. He will be a failure, and then we will
make the revolution.
They were the specific instructions of Stalin [p.58]

My point here?
If the Left fails to organize, the Right will do so.

We are all at a critical turning point in American and world history.

What happens next may depend on our efforts.

Thank You!

Ona Move! Long Live John Africa!

From Death Row, this is Mumia Abu-Jamal

************************************************
The U.S. Supreme Court recently rejected Mumia Abu-Jamal’s appeal for a new trial based on racism in jury selection. The U.S Supreme Court has not yet decided whether it will further consider the Philadelphia DA’s appeal of the 2001/2008 rulings of two lower courts, which ruled that Abu-Jamal deserves a new sentencing hearing if the death penalty is to be re-instated. If the U.S. Supreme Court rules in favor of the DA, Abu-Jamal could be executed without a new sentencing hearing.
In response, Abu-Jamal’s lead attorney Robert R. Bryan will be filing a “petition for re-hearing” at the U.S. Supreme Court. Emergency meetings have been held in several cities to coordinate grassroots response, and over 3,000 people have signed an online petition in an effort coordinated by anti-death penalty activists.
On Friday April 24 and 25, 2009 events were held in more than a dozen cities to organize and to celebrate the release of Mumia’s new book with City Lights, JAILHOUSE LAWYERS. More info here:www.citylights.com
Watch Angela Y. Davis speaking at the Oakland event on April 24, 2009
http://www.zmag.org/zvideo/3128
Listen to Mumia’s response to the Supreme Court decision in an interview with Noelle Hanrahan of Prison Radio.
http://www.prisonradio.org/mumia_interview_4_6_09.htm
Contact the White House to protest the unjust ruling
www.whitehouse.gov/CONTACT
Emergency Rally | 4pm, Friday May 8th | 163 W. 125th St. in Harlem
http://www.freemumia.com/may8.html
Ongoing updates:
http://www.freemumia.com/
DEMAND A NEW TRIAL | FREE MUMIA!
http://www.zmag.org/zspace/commentaries/3851