International news in brief

IRAQ
Will Mosul be another Fallujah?

U.S. and Iraqi forces are deploying in large numbers to Mosul, the third-largest city in Iraq and capital of the Nineveh province on the border with Syria and one with a large Kurdish population. The U.S. and Iraqi puppet forces, including 20,000 police, number 45,000 in the province. (McClatchy Tribune, Feb. 2) U.S. troops drive Humvees through deserted areas of Mosul, and five were killed in an explosion on Jan. 28.

The Nineveh campaign is part of what the U.S. calls Operation Phantom Phoenix, a U.S. project allegedly to eliminate al-Qaida and other “extremist” forces but really a genocidal project aimed at destroying the Iraqi resistance that has stalled the U.S. occupation for nearly five years now. This offensive poses a serious threat to the general population, whether they are civilians or armed resisters.

According to Al-Jazeera (Feb. 3), U.S. commanders in northern Iraq have said the battle to oust them from Mosul will be a grinding campaign that will require both the Pentagon and Iraqi allies to use more firepower and risk more troops. Merchants in Mosul report that residents are stocking up on food and fuel. Everyone is fearful that the U.S./Iraqi puppet offensive will not only kill many people as it did in Fallujah but will unleash chaos in the city, as it has in other areas of Iraq.

PALESTINE/GALILEE
‘Israeli Arabs’ protest police whitewash

More than 20,000 people marched Feb. 1 in Sakhnin in Palestine to protest the decision of Israeli Attorney General Menachem Mazuz earlier in the week not to indict any police officers involved in the deaths of 13 Arab civilians during the October 2000 uprising in that city in solidarity with what became known as the second Intifada. The protest participants, who were overwhelmingly Palestinian Arabs living within the pre-June 1967 boundaries of the Israeli state, carried 13 mock coffins with the pictures and names of the victims.

PALESTINE/GAZA
Relief convoy stopped at border

On Jan. 26, some 1,500 people traveled as a convoy from all over the Israeli state to the Erez junction border with Gaza in an attempt to bring much needed supplies to the Palestinians of Gaza, who had been under a murderous siege they partially broke with a mass action tearing down the wall on the Egyptian border on Jan. 22. Participants held a rally of Jewish and Palestinian activists inside of the Israeli state at Erez and a parallel rally of Palestinians inside of Gaza. The actions were held by the Palestinian International Campaign to End the Siege on Gaza and about 20 different Israeli organizations. In the convoy were three tons of food and other supplies meant for Gaza. As of Feb. 4, the Israeli military had still not let the relief convoy through.

PUERTO RICO
On verge of teachers’ strike

The teachers and workers of Puerto Rico are preparing for a strike in defense of free and excellent public education and in favor of the right to strike and to have an independent union with democratic representation. In January, the Puerto Rican government decertified the Federation of Teachers of Puerto Rico (FMPR) as the exclusive representative of the 42,000 teachers. An Assembly of Delegates of the FMPR in September 2007 recommended a strike action that was approved unanimously by 7,000 teachers in a general assembly a month later. Since teachers’ strikes are illegal, the colonial government is trying to use this vote to destroy the union. Law 45, forbidding teachers’ strikes, is similar to the Taylor Law  of New York State, and is now being challenged by the union in the courts as unconstitutional.

FMPR leader Rafael Feliciano called for negotiations with the government and at the same time, while surrounded by representatives of the Broad Front—organizations that support the union—that the FMPR is prepared to go out on strike. “The number of strike committees that we have managed to organize all over the island has surpassed expectations,” said Feliciano.

SERBIA
Narrow victory for pro-West president

Despite material aid for his campaign from Western imperialist powers and heavy threats of isolating Serbia if he lost, the pro-Western candidate for president, incumbent Boris Tadic, got only 50.5 percent of a two-way vote against Tomislav Nikolic of the Serbian Radical Party, a nationalist party favoring closer ties to Russia. Analyst Cathrin Schuetz reports from Belgrade that besides the warnings from the European Union of Serbian “isolation,” there was a threat that if Nikolic won the right-wing regime in Kosovo province would immediately declare secession. She also notes that this is the first time since President Slobodan Milosevic was thrown out of Serbia’s leadership by a coup in 2000 that such a large proportion of people in Serbia voted against the pro-Western parties and that this is a sign of the coming struggle there.

GERMANY
Electoral shift leftward

German voters in two western German states showed their dissatisfaction with the neo-liberal regime governing Germany and voted decidedly to the left of their 2003 vote. The new Left Party (a coalition of the former Party of Democratic Socialism from eastern Germany and a left split led by Oscar Lafontaine from the Social Democratic Party, and supported by smaller left tendencies) showed for the first time that pro-socialist representatives could break through the 5-percent barrier and win representatives in the West. The Left Party got 5.1 percent of the vote in Hesse (Frankfort) and 7.1 percent in Lower Saxony (Hannover).

The two major pro-capitalist parties—the rightist Christian Democrats (CDU), which lost the most votes, and the centrist Social Democrats (SD)—are in a CDU-led “grand coalition” running the national government. The two parties have been carrying out anti-worker cutbacks of pensions, unemployment insurance and health care and sending German youths to participate in an unpopular imperialist war against Afghanistan. While it is unclear what exact direction the Left Party will take, the leftward vote is a measure of discontent among the German workers.

GERMANY/AFGHANISTAN
Solidarity with U.S. resisters in Mannheim prison

Three GIs, Andrew Hegerty, Jeffrey Gauntt and James Blanks, all members of the 173rd Airborne and all of whom refused deployment to Afghanistan, have been confined in Mannheim Prison in Germany since last fall. In solidarity with these war resisters, the German anti-war movement has launched a countrywide solidarity campaign to send the three resisters postcards and letters. The 173rd Airborne is presently deployed to Afghanistan and previously fought in Iraq. The division has its headquarters in Vicenza, Italy, the site of massive anti-war demonstrations protesting expansion of the base, and has units in Schweinfurt and in Bamberg, Germany. Hegerty, 19 years old, who is receiving a dishonorable discharge for his honorable action, had told the officers who put him on trial, “I’m not really able to pull the trigger and shoot anyone.”

To write to any of these GIs, address the letter or postcard to their name with the additional address: Unit 29723, Box LL, APO, AE 09028-9723, USA. For more information, look for the article on “Solidarity campaign for GI resisters in German prison” posted Jan. 30 at couragetoresist.org.

ITALY
Center-left government falls

For its 20-plus months of existence, the center-left government led by Premier Romano Prodi has carried out a program that included increasing the pension age for workers, building camps to detain undocumented immigrant workers, sending Italian troops on imperialist adventures in Afghanistan and Lebanon, increasing the military budget, and allowing the U.S. to expand the military base in Vicenza (see brief on U.S. troops in Germany).

Prodi’s government was able to pass these reactionary measures with the votes of 150 left delegates and senators. The left parties, including the Party of Communist Refoundation (PRC) and the Communist Party of Italy (PCI), argued that to abandon the Prodi government would allow the return of ultraright-wing billionaire media magnate Silvio Berlusconi to power in Italy. In January, a tiny centrist party called UDEUR with three senators decided to break with the Prodi government over a minor political issue—its leader, a cabinet member, had been charged with corruption—and the Prodi government fell. Elections are set for April.

While the parliamentary situation looks bleak, there have been massive workers’ demonstrations and powerful anti-war demonstrations opposing the anti-worker policies and militarism that shows there is still extraparliamentary mass resistance to the reactionary course in Italy.