‘All issues are women’s issues’

Women around the world held actions against imperialist war, occupation, globalization and oppression on the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day (IWD). Marches and rallies were in the militant tradition of this special day—originally founded by European socialist women—despite attempts by the U.S. and other capitalist governments to water down the meaning of IWD.

Here are some of this year’s highlights:

The actions started off with a bang on March 4 when Brazilian women protested corporate globalization and environmental theft and destruction, days before the actual holiday. Some 900 women from Via Campesina occupied the 5,200-acre tree farm of Finnish-Swedish paper giant Stora Enso in Rio Grande do Sul in southern Brazil. They cut down eucalyptus trees and planted native ones.

When a police attack hurt 50 of the women, the Brazilian Landless Rural Workers Movement countered this by blocking eight roads.

Three days later, hundreds of women from Via Campesina protested the Brazilian government’s decision to permit Monsanto, the world’s largest biotech seed corporation, to sell genetically modified corn in their country. They broke into the company’s seed research unit in southeastern Brazil and destroyed a greenhouse and testing field for GM corn.

Protecting reproductive rights, especially abortion, was on the agenda for European women, who also deplored employment inequities and domestic abuse. In Italy women’s groups and trade unions marched in many cities for abortion rights endangered by the Vatican and other rightwing forces, which are scheming to overturn the country’s 30-year-old legal right to abortion.

And 2,000 Polish women marched in Warsaw demanding restoration of the right to abortion. The previous pro-socialist government had guaranteed all reproductive rights. It was a victim of U.S. Cold War pressures and was replaced in 1989 by a capitalist government in league with the Catholic Church.

From South Africa to Kenya, women in Africa commemorated IWD with marches, rallies and celebrations.

Asian women’s protests raised many issues.

Thousands of Pakistani women, including workers, targeted the U.S.-backed Musharraf regime in Murdan, Lahore and Karachi, decrying political repression and disappearances of family members. The protests were organized by Women Workers Help Line and Labor Education Foundation. They also demanded political, economic and social rights. In Islamabad, signs condemned “foreign intervention.”

Philippine women marched to U.S.-backed President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s Manila palace. Calling for her ouster, they burned an effigy of the president. Protesters also went to the U.S. Embassy to demand that U.S. troops leave their country.

In Seoul, South Korea, women targeted the Japanese Embassy, demanding full compensation and an apology for wide scale sexual slavery by Japan’s imperialist army during World War II.

In Jakarta, Indonesian women, carrying tins of milk, demanded that their government lower food prices and solve the problems of hunger, poverty, high oil prices and unemployment.

Factory workers were among women who rallied for their rights in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Signs called for gender equality, equal property rights and resources.

For women living under U.S.-backed occupation, life is very difficult.

Heroic Palestinian women rallied on IWD in Gaza City in the face of a siege by Israeli occupation forces that has worsened their economic situation and denied their human rights. A recent invasion and air strikes by Israel killed 126 people, including 27 chidren and six women in Jabaliya alone.

Their sisters in the West Bank cities of Nablus, Hebron and Ramallah waved Palestinian flags and carried pictures of family members held in Israeli jails. Salwa Abu Khadra, secretary-general of the General Union of Palestinian Women, which led a march through Ramallah City, appealed for international support “to stop this crime wave, which we consider to be against all of humanity, not only against women.”

In Afghanistan, the U.S. made a mockery of IWD and the terrible plight of Afghan women by holding a “fashion show” at the U.S. military base in Bagram. But in Kandahar, 1,000 women gathered for IWD and told of their hardships. Afghan women’s life expectancy is 44 years, 85 percent are illiterate, and some work 11-hour shifts for $2 an hour. One million widows are economically desperate; many are forced into prostitution.

On this IWD, women of the world extended their solidarity to their Iraqi sisters, whose conditions of life have deteriorated in all ways under the U.S.-led imperialist war and occupation.