N THE days leading up to the march the media had reported that both pro-choice demonstrators and "pro-life" counter-demonstrators would be present in Washington. But any representatives of the rightwing, anti-abortion crowd were few and far between, and they were clearly overwhelmed.
The rally featured dozens of speakers, including Patricia Ireland, NOW president. Present at the march, but specifically not invited to speak at the rally were Democratic Party presidential candidates Bill Clinton, Jerry Brown and Paul Tsongas.
The immense turnout for this action is an indication of the outrage felt by millions of women. The attempt to roll back gains women won in the 1960s and 70s is not limited to reproductive freedom, but includes such questions as the lack of pay equity for women workers, access to education and jobs, sexual harassment, abuse and discrimination in all walks of life, and access to affordable health and child ve American women who live on the reservations and poor women who depend on the federal Medicaid program. Restrictions have also been implemented in some states requiring that young women notify their parents before having an abortion, that marred women notify their spouses and that clinics provide "counselling" - designed to discourage a choice for abortion
- to prospective patients prior to the procedure. Clinics prevented from giving advice
In one of the most outrageous acts, federally funded family-planning clinics have been "gagged", with staff under legal compulsion not to inform women that abortion is available as one of their options. The Supreme Court recently upheld the constitutionality of this federal regulation. Speaking at the rally, Patricia Ireland said that "44 million women in the US have already effectively lost the right to choose".
Belief that reproductive choice is a fundamental right for all women, not just for a privileged few, remains strong in the US women's movement. This theme was reiterated by many speakers at the rally.
Young women who grew up after the about what it means to really be a pro-choice candidate. Patricia Ireland felt constrained to point out that the current Congress is allegedly already pro-choice. But in fact Congress has been complicit in the Reagan-Bush campaign to undermine abortion rights over the last ten years. It helped confirm Bush's last two nominations of anti-women's rights and anti-abortion candidates to the Supreme Court, while failing to pass the Freedom of Choice Act — although it was introduced in 1989 — and making no concerted effort to stand up to Bush's threatened veto of pro-choice legislation.
Clearly, the women's movement does not need any more friends like those it supposedly has in government right now. Rather it needs to push ahead with independent political action. Feminism in the mainstream
This march and rally clearly showed that the government's attempts at restricting abortion and not going to be met quietly or without a challenge. The outpouring of women and men, young and old, of all religious racial and ethnic backgrounds on April 5 directly contradicts the media's portrayal of the marginalization of the women's movement. It shows how false are the assertions that the goals ofream America out of touch 1 3 with "mainstream" America. *
The Spring syndrome
April 27, 1992
TURKEY / KURDISTAN caused great public indignation, all the more so in that the PKK leader, "Apo" had threatened such actions as reprisals. Certainly the fire and the deaths went beyond what the militants intended, but Kurdish nationalist circles seemed inclined to defend these kinds
"FOR Turkey to recognize the Kurdish reality — and this is what it has done - is the most important event of the year", declared Turkey's prime minister Suliman Demirel to the Milliyet newspaper on December 9, 1991.
Despite such declarations and the promises made by the
Turkish government, which had authorized the celebration of the Kurdish New Year ("Newroz"), on condition "that the law be respected" and despite Demirel's instructions to the forces of law and order to "not intervene unless public order is threatened", the army fired on demonstrators.
The Newroz was drowned in a bloodbath, with a hundred killed, hundreds of arrests and a curfew in several Kurdish towns in Turkey.
This outcome was predictable. Earlier this year the Kurdish
Workers Party (PKK) announced an uprising for the spring
(see the interview with its leader Abdullah Ocalan on p. 16), while the state had threatened a "Spring operation" to wipe that organization out.
FUAT ORÇUN
FTER the repression, 14 of the
A
20 Kurdish deputies from the
Popular Social Democratic Party
(SHP — a member of the coalition government and of the Socialist International) resigned from the party, putting an end to the entryism they had been engaged in since the October 1991 elections (see box on p. 15)
The clashes and the demonstration of force by both sides at Newroz proved that neither the state nor the PKK are yet able to definitively defeat the other. After eight years of guerilla war, the PKK has not succeeded in significantly increasing its sphere of action beyond the South-Eastern region, apart from occasional raids. Furthermore it has been losing strength on its home ground.
The PKK has been able to build up a certain strength by armed propaganda, but this has also hidden the need to find new forms of political action. The Kurdish national movement cannot be reduced to the PKK alone, even if this is an unavoidable part of it.
Thanks to the coalition between the Party of the Just Way (DYP, led by Demirel) and the SHP after the elections, Kurdish deputies and supporters of a negotiated solution to the
Kurdish question from the People's Labour
Party (HEP) indirectly found themselves in government as SHP members.!
However the DYP hawks could not accept
14 this. Incidents took place at the very opening