News Reports..
Danish left votes against IFOR The Red-Green Alliance was the only left force to oppose the law authorising Danish participation in the NATO Implementation Force (IFOR) in Bosnia, in a debate and vote on 12-13 December 1995. "The Red-Green Alliance doesn't evaluate Danish participation in the NATO-led force in Bosnia from a selfcentred or nationalistic point of view", Deputy Søren Søndergaard told the parliament. "But we ask one question: what kind of peace agreement are Danish troops supposed to defend, or even die for? Is it just? And will it lead to peace at all?...You don't need to be an expert on the Balkans to realise that the Dayton agreement will cause the partition of Bosnia that we have been warning about! Serbia will get control over half the country, Croatia over the other half. And this is exactly what the nationalistic war criminals on both sides have murdered, plundered and destroyed to obtain. Now they get their reward, recognised by the international community, and neatly written down in an agreement: the partition of Bosnia!... At the same time, the [Dayton] agreement could easily cause new outbreaks of ethnic cleansing and killings. As the international community have accepted a partition along ethnic lines, the logic is, of course, that the various sides will try to make their territory ethnically clean, by all the means they find appropriate and usable."
News Reports...
Søndergaard, a leading member of the Fourth International, pointed to UNPROFOR's failure to protect the population in Srebrenica as evidence that "we can't trust the implementation force to ensure peace, never mind a just peace". Danish participation in IFOR will cost the country's taxpayers an estimated 500 million Danish Krone Søndergaard argued that the money would be better spend on supporting multi-ethnic forces and initiatives in Bosnia. "There is a need for help," he said, "but the ethnic partition of Bosnia is not worth fighting for or dying for. * 1. The ultra-right Danish People's Party also opposed the law, for their own Timorese occupy embassies in Jakarta Some 97 Indonesian and East Timorese activists occupied the Dutch and Russian embassies in the Indonesian capital of Jakarta on 7 December 1995, in protest against continued repression in East Timor. The occupations were organised by PRD, an umbrella organisation formed in 1994 and made up of a number of activist organisations including PPBI (Indonesian Centre for Labour Struggle), SMID (Student Solidarity for Indonesian Democracy), STN (National Peasants Union), JAKKER (Peoples Art Network) and SPRIM (Indonesian People's Solidarity Struggle with the Maubere People). PRD and its affiliated organisations have been working to build an East Timor solidarity campaign within Indonesia for several months. Central to this strategy is making Indonesian workers and the general public aware of the similarity between the repression Indonesian workers and peasants face in response to demands for greater 34 International Viewpoint December 1995 freedoms, and the repression and violence experienced by the East Timorese. Due to pressure by staff at both embassies and duplicity on the part of the Indonesian government, activists in the Russian embassy were "persuaded" to leave, believing they would be safe. Dutch embassy staff simply handed the demonstrators over to the waiting Indonesian military. All were arrested and taken to the Central Jakarta Police Offices where they were interrogated and in some cases tortured. Police told the activists that they would be retumed home by bus. Most have simply dissapeared. PRD member
Wilson, who escaped from the bus, believes that the others are being held at the Military Intelligence
Headquarters where they may be undergoing further interrogation and are at serious risk of mistreatment. Source: AKSI, PO Box 458, Broadway, NSW 2007, Australia. Phone: 02 690 1230. Fax: 02 690 1381. E-Mail: links@peg.apc.org Save this Kenyan journalist Francis Okoth Oswe is a Kenyan joumalist who fled to Sweden following "routine" harassment and torture by security agents. At the time of his departure, he was working on a book about the murder of Dr. Robert
Ouko, late Minister for Foreign Affairs and International Co-operation, who was brutally murdered by Daniel Arap Moï's regime in February 1990. Ouko had opposed Moi's decision to lease Kenyan forest interests to the IMF in exchange for a loan package. Osewe's application for refugee status has been turned down, as has his first appeal. The Swedish immigration Department argued that, since Osewe was released after being tortured, "his life cannot be said to be in danger". His last chance is his current appeal to Sweden's Aliens Appeal Board. A decision is expected at any time. Osewe will probably die if he is deported to Kenya. Ten witnesses in the Ouko murder case have already been eliminated by the Moi government.1 Ouko himself died after torture by the regime's "smart boys" - a torture unit
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Osewe claims were trained in Israel. Amnesty International reports that, in 1995 alone, more than 800 Kenyans died in prison, while the use of torture has become "routine" in police investigations. * Appeals, beginning "Dear Sir," should be sent to The Swedish Aliens Board, Box 45102, 104 30 Stockholm, Sweden. tel. +46.8.301539 Please send copies to Okoth Osewe Defence Campaign, c/o Arne Johansson, Oslogaten 11, 164 31 Kista, Sweden. fax +46.8.605 9402 1. Tommy Lindqvist, "Ouko man still fighting", New African, November 1995, p.25 2. Kenya: Torture compounded by denial of medical treatment, Amnesty International, December 1995. Mandel in Mozambique We have recently received an obituary for our leading collaborator Ernest Mandel, which was published in Mozambique's independent weekly Savana on 21 July 1995. Emest is presented as "one of the principle Marxist thinkers of our times... one of the animators of the debates around the student revolts of May 1968, and a member of the Fourth International, founded by Trotsky in 1938." Savana also reports that "Mandel's fundamental work, O Tratado de Economia Marxista (Marxist Political Economy) was forbidden at the Faculty of Economy of the University during the first years after independence, after the school was captured by an academic faction with pro-soviet sympathies."
Remember this?
• Russian left demonstrates against Chechnya war • International Women's Day 1995 in Algeria • Salvador's FSLN becomes a single party • Indian feminists debate the UN Conference on Women • "Land and Freedom" debate on Spanish left •1 million African Americans march in Washington DC Just some of the articles we published in 1995. Documents worth reading again if you don't want to loose your bearings in 1996. The bound collection of International Viewpoint costs only £5/$ US 10 per year (1982-1995), plus 20% postage charge for orders of less than 5 volumes. Order now!