Solidarity 077, 21 July 2005

Iraqi women’s rights activist: “Fighting for survival and human dignity”

Yanar Mohammed, president of the Organisation of Women’s Freedom in Iraq (OWFI), spoke to Martin Thomas when she visited Britain at the end of June. What does the OWFI do? For example, what were you doing in Baghdad in the week before you came to Britain? Last week we started something new. In spite of our work for equality and a secular constitution, we know that if we do not do the daily outreach to women and people in general, if we are not becoming a social movement, then we are not getting anywhere. We decided to do what we call a Thursday Evening. The name in Arabic means “Women’s...

Stop Zimbabwe deportations!

On 14 July, the campaign by over a hundred Zimbabwean asylum-seekers who had gone on hunger strike, plus their supporters, won a victory. The Government has promised not to deport any "failed asylum seekers" to Zimbabwe before 4 August. On that day an appeal is due to be heard in the High Court against the Government's refusal to admit that the risks of harassment, injury, or murder by Robert Mugabe's police which people would face on being deported to Zimbabwe can be valid grounds for a fresh claim for asylum. Determined campaigning can win. But the respite is only brief. Zimbabweans and...

Basildon plans to evict 120 families

By Sally Alexander “An unprecedented mass eviction of a whole community”: that’s how a Labour councillor described the “direct action” operation voted through by Basildon’s Tory council on 14 July. By a majority of three, with every opposition councillor voting against, the council voted to back Tory leader Malcolm Buckley’s plans to remove 220 “unauthorised” caravans, housing more than 120 traveller families, from the Dale Farm and Hove Field districts. In doing so it authorised the expenditure of something like £3 million, plus huge legal costs, to create what a local human rights group has...

When the crazy becomes “normal”: the Byers/ Railtrack row

By Gerry Bates Roman tourists who went to Greece 1900 years ago would watch as the brutal glories of the ancient Greek city state of Sparta were evoked for them by courtesy of local showmen, by flogging a slave to death. There were contemporary people who opposed such horrors. But at that time most people took it as “normal”, as “given”. Slaves had no rights. And what you take as “natural”, as just how things are, you don’t question. That fact is one of the great psychological props of the gangrenous conservatism which, in history, has protected so many horrors for so long. Something like that...

BNP defeated in East London

At the beginning of the summer the British National Party looked set to significantly expand its electoral base in East London; half way through July, their hopes are in tatters. The last month has seen the fascists lose their Goresbrook seat on Barking council and frustrated in their attempts to win a second seat in the council’s Becontree ward. In September last year, the BNP won in Goresbrook with 52% of the vote against Labour's 29%. This time, despite a viciously racist campaign which explicitly attempted to cash in on anger at the Islamist bombings in London, that result was reversed: 59...

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