Solidarity 104 10 January 2007

Ethiopian teachers union fights to survive

By Sacha Ismail based on a longer article by Wondimu Mekonnen, former lecturer at Addis Abba University and Ethiopian Teachers’ Association On 14 December, Ethiopian Teachers’ Association (ETA) activist Ayalew was detained without a warrant by the Ethiopian government. Ayalew has reportedly been tortured and denied medical treatment while in police custody. His relatives and fellow ETA members are now extremely worried, as they have not known either his health condition nor his whereabouts since 18 December. Another activist, Mengistu, disappeared on 15 December. For fifteen years the...

Stop the repression in Oaxaca

By Gerry Bates In the aftermath of the titantic struggle in Oaxaca last year, the repression of militants continues. Narconews website reported at the end of December that three prominent leaders from the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO) were kidnapped at gunpoint, taken to a private home, beaten and tortured and then dumped behind a shopping mall area after two hours. Florentino López, a spokesperson for the APPO and one of those abducted, said: “They wanted to know what the agreements were of the assembly, they demanded the names of our family members, they demanded the names...

Union action can save the NHS

By Mike Fenwick, Kate Ahrens and Nick Holden The holiday season was used by the government to announce further redundancies and cuts. Redundancies in the Yorkshire Ambulance Service, delays in operations until the new financial year and more penny-pinching and potentially dangerous cost savings — such as reusing disposable clinical equipment, increasing the risk of infections. The relentless drive to privatise is however causing political contradictions for the government. Senior Labour Ministers have been forced to come out in defence of local services to preserve their seats. The same...

The global epidemic of AIDS: preventable and treatable…. but not if you are poor

By Dan Jakopovich “The same conditions have governed the emergence of epidemics for thousands of years. Epidemics are preceeded by rapid population growth that tails into famine and malnutrition, urban crowding, poverty, and lack of sanitation and fresh water.” Susan Hunter, Who cares? AIDS in Africa1 “The AIDS pandemic has has taken more lives than the Black Death in Europe of the Middle Ages. (…) HIV/AIDS (…) has infected over 60 million people, claiming almost 22 million lives. This is the equivalent of 7000 World Trade Center 9/11 disasters, four Holocausts and more than 22 genocides in...

PCS: gear up for pay and jobs fight

By a civil servant Two hundred and eighty thousand members of the civil service union PCS are being balloted for national strike action over job losses and pay. Activists in the PCS Socialist Caucus are working flat out to deliver the biggest possible "Yes", "Yes". On jobs, the Government could easily give the union a no compulsory redundancy guarantee. In fact even in terms of its own financial orthodoxies, New Labour could easily stop all the cuts, as they are wholly politically driven. Of course a no compulsory redundancy guarantee does not stop the cuts; implicitly it is an acknowledgement...

New Labour and special needs education

By a Tower Hamlets teaching assistant Ruth Kelly’s government has been instrumental in closing down, wholesale, special schools in line with a policy called “inclusion”. The idea was that students with special needs would do better if included in mainstream schools. Many people agreed with this and it had its good points. Students with disabilities or learning difficulties would get to mix with and learn alongside their peers rather than being sidelined in a separate institution. More able students would learn to be tolerant and accepting of people different from themselves. However, many...

Death of a tyrant

Saddam Hussein was hanged in Baghdad on 30 December. The first thing that needs to be said about it, and said clearly and unambiguously, is that he should have been hanged a long time ago! The second is that it is a great pity it was not the Iraqi workers, but the invaders and the Shia-dominated government of Iraq, that, 40 years too late, put a hangman’s rope around Saddam’s wretched neck. The most surprising thing about the circumstances surrounding the hanging of Saddam Hussein is the international reaction to it. Part of the gruesome ceremony was obligingly filmed by his captors and...

The way forward for Iran solidarity?

We reprint here the founding statement of “Hands Off the People of Iran!”, a campaign currently in the process of being launched by a number of Iranian socialist groups and individuals in and around “Workers’ Left Unity”, as well as the CPGB/Weekly Worker group here. The AWL welcomes the move to establish a principled Iranian solidarity campaign. For too long, activity in connection to Iran has been dogged by fragmentation and lack of focus on one hand, and the SWP and Stop the War’s pro-Islamist politics on the other. An active campaign of support for Iranian workers against both US war...

Bush blunders towards more bloodshed in Iraq

By Martin Thomas George W Bush's "new policy" in Iraq is a recipe for more bloodshed on the lines of the assault on Fallujah in November 2004 - but also, so it seems more and more, a botched compromise which makes no sense from any angle at all. Bush's basic line - a "surge" of 20,000 more US troops into Iraq, raising the numbers there to the highest level since 2003 - comes from right-wing wonks Jack Keane and Fred Kagan, the sort of people who believe that the USA could have won the Vietnam war with "one more push". But Keane and Kagan have written: "Bringing security to Baghdad - the...

End private education!

By Tom Unterrainer The former education secretary and current “communities minister” Ruth Kelly has caused outrage amongst teachers, constituents and fellow Labour Party members by deciding to send her son to a £15,000 a year private school. Kelly has “defended” the decision by claiming her son’s dyslexia poses a significant problem that schools in Tower Hamlets, where she currently lives, cannot address. She claims that opting for private education is “the right thing” for her son. Kelly has exposed for all to see the rank, “do as I say, not as I do”, hypocrisy of this government, that claims...

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