Minister for Peace and Reconstruction, Rakam Chemjong, on Wednesday said Nepal doesn't need the UN mission anymore for concluding the peace process.
Minister Chemjong said the government does not feel it necessary to extend the tenure of the United Nations Mission in Nepal (UNMIN).
Speaking at an interaction programme in Dhankuta, minister Chemjong accused UNMIN of failing on several counts while monitoring the peace process.
According to him, the mission has been biased and that it is more loyal to the Unified CPN (Maoist).
Minister Chemjong mentioned that the Special Committee for supervison, integration and rehabilitation of the Maoist army combatants would be able to handle the remaining works of peace process after the UNMIN departs from Nepal.
If UNMIN does not remain and armies are not unified, the entire nation will be
pushed into conflict and at that time People\'s Liberation Army (PLA) and Nepal
Army (NA) will be on the same frontier putting arms on arms to fight against
the invaders.
There will be no options to be left before the Nepalese people than
to resist it. These are the versions of UCPN-Maoist standing committee member
Barsaman Pun Ananta in a telephone talk with the correspondent of Red Star
fortnightly.
The complexity in situation is being created by the care taker government
and the puppets of Indian power. The cause or unseen hand
behind the curtain is clear; however, the remedy to get rid off it is still in debate.
Only the unity of nationalist, progressive, leftist and the revolutionaries can
resist successfully the inevitable invasion of foreign power.
In February 2010 prisoners at Yarl's Wood immigration prison organised a hunger strike. They demanded an end to indefinite and abusive imprisonment. Their courageous protest lasted five weeks, despite violent attacks by guards at the detention centre.
As retribution several people involved in the hunger strike were moved to prisons. Three of those targetted in this way are still behind bars: Denise McNeil, Sheree Wilson and Aminata Camara. They have been away from their families, friends and communities for too long.
Their struggle was “for everyone in detention”. We need to support those who take action on the inside. When they use prison to try to silence resistance we will fight back. At the start of a new year, let’s show them that they have our support and that the struggle for freedom goes on.
At 4pm on New Year’s Eve demonstrate outside Holloway Prison, Parkhurst Road N7 0NU in solidarity with the Yarl’s Wood 3. Please invite your friends and family. All ages are welcome. Bring noise-makers.
The Yarl’s Wood 3 will also have bail hearings in the coming month. Your support is very welcome. If you would like to come to the court to show support for them contact freedenisenow@gmail.com.
Ka Oris reports on the victories achieved by the revolutionary movement during the past year
Thousands join CPP celebrations despite AFP/PNP harassments December 27, 2010
Several thousand people joined celebrations yesterday of the 42nd founding anniversary of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) in a what was described as "one of the biggest celebrations of the revolutionary victories of the Filipino people exhibiting the continuing growth of the revolutionary movement led by the CPP."
At the same time, the CPP denounced the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) and Philippine National Police (PNP) "for setting-up checkpoints along the route to the site of the assembly to harass participants and dissuade them from proceeding to the site of the celebrations in violation of the spirit and intent of the 19-day ceasefire."
The whole day celebration was hosted by the National Democratic Front-Mindanao.
According to NDF-Mindanao spokesperson Jorge "Ka Oris" Madlos, a few more thousand people failed to join the celebrations because of the checkpoints setup by the military and police. "Checkpoints were setup by the 4th Infantry Division all over the Caraga region in a desperate attempt by the AFP to prevent the people from joining the celebrations of the CPP anniversary."
At around eight in the morning, traffic built up to around two kilometers along the main highway leading to San Agustin town, Surigao del Sur, as military and police operatives blocked scores of vehicles carrying participants. According to Ka Oris: "The military and police unreasonably blocked the people's free movement insisting on listing all the license numbers of vehicles, asking for registration papers and checking the license of drivers."
The military and police checkpoints only relented when reporters and cameramen from local and international media outfits arrived and witnessed the harassments.
"The attempts to stop people from joining the celebrations of the CPP violated the spirit and intent of the simultaneous ceasefire which, among others, aim at allowing personnel of both sides to be with their families and friends to hold celebrations during the holidays," added Ka Oris.
"Despite the harassments, the celebrations pushed through and was carried out successfully," added Ka Oris. Thousands of peasants and lumad people, fisherfolk, as well as workers and students from town centers joined a company of New People's Army (NPA) Red fighters in a field surrounded by coconut trees and rice paddies. "This shows the deep and widespread support of the people for the Communist Party and the revolutionary movement."
The occasion also served as an opportunity for Red fighters to be joined by their families.
According to the CPP, scores of other smaller assemblies were carried out in guerrilla fronts all over the country, as well as in factories, schools, offices, private homes and communities in cities and town centers.
Three weeks ago inmates at prisons across the state of Georgia staged an unprecedented protest, organized with the help of smuggled cell phones and text messages, demanding that they be provided basic necessities like heat and vegetables, as well as greater educational opportunities and access to their families.
Georgia imprisons more than 53,000 men and women, making it the eighth most incarcerated state in the U.S. on a per capita basis. And while some no doubt deserve to be separated from society, a plurality are imprisoned not for crimes like rape or murder, but for nonviolent drug offenses.
And as a delegation of officials from the ACLU and NAACP discovered when they met with some of the protesting prisoners last week, many of those behind bars for victimless crimes reported that they are often denied visitation with their loved ones and forced to pay for their own medications, despite the fact that they are not paid a cent for their labor. Inmates also say prisoners are routinely and unjustifiably denied parole, while suffering constant abuse at the hands of guards.
Speaking to Change.org, one inmate, who requested anonymity for fear of retribution, said the protest – which entailed prisoners engaging in a work stoppage and refusing to leave their cells – has had a discernible impact, resulting in some minor but welcome improvements in conditions.
Housed at Telfair State Prison, an 1,160-bed facility in the center of the state, the prisoner says that after officials stopped their lock-down of the facility, “they immediately gave almost double portions on food trays.” They also stopped conducting the “everyday military-style inspection” of cells they engaged in prior to the protest, and “delivered commissary on time” for a change.
In addition, “The verbal abuse from staff has subsided some,” and prisoners are finally being provided adequate heat as outside temperatures inch closer to single digits.
The most dramatic difference, though, can perhaps be seen among the inmate population itself. While prisons are notoriously divided along racial lines, the inmate tells Change.org that right now “ethnicity is not a factor, although there is always an idiot in every bunch. But for the majority there is unity.” Prior to the protest, interracial strife was widespread, with “multiple racial stabbings weekly." Now attacks between the races have fallen to “almost nil.”
But unless conditions substantially improve, the inmate warns unrest could spill over into violence – which he notes is exactly what prison officials are hoping for, as it would immediately discredit the inmates' cause. But many prisoners, he says, “are young and have a lot of time on their hands, and they are truly uneducated [regarding] just how monstrous these people can be …. [whereas] I know that they are waiting for violence to occur.”
“However, those of us in leadership are holding them at bay.”
But there's only so much those who are already incarcerated can do to improve their conditions. Ensuring those behind bars are treated with dignity – which is not only morally right, but pragmatically wise in terms of reducing recidivism – requires that those on the outside ditch their indifference for activism.
And that activism need not be limited to contacting politicians and prison wardens -- it can, and should, extend to reaching out to prisoners themselves. As one incarcerated man, Johnnie Jones, recounted in a recent piece on the website Behind the Bars, which publishes letters and poems from prisoners, doing so can make all the difference in a convict's life.
"I have witnessed hardcore men cry like [babies] when shown kindness,” Jones wrote, describing a program where inmates are provided letters and drawings sent to them by school children. “Not one man in that program did not cry after reading the words of [encouragement] from those kids .... kindness and love are the two most important things that a convict needs in his [rehabilitation] process. He needs to know that someone loves him.”
In addition to writing inmates and calling prison officials – Change.org's Wendy Jason has provided a list of their phone numbers – those who wish to express their solidarity with Georgia's incarcerated men and women and their desire to see them rehabilitated, not dehumanized, can send a letter to officials with the Georgia Department of Corrections.
But will that really make a difference, one wonders – does outside lobbying and activism from concerned citizens really matter? “More than you could ever begin to fathom,” the Georgia inmate tells Change.org. “I would like [your readers] to know that many of us in this environment are still moral human beings,” he adds. “However, there is only so much we can do from in here.”
Democracy and Class Struggle presents some videos which report on the recent prison struggle in US followed by some of the writings of Kevin Rashid Johnson on the current US Prison System.
There has been limited coverage of the current US prison struggle not only in the bourgeois press but also on the Left which reflects a political weakness that needs to be rectified has this is an important frontline of struggle.
We see the spirit of comrade George Jackson in this current phase of struggle in the US prisons see his 1971 interview on prison struggle here :
My name is Shaka Zulu. I am the Chairman of the New Afrikan Black Panther Party (NABPP), a revolutionary nationalist vanguard Party in the tradition of the original Black Panther Party. Our ideology is called Pantherism, illuminated by Marxist-Leninist- Maoism (MLM). Pantherism is the theory and practice of socialist revolution for all oppressed people across the world. Pantherism holds that in order to defeat our oppressors we must build base areas of social, cultural and political power in our own oppressed communities.
We see our Party as the 21st century embodiment of the original Black Panther Party (BPP). We have set up our Party Organization in a way that absorbs ALL who can help in the development of NABPP as a cutting edge proletarian vanguard Party. We are inviting you to put your talent and energy in a revolutionary vanguard Party. The many Panther formations that have sprung up across the country, while a good thing because it means that people are doing things to advance the national liberation struggle, cannot liberate the masses from the junk of bourgeois culture until we form a fighting party, an advance detachment of proletarian consciousness and activism.
We think that it is absolutely important for all of us to be united and together as Panthers, as one huge revolutionary family cemented with Panther Love. Panther Love is revolutionary love, liberating love, world changing love. We believe that Panther Love as a viable means of unity will enable us to better advance our strategy of “Turn the Iron Houses of Oppression into Schools of Liberation, and the Oppressed Communities into Base Areas of Cultural, Social and Political Revolution.”
We have to be together to collectively deal the avarice vampire monopoly capitalist a final death blow. While we fight and divide at the bottom, the monopoly capitalist are cooperating locally and globally to maintain capitalist imperialism oppression and domination over places like Afrika, Central Asia, Latin Amerika, the Middle East, and the various oppressed nations in empireland. We cannot defeat them by being scattered and loose. We need a powerful force such as democratic centralism. Our struggle is not a race struggle, but a class struggle, an international struggle against capitalist imperialist structures which perpetuate the economic exploitation of resources, lands, markets, wage-workers, and the environment.
The Maoist Movement is international–which means that if we intend on sowing seeds of world socialist revolution–we should be proud to raise the Red flag from a position of unity.
In the Party’s newspaper Right On! #1, we stated that “Understand¬ing the role that the party must play is also understanding the role others must play and how these roles fit together to serve the highest interests of humanity. The Party cannot be all things. Its special purpose is to represent the future in the movement of the present and illuminate the path forward. It is a Black revolutionary nationalist party that recognizes that class struggle and socialist revolution is the path forward.”
The solution to all of our problems come down to revolution, socialist revolution and the correct practice of Pantherism, which is the 21st century ideology of the New Afrikan Black Panther Party-PC (NABPP). So while the monopoly capitalist class oppressors remain united, our ranks exude the death of division and petty squabbles over who hold the principle political line. It comes down to really understanding the tricks the ruling class historically, consistently use to keep us divided.
Comrade Tom Big Warrior stated so eloquently in his forward to “Black Youth and the Criminalization of a Generation” that the oppressors have a strategy that unite neo-liberals and neo-conservatives all over the world. And in order to defeat them, we must develop our strategy–of building base areas of cultural, social, and political revolution–of going amongst the people and organizing and mobilizing them to take on the historic mission of making revolution.
Comrades! We have a marvelous role to play, an historic task to complete, a great opportunity to turn our single fingers into a fist of revolutionary unity by getting together under the leadership of the New Afrikan Black Panther Party (NABPP). We need you! We invite all sincere, honest, loyal Comrades to struggle with us to free New Afrikan people and all oppressed people across the world. Pantherism is the key here.
We leave you with these words from Comrade Huey: “But to achieve such freedom, we must all start at the bottom. We must fight as brothers [sisters], each in our own community or ghetto, but against the common enemy that deprives’ us of our identity, that is, that exploits us economically, politically, culturally. We are then both nationalist and internationalist. We fight for our freedom in our own terrain, but in alliance with everyone who fights: our enemy, not just because we need each other tactically but because we are brothers [sisters].”
The New Afrikan Black Panther Party is one of the first organizations to reemerge in the U.S., since the destruction of the Black Panther Party in the 1970s, that fully embraces the original program of the BPP and has clearly stated its intention to organize oppressed people for socialist revolution. Claiming the ideology of Pantherism which they indicate to be illuminated by Marxism-Leninism-Maoism.
Below is article by Kevin "Rashid" Johnson of the prison chapter of the New Afrikan Black Panther Party on US Prisons and Torture, we shall publish more of this comrades writings in future..
Most people don’t quite relate US prisons to government-sponsored torture. We can thank the mainstream corporate media and politicians for this. Since the 1960s and 1970s they’ve persistently projected the false image of US prisons as resorts where criminal predators eat chips, lift weights, and watch videos all day, much like the images given of slavery as an experience that Black folks actually enjoyed. These false images are sustainable because the real world of prisons is a hidden one, concealed behind walls and razor wire, inaccessible to the public.
There’s also a connection between prison and slavery. The plantation system actually merged with the penitentiary system after the Civil War and the torture and savagery, especially beatings, remained a mainstay. In fact at the end of the Civil War slavery was for the first time authorized by the US constitution in the 13th amendment, which authorized the government to treat convicts as slaves. So the newly “freed” Blacks were simply targeted with criminal prosecutions and then placed right back into bondage to serve as contract laborers, on chain gangs, and on prison plantations. Today, in a mad rush to find cheap labor, corporate Amerika looks to prisons to serve as a source of free labor pools. But let’s look at torture.
Brutality and torture are the common features of US prisons. Nothing coming out of Guantánamo Bay or Abu Ghraib has matched the images that showed the savage torture of prisoners following the Attica uprising in 1971. And what about California’s Corcoran state prison where guards set up fights between prisoners, gambled on the outcomes and then shot the prisoners for fighting? Some 43 were shot and 8 killed just between 1989 and 1994. Others were shot and killed with no justification. Then there’s the decades-long torture of some 135 New Afrikan (Black) males inside “Area 2” of Chicago’s jail. The exposure of the false confessions resulting from this torture led to the removal of 164 men from Illinois’s death row and, in four cases, the granting of full pardons. These are documented situations.
As during slavery, sexual abuse by officials in US prisons is prevalent.1 There has long been a nationwide scandal surrounding women prisoners being raped by male guards.2 Then there’s the sexual humiliation attendant to abusive strip searches, which are often accompanied by degrading verbal abuse. All this is exacerbated by complete denial of voluntary heterosexual relations. And there’s a genocidal component to this and to the vast targeting of virile-aged youth of color for lengthy imprisonments where they cease to be able to reproduce –- and in an environment where HIV, AIDS, and hepatitis abound while preventive aid is nonexistent and medical care substandard to nonexistent.
But there’s a higher grade of torture. After World War II western governments established an aversion to physical torture, which they embodied in the charter and treaties of their newly established United Nations. This was brought on by the embarrassment and guilt of the Allied Western nations who had stood by passively while the German Nazis tortured and conducted gruesome experiments on Jews and other Germans (disabled people, dissidents) as well as Slavs, Poles, and Gypsies.3 On account of this, the newly established CIA became very interested in developing less physically evident methods of mentally breaking and brainwashing enemies. As a result, the CIA and the Defense Department funded several studies with independent, Harvard University, National Institute of Mental Health, and other psychiatrists and psychologists.
In February 2010 prisoners at Yarl's Wood immigration prison organised a hunger strike. They demanded an end to indefinite and abusive imprisonment. Their courageous protest lasted five weeks, despite violent attacks by guards at the detention centre.
As retribution several people involved in the hunger strike were moved to prisons. Three of those targetted in this way are still behind bars: Denise McNeil, Sheree Wilson and Aminata Camara. They have been away from their families, friends and communities for too long.
Their struggle was “for everyone in detention”. We need to support those who take action on the inside. When they use prison to try to silence resistance we will fight back. At the start of a new year, let’s show them that they have our support and that the struggle for freedom goes on.
At 4pm on New Year’s Eve demonstrate outside Holloway Prison, Parkhurst Road N7 0NU in solidarity with the Yarl’s Wood 3. Please invite your friends and family. All ages are welcome. Bring noise-makers.
The Yarl’s Wood 3 will also have bail hearings in the coming month. Your support is very welcome. If you would like to come to the court to show support for them contact freedenisenow@gmail.com.
