Please Help the Dozens of Greek Migrants Hospitalized During 37 Days of Hunger Strike

78 hunger strikers in hospital, with the number growing by the hour
Wednesday, March 2, 2011

Last night, March 1, at least 78 immigrants hunger strikers were in hospitals in Athens and Thessaloniki. The medical team responsible to support the hunger strikers decided the transfer to the hospitals because the hunger strikers were suffering from:

a) imminent acute renal failure (that is reversible if treated promptly),

b) severe dehydration with electrolyte deficiencies,

c) cardiac arrhythmias,

d) several other medical problems.

In several hospitals police “visited” the doctors and asked the Ids and data about the medical condition of the hunger strikers. When doctors refused to give any information about their patients, police have written down the names of the doctors. Such incidents in hospitals were taking place in Greece only during the period of the dictatorship.

Yesterday morning, riot police attempted to prevent a press conference in front of the parliament. Several trade unionists, intellectuals, artists and antiracist activists (among them the writer Vassilis Alexakis) were hit and pushed violently by the policemen. ( Photo ).

300 undocumented immigrants are now on the 37 day of hunger strike demanding to get papers.

You can send e mails and fax of protest to the following :

e-mails:

dialogue@politicalforum.gr, ypourgos@ypes.gov.gr, info@ypes.gr, papoutsi@otenet.gr, pressoffice@yptp.gr, Louka.katseli@parliament.gr, anna.dalaras@gmail.com, hungerstrike300@gmail.com

fax numbers:

Ministry of Interior, fax: 0030 2103665089,
Ministry of Citizen Protection, fax: 0030 2103387708
Ministry of Labour, fax: 2105249805, 0030 2103213688

For Regular Updates on Migrants Hunger Strike visit:

http://hungerstrike300.espivblogs.net/category/γλώσσες/english/

John Rees Reporting to Counterfire on North African and Middle East Uprisings - insights from a Movementist

Counterfire is an interesting movementist phenomena on the British Left and John Rees since being expelled by the Socialist Workers Party in Britain appears to have dropped some of his trotskyist baggage.

Whilst we appreciate some of the contributions especially on the Middle East coming from John Rees and Counterfire they are hostile to Marxism Leninism Maoism and whether our contradictions with them are amongst friends or with enemies we will only find out through practice has the class struggle unfolds in the 21st Century.

No to Foreign Intervention the Libyan People Can Manage it Alone

 

How the Abu Salim Prison Massacre in 1996 Inspired the Revolution in Libya

By Andy Worthington

Reporting from Benghazi for Channel 4 News, reporter Lindsey Hilsum has just met family members of some of the prisoners killed in the notorious Abu Salim prison massacre on June 29, 1996, when an estimated 1,200 prisoners were killed in just a few hours by Colonel Gaddafi’s forces. The massacre — the single biggest outrage in Gaddafi’s brutal 41-year reign — has long been a source of deep hatred of the Gaddafi regime for the families of those killed, who have, ever since, risked the retaliation of the dictator’s security forces by staging regular protests to try to secure official acknowedgement of their relatives’ deaths, and to recover their bodies. The process, as Hilsum reported, has been patchy at best, with some family members visiting Abu Salim for years, thinking that their relatives were still alive, and hoping to be allowed to meet with them, only to be told, finally, that they were killed in the massacre.

In an article a month ago, Torture and Despair: The Psychic Roots of the Revolution in Tunisia, Egypt and Across the Middle East, I attempted to analyze and understand the symbolic power of the revolutionary movements that were sprerading like wildfire across the Middle East, recognizing that, in the case of Tunisia — where it all began just ten weeks ago — it was the self-immolation, in the provincial town of Sidi Bouzid, of Mohamed Bouazizi. 26 years old and universty educated, Bouazizi had been surviving by selling fruit and vegetables in the street without a licence, but when the authorities stopped him and confiscated his produce, he was so angry that he set himself on fire, and his death — and its symbolic significance to a people robbed of hope and humiliated by the dictatorial regime of Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali — led to rapidly escalating protests that, in just 17 days, led to the flight of Ben Ali.

In Egypt, a similar trigger was the cold-blooded murder, in a street in Alexandria last June, of Khaled Said, a 28-year old businessman from Alexandria, who was beaten to death by the police after they dragged him onto the street from an internet café. Said’s murder led to the creation of an Internet campaign — for justice, essentially — in his name (We Are All Khaled Said), and, as I explained in my article last month, I considered that:

[A]lthough brutality was widespread in Tunisia too, it is appropriate that the Egyptian people are holding the memory of a victim of the state’s appalling violence as an inspiration, because Mubarak’s brutality — exercised in Egypt’s torture prisons, as well as in casual homicides like that of Khaled Said — is not only an emblem of Egypt over the last 30 years, but also reflects on wider issues that have, indirectly, dominated my life for the last five years since I beganresearching and writing about Guantánamo and the Bush administration’s “War on Terror”: the hypocrisy of the West (and, in particular, the United States), which funds Mubarak’s repressive regime (to the tune of $1.3 billion a year), and which made Egypt central to the “War on Terror,” its vile torture prisons the first port of call for victims of the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” program.

In her report for Channel 4 News, Lindsey Hilsum (following a lead established by others in recent days, including Foreign Policy, the New York Times, TIME and Middle East Online) has — correctly, I believe — identified the Abu Salim prison massacre as the symbolic trigger for the uprising in Libya, beginning her article as follows (emphasis added):

As I took off my shoes to enter the house, I realised this would be emotional.

About a dozen women and men were sitting on sofas around the living room, each silently holding up a photograph of a son, a brother, a husband, a father.

They were relatives of some of those killed in the most notorious massacre of Colonel Gaddafi’s rule, when security guards machine-gunned 1,200 men in Abu Salim prison in 1996. It was their story which sparked the uprising in Benghazi.

Specifically, the trigger was the arrest in Benghazi on February 15 of Fathi Terbil, a lawyer who represents the families of those killed in the Abu Salim massacre, and who lost three family members, including his brother, in the massacre. As NPR reported, “For years, he held an often solitary weekly protest in front of the courthouse, demanding justice,” and “was arrested seven times” and “repeatedly tortured.” On February 15, however, his arrest (even though he was subseqently released) prompted thousands of people to protest, igniting an unstoppable movement within just 24 hours. He told Hilsum:

We, the Abu Salim families, ignited the revolution. The Libyan people were ready to rise up because of the injustice they experienced in their lives, but they needed a cause. So calling for the release of people, including me, who had been arrested became the justification for their protest.

In a more prosaic sense, the trigger for Libya’s uprising, as with the uprising in Egypt and Tunisia, was the steady mobilization of disaffected youth, professionals and trade unionists over a rather longer period of time, and, with particular reference to Tunisia, the extraordinary speed with which an overwhelming number of Tunisians drowned Ben Ali’s hopes of retaliating. This was something that then inspired similar actions in Tahrir Square in Cairo (often with extraordinary fearlessness) and across Egypt, and that has also gripped the east of Libya and spread to other towns and cities, and is erupting in southern Yemen and elsewhere in the region.

However, while Tunisia will forever provide the example of revolution through overwhelming numbers — an example that continues to provide inspiration not only throughout the Middle East, but also globally — I believe that a symbolic trigger is needed to be the emotional heart of these revolutionary movements, and to draw in people from all walks of life, and that, in the memory of the Abu Salim prison massacre, Gaddafi faces a nemesis that has been building for nearly 15 years, and that he cannot defeat by force.

Lindsey Hilsum’s article is cross-posted below:

Meeting the families left behind by Gaddafi’s prison massacre
By Lindsey Hilsum, Channel 4 News, March 1, 2011

As I took off my shoes to enter the house, I realised this would be emotional.

About a dozen women and men were sitting on sofas around the living room, each silently holding up a photograph of a son, a brother, a husband, a father.

They were relatives of some of those killed in the most notorious massacre of Colonel Gaddafi’s rule, when security guards machine-gunned 1,200 men in Abu Salim prison in 1996. It was their story which sparked the uprising in Benghazi.

For years, the families continued to take food and clothing to the prison, believing that –- although they weren’t allowed to see their relatives –- they were still there being held without trial on suspicion of opposing the government.

“We did this for 14 years before we were told that he was dead,” said Fouad Assad ben Omran, a grizzled old man in a traditional dark red hat, whose brother-in-law was amongst the victims.

“They told us he was there, but we weren’t allowed see him. The government said we could come every second month, and we used to spend a day or two at the gate.”

An elderly woman in black wept as she showed me a handwritten letter from her son. She had framed it. She thrust a passport-size photograph of a plump-faced boy into my hands. He looked about 20. Two years ago, after 12 years of denial and silence, the government gave her a death certificate. It simply said he had died in Tripoli in 1996. That’s all.

Over the years, information has came out in dribs and drabs, as people have been released from Abu Salim. In the 1980s and 90s thousands of men were arrested all over Libya and taken to gaol in Tripoli. Some were Islamists, others secular opponents of the regime, still others just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Their conditions were abysmal, and in June 1996 they protested.

“They said ‘we want better conditions because even animals cannot live like this,’” said Faiza Ahmed Zubi, whose brother was killed. “They didn’t even ask for release but just to be treated like prisoners elsewhere. They said ‘we want to breathe, to see the sun, to live.’”

After a few days, according to Human Rights Watch (who investigated in 2004), Colonel Gaddafi’s brother-in-law Abdullah Sanussi sent negotiators to the prison, but instead of holding discussions, Sanussi allegedly sent troops armed with machine-guns onto the prison roof and ordered them to shoot the men assembled in the courtyard.

Just as the gassing of the Kurds in Halabja in 1988 was the clearest example of Saddam Hussein’s brutality, so Abu Salim is the atrocity which defines Colonel Gaddafi’s 42-year misrule.

Over the last four years, the families in Benghazi have demonstrated every Saturday, demanding justice and answers. Where are the bodies? Who was responsible? Who will pay?

When their lawyer, Fathi Terbil, was arrested on 15 February, they came out again, but this time, thousands of others joined them. This was the spark that lit the fuse in Benghazi.

“We, the Abu Salim families, ignited the revolution,” he told me. “The Libyan people were ready to rise up because of the injustice they experienced in their lives, but they needed a cause. So calling for the release of people, including me, who had been arrested became the justification for their protest.”

Mr Terbil still fears for his life, believing that Colonel Gaddafi’s agents could still be in Benghazi.

Every day more photos appear outside the courthouse, where Benghazi’s new anti-Gaddafi administration is based.

Some families have been so terrified for so long, they’ve never before dared to admit that their relative had disappeared.

After Colonel Gaddafi gave up his weapons of mass destruction –- and compensated the Lockerbie families –- he was rehabilitated internationally. Tony Blair came to visit. The Colonel travelled to Italy. But people I’ve met in Benghazi are not prepared to forgive and forget.

They blame him for the murder of their sons and brothers, and this uprising is their demand not just for freedom, but for justice.

Note: See here for the website of Cairo-based photojournalist David Degner, who took the photo of Fathi Terbil above.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to myRSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in July 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, on tour in the UK throughout 2011, and available on DVD here), mydefinitive Guantánamo habeas list and the chronological list of all my articles, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

Breathtaking hypocrisy: selling Gaddafi arms one week, itching to go to war the next ...

Stop the War statement on Middle East revolutions

There must be no US or British intervention in Libya: the future of Libya, Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain, Yemen must be determined by the people of those countries alone.

Stop the War's John Rees tells BBC News why intervention would be a disaster

Selling arms to Gaddafi one week, itching to go to war with him next

The uprisings sweeping the Middle East deserve the support of all progressive people. They are directed against autocracies which have denied their people basic rights and the possibility of a decent life.

These autocracies have also, for the most part, depended on the self-interested support of the big powers, the USA and Britain first of all. Western governments have prioritised cheap oil, arms sales and support for Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians above the rights of the Arab peoples.

The response of the British government to the events of the last month exemplifies this hypocrisy. David Cameron has prioritised arms sales to the region. And the clamour to intervene in Libya has more to do with control of that country’s oil resources than with support for Libya’s people.

The Conservative-Liberal Coalition has followed Tony Blair’s lead in seeing the Middle East entirely through the prism of the interests of BP and British Aerospace. Any British intervention in the region would be directed to furthering those interests, not the freedom or democracy which can only present a challenge to western domination of the region.

Stop the War Coalition is clear that there must be no US or British intervention in Libya or anywhere else in the Middle East under any pretext whatsoever. Such interference over the last century is the root of the region’s troubles, and its continuation will solve none of the difficulties there.

The future of Libya, Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain, Yemen and all the other states facing popular uprisings must be determined by the people of those countries alone. Solidarity with those fighting for their democratic and national freedom is our obligation.

We can best discharge it by demanding that the government at long last takes its hands off the Middle East and its people, leaving them to settle accounts with their own rulers.

Democracy and Class Struggle does not characterise the current Uprisings in North African and Middle East has Revolutions like this Statement of Stop the War.

Captain SKA - Shame on You

Egyptian perseverance needed to free Dr Sen by Agrotosh Mookerjee

At an epoch-making time while the incredibly brave and inspirational women and men of North Africa and the Middle-East are shaking off the tentacles of political repression and every dictator worth his salt is quaking in terror of the inevitable, it is worth re-examining the nature of some of the things the people are protesting against- political persecution, judicial tyranny and draconian State-backed violence- no not in a dictatorship but in the world’s largest democracy.


Public opinion outside of India seems to be blinded by the all singing, all dancing, Bollywood pelvic thrusting musical of shining India, glorious colourful India, all sparkles and sequins with a bit of picturesque poverty thrown in for good measure- Jai Ho! An India of chicken barons and wine-merchants who can afford to buy Premier League clubs and Formula One teams and billionaires who live in the world’s largest mansion in Mumbai and 20-20 cricket stars, who are auctioned off to Indian cities for millions of dollars. Also an India of the great-consumerist “Great Indian Middle Class”, who make up a miniscule percentage of the total population of India but are still a large enough target market for multinational corporations and international governments to start drooling at the mouth.

The other India, which is not so commercially lucrative and good for brand-India, is a country where hundreds of millions of people live in dire poverty and tens of millions face living conditions worse than sub-Saharan Africa. It is a country where the ‘black money’ sloshing around in Swiss bank accounts and the coffers of corrupt politicians and the elite class is estimated to be about $1.6 trillion while an estimated 35% of adults and 40% of children suffer from chronic malnourishment. It is a country where (according to the National Rural Health Mission (2005-2012)) less than 1% of the GDP is spent on public health and where for every 1 rupee spent on the poorest 20% 3 rupees is spent on the richest 20%. It is also a country where vast regions are in the vice-like grip of a bloody, often unreported civil war and civil unrest as the Government forcibly displaces millions of indigenous ‘adivasi’ people to make way for mega-dams and mining companies. The key participants in this dirty, blood-soaked civil war are the Maoist guerrilla troops and the Government funded armed militia groups and millions of the poorest, most vulnerable people in India, who find themselves living in the war-zone. The key stakeholders are the Government of India and Indian and multi-national corporations. According to the Indian government’s own admission, since independence about 40 million people were forcibly displaced to make way for industrial projects and more than 30 million are still waiting for any kind of rehabilitation or compensation!

Imperialists - Hands Off Libya - I will not dance to your war drums - Suheir Hammad

Democracy and Class Struggle: We will not dance to the war drums of Imperialism, The Gaddafy elite is in the process of replacement by another elite of ex Gaddafy and opposition leaders being prepared in Benghazi.

The people of Libya will decide the future of their country - No to Imperialist intervention.

We are for the democracy of the masses not the elites, the people are not pawns of the elites on some Middle East chessboard they have their own agency and in the words of our Chairman Mao Zedong.

"The people and the people alone, are the motive force in the making of world history"

Also Libya - Suheir Hammad

also libya

no one tells you
if anyone does you do not listen anyway
if you do still you do not understand
no one tells you how to be free
there is fire in your neck
ocean in your ear
there is always your fear
the words you cannot even
no one is here
when the world opens upside
down you reach toward dawn
your weight on the earth changes
some of us plant deeper
others ache to fly

Revolution in Libya: Protestors Respond to Gaddafi’s Murderous Backlash with Remarkable Courage; US and UK Look Like the Hypocrites They Are

By Andy Worthington

“Now people are dying we’ve got nothing else to live for. What needs to happen is for the killing to stop. But that won’t happen until he [Gaddafi] is out. We just want to be able to live like human beings. Nothing will happen until protests really kick off in Tripoli, the capital. It’s like a pressure cooker. People are boiling up inside. I’m not even afraid any more. Once I wouldn’t have spoken at all by phone. Now I don’t care. Now enough is enough.”

These are the words of a young woman in Libya — a student , a blogger and a member of the youth protest movement in Libya that is part of a growing uprising against the tyrannical 41-year reign of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi. Speaking to the Guardian by phone from her home on the outskirts of Benghazi, the eastern city where the revolution in Libya began just six days ago, and where hundreds of protestors have been killed by Gaddafi’s security forces, she said, “I’ve seen violent movies and video games that are nothing compared to this. I can hear gunshots, helicopters circling overhead, then I hear the voices screaming. I can hear the screeching of four-by-fours in the street. No one has that type of car except his [Gaddafi's] people. My brother went to get bread, he’s not back; we don’t know if he’ll get back. The family is up all night every night, keeping watch, no one can sleep.”

Described by the Guardian as “an expert in subverting net censorship,” who “had regularly posted messages online to gather support” for the protests that began last week, the student explained how, since the uprising began, “her internet connection is down, landlines cut off, mobile coverage interrupted, electricity sporadically cut off and the house plunged into darkness.” She added, “There are even stories here that he [Gaddafi] has poisoned the water, so we dare not drink. If he could cut off the air that we breathe, he would.”

Unlike the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, where there was remarkably little bloodshed, and the dictators Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali and Hosni Mubarak fell from power through the pressure of sheer numbers, there are no signs that Colonel Gaddafi has any intention of relinquishing power without a bloody fight. As the Guardian also reported, sources close to his family told the Saudi paper al-Sharq al-Awsat, “We will all die on Libyan soil,” and it appears that the brutal suppression of the uprising in Benghazi is being led by one of his sons, Khamis, described as “the Russian-trained commander of an elite special forces unit,” and that another of Gaddafi’s sons, Saadi, is also present, along with Abdullah al-Senussi, the regime’s long-standing head of military intelligence.

For those familiar with Libyan history, the brutal response to the uprising is typical, demonstrating what experts told the Guardian was Gaddafi’s “instinctive brutality when faced with challenges to his rule.” The London-based writer and activist Ashour Shamis explained, “For Gaddafi it’s kill or be killed. Now he’s gone straight for the kill.”

In the 1980s, as the Guardian explained, Gaddafi “sent hit squads to murder exiled ’stray dogs’” who challenged his dictatorship, and throughout the 1990s he crushed Islamist opposition — and any other political opposition — at home, most notoriously instigating a massacre of at least a thousand prisoners in Abu Salim prison in Tripoli in June 1996, as I reported in an article in 2009, entitled, UK protestors mark 13th anniversary of Libyan prison massacre.