'No to war'

Lisbeth Latham

PERTH - On December 8, more than 1000 people rallied in Perth to oppose the impending war in Iraq. Organised by the NOWAR Alliance, the protest demanded: no war on Iraq; no Australian support for war; an end to sanctions on Iraq; and no attacks on civil liberties.

ALP parliamentarian Carmen Lawrence spoke at the protest. "Australian people are not willing to support a new American imperialism", she said. "People need to come out and oppose the war."

Other speakers included Theo Mackaay, from the Anglican Social Responsilities Commission, Russell Pickering, from the Socialist Alliance, Sheik Omran from a local Islamic college, Rosemary Miller from the Uniting Church Social Justice Commission, local Greens MLC Giz Watson and Democrats representative Helen Hodgson.

Pickering said: "World wide protests against the war on Iraq are developing solidarity with people of the Third

World, who are under attack from the military and corporations from countries like Australia and the US. Today we are taking a stand against the agenda of repression and exploitation that divides our world. The war on Iraq is bringing together a powerful movement for change -

a peoples' movement which says no to war, end the sanctions."

From Green Left Weekly #520.

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WA building workers win 36-hour week

Lisbeth Latham
On November 22, members of the Western Australian branch of the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union's construction and general divisions began the process of implementing of a new enterprise agreement.

The agreement includes a 36-hour week for construction workers, based on the introduction of increased rostered days off over the next three years (five days in first year, nine in the second and 13 in the final year).

Other gains include: a 12% pay rise over the next three years; travel allowances increased to $22.50 a day; weekly superannuation payments of $95 in the first year, $100 in the second and $110 in the final year; redundancy payments increased to $70 a week; a 150% increase in trauma insurance payouts for death or permanent incapacitation, from $100,000 to $350,000 (in addition to any workers compensation payments); and a 10% increase in site allowances.

The agreement has been signed by WA's eight largest construction contractors and 40 subcontractors, with 100 subcontractors likely to sign on in the next two weeks, resulting in 6000 CFMEU members (90% of the union's WA membership) in Perth being covered by the agreement.

The CFMEU is committed to winning the extension of the agreement to all members, CFMEU construction division secretary Kevin Reynolds told Green Left Weekly. “We will seek protected action and take all forms of bans, limitations and strike action against the companies that haven't signed”, he said. The CFMEU has not signed an agreement with notorious anti-union millionaire Len Buckridge. However, the union will sign up the subcontractors used by Buckridge.

Reynolds told Green Left Weekly that the ability of the CFMEU to make significant gains for its members without having to take industrial action reflected the union's strength in Western Australia and Victoria. “The builders saw what can happen when they take us on, in Victoria three years ago. The builders there made a decision that they were not going to go through hell again. The major contractors in Western Australia are the same contractors who operate in Victoria and they knew what they were in for. Therefore, they made a commercial decision and decided it would be cheaper to settle with the union without a brawl, than to have a punch-up.”

Reynolds added that “on this occasion it suited us to negotiate ... as it demonstrates to everyone that the unions and the employers, left to negotiate things, can sort out their problems ... without any interference from governments or royal commissions”.

In recent weeks in Perth, there have been two deaths on building sites. Reynolds blamed the deaths on intransigent employers who refuse to work with unions. Unionised companies are more likely to enforce safety regulations.

However, Reynolds pointed out that when the same companies operate in places where the CFMEU is not strong, their health and safety records are significantly worse.

“We hope for the day that contractors who kill workers face manslaughter charges”, Reynolds told Green Left Weekly.

Originally published in Green Left Weekly http://www.greenleft.org.au/2002/519/27053

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Building workers protest royal commission

Lisbeth Latham

PERTH — On October 2, some 1000 members of the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union's construction division protested against the return to Perth of the royal commission into the construction industry.

CFMEU state secretary Kevin Reynolds, who appeared at a commission hearing for the first time, informed the rally that "of the 640 witnesses called only 30 have been from the side of the union".

Reynolds reminded the CFMEU members that commissioner Terence Cole "is not interested in the truth, but in destroying your union. Kevin Reynolds may come and go but the union will always remain a strong militant union willing to bring them to heel."

Transport Workers Union state secretary Jim McGiveron expressed his union's support for the CFMEU and all unions under attack. He pointed out the hypocrisy and anti-union bias of the commission's hearings with "97% of the witnesses called in NSW being anti-union [and] 71% of all witnesses were employers, it amounts to an attack on unions".

CFMEU mining and energy division state secretary Gary Woods, former West Australian Labor premier Brian Bourke and former federal industrial relations minister Senator Peter Cook also addressed the rally.

From Green Left Weekly #512

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Unions attempt to stop deportation

Lisbeth Latham

PERTH — On June 1, Iranian asylum seeker Nader Sayadi Estahbanati was deported from Esperance in WA on the Iranian freighter Mazardaran.

In 2000, Estahbanati and two friends stowed away on the Mazardaran to flee persecution in Iran following the Abadan uprising during which 23 people were shot dead and hundreds disappeared. Hosein Iran hid them in the 60-centimetre-high space above his cabin for five weeks.

When they arrived in Australia, Hosein was charged with "people smuggling", but received a suspended sentence because the magistrate found that he broken the law for humanitarian reasons rather than financial gain. The sentence is being appealed and Estahbanati's deportation will impact negatively on subsequent hearings.

During Hosein's case, Estahbanati gave testimony and was named as an enemy of the Iranian state. His picture appeared in the media. He was worried about the safety of himself and his family and friends. Since Estahbanati's brother Nesser voluntarily returned to Iran last month, no-one has seen or heard from him.

Despite lawyers' appeals, on May 29 Estahbanati was drugged in the Perth Immigration Detention Centre and forcibly transported to the Mazardaran, which was docked in Fremantle and about to sail to Esperance.

Under maritime law it is legal to return stowaways to the vessel they came in on. After activists contacted the ACTU for support, they accompanied Maritime Union of Australia (MUA) and the International Transport Federation (ITF) officials to Esperance to issue a subpoena, obtained by the ACTU, to remove Estahbanati from the ship.

The ship's master initially denied Estahbanati's presence, but then told the officials and activists that they could see Estahbanati if they had legal documents. He added that he would prefer Estahbanati was removed because he did not think the asylum seeker would make it to the next port of call due to his poor health.

Before Estahbanati could be seen, Australasian Correctional Management officers arrived and directed the officials and activists to wait in another room. After several phone calls, they were informed that they could not see Estahbanati, however, the subpoena would be delivered.

The ACTU and ITF asked that Estahbanati be allowed to see a doctor. The doctor later said that Estahbanati seemed in good health, but admitted that he had not seen identification for the patient. He described the man he treated as being 2 metres tall with a beard — very different to Estahbanati's description.

The ACTU has committed to take up Estahbanati's case with the government, and the ITF will discuss it at its conference in Britain next month. The ITF and ACTU are also concerned about Estahbanati's deportation because of the broader implications of merchant ships being used as detention centres and to assist deportations.

From Green Left Weekly #496.

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Why this is a racist war

Lisbeth Latham

Recently at an anti-war rally in Perth, I was asked by another participant ``is it really a racist war?’‘ George Bush, Tony Blair and their bellicose supporters in Australia, John Howard and Kim Beazley, have argued that the bombing campaign on Afghanistan is not a war on the Afghan people and it is definitely not a racist war.

The central aim of these statements has been to attempt to block the ability of opponents of the war to mobilise public opinion against the war. This aim has been necessitated by the growth since the 1960s of a general sentiment against racism. This popular anti-racist sentiment means that racists do not always openly claim to be racist or speak in openly racist terms.

This raises the question ``what is racism?’‘ Racism is the view, expressed either overtly or covertly, which justifies social inequality between people based on fetishising superficial external physical features, most particularly skin colour.

Racism first emerged with the development of capitalism to justify the forcible transportation of millions of Africans to the Americas in order to provide a system of institutionalised forced labour on the plantations of the European settler colonies.

At the end of the 19th century, racism continued to provide justification by the capitalist rulers of imperialist countries, whose populations were predominantly white, for the economic and political subjugation of the non-white peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America.

The current US bombing campaign against Afghanistan has been justified as necessary to ensure that terrorist attacks like that on September 11 in New York and Washington, in which more than 4000 people were killed, do not occur again. But the bombing has already been estimated to have killed 1000 Afghan civilians.

Moreover, aid agencies such as Medicins Sans Frontiers (MSF, Doctors without Borders) estimate that at least two million Afghans (with upward estimates of seven million people), will die from starvation by the end of winter if the bombing does not stop and aid agencies are unable to deliver large-scale food aid. The widespread unchallenged implication is that the lives of at least two million people, 10% of the Afghan population, are of less value than those who died in the US on September 11.

Imperialism is a word that is often misused. Marxists use it to refer to a particular stage in development of capitalism that emerged in the industrially developed countries at the end of the 19th century. Nearly all branches of their economies came under the monopolist control of a few large corporations.

These large corporations were owned by super-rich capitalist families, like the Rockefeller and Morgan families in the United States, who also owned the big banks, insurance companies and stock exchange investment houses. These families were often financially and personally inter-related and formed a financial oligarchy that dominated not only the economy but the political life of the developed capitalist countries.

The corporations and banks in the developed countries took advantage of the uneven development of the world capitalist economy to preserve their monopoly of ownership of advanced technology and to use this monopoly to extract above-average profits from the underdeveloped capitalist countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

As a result of the emergence of monopoly capitalism, the world was divided into a handful of predominantly white, rich nations dominating the economic and political life of the great majority of the world’s population.

The division of the world into rich and poor nations created a massive drive towards the militarisation of the imperialist nations. This was essential to ensure that they would be able to protect their investments and markets from challenges by their imperialist rivals. This was the central focus of both the first and second world wars.

Since the second world war, the imperialist powers have subordinated their rivalry to uniting behind the strongest imperialist power, the United States, to crush any challenges from the oppressed nations to throw off imperialist domination. This was the driving force behind the US-led military interventions into Korea in the 1950s and Vietnam during the 1960s and 1970s.

During the US-led war against Vietnam, anti-war sentiment became widespread in the United States and other imperialist countries like Australia. So too did anti-racist sentiment.

Widespread acceptance of the idea that it was racist for the governments of rich, white nations to wage war to stop the non-white peoples of the poor, Third World countries from choosing governments that US and its allies were hostile to, helped to limit the ability of the US and its allies to utilise their own armies to wage such wars.

Instead, the imperialist powers were forced to rely on the creation and support of right-wing proxies to attempt to maintain their domination over Third World countries. This is what the US did in the 1980s in Nicaragua with the contras, and in Afghanistan with the mujaheddin and the Taliban.

Since the September 11 terror attacks, the rulers of the imperialist countries have sought to regain public acceptance for the large-scale use of their own ground troops to impose on Third World countries governments that are totally subservient to the imperialist interests.

This is the real goal of the current “war on terrorism”. But it is being masked by claims that it is aimed at defending “civilisation”. Blair has even attempted to present the US-led war as part of a drive for a better world for “the starving, the dispossessed, the ignorant, those living in want and squalor”.

The US government has increasingly made it clear that the “war on terror” will have no end, and has already identified more than 60 countries that it will take action against for allegedly harbouring “terrorist organisations”.

The imperialists’ “war on terror” aims to crush all resistance to their ability to exploit the peoples of the Third World, and thus to maintain global inequality between the rich, predominantly white, nations of the First World and the poor, predominantly non-white, nations of the Third World. That is why this is a racist war.

From Green Left Weekly issue #472

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Indonesian military escalates repression

By Lisbeth Latham & Pip Hinman

On February 20 the "cease-fire" between the Free Aceh Movement (GAM) and the Indonesian military (TNI) was extended for the third time since the so-called humanitarian pause in 2000. These declarations mean nothing, Syadiah Marhaban from the Aceh Referendum Information Centre (SIRA) told Green Left Weekly. That very night the TNI swept through four villages terrorising and killing people.

Following every previous cease-fire extension, attacks on unarmed Acehnese take place almost immediately; more than 100 people have been killed since January. Since GAM declared unilateral independence from Indonesia in December 1976, some 30,000 people have been killed.

Under the current cease-fire, GAM and the Indonesian government have agreed to a four-point code of conduct. However, given the lack of an enforcement authority, the TNI continues to hunt down GAM members especially in the rural areas. Ed Aspinall, who lectures in Indonesian studies at University of New South Wales and has recently returned from Aceh, told an Amnesty International forum in Sydney that the TNI routinely strafes whole villages in revenge attacks if even one of its soldiers comes under fire.

On February 15, the TNI announced an additional 6000 troops would be sent to Aceh, bringing the total deployment of combat troops to more than 30,000.

Aspinall described the northern-most city of Banda Aceh as being like a "war zone" in which there is an unofficial curfew as night falls.

"People are just too scared to leave their homes after dark. Local commanders are calling on the central government to call an all-out civil emergency", he said.

Aspinall described President Abdurrahman Wahid as pursuing a dual policy of negotiations with GAM while the TNI is allowed a virtual free hand to wage war.

And while the political situation in Indonesia remains unstable, the military is playing up their role as harbingers of peace and security.

The TNI's attempts to hunt down GAM members and terrorise its rural support base reflect the Indonesian government's unwillingness to engage in genuine negotiations over Aceh's future. The military have significant commercial operations in the gold, oil, gas timber and marijuana-rich state of Aceh.

Autonomy versus independence

Syadiah Marhaban told Green Left Weekly that a poll conducted by SIRA just before the November 8 referendum rally last year -- during which 48 people were killed, hundreds were injured and thousands of public and private vehicles damaged by the security forces -- 92.6% said they favoured independence rather than autonomy.

Despite the overwhelming sentiment for independence, the Wahid government is only prepared to allow greater autonomy -- a position the Aceh People's Council has adopted. Wahid's government is pushing the Acehnese House of Representatives to prioritise deliberation of the autonomy law which ensures the central government maintains control over financial and security affairs.

While the new autonomy laws -- scheduled to take effect from May -- are supposed to decentralise decision-making and allow Aceh to retain a greater percentage of earnings from the exploitation of its natural resources, they say nothing about reducing the number of TNI troops in Aceh.

In an attempt to shift the balance of forces and provide some legitimacy to the autonomy demand, the Wahid government is seeking to include anti-independence groups in the negotiations. However this is unlikely to be successful given GAM's strong base of mass support, and the activities of pro-referendum groups like SIRA and the radical Student Solidarity with the People (SMUR).

On February 20 Indonesian defence minister Mahfud Mahmoddin declared he was tired of prolonged talks with the independence movements in Aceh and West Papua and threatened to become increasingly tough with "separatist groups".

SIRA has evidence that the TNI has started to train militia groups in the northern part of Aceh. "Jakarta is going to try to repeat what it did in East Timor", Marhaban warned. She said that the TNI is recruiting poor transmigrants from Java for six months of training. "This shows the Wahid government's desperation. It has been unable to contain or curtail the pro- referendum sentiment by military means, and is now resorting to inciting communal conflict to achieve its ends."

Attacks increase

Following the forced resignation of the despot Suharto in 1998 the democracy movement forced a number of concessions from President Habibie's government and the TNI including the abolition of wide-ranging anti- subversion laws.

However, many restrictive laws remain on the books, including those dealing with freedom of speech (including the law banning the propagation of Marxism).

Last November Muhammad Nazar, chairperson of SIRA, was detained and charged with treason. After growing pressure he was finally set to go to trial last week. He looks set to be the first activist to be so charged since the Suharto days. According to Marhaban, some 500 extra soldiers have been deployed for his trial in Banda Aceh.

The Western powers' opposition to Aceh's independence is primarily motivated by a desire to maintain a politically stable environment for corporate investment throughout the Indonesian archipelago. There is a general fear within the ruling circles of the imperialist powers, in particular in Washington and Canberra, that if Aceh was to win its independence, the West Papuan independence struggle would be given added momentum and other provinces dissatisfied with rule from Jakarta would become similarly inspired.

US support is important for the Wahid administration to maintain control in Aceh. It gives political cover to Jakarta and helps keep the independence forces relatively isolated and serves to strengthen a weakening military position within Indonesia.

TNI and Indonesian police forces are increasingly stretched. It is estimated that half of Indonesia's 200,000 soldiers and 300,000 police are now deployed in provinces waging struggles for independence such as Aceh and West Papua or where communal violence is breaking out, such as in Kalimantan and Malaku.

Marhaban is under no illusions about how the fight for the right to a referendum would eventually be won. "International pressure on Jakarta, particularly from countries such as the US and Australia, is vital", she said.

US military training, or the stepping up of such training by Australia, will provide further legitimacy to the Indonesian government's effort to smash the independence forces. For this reason, she argued, the Australian and US governments must be forced to end all military ties to Indonesia.

SIRA is demanding the TNI and police leave Aceh. After that there's a need to conduct a campaign to raise consciousness among Acehnese about what a referendum would mean. "We have to be ready to take the consequences", Marhaban said, alluding to the likely difficulties a democratic government might encounter from multinational companies, such as Exxon (Esso), currently profiting from the Acehnese people's misery.

From Green Left Weekly issue #440

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Indonesian students demand: No cuts to education subsidies!

By Lisbeth Latham

On April 1, Indonesian students involved in the National Student League for Democracy (LMND) participated in a national mobilisation in Jakarta demanding that the government abandon plans to cut education subsidies to state universities. The policy is expected to result in tuition fee increases of around 300%.

The cuts are part of the broader austerity measures introduced by the Indonesian government on April 1, under the guidance of the International Monetary Fund and its Coordinating Group on Indonesia (CGI), in order to repay Indonesia's debts to international banks and corporations.


The slashing of subsidies on other basic items such as food, cooking oil and electricity will force workers, peasants and students to shoulder a greater share of the burden of the 1997-99 economic crisis.

The LMND sent a solidarity statement to the March 22 national day of action against education privatisation in Australia. It was read out at many of the rallies and received a good response.

It explained that due to rising living and education costs there has been a large drop in the number of students going on to attend high schools and universities. Of the 4.5 million high school students enrolled in 1996-97 only 2 million entered university studies in 2000. At the same time only around 5 million of the 7.5 million junior high school students enrolled in high school.

The LMND is demanding: no cuts to education subsidies, free education for the people, and for the arms bill to be cut so that more funds can be allocated to education.

ASIET member Kerryn Williams told Resistance magazine, “The fact that the Indonesian and Australian governments are pursuing the same policy of shifting education costs onto students and their families makes building solidarity between the campaigns of students here and there very important.”

From Green Left Weekly issue #400

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