Mosul and other cities in Iraq are experiencing dramatic, dangerous, and fateful changes. [1]
A Voice From Inside Mosul
22 June 2014Interview by the Iraqi Civil Society Solidarity Initiative (ICSSI), with an Iraqi human rights defender (“QC”) from Mosul
Popular movement and imperialisms
16 June 2014, byThis resolution was adopted at the meeting of the FI Bureau on 7 June 2014.
Plenums, power, politics
16 June 2014, byFor more than two months, in all the cantons of the Croatian-Bosniak Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina [2] hundreds, sometimes a thousand people have been meeting regularly, discussing, taking decisions by simple majority, forming working groups responsible for producing proposals for discussion, ensuring the rotation of their own "moderators"... These popular assemblies - "cantonal citizens’ plenums" – represent a new form of popular self-organization, with the aim of controlling the authorities, of dismissing them, of imposing their political choices without aspiring - until now at least - to exercise power themselves. All residents are welcome in these plenums, all of them have the same right to speak and nobody has the right to “represent" a plenum. The interventions are rapid and the moderators have the right to intervene so that the intervention does not deviate from the subject under discussion. The desire to seek unanimity does not interfere with people expressing themselves in a resolutely critical manner.
"For the moment, a process of building new mass organizations and clear references to a new political project have not developed”
16 June 2014, by ,Fernando Silva is at present the general secretary of the PSOL and a member of the National Coordination of Insurgência (a current within the PSOL). This interview with João Machado was first published in the newspaper of the NPA in France, l’Anticapitaliste.
Europe adrift and an earthquake in France
16 June 2014, byIt was a genuine historic shock for Europe and a huge thunderclap in France with the victory of the Front national. The results of the elections confirm the terrible political crisis which is striking Europe. There is a shock wave whose political effects cannot yet be measured. For sure, we should avoid a France-centred reading of electoral results affecting 28 states: according to the political situation in each country, the relationship of forces can vary here and there, but broad trends are nonetheless discernible on the basis of crisis and degradation of the relationship of forces for the worker’s movement: massive abstention, rise of the far right, setbacks for the traditional right, considerable weakening of social democracy, maintenance of the radical left with the rise of Syriza in Greece and Podemos in Spain.
After the abdication of the king, it’s time to checkmate the regime
16 June 2014, byThe regime is collapsing, it is dying and in its last-ditch struggle to survive, the king has abdicated. Never has the regime resulting from the Transition [3] been as widely challenged as it is today. The pillars on which it rests, the monarchy, the judiciary, bipartisanship, have been greatly delegitimized for some time now. We no longer believe in their lies, those lies with which they are trying to hold together a system that is falling apart. What seemed not so long ago impossible appears today as a reality. Let us push with all our might to widen even further this breach that the economic, social and political crisis has made possible.
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Footnotes
[1] This statement originally appeared on Jadaliyya in Arabic http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/inde... and Ali Issa translated it into English.
[2] Since the Dayton Peace Accords (1995), the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina has been divided into autonomous regional authorities: the Republika Srpska (Serb Republic), the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (Bosniak and Croat) and the Brcko District (under the joint jurisdiction of the first two entities, but which is governed under the direct responsibility of the UN representative in Bosnia-Herzegovina). The Federation, which is more decentralized than the Republika Srpska, is also divided into cantons with cantonal governments. The Republic, a sort of protectorate of the European Union, has in reality only a little power: it is the High Representative of the UN who represents the highest authority and has executive powers; the presidency of the Republic is symbolic and collective (one Bosniak, one Croat – who are elected by the citizens of the Federation - and one Serb elected by those of the Republika Srpska) and it is the local authorities which manage the country on a day to day basis. This structure increases the role of the various levels of bureaucratic administration and leads to political parties – dominated by one or other ethnic group - playing an important role in the primitive accumulation of private capital. Since 2004 a military force of the European Union, EUFOR, has been stationed there, with about 7,000 soldiers. Only the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina has an international status.
[3] The Transition is the name given to the political process following the death of Franco, which culminated in the Constitution of 1978