IV340 - May 2002

Israel today resembles a bus driven by a crazed drunk at 100 miles an hour. This bus crushes everything in its path, does not stop at any red lights and plunges straight into the abyss. We are witnessing a destructive and murderous fury that knows no limits.

The current brutal military offensive of the Israeli army against the Palestinians, entitled ’Defensive Wall Operation’, typical to Israel’s Orwellian double talk, indicates the opening of a new stage in the long process that aims at destroying the Palestinian national movement.

The weakness of the political regime has deepened. And not only in relation to the government, as expressed in the pots and pan banging demonstrations against the Court - but in the series of incidents in the street with politicians being repudiated, insulted and harassed.

Latin America is living on the brink of a nervous breakdown. First in Paraguay, then in Ecuador, in Argentina and now in Venezuela, the presidents succeed each other at hourly intervals.

There is a confrontation over the political regime, over oil, but the two currents that face each other are both neo-liberal, even if they represent different tendencies.

At the recently held 16th Congress of the Communist Party of Spain (PCE) there appeared, for the first time in the party’s history, a nationwide platform that presented alternative political documents and put forward its own candidates to the Federal Committee and the General Secretariat.

In spite of the dramatic significance that this 16th Congress of the PCE had been accorded inside Izquierda Unida (some had presented it as almost a replay of the 6th assembly of IU) its development and results do not seem to have fulfilled such expectations.

Understanding the recent crisis in the Spanish trade union confederation, the CC.OO (Comisiones Obreras - Workers’ Commissions) - or to be more precise, the crisis in its majority leadership - is not an easy task; the underlying differences are not clear or explicit and it is difficult to predict the consequences and the changes that may take place in the CC.OO.

There is nothing surprising in the fact that the economic revival in Russia which began in late 1998 is now giving way to stagnation. Even when the recovery was only just beginning, independent experts were pretty accurate in their predictions of how long it would last: if Russia’s economy was going to develop by inertia, then the factors which brought about the economic upswing would play themselves out in about two to two-and-a-half years. And that’s exactly what happened.

The enlargement of the European Union to include the Central and Eastern European countries (CEECs) has now reached the decisive moment. The European Council meeting in Gothenburg confirmed that it was an "irreversible" process and adopted a final schedule for the negotiations, which are to conclude by the end of 2002, thus enabling the applicant states to participate in the elections to the European Parliament in 2004.