IV482 - March 2015

Michel Warschawski has been politically active in Israel for many years. He retraced his biography in one of his books, Sur la frontière (Stock, 2002). After spending his early years in Strasbourg, he decided at the age of sixteen to go to Jerusalem, where he undertook Talmudic studies. In 1968 he joined the Israeli Socialist Organization, which had been founded in 1962 by expelled members of the Israeli Communist Party and older activists influenced by Trotskyism. The group was best known (…)

On the night of December 2, 1984, unknown poisonous gases (released by the runaway reaction of water with methyl isocyanate, or MIC) burst out from a Union Carbide pesticide plant located in a densely populated, working poor vicinity of the city of Bhopal in central India. The plant, scheduled for possible closure, was understaffed, not maintained adequately, and had already seen prior deaths from exposure to leaks.

Five months ago 43 students from the rural teacher’s college in Ayotzinapa in Mexico’s Guerrero state disappeared. The Mexican state bears responsibility for these disappearances. The Fourth International expresses its full solidarity with the parents and friends of the Mexican students as well as with the tens of thousands of persons who have mobilized throughout the country, thus avoiding the case being closed by the authorities under the pretext of a purported definitive “historic truth”. The official version seeks in reality to hide a state crime and convince public opinion that the students were killed and incinerated by killers hired by organized crime.

Argentinian prosecutor Gerardo Pollicita announced in February 2015 that he would pursue charges against President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner. The allegations were supposedly prepared by Alberto Nisman, a special prosecutor who died by a gunshot to the head under mysterious circumstances the previous month. Kirchner’s center-left government has come under increasing fire from opposition forces for her handling of both Nisman’s death and his investigation into a 1994 terrorist attack on a Jewish cultural center. However, many people feel the issue is being used by the right wing as a cover to discredit the government.

The following editorial was published on the Russian leftist website Open Left in response to the murder of opposition leader Boris Nemtsov on Friday 27 February 2015.

This statement was adopted by the International Committee of the Fourth International meeting in Amsterdam on 24 February 2015.

The following declaration on Palestine was adopted by the International Committee of the Fourth International in Amsterdam on 24 February 2015.

The Syrian people’s revolution is approaching the end of its third year, still confronting the apparatus of death and destruction of the ruling dictatorial regime, in addition to numerous threats and dangers. The popular masses have made huge sacrifices in this period: in addition to over a hundred thousand number of killed, hundreds of thousands are wounded or missing, and around half the population of Syria have become internally displaced persons or refugees in neighbouring countries.