IV447 - April 2012

There is another way! Without debt, euro, EU and memoranda!
For the anti-capitalist overthrow of the coalition government and the Troika!
Power and wealth in the hands of the workers! For a battle-front based on a break with the system and revolution—for a strong anti-capitalist left!

Ahlem Belhadj, President of the Tunisian Association of Democratic Women (ATFD), spoke to Eve Fitoussi and Alain Baron for Afriques21 in January 2012 about the current situation of women in Tunisia.

Adnen Hajji, a teacher and UGTT activist from Redeyef, spoke to Eve Fitoussi and Alain Baron for Afriques21 in December 2011 about the current situation in Tunisia.

More than 5,000 people packed Colombo’s Sugathadasa stadium for the inaugural conference of the Peratugami Samajawadi Pakshaya (Frontline Socialist Party – FSP) on 9 April 2012. Most were members and sympathisers of this new Left party – a breakaway from the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (Peoples’ Liberation Front – JVP); but many representatives of other radical Left parties, Left intellectuals, and progressive social activists were also in attendance. The emergence and consolidation of the FSP is an important and hopeful development for the revival of peoples’ movements in Sri Lanka in the post-war era, following decades of retreat of the labour and left movements.

The book Debitocrazia, published by the CADTM [1] was largely written in 2010 and consequently does not take the Italian case into account. However, already last summer, and even before, the experts of the Committee, founded in Belgium at the beginning of the 1990s, had put Italy under observation because, if we follow the most emblematic examples described in the book and the dynamics which underlie the formation of public debt, our country also joins the list of the cases in which we can call for cancellation of the illegitimate or illicit debt. The formation of the Italian public debt enables us to retrace a history of the country and to highlight one of the mechanisms of a way of functioning that is specific to capitalism, in which tax incentives for big companies and for the wealthiest individuals are combined with the use of the state machine to produce a way of managing welfare spending that is centralised and has a class nature.

For a whole day the Faculty of Physics at La Sapienza University in Rome was transformed into a free university in movement. Approximately 200 participants, for the most part young people and students, were able to listen, on Saturday March 24, to the speech by Eric Toussaint, president of the CADTM (Committee for the Abolition of Third World Debt),Belgium, who is a militant, an activist of the global justice movement and author of the book Debitocrazia, who by sketching out the elements of the global economic crisis explained how and why cancellation of illegitimate debt constitutes an opportunity for social movements to think about an alternative.

Capitalist crisis, social and environmental justice was the subject of the Thematic Social Forum organised in the run up to the People’s Summit of Rio+20, which was held in Porto Alegre from January 25-28 and brought together at least 60,000 participants in about 600 activities. (40,000 of them had officially paid registrations). This Forum, the first Thematic Social Forum held in Brazil, was a huge success in one of its goals which was to mobilize and involve Brazilian and international civil society in the process of the People’s Summit that is already being discussed more widely. It also made it possible to intensify the dialogue with the Brazilian government about what is at stake in Rio+20: President Dilma Roussef participated in two activities; a private meeting with 90 leaders of movements and an open one at Gigantinho Stadium [2].

This article initially appeared in three parts in the New Socialist

Sri Lanka’s farmlands are being aggressively marketed as investment opportunities for agro-export agriculture by the island’s foreign missions in the Gulf, and to Gulf-based businesses, including at the recently concluded Sri Lanka Expo 2012 (28-31 March) in Colombo.

Democratic freedoms are increasingly under attack in Sri Lanka. In a climate of intense chauvinism, critics of the government and its increasingly authoritarian and repressive policies are more and more threatened. Even journalists who have already been forced into exile are targets of threats and smear campaigns. Government members have personally called for violence against media personnel that have raised criticism of the Sri Lankan government or that have drawn attention to violations of Human Rights in the country.