IV363 - January 2005

Thanks to the Russian government’s decision to ratify it, the Kyoto Protocol will come into force in 2005. With the USA having withdrawn in 2001, ratification by Moscow was necessary in order that the agreement, signed in Japan in 1997, should be effective. A new phase of climate negotiations is opening, during which neoliberal pressure will redouble in intensity.

In the days since the tsunami hit South Asia, the enormous death toll has been rising daily. It is likely that we will never know how many lost their lives. More than two weeks after devastation struck so many communities, thousands upon thousands lack the necessities of survival - clean drinking water, food and in many cases medical supplies.

US plans to "kill" the Iraqi resistance are failing, and the plans for the January 30 election are in serious jeopardy. With less than one month to go before the projected Iraqi elections, no one knows whether they will take place all at once or over a protracted period or how many people will vote. The BBC World Service reports that in Baghdad, you wouldn’t even know that an election is taking place. Every day there are resistance attacks, which the US and its allies are powerless to prevent. The US stabilisation project is in danger of collapse.

The hypocrisy of the Bush administration is limitless - The fact of the matter is that democracy has never been more than a subsidiary pretext for the Bush administration.

EU governments are trying to impose a constitution designed behind closed doors on 450 millions people. This so-called constitutional treaty has taken the place of a constituent process based on a mandate coming out of open democratic debates and sovereignty of the peoples of Europe. This constitution is dangerous.

François Sabado recently represented the LCR and the International at the congresses of Espacio Alternativo (which groups together militants identifying with the Fourth International) in the Spanish State and of the Revolutionary Socialist Party (PSR) in Portugal. We publish here the main lines of his interventions at these two congresses.

Luizianne Lins, militant of the Socialist Democracy (DS) tendency of the Workers’ Party (PT), was elected as mayor of Fortaleza, a city of almost two million inhabitants, capital of the state of Ceara (in the North-East of Brazil).

Ever since the earthquake that struck off the coast of Indonesia on 26th December there has been a profusion of figures in the headlines, increasing remorselessly: the number of victims, the cost of the damage, the amount of international aid. And a succession of meetings involving the major powers: the Jakarta conference, a G7 meeting, a session of the Paris Club ... Let us pause to comment on some little-known facts and figures that should be at the heart of the debate.

At the beginning of 2004, two initiatives appeared, challenging the governing Social Democracy: the “Electoral Alternative 2006” and the “Initiative for Jobs and Social Justice”. On June 20, 2004, the two initiatives came together to create the “Electoral Alternative for Jobs and Social Justice” (WAsG, from its German initials).

The response of Western governments has been criminally slow and half-hearted, compared with the flood of solidarity shown by ordinary people worldwide