second refusal earlier in January to allow the Dutch government to deport Kurdish activist Nuriye Kesbir to Turkey was a welcome victory for her and her supporters, but does not in anyway portend an easing of the repression in Europe.
It is not yet known what charges Remzi Kartal may face, but readers are asked to watch for appeals calling for his release, against his extradition, and for an end to criminalisation of the Kurds in Europe and in Kurdistan.
This pressure on the Kurdish movement is linked to two things.
First, the US and Turkey know that even though the Kurdish movement led by KONGRA-GEL has been weakened since Ocalan's capture in 1998, it has not been obliterated.
Thousands of Kurdish people are still struggling for their rights, social justice and independence, not only Turkey, but in Iran, Iraq and Syria and in the diaspora.
This represents a threat to perceived US interests generally (the US does not want independent worldviews to flourish) and to the Turkish state.
Second, the US is worried that while there are progressive Kurds active in Kurdistan, sooner or later they may be able to galvanise effective opposition to US schemes to ignore and marginalise the Kurds' own legitimate demands, even in South Kurdistan, while using Kurdish collaborators, such as Barzani and Talabani against those resisting the US onslaught, not just in Iraq, but in Iran and Syria.
Socialists have every interest in supporting campaigns which strengthen Kurdish sellorganisation and resistance and to avoid falling victim either to the growing antiKurdish convergence between Turkey, Iran and Syria, or to the machinations of the US and Britain.
The latter will not scruple to use legitimate Kurdish grievances in Iran and Syria as a battering ram against those regimes and to further bloodily divide the Middle East along confessional and ethnic lines if it suits their purposes.
In this context, it is important to draw attention to Marwan Othman's campaign. A wellknown Syrian Kurdish political activist (see interview in autumn edition of International Viewpoint, www.internationalviewpoint.org), he has just started a hunger strike in Hannover, Germany, to draw attention within the EU to the continuing imprisonment and torture of Syrian Kurds in the wake of the uprising last year.
• For further information contact the Kurdistan Solidarity Committee on [email protected] Shia have something to say about that.
Despite the exhortations of the whole international political establishment to the Iraqi people to vote, the fact of the matter is that these elections have deepened the problems of the US and the UK in Iraq.
In Baghdad, a city of 5 million, there are continuous power cuts, shortages of basic items, the health system doesn't function, and people in a land sitting on huge reserves sit for in a queue for days to buy petrol.
There can be no peace in the country and no truly democratic government until the forces of occupation leave.
Welcome to the new Iraq.
page 12 of the scan
The facts of world poverty are well known. One half of humanity (three billion people) lives on less than $2 a day. Of these 790 million, the majority in Asia and the Pacific, are chronically undernourished. Nearly one and a half