WHEN SOUTH Africans went to the polls this week it marked ten years since black people won the right to vote. A cursory examination of South Africa today reveals deep cracks in the post-apartheid capitalist society. Despite big talk about what has been achieved, the rich continue to get richer and the poor poorer. The majority black ANC government wants South Africans to celebrate and relish the newfound peace, justice and national unity after centuries of conflict, division and injustice.
TREVOR PHILLIPS, the head of the Commission for Racial Equality, caused a storm last week by saying, "We should kill off the word multiculturalism. Multiculturalism suggests separateness."
THE NATIONAL Union of Teachers (NUT) has maintained a course for bitter confrontation with the government. And it has called for a wider alliance of unions to fight New Labour's "modernisation" of the public sector. The NUT conference in Harrogate unanimously refused to compromise its opposition to the government's drive to bring in teaching on the cheap by replacing qualified teachers with underpaid assistants.
THIS WEEK Socialist Worker sellers in Sheffield realised what it means to sell a paper that is at the heart of the movement. They sent this report about how sales and campaigning and solidarity fitted together last week:
IMMIGRANTS ARE under fire again. No one should fall for the lies the mainstream parties and the press peddle about immigrants and asylum seekers flooding the country. Beverley Hughes had to resign as a minister because New Labour whipped up a climate of hostility to satisfy the Tory press.
TWO MEN were forced to testify before a government committee last week after being accused of stashing away £100 million. It should be branded as one of the biggest scandals of New Labour's government. The two, John Towers and Peter Beale, are the bosses of Phoenix.
I WAS born in 1968 in Baghdad. I arrived with my family in Britain in 1970. My father is from the same town as Saddam Hussein and attended the same school. But he was a staunch opponent of the Ba'athist regime. Things became extremely oppressive for those who didn't stay in line. So my father came to Britain under the pretext of getting a university fellowship. In reality he was fleeing an unbearable situation.
GENOCIDE IS an overused word, but ten years ago it took place in the tiny African country of Rwanda. Throughout 100 days between 800,000 and one million people were murdered in a country of just six million. The media coverage remembering these events conveys the horror. But much of it also accepts two arguments. The first is that there was something inexplicable about what occurred-or that perhaps this is something uniquely "African".
SHOCK AND anger swept most parts of the world last week after Israel's murder of Sheikh Yassin. Socialist Worker sellers were part of the response, agitating for Palestinian rights and against Bush and Blair's support for Israel. Simon reports from north west London, "After the assassination of Sheikh Yassin, a couple of us went round the Arab cafes of Bayswater and Edgware Road.
In 1987 an Israeli historian called Benny Morris published a book, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem. It caused a sensation at the time. Using official Israeli military archives, it confirmed the Palestinian case that the foundation of the Israeli state in 1948 had depended upon armed terror-resulting in the forcible "transfer", or expulsion, of three quarters of a million Palestinian Arabs. This was something that the Zionists - the ideologues who advocate an exclusively Jewish state in Palestine - had always denied.
The cruel and brutal actions of Israeli governments, armies and sections of the population since the formation of the state of Israel in 1948 have been well documented. The recent brutality against the Palestinian uprising and horrors in the Occupied Territories now show how Israeli policy has been characterised by fierce and unrelenting reaction.
