People looking for sources of income and cheep living conditions settled down right near the landfill starting with the end of 1960s and carried on informal labour (waste selection) since then. Today approximately 250 persons are living within this neglected and life threatening territory in 50 improvised barracks. They were told that they were tolerated and they should be merciful, as if this was a “humanitarian act” of toleration on the side of authorities and sanitation companies towards them.
Month: March 2014
Categories
Is Crimea another Kosovo?
James Robertson recounts the history of Kosovo, before and after the breakup of the ex-Yugoslavia, and assesses the accuracy of Russia’s comparisons to Crimea.
published in Socialist Worker, March 27, 2014THE EVENTS in Crimea over the past few weeks, culminating in the territory–a peninsula on the Black Sea off southern Ukraine–being annexed to Russia following a referendum in favor of secession from Ukraine, have provided a platform for some of the most base displays of hypocrisy from all sides.
I think it’s worth pausing, and reflecting on the fact that the EU has applied sanctions.
Well. Don’t make the EU angry. You wouldn’t like them when they get angry. Raaaahhhrr! EU SMASH!
And yet – and yet – Russia continues to ‘defy the international community’. Such rare valour. Such nose-thumbery. Such bare-faced insouciance.
I don’t want to be misunderstood. I am obviously happy that the US and EU are not flexing serious muscle, that the dire warnings of neocon expeditions are looking so utterly threadbare, that Obama is specifically ruling out “a military excursion in Ukraine“.
Imagine a country that once was considered the last stronghold of Stalinist socialism. A country that after the velvet revolution quickly became the apt pupil of the IMF, was one of the first to implement neoliberal reforms, and was also considered in the early nineties by none other than the IMF to be the ideal model of neoliberal capitalist restructuring. Imagine a country whose deindustrialization and mass privatization were shattering, whose unemployment reached its peak and was countered only by mass emigration to the West, especially to Greece and Italy.
We have heard terrifying stories from the revolution in Ukraine: anarchists participating in anti-government street-fighting behind nationalist banners, anarchist slogans and historical figures appropriated by fascists, a dystopia in which familiar movements and strategies reappear with our enemies at the helm.
This text is a clumsy first attempt to identify the important questions for anarchists elsewhere around the world to discuss in the wake of the events in Ukraine. We present it humbly, acknowledging that our information is limited, hoping that others will correct our errors and improve on our analysis.
by Jennifer J. Carroll
Outside the sphere of Russian propaganda, the Kremlin’s assertion that the Ukrainian crisis is fueled by radical nationalists and fascist provocateurs is widely understood as fabricated. Putin’s claims that radicals and extremists control Ukraine’s parliament and that Russian nationals face physical threats are categorically false, and even the US Department of State has gone on record to say so.
The great irony here is that many western scholars and journalists spent the weeks and months prior to the Russian invasion of Crimea toeing the very same line, accusing groups such as Spilna Sprava (Common Cause), Pravy Sektor (Right Sector) and the Svoboda (Freedom) party of being the militant forces of political evil on the streets, aggressively gunning for their narrow and hate-filled agenda.
Note from the editorial board of LeftEast: an earlier version was published on the All the Russias’ Blog of NYU’s Jordan Center: http://jordanrussiacenter.org/news/dangerous-liaisons-ukraine-western-slavists/
Writing in the middle of a crisis is always dangerous. Analysis, predictions, recommendations can be proven dramatically wrong within a matter of days. I write these lines as the main author of an editorial statement of the LeftEast platform, which in addition to causing a serious controversy within our editorial board, proved spectacularly wrong in its optimistic predictions that the aftermath of this Second Orange Revolution—a mass, anti-authoritarian movement that spectacularly replaces of one set of elites with another without at all affecting the oligopolistic nature of Ukraine’s society and economy—will provide a much better terrain for the left than the Euromaidan struggles, which had split and demoralized it.
Note from LeftEast editors: The following interview was originally published in the Slovenian journal Pogledi. It is translated and published here with kind permission from both interviewer (Bostjan Tadel) and interviewee (Anej Korsika).
The Initiative for Democratic Socialism (IDS) is a Leftist organization initially conceived following the mass protests that shook Slovenia in the winter of 2012/2013, which eventually led to the collapse of the right wing government of Janez Jansa. On May 1 2013 the group was formally established to bring together activists that had been involved in many spheres of activism – from campaigns against Slovenia’s entry into NATO to movements addressing the precarity of migrant and adjunct work.
Categories
Russian and Ukrainian socialists speak out
Author:
Dave Ball
In a statement issued on 1 March, the Russian Socialist Movement denounced Putin’s invasion of Crimea.
“War has begun. With the aim of protecting and increasing the assets of the oligarchs in Russia and in Yanukovich’s coterie, Russia’s leadership has undertaken an invasion of Ukraine…
“It goes without saying that the peoples of Ukraine have a right of self-determination, of full autonomy and independence. But what we are seeing today has nothing to do with the democratic will of the masses.
Early this morning in Montréal, signals from around the world were flooding in about Ali Mustafa’s violent death in Syria.
A principled internationalist, thoughtful revolutionary and independent media maker, Ali’s beautiful spirit certainly lives on. Illustrated so beautifully by Palestinian artist Nidal El-Khairy above.
On the ground in Aleppo, Ali died during an attack by Syrian military aircraft, killed by ruthless barrel bombs, dropped without distinction over the Hadariyeh area of the city.