January 2006

This year the World Social Forum (WSF), a forum for alternative thinkers the world over, is convening twice. Different venues and dates, but both meetings will be decisive: in Bamako, Mali, from 19-23 January, and in Caracas, Venezuela, from 24-29 January. An important political meeting is scheduled for 18 January, the day before the Bamako forum convenes, and the 50th anniversary of the famous Bandung conference.
The meeting is described as an international day of reflection, successor to (...)

Ariel Sharon has been the incarnation of Israeli nationalism: a general and prime minister, heir to David Ben-Gurion’s socialist, and Vladimir Jabotinsky’s revisionist, Zionism. He tried through war and murder to make the occupation of the Palestinian territories and the foundation of settlements irreversible. The intifadas persuaded him to don the mantle of man of peace to disarm international pressure and preserve the essence of Israel’s hold on Palestine.

With the withdrawal from Gaza, he managed to put the roadmap in formaldehyde as he accelerated the building of settlements and the separation wall around future bantustans. This, and the way in which he rallied the international community to his vision of the paths to a political settlement, won him unprecedented popularity in Israel.

His departure from the political scene will radically alter the Middle East. It makes the Palestinian legislative elections more uncertain. It increases the unknowns in the Israel elections in March. Will Sharon’s Kadima party survive? We do not know if Israelis who were preparing to vote for it to support him will return to their Labour or Likud roots. Nor do we know if Labour under its new leader, peacenik Amir Peretz, will win wider support among the working class. Nor, if the new Knesset has a majority that favours negotiating a peace accord with the Palestinians, do we know which leaders will have the authority to impose it. But we do know that time is running out if we are to avoid a third intifada.

Israel’s political landscape was already shaken by the withdrawal from the governing coalition of the Labour party under its new leader, Amir Peretz, and Ariel Sharon’s creation of a new party. Electors will vote on 28 March. Can Labour advance the interests of working class Israelis and deliver peace with the Palestinians?

China has moved into fourth position in the league table of world economies, but only a third of its population has access to the new temple of consumerism. The rural poor, internal imigrants and laid-off workers suffer worst from the gross new inequalities.

Wal-Mart is the world’s biggest company, and the social dumping that has made such success possible is infecting western economies, especially labour relations and minimum pay rates. It buys cheaply and sells cheaply, but at a huge cost to communities all over the globe.

Wal-Mart subcontracts the manufacture of many of its products to companies in Africa, South America and, most recently, China, where wages are even lower. But Wal-Mart as a buyer does not discourage, and may actively encourage, serf-like factory conditions.

In her book ‘Nickel and Dimed’, the US writer Barbara Ehrenreich related her own experience of Wal-Mart, where she worked for $7 an hour. This extract describes the company’s preferred self-image.

Ten years after the Dayton accords, accession or pre-accession negotiations are beginning between the European Union and all the post-Yugoslav states. Separate talks on the final status of Kosovo, which is still a province of the federation of Serbia and Montenegro, are scheduled to begin this year.

Bosnia emerged from the Dayton accords as a state under the control of the international high representative, its economy and employment destroyed and its war between three nationalist and religious groupings muted into an ongoing cold war at the polls and in life.

GM soya has been smuggled into the fertile state of Paraná in southern Brazil, where it suits the owners of agribusinesses that cover 70% of the land but endangers the survival of the remaining small farmers, who provide most of the agricultural jobs and key national foodstuffs.

Last year there were demonstrations in Western Sahara in support of its secession from Morocco: these were aggressively suppressed. Despite an attempt at UN mediation, both sides are recalcitrant and unwilling to make any of the necessary compromises.

Last November marked the 30th anniversary of the Sahara crisis, triggered when Morocco successfully pressured Madrid out of its desert colony in autumn 1975. Despite the United States’ denials, declassified records reveal that King Hassan’s success was made possible through US intervention.

There are practical ways in which we could immediately start to save our species from ecological and social crisis and our planet from being destroyed by our greed. So why aren’t we adopting them? What prevents us from desiring a simpler and better way of life?