Asia

On Saturday more than 200,000  people took to the streets in South Korea calling for President Park Geun-hye to step down. This latest protest, was the biggest for several years and it highlights the deep crisis of the Park government.

Gaddani is one of the largest Ship Breaking Yards in the World. Located near the industrial city of Hub in Balochistan, bordering Karachi, it supplies twenty five percent of the steel demand of the country.

On Monday night once again blood flowed in Quetta. At least 61 were killed and 117 wounded, many of them in a critical condition, when terrorists attacked a police training college in Quetta. Around 9:30 in the evening three terrorists entered the college where 700 trainees were present. They entered one of the hostels rounded up and then killed trainee cadets in the building.

The recent rally in Jaffna, a Tamil populated capital in the Northern province of Sri Lanka, under the banner “Ezhuka Tamil” (Rise Up Tamils!) has once again posed the question of Tamil self-determination to the fore since the bloody defeat of Tamil Tigers 7 years ago. This demonstration is an indicator of swelling discontent among the Tamil minorities. Despite Sri Lankan State’s victory over the armed separatist Tigers the national question has not been solved in Sri Lanka and the misery of the Tamil population in the North and Eastern provinces have only worsened.

Fifteen years after the invasion of Afghanistan, the Kabul government is both at war with the Taliban and attempting to involve them – or at least sections of them in government. This contrasts starkly with what was being said by the bourgeois media and politicians back in 2001 with their rejoicing at the final end of the rule of the Taliban. Alan Woods explained at the time that, “…even if a ‘national unity’ government is formed, it will not take long to disintegrate into a government of national dis-unity. Once again, matters will be resolved, not in the corridors of parliament, but in the streets and in the mountains.” Events since then have amply confirmed the Marxist analysis. Also see Afghanistan - the unwinnable war by Alan Woods (October 2008)

Indian-occupied Kashmir has been in revolt since the killing of Burhani Wani, a commander of the Hizbul Mujahideen group, by Indian troops on 8 July. The killing sparked a massive protest movement across the whole of the Kashmir Valley. The Indian state has responded brutally, imposing a draconian curfew, killing over 80 people and injuring thousands. We publish here a comment on the present situation by Yasir Irshad, a Marxist of the IMT in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir.