International News

Russian Social Movement “Alternatives”: Awakened Sense of Dignity

By Andrey Kolganov and Aleksandr Buzgalin, reporting from Bolotnaya Square

Why, after many years when street politics in Russia were deep-frozen, have citizens again acquired a taste for street actions? After a public rally near Chistie Prudy metro station in inner Moscow drew six or seven thousand people, what caused ten times as many to then gather on Bolotnaya Square?

Can it be the crisis? The fall in living standards? When the crisis first hit, nothing took place to remotely match the recent meetings.

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South African Unemployed Movement Begins Occupation

[Ed. note: This group is affiliated with the South African Shack Dwellers Movement; see our earlier articles on the Shack Dwellers and their youth movement.]

13 October 2011: Unemployed People’s Movement Press Statement

Occupy Grahamstown! Recapitalise the Poor!

As a movement of the poor we have taken great inspiration from the rebellion that has spread from Tahrir Square in Cairo to Syntagma Square in Athens, the Puerta del Sol in Madrid and now Liberty Plaza in New York. Our comrades in Students for Social Justice have been just as inspired by the growing spirit of rebellion that is jumping, like a fire, from country to country.

On Saturday we will occupy Grahamstown. The students will march into town from the Botanical Gardens. We will march into town from the township and the squatter camps. We will meet on the square at the Cathedral. We will turn that square into a people’s university, a people’s kitchen and a space of people’s power. Our aim is to bring the rebellion of the poor, the rebellion that has put thousands and thousands on the streets of South Africa in recent years, into dialogue with this global rebellion. The alliance between organised students and the organised unemployed is strong in Grahamstown. Together we can build strong foundations for the struggles to come.

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Libya and Egypt, Without Dictators, Face the Future

by Anne Jaclard

Sunday, Aug. 28 – Libyan rebel forces have taken control of nearly all of the country. They seized the oil town of Ras Lanuf and are waiting for reinforcements to move further west, step by step. From both east and west, the rebel army approaches Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s home town of Sirte, where he or his family may be hiding; his representative offers to negotiate peace. It is too late for that, says the new self-declared national authority, the Transitional National Council (TNC).

Its priority today is to find 50,000 rebels who are unaccounted for and may have been taken captive by Qaddafi’s forces over the past months of warfare. Some prisoners have just been liberated, including 107 from the infamous political prison Abu Salim in Tripoli, where one inmate was held for 16 years. But fears are that tens of thousands more may still be locked in Qaddafi’s secret prisons, where they face imminent death from their loyalist keepers or, if their keepers fled when the rebels entered Tripoli a week ago, from starvation.

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