5112개의 게시물을 찾았습니다.
Well, in the coming days we'll possibly a further escalation of the power struggle(*) between the co-called "red-shirts" and the gov't on the streets of the Thai capital.
Today's al-Jazeera has a detailed report about the present situation on the "front line": ☞ Troops return to Bangkok streets
* Some, especially Trotskyist organisations, are already calling it a "class struggle". But as far as I know, a successful class struggle needs revolutionary mass organisations... But unfortunatelly all the revolutionary organisations in Thailand, such as the Communist Party, were "successful" (from the viewpoint of the ruling class) smashed by the the army (and internal conflicts/party disputes!!).
And after all the United Front for Democracy isn't a revolutionary organisation, not at all!
Related article:
☞ Thailand mulls a 'half coup' (Asia Times, 4.17)
The cover picture - heading: "Church Today" - on the latest edition of Titanic (German satirical magazine) you must see in connection with increasing (thousands across the western "civilized" world!!) charges of sexual abuse in church-based (mainly Catholic) "education" institutions (schools/boarding schools)..
* The Duriban building (aka "Little Yongsan") is an occupied house in Seoul's Hongdae district(**).
A part of the building used to be a Korean food restaurant run by a couple, but then the gov't announced the notorious "redevelopment plan" and the "construction mafia" (supported by the municipality/district office) bought the designated area and the land price went up by 10 folds and the poor tenants like the restaurant woman and her husband had to leave the building with nothing because the new owner of the land sent gansters and thugs to kick out them, like tens of thousands other poor people in Seoul.
After several days - it was the early morning of Dec 26, 2009 - the couple decided to occupy the whole building and started a sit-in struggle.
April 3 marked the 100th day of the sit-in struggle and the resistance is still going on.
** Subway line No. 2, Hongik Univ Stn(exit No. 4) --> 100 m straight ahead to the "redevelopment" zone --> Duriban B/D
Last Sunday, on the eve of the "Nuclear Security Summit" in Washington, Rodong Shinmun's editorial detected that "the danger of a nuclear war is increasing on the Korean Peninsula day by day", as KCNA reported:
S. Korea Urged to Stop War Aggression against North
The chief executive of south Korea was recently reported to have kicked up war
atmosphere, instructing the warmongers of the military to "get fully ready for any
event." His minions let loose a whole string of dangerous war outbursts,
trumpeting about the non-existent "threat" and "provocation" from someone.
The above-said outpourings of the south Korean ruling quarters are
unpardonable acts of treachery as they threaten the destiny of the nation and
disturb peace of the country and rash acts of going against the trend of the times
towards independent reunification, peace and prosperity.
The danger of a nuclear war is increasing on the Korean Peninsula day by day
and the inter-Korean relations are inching close to an unpredictable collapse due
to the reckless moves of the group of traitors to provoke a war.
The south Korean ruling quarters are persistently rushing headlong into the
moves for a war of aggression against the north, challenging the ardent desire of
the Koreans for peaceful reunification. This is absolutely intolerable as it is the
greatest treason of letting the country and the nation fall victim to a nuclear war to
be started by foreign forces.
Their reckless remarks are nothing but a replica of the call for achieving
"unification by prevailing over communism" made by the successive anti-
reunification elements of south Korea. The present ruling quarters of south
Korea are getting frantic in the moves to escalate the confrontation and ignite a
war, retrieving the dregs of history which had been thrown into its dumping
ground after being cursed and denounced by the whole nation.
This is a blatant challenge of the outdated forces intended to block the advance
of the June 15 era of reunification and bring back the last era of confrontation in
a bid to prolong their remaining days.
The anti-reunification conservative forces are now going mad with the moves to
start a war of aggression against the north in collusion with outsiders, but this is nothing but the last-ditch effort of those who have lived out their days.
http://www.kcna.co.jp/item/2010/201004/news11/20100411-07ee.html
Last Saturday, heavily armed troops fought pitched battles with the protesters in an attempt to reclaim an area in the historic part of Bangkok that tens of thousands of supporters of the "United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship" (aka the "Red-Shirts") have occupied for four weeks. Twenty-one people died in the violence, including four soldiers and a Japanese TV cameraman. Over 800 people were reported injured:
Related articles:
☞ Violence exposes battle lines in class war (A. Times, 4.12)
☞ Red shirts in Bangkok coffin march (al-Jazeera, 4.12)
Asia Times(HK) published last week(4.07) the following excellent piece:
Collateral Pentagon
By Pepe Escobar
"We've shot an amazing number of people and killed a number and, to my knowledge, none has proven to have been a real threat to the force."
That was General Stanley McChrystal, supreme commander of United States forces in Afghanistan, late last month - during one of the virtual "town hall" meetings held with US troops every two weeks, as reported in the New York Times.
McChrystal added, "To my knowledge, in the nine-plus months I've been here, not a single case where we have engaged in an escalation of force incident and hurt someone has it turned out that the vehicle had a suicide bomb or weapons in it and, in many cases, had families in it."
So here's the war hero responsible for conducting President Barack Obama's "good war" in Afghanistan admitting on the record what really goes on at times in these checkpoints, while also shedding some light over those recurrent missile bombings of Afghan wedding parties.
Since Obama's summer 2009 surge in Afghanistan, US and North Atlantic Treaty Organization troops killed 30 and wounded more than 80 Afghans in convoy and checkpoint shootings; that's only the "official", documented list.
McChrystal's spokesman, Tadd Sholtis, said the general was basically using his comments to urge his soldiers to exercise "courageous restraint". Public opinion in the Pentagon-defined "arc of instability" from the Middle East to Central Asia may see it for what it is: the "rules of engagement" for a Pentagon serially engaged in perpetrating "collateral damage".
'Look at those dead bastards'
The direct connection between the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the prevailing "shoot an amazing number of people" rules of engagement in both, has just been provided by the small, independent Wikileaks website.
This Monday, Wikileaks released an up-to-now secret, decrypted air strike video of a massacre of civilians in the southeastern suburb of New Baghdad on July 12, 2007, conducted by the 30mm cannon fire of Apache helicopters. The website said the video and supporting documents were offered by "military whistleblowers".
Wikileaks calls it "Collateral Murder" (see the video at www.collateralmurder.com) . This is definitely not Academy Award winner The Hurt Locker - where American soldiers are selfless heroes and Iraqis are faceless ghosts. This is real life - with American soldiers as video game killers and Iraqis as corpses. These are the kind of heroes who mistake a telephoto lens for an rocket-propelled grenade.
The video speaks for itself. Among those gunned down from above were Reuters photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen, 22, and driver Saeed Chmagh, 40 (both shot dead), as well as two Baghdad kids (both seriously wounded).
Reuters had been trying to obtain the video through the Freedom of Information Act since 2007. David Schlesinger, editor-in-chief of Reuters news, released a statement on Monday saying, "The video ... is graphic evidence of the dangers involved in war journalism and the tragedies that can result." No criticism of the Pentagon, not even when all the signs point to a Pentagon-orchestrated cover-up. "There is no question that coalition forces were clearly engaged in combat operations against a hostile force," spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Scott Bleichwehl said at the time.
As a document of the tragedy and absurdity of the continuum Afghanistan-Iraq - and of a series of Pentagon-sanctioned war crimes - this video tells it like it is, louder than any anti-war manifesto published or broadcast since 2001. And no - it will not be running for Best Documentary Short in the 2011 Oscars.
"Oh, yeah, look at those dead bastards."
"Nice."
"Good shoot'n."
"Thank you."
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/LD07Ak01.html
1. Sorry, dear comrades, but in the coming two(?) days I'll have no access to any computer and internet connection!
So, until Sat./Sun. there will be a short break here...
Please relax and be patient!^^
2. Al-Jazeera, like many other int'l news agencies reported today the following:
A US man has been sentenced to eight years hard labour in North Korea after he was convicted by a court in Pyongyang of entering the country illegally, state media has reported.
Aijalon Mahli Gomes was sentenced on Wednesday, a day after he pleaded guilty in court, according to the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA).
The report said the Central Court – the North's highest – had also sentenced Gomes to pay a fine of $700,000.
Oops... a "Fine of $700,000"?? Sounds for me more like a "legal"(^^) hostage-taking...
AFP (4.04) reports from the (former) frontline of the S.K. class struggle:
Peace breaks out on S.Korean factory floors
Eight months ago, Ssangyong Motor's car plant looked like a war zone as unionists occupying the premises battled riot police with catapults, firebombs and steel pipes.
Today the mood is altogether more co-operative, and both sides are seeing the benefit.
The 77-day occupation, in protest at mass redundancies designed to save the loss-making carmaker, ended only with a police raid featuring commandos rappelling from a helicopter in a hail of missiles.
More than 100 people were hurt, dozens were arrested, the redundancies went ahead and the firm's financial troubles deepened with the lost production.
"There was no winner: neither management nor labour could get what they wanted," said Ssangyong Motor union leader Kim Kyu-Han, a moderate elected in the wake of the strike.
Workers at the country's smallest automaker also cut ties with the militant Korean Confederation of Trade Unions (KCTU) -- part of a trend in South Korea's labour movement, which was once known for its militancy.
Some members of the KCTU and its less hardline rival the Federation of Korean Trade Unions (FKTU) announced in March they had quit the umbrella groups to launch a "third way" union alliance.
Labour Solidarity for New Hope has recruited 52 unions with 120,000 workers in less than a month. The FKTU and the KCTU have 800,000 and 650,000 members respectively, government data shows.
The unions of Hyundai Heavy Industries, the world's largest shipbuilder; subway operator Seoul Metro; and KT, the top communications firm, are leading the new alliance.
They see the established umbrella groups as too violent, too politically biased or too bureaucratic.
"The era of unions resolving problems by force has gone," Seoul Metro union leader Chung Yeon-Soo, a KCTU founder and now co-chairman of the new grouping, told AFP.
"The paradigm of the labour movement -- based on the 19th century industrial structure -- no longer fits the business environment in the 21st century."
Radicalism has its roots in the 1970s and 80s, when unions led the pro-democracy movement against military-backed dictatorship.
Attitudes began to change during the 1997-98 financial crisis, which triggered tens of thousands of redundancies in a country which once prized lifetime employment guaranteed by strict labour laws.
Kim Jeong-Han, of the Korea Labour Institute, a research body, attributed militancy partly to a poor social welfare network and a still-inflexible job market.
"In South Korea many workers still think that if they get laid off, they will be unable to find other jobs. That's why they become desperate and often radical."
But Kim said more and more unionists realise working conditions cannot improve just through a strike.
At the Ssangyong plant in Pyeongtaek, 70 kilometres (40 miles) south of Seoul, union chief Kim said the mood has changed.
"Many KCTU unionists called me a traitor and some still do, but I don't care," the 41-year-old said.
A framed photo of him and other union leaders staging a sit-in at the plant in 2006 hangs on his office wall. "I put it up on the wall a month ago so as not to repeat the same mistake," Kim said.
Underneath is a blanket, pillow and sleeping mat in case he has to work late and sleep in his office.
"I used to sleep out for a strike. I sleep here these days to spend more time cooperating with management to pull the company out of this crisis," he said.
Kim said executives often pay him unscheduled late-night visits to discuss business problems -- unimaginable in the past -- and even bring pizza.
Productivity has risen sharply. The average manufacturing time for each vehicle fell from 87.9 hours before the strike to 48.7 hours afterwards, said company spokesman Choi Jin-Woung.
"Workers are all desperate to help save the company from the crisis," said Oh Tae-Soo, 42, as he worked on the assembly line turning out Kyron sports utility vehicles.
Ssangyong Motor ended up laying off over one third of its total 5,000 staff. "The job cuts could have been smaller than that if we had avoided the loss-making strike last year," said Kim Choon-Sik, a deputy manager.
After the bitter dispute ended, labour and management at Ssangyong announced a policy of no industrial disputes. In March they rallied together from the factory to Seoul to seek financial aid.
"If our salaries could rise with a general strike, we would walk out. If we could improve working conditions by jabbing our arms in the air at a union rally, we would do so," said union leader Kim.
"But it's not true."
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5iKOGQ2rUO4t5N-suxVKRmE3yLEGg
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