Fight Back! interviewed Cristiano Mayta, a trade unionist in Peru on January 3 to learn more about the situation in Perú after the overthrow of democratically-elected President Pedro Castillo by an oligarchy-dominated Congress. There is a national strike called for January 4 amid violent repression. Fight Back!: What is your organization?

Cristiano Mayta: I am the international secretary of the union SINATREL at a Coca-Cola bottling plant. I am also a member of an organization called Socialist Left of Peru (Izquierda Socialista Perú).

Fight Back!: From your perspective, what happened with President Castillo? Was it a pure overthrow or something more complicated?

Mayta: It was an overthrow of President Castillo by the Congress after he tried to dissolve the Congress who were going to vote for a third time for his removal. Castillo had consulted with the Ministers of Defense and Interior and was told the armed forces supported his constitutional right to dissolve a Congress that was clearly not acting in the best interests of the people. But the armed forces abandoned him, sold him out, and lied to him. No more than 20 minutes after President Castillo addressed the nation of his decision, the armed forces publicly stated they did not support the president’s decision. Then they moved to arrest him. So, despite what the media is saying about Castillo, it was clearly the Congress overthrowing the President.

Fight Back!: What has been the level of resistance since the overthrow? And who are the main groups involved?

Mayta: Since December 7, the people have risen up and there has been continued mobilizations all over the country but more highly concentrated in the south of the country. After violent repression from the military and police – some called it a massacre – that resulted in over two dozen dead and hundreds injured, something of a truce was called for the holidays. But not all agreed to this truce; in Puno, on the southern border with Bolivia, they remained firm with their protests, they continued blocking streets and the bridge for the international border.

Fight Back!: What are the demands of the groups involved in the national strike?

Mayta: On December 28, in our city of Arequipa, various social sectors and groups from ten or eleven regions nearby gathered to meet and agreed to retake the streets and continue mobilizations on January 4. This is something of our own congress of peoples gathered to agree to our demands and initiate an indefinite national strike. Here in the south of Perú, we are more active and militant because we don’t believe what is being said in the media, and in Lima.

Our demands are: first, renounce the usurper, Dina Boluarte from the presidency. Second, shut down the Congress and call for immediate elections as soon as possible. Third, a popular referendum to create a constitutional assembly, to elect a new popular assembly that will create a new constitution. Four, immediate release of President Castillo who was unjustly arrested and this is a grave abuse. We renounce the false accusations and usurpations of the constitution.

#Peru #Interviews #Coup

Frank Chapman, a longtime leader in the Black liberation movement and Executive Director of the National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, talks about the upsurge against police crimes and the need for community control of the police.

Fight Back!: What are your observations about the rebellions and upsurge in the fight against police crimes?

Frank Chapman: The National Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression initiated this campaign against police crimes back in 1973 – over 46 years ago. We have never seen an uprising like this, that confirms in the dirt and blood of battle that what we need is community control of the police.

The rebellion is not necessarily raising that demand, but that’s ok. They are raising issues around it, like defund the police, putting regulation on police behavior, such as outlawing choke holds, and more generally prohibiting brutality. Community control of the police is the vehicle for achieving all of this.

Once we have passed legislation that empowers our people to say who polices our communities and how our communities are policed then we can defund the police, we can demilitarize the police, and we can regulate the police. That’s what community control of the police does. And that’s what we can bring to this rebellion – it puts power into the hands of the people. A very important and very democratic demand, and this rebellion is bringing that demand forward like nothing that has happened in our history.

Fight Back!: What has the NAARPR been doing in the context of the upsurge?

Chapman: The main thing we’ve been doing is being in it, and I think that is so important. In fact, we called for a national day of protest before the rebellion really got underway. We called a national day of protest around the question of depopulating the prisons, the detention camps and the jails. Then when the rebellion got underway, we added demands for Justice for George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and others who had been murdered by the police or vigilante groups.

Shortly after we put out that call for a national day of protest these murders became the headlines throughout the country and the world. On May 30, our national day of protest, with less than a week of organizing, we were able to bring into the streets in Chicago over 20,000 people, and over 100,000 nationally in 23 cities [Washington DC; Los Angeles; Tallahassee, Jacksonville, Tampa, Miami and Pensacola, Florida; Chicago, Louisville, Baltimore, Minneapolis and Saint Paul, Saint Louis, New York, Cincinnati and Columbus, Ohio; Portland, Dallas, Austin and Houston, Salt Lake City, Seattle, and Milwaukee]. It was phenomenal. In Chicago, we had 4000 cars in a caravan.

We were paid back in great advances: on May 30, over 700 people joined our national organization, and with over $30,000 in contributions, and now we have over $60,000 for the National Alliance. And in this spontaneous protest movement, we have been bringing forward the demands for community control of the police.

Fight Back!: Some are calling for “defunding the police.” Why is the fight for community control of the police so important?

Chapman: As I said earlier, once we have community control of the police, we can defund them. It’s important who controls the process here. Defunding, controlled by the powers that be – the city councils and the mayors – is going to work the way that they work it, and the way that they have been working the whole question of police accountability. We don’t trust them. We want the people to be in charge of the process, and that’s what community control of the police does – it puts the people in charge so that the people are controlling the defunding of the police.

We’re not against defunding the police, but this is a slogan without a program right now. Once we bring it into conformity with community control of the police, then it becomes a slogan with a program. In Chicago we call it CPAC – an all elected, all Civilian Police Accountability Council. In other areas it may go by another name. What it all comes down to is giving the community the power to say who polices our communities and how our communities are policed.

#UnitedStates #OppressedNationalities #Opinion #PeoplesStruggles #Interviews #AfricanAmerican #PoliceBrutality #Antiracism #FrankChapman #NAARPR

Fight Back! interviewed Andy Brooks, General Secretary of the New Communist Party of Britain, on the impact of the pandemic in Britain. Fight Back!: How are the working people of Britain being impacted by the pandemic?

Brooks: Well the pandemic is something no one in living memory has ever experienced. Thousands of workers, including many pensioners, have died due to the coronavirus. The emergency measures that were eventually taken in late March have now reduced the mortality rate. But many of those deaths could have been avoided if the Johnson government had taken emergency action when COVID-19 first spread to Britain at the beginning of the year.

Most schools and all “non-essential” shops have been closed for over two months, along with all sporting and social events under a lockdown regime not seen since the Second World War.

The government’s emergency measures to stave off social unrest were taken in consultation with the unions as well as Labour and the other opposition parties in Parliament. These included the suspension of business rates for small firms, extending sick pay and increased NHS [National Health Service] funding and providing subsidies for furloughed workers and the self-employed. But they only went part of the way to tackling the escalating threat of a devastating epidemic that has stretched the health service to its limits and seriously undermined the economy at the same time.

Workers have responded cautiously to the easing of some of the restrictions in June. Boris Johnson’s decision to shelve the plan to get primary school pupils back into the classroom before the summer break was welcomed by parents and teachers fearful of a premature return that could trigger off a second wave of the coronavirus plague, particularly given the government’s failure to get an adequate track and test system running and still no sign of a COVID-19 vaccine in sight.

Fight Back!: Are the big factories and large workplaces still functioning? If so, how are workers resisting?

Brooks: Manufacturers were exempted from the UK coronavirus clampdown on “non-essential” work, travel and gatherings. Staff were encouraged to work from home in large parts of the financial sector but in other areas the imposition of social distancing has led to massive cuts in their services.

The social restrictions, which banned all meetings of more than two people, has paralyzed the unions at the grassroots level. Many national union elections have been deferred for a year and all union conferences have been postponed until September at the earliest. The union bureaucracies, of course, continue to function and at a national level; they continue to negotiate with employers while lobbying the Labour Party leadership and the government in the usual way. But the rank and file have not been completely side-lined. While health service workers’ demands for personal protective equipment have still to be adequately met, transport and postal workers have had more success by threatening or taking wildcat action to enforce health and safety demands.

The actions of some Royal Mail depot managers, [which were] indifferent to the government’s emergency health and safety regulations, led to worker walkouts in a number of sorting offices in April that forced management to deep clean the sites and enforce the two metre spacing guidelines.

In London at least 33 London bus drivers have died from COVID-19 and a further ten underground and railway staff have also fallen to the deadly infection. In the absence of any serious response from management, many drivers began taping off the front of their buses to avoid close contact with passengers. This forced Transport for London to suspend all bus fares on April 20 when passengers were banned from using the front door in a bid to shield drivers because the emergency measure meant the card reader next to the driver's cab was out of bounds.

Now we’re seeing workers, particularly young workers, taking to the street in support of the new Black Lives Matter campaign that erupted over the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. When they pulled down the statue of the Bristol slave dealer Edward Colston and dumped it in the river last week they sent a message to the ruling class that goes far beyond the issue of the trans-Atlantic slave trade which built the British Empire in the first place.

Fight Back!: How does your organization view the government's response to the pandemic?

Brooks: The Tory government’s response has been evasive and ambiguous. It’s led by Boris Johnson, a vain man clearly unfit to hold public office even by the low standards of the Tory Party he leads. Initially Boris Johnson’s plan for dealing with the coronavirus plague was to let the infection sweep through the population to keep people working to protect the capitalist economy, while accepting that tens of thousands of vulnerable elderly people would die prematurely as a consequence. But Johnson was forced to abandon the “herd immunity” ideas of his Rasputin, Dominic Cummings, which would have led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of vulnerable pensioners, through public pressure that included doctors and pensioners’ groups.

Government figures say that some 41,000 people have died, so far, from coronavirus. Others say the real death toll, when all the deaths in care homes are factored in, is much, much higher. What is certain is that Britain has the highest death rate in the whole of Europe. The easing of the lockdown has led to a surge in the numbers returning to work in central London. Trains and buses are, once again, packed in the rush hours, firing fears that a new round of infection will spread like wildfire across the capital.

Fight Back!: What is the New Communist Party doing in response to this crisis?

Brooks: Our regular fund-raising events have been cancelled. We cannot hold public meetings. Our bookshop outlets are closed and our street sales have been suspended. This has produced a cash-flow problem, but our supporters have responded to the call and our weekly paper continues to come out, as it always has since 1977, for regular subscribers who receive it in the post.

As soon as we can, we will return to campaigning on the street. In the meantime, we fight to put the communist answer to the capitalist crisis back on the working-class agenda in the columns of our paper and in the social media. We stand for Marxism-Leninism. We fight for peace and socialism, solidarity with Venezuela and national liberation movements all around the world and the people’s democracies of China, Cuba, Democratic Korea, Laos and Vietnam. We’ve got plenty to say and everything we’ve said in the past has been proved right.

Our paper represents the voice of struggle in all its forms. It gives a clear communist line on the issues of the day, a Marxist-Leninist analysis of the problems facing the working class and it provides a window to the world communist movement and the national liberation movement; the bigger the readership, the greater our influence. This is our paramount task.

#Britain #International #CapitalismAndEconomy #Opinion #Europe #Healthcare #Interviews #Socialism #COVID19 #NewCommunistPartyOfBritain #UnitedKingdom

Fight Back! interviewed Charlotte Kates, International Coordinator of the Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, on the fight to free Palestinian political prisoners in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. We ask that all of our readers to support this important effort.

Fight Back!: How has the pandemic impacted Palestinian political prisoners?

Charlotte Kates: One of the major concerns has been the fact that Palestinian prisoners are essentially cut off from the outside world. Israel claims that its ban on family visits and legal visits are attempts to prevent the spread of COVID-19, but they are also doing everything possible to avoid providing alternative options for the prisoners, including the over 180 Palestinian child prisoners, such as phone calls.

There are strict conditions over which prisoners can have a video or phone call with a lawyer and there is no protection for the privacy of such calls. These isolation protocols are also not being applied for Israeli guards, jailers and interrogators. Palestinians are still being arrested on a daily basis in violent night raids and even once imprisoned, they are continuing to face repressive units ransacking their rooms. After weeks of protest, including returning meals, Israeli guards are finally counting prisoners outside the cells and wearing masks on at least some occasions, but these are insufficient protection for the prisoners.

One prisoner, Noureddine Sarsour, was discovered to have COVID-19 after his release. The Israel Prison Service is not providing testing nor even appropriate quarantine protocols. People are being ‘quarantined’ in filthy isolation cells. In the meantime, sanitary products and other items have been removed from the canteen, or prison store, where Palestinian prisoners are forced to purchase basic items. Again after prisoners' organized protest, some of the main halls are being cleaned, but still insufficiently, and prisoners are continuing to organize and protest. All of this is amid a context of clear Israeli medical negligence that has taken the lives of at least 67 Palestinian prisoners, as well as the knowledge-lockdown for the families of the prisoners.

If COVID-19 spreads within the prison from Israeli guards and jailers who continue to interact with society, the prisoners will be most at risk of swift transmission. They are held eight to a room, and many are elderly or have other serious medical conditions. This is why it is once again incredibly important to demand freedom for all Palestinian prisoners, especially the elderly, children, sick prisoners, women prisoners and those held in administrative detention without charge or trial.

Fight Back!: The Israelis are holding a number of high-profile political prisoners, such Ahmad Sa’adat of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). What can you say about their condition?

Kates: In many ways, these high-profile political prisoners like Ahmad Sa'adat share the tribulations of their fellow 5000 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. They are also denied family visits, legal communication and access to basic protective measures and appropriate health care. It is important to note that the repressive mechanisms being justified here as an attempt to prevent the entry of COVID-19 into the prison system are also the sort of repressive measures that have been recommended and developed by the racist, colonial Israeli political structure as well.

The so-called ‘Erdan commission,’ headed by Minister of Public Security Gilad Erdan, recommended doing everything possible to make prisoners' lives worse in an attempt to roll back basic rights that were won only through struggle by the prisoners, such as hunger strikes. Family visits are continually used as a weapon against the prisoners, and the prison administration has dragged its feet relentlessly on installing the public phones it agreed to install in order to end the 2019 mass hunger strike.

Gilad Erdan is, of course, not just one right-wing politician but reflective of the entire Zionist mechanism of racist repression and control. It is worthwhile to note, however, that he simultaneously holds another position in Netanyahu's government. He is the Minister of Strategic Affairs, the so-called ‘anti-BDS ministry’ that is attempting to smear, criminalize and harass Palestinian human rights defenders and organizations as well as Palestine solidarity groups around the world, especially those that work on the prisoners. He and the Israeli state he represents are attempting to impose the ‘terror’ label on support for Palestine and Palestinian liberation in the United States and Europe. This is another attempt to isolate the prisoners, especially those like Ahmad Sa'adat, who continue to play a leading political role and reminds us of how important it is to keep up the advocacy for Palestinian prisoners around the world.

Fight Back!: Would you comment on the case of Georges Abdallah and the fight to free him?

Kates: Palestinian prisoners are not only found in Israeli occupation prisons. Much like imperialist powers like the U.S. and France are fully complicit in the oppression and dispossession of the Palestinian people as a whole, this also extends to the imprisonment of Palestinians and strugglers for Palestine. In the U.S., we see the case of the Holy Land Five, Palestinian charity workers sentenced up to 65 years for their work.

In France, there is the case of Georges Abdallah, a Lebanese Arab communist struggler for Palestine who has been held in French prisons for 35 years. He has been eligible for release since 1999 after being convicted of involvement in an armed action conducted by Lebanese resistance groups against U.S. and Israeli officials. His entire trial was marked by severe irregularities, and his lawyer was actually a spy for French intelligence. Even the French judiciary has agreed to release him to Lebanon on several occasions, and the U.S. has played a key role in keeping him behind bars. As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton's released emails showed her contacting the French government to pressure them to override the judiciary and keep Georges imprisoned.

There is a growing movement in France and in Lebanon to demand his immediate release, but it is also important to publicize his case in the United States, given its role in depriving him of his freedom. Further, Georges is also a leader behind bars and actively participates as part of the Palestinian prisoners' movement. He returns food along with Palestinian collective hunger strikes and has organized Basque and Arab fellow prisoners to do the same, and Palestinian prisoners like Ahmad Sa'adat have expressed their commitment that Georges' freedom is also critical to them.

Fight Back!: Can you say a few words on the importance of the struggle to free Palestinian prisoners and how our readers can participate in this fight?

Kates: The Palestinian prisoners are locked up because Israel wants to isolate them from their communities, their people, the international and Arab movements and the world. They are true leaders of the Palestinian people and represent ongoing Palestinian resistance; this is why they face such severe attacks by Zionist colonialism. They have been violently ripped away from their people because they offer a vision and a commitment to the liberation of Palestine from the river to the sea. And, of course, the struggle for the freedom of the prisoners is an internationalist one. The fight to free the Palestinian prisoners comes hand in hand with that against the racist U.S. prison system, with fights for justice for the political prisoners of Egypt, the Philippines, Colombia, Turkey, India and elsewhere.

There are amazing organizations in Palestine and internationally working to free the prisoners. For example, Addameer provides legal support to Palestinian prisoners and their families inside occupied Palestine. Many Palestinian community and Palestine solidarity groups are working together on initiatives that recognize the connection between struggles against racism in the U.S. and in Palestine, including resisting the systems of mass incarceration targeting peoples and communities.

As Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, we are an international network of activists and organizers working to build the movement to free the prisoners and to free Palestine from the river to the sea by building internationalist solidarity, organizing demonstrations, call-ins and other actions, amplifying the voices of the Palestinian prisoners' movement and working to expand boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaigns to isolate Israel at an international level. We invite people to get involved and work together with us; you can find out more at our website, samidoun.net.

#UnitedStates #AntiwarMovement #InJusticeSystem #OppressedNationalities #Palestine #Opinion #MiddleEast #PeoplesStruggles #Interviews #PoliticalPrisoners #PoliticalRepression #SamidounPalestinianPrisonerSolidarityNetwork #COVID19