LAST WEEK the Macedonian army and police launched their biggest
offensive so far against rebel Albanian forces. The horrific prospect of
all-out civil war has come one step closer.
It has been the biggest working class mobilization of the last decades.
It shook every single town in Greece and not only Athens. It caused a
complete paralysis of everything and everywhere. There have been many
general strikes in Greece during the last decade. Certainly over twenty
in all. But not one of them can be...
In the Czech Republic, political competition has made television into an
unscrupulous battleground for ambitious bureaucrats, reflecting a
government led by rival parties, the rightist ODS and the leftist CSSD,
who each want so badly to govern that they have forged an unlikely
"opposition agreement."
The European Union (EU) summit in Nice was supposed to be one of the
most important conferences in Europe’s history. But the marathon summit
ended in a messy deal of scaled down ambitions couched in the language
of success. The summit and the discussions beforehand show increasing
political divergences inside the...
Socialist Party T.D. Joe Higgins was suspended from the Dail today until
the next session in 2001 because he protested against a ruling of the
Ceann Comhairle that only the Leaders of Fine Gael and the Labour Party
could argue against the Taoiseach’s proposals for Dáil business.
The angry scenes in Austria this past week have shown that the entry of
Jorg Haider’s Freedom Party into the Austrian government will not go
unchallenged.
The war in Chechnya, ruthlessly conducted by Russia’s new capitalist
rulers, has been a human, economic and environmental catastrophe.
Thousands of civilians are being massacred. There are over 260,000
refugees in Ingushetia alone. Thousands of young Russian conscripts are
reported dead or ‘missing’....
The recent roots of the bloody break-up of the former Yugoslavia lies in
the deepening crisis it faced in the 1980s. Throughout the 1980s its
economic situation worsened. By 1987 inflation was running at over 100%
a year, by mid-1988 the annual rate reached 160%. Workers’ living
standards were falling with the...
The massive NATO attack on Serbia has hugely exacerbated the crisis in
the Balkans and threatens to widen the conflict further, with terrible
repercussions. Already there has been Serb shelling of Albania and
pro-Serb riots in Macedonia. Working class people, Kosovar Albanians,
Serbs and the masses of the Balkans, will...
The launch of the euro has been presented as a new era for Europe ; or
in the words of the finance minister of Portugal, the euro is here to
stay, it is now impossible to turn back.
Over the last few months, all over Europe, from France to Greece,
Belgium to Italy, Germany to Spain, there have been mass protests
against unemployment and cuts, and struggles for improved living
standards.
The clashes and deaths in Kosovo have put on the agenda the possibility
of war breaking out in the Balkans for the fourth time this decade.
Already over 100,000 have been killed in the three previous wars, with
nearly a million and a half people "ethnically cleansed" and forced into
exile. Before this...
