Départ des dernières troupes américaines d’Irak: interview de Yanar Mohammed

Vidéo d’une interview (en anglais) de Yanar Mohammed, présidente de l’Organisation pour la liberté des femmes en Irak, sur Democracy now! qui faisait le 20 août dernier une émission sur le départ annoncé par Obama des dernières troupes américaines d’Irak (émission entière ici).

Transcription:

AMY GOODMAN: Our guest, Yanar Mohammed, president of the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq.

Yanar, usually you’re in Iraq, but right now you’re in Toronto. Your thoughts on this moment, how important it is? What is happening on the ground with women?

YANAR MOHAMMED: To tell you the truth, if I wouldn’t have seen it on CNN, I wouldn’t have been aware of it at all. And it’s only two weeks since I’ve left Baghdad, and I’m going back in a few days. You don’t see the US troops on the streets anymore. They are in their bases. They are running the politics totally on their own terms, for their own interests. But they don’t have—they don’t need to have their troops on the ground. They have trained the Iraqi army to do the same oppressive acts that they do to the people on the ground. The number of detainments, the oppression against people everywhere, the Iraqi army is doing a very good job at that. They are representing the same tactics, so the US troops don’t need to be there, as long as the US politics have been put in place.

So, what do we feel about that? Well, we have heard in the report earlier that it was called Operation Iraqi Liberation or Iraq Freedom. In our opinion, we are back to point zero now. At this point, organizing—freedom of organizing does not exist, because as—I don’t know how many people in the US have heard that workers are not allowed to organize. Unions have been banned to organize in some of the ministries in Iraq. Civil society organizations are also being harassed by some facilities put in place by the government. And the democracy that has been imposed on Iraq by this occupation has brought forward a prime minister who runs prisons. Nouri al-Maliki runs a prison, and everybody knows that. The Human Rights Watch has written a report about it. He runs a prison where hundreds of men have been tortured. And I’m not speaking five years ago, six years ago; this was found out in April 2010. Nouri al-Maliki runs a prison in Baghdad where hundreds of men have been tortured Abu Ghraib-style. And we all know where those lessons have come from.

So, the fact that the troops are leaving is good, by itself, if you look at it as a separate fact of what’s happening on the ground. But what’s happening on the ground, there are no freedoms. We are back to the same dictatorship that we had in Saddam’s time. No freedom to organize for workers. Women are afraid to speak out. We are being harassed by some facilities of the government. And when we go back home to hide, trying to get some security, we don’t find electricity. We get water a few hours a day. And to tell you the truth, I ran from the heat in Baghdad, because I couldn’t tolerate it anymore. And that’s why I’m here in Toronto now. And it’s very hard to live an ordinary life if you are in Iraq now.

All stories of democracy—excuse me, we do not feel them in Iraq. And we are working in organizations. We are sometimes speaking politics. We are not ordinary people. We are a good gauge for these things. We don’t feel any of this. The Prime Minister, when he is the head of a prison, this is not a democracy to have. And the deadlock that’s on the dysfunctional government, it was expected. Nouri al-Maliki, having been prepared for—to take over in the last four years, would not let go of his chair easily. And what he said over the interview, there was a part that was missed in the translation. He says that a weak man cannot take over. When he says a weak man cannot take over, he means he is the strong man, because he is supported by the US policies. That’s the message in there. That’s his message to his colleague, Allawi—

JUAN GONZALEZ: Yanar Mohammed?

YANAR MOHAMMED: —that he is the one who’s chosen.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Yanar Mohammed, I’d like to ask you—here in the United States, obviously, the media coverage is suggesting this is the end of the Iraq war that began with the invasion of 2003. But obviously you are aware, as millions of Iraqis are, that the conflict between the US and Iraq now is almost twenty years old from those days in ’90, ’91, with the—Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait. Your sense now, twenty years later, of the overall impact of the US hostilities—the bombing campaigns, the sanctions and then the invasion—on life in Iraq?

YANAR MOHAMMED: You need to have a cameraman visit Baghdad and see how destroyed the city still is. All the buildings look like they are thirty years old. And the streets are—the way I go from my house to my work, all the streets are bumpy, and none of them is fixed. The corruption, the level of corruption in Iraq is one of the highest in the world. The amounts of money that have been lost, meanwhile, in the last seven years and a half, I cannot even say the number. I cannot imagine it. So, using false words of democracy are good for the media in the US, but in reality, in our lives in Baghdad, level of unemployment is so high. And if CNN says it’s something around 60 percent level of employment, well, most of those are in the army, are in the police—young men who have to get some kind of job and later on get bombed while standing in a lineup. Level of unemployment among women is, I would say, 80 percent. How are we living? Scarce electricity, services, and everything is so expensive.

AMY GOODMAN: When you say "scarce electricity," Yanar, what do you mean by "scarce electricity"? How much electricity do you have a day in Baghdad?

YANAR MOHAMMED: In my home, which is central Baghdad, I get almost three hours of electricity a day, and I have to pay somewhere between $150 and $250 for the guy who sells electricity next door. It means that the government finds herself not responsible of providing me with electricity. In the time when the temperature is 55 Celsius, you cannot stand in the street, you cannot sit in a room. You’re sweating. And the levels of deaths that happen with this high temperature is no concern of the Minister of Electricity, who is busy oppressing the workers who work in his ministry. He has banned unionizing, and he has been put on—he has two ministries. So, to make a long story short, our lives are so difficult in Iraq. And the confrontation with the US policies, for us, are getting harsher every—day after day. And we find out that we have to buy the oil that comes out of our own ground in a very high price that is not our—that isn’t proportional with the level of pay that we have. Unemployment is so high.

AMY GOODMAN: Yanar Mohammed, just for the record—

YANAR MOHAMMED: And the other thing, as a women’s organization—

AMY GOODMAN: —for the US audience—just for the record, for the US audience, when you talked about 55 degrees Celsius, that’s, what, about 131 degrees Fahrenheit, is what Yanar Mohammed is talking about.

The presence of the US, the embassy—eighty (80) football fields—the private security, the private companies. You know, Erik Prince, who’s the head of Blackwater, just moved to the United Arab Emirates. They don’t have an extradition treaty with the United States, as Blackwater is embroiled in various charges about its involvement in murder and torture. Can you talk about what the presence of the private security firms mean—they’re going to be doubling—and what this massive, the largest US embassy in the world means still in Iraq?

YANAR MOHAMMED: In what used to be called in Iraq the presidential palace, now there is a zone that none of us regular people can reach to. It is surrounded by almost five high concrete walls. And among these concrete walls, you have to be searched almost five times before you go inside. And if you don’t have three IDs on you, you will not reach into that zone. So the American embassy is something that we have not seen. I’ve just read about it in the magazines. You may know more about it than I do, while it is in our country.

As for what the—what we call—you call them the private contractors. We call them faraq al-qadera [phon.], which means the dirty gangs or dirty mobs, who are giving—I think most of them are working as bodyguards for the parliamentarians and for the VIPs in Iraq. And you have to be real careful when you see one of those convoys in front of you, because they have no problem shooting anybody in their way or hitting your car or jeopardizing your life. They are the ones that you need to be careful from. And you cannot stop them and ask them, "What’ss your ID? Are you American, or are you Iraqi?" because they have employed a big number of Iraqi young men who cannot find any other jobs, and they have taught them their same ways, unfortunately.

This point brings me to another conclusion. After seven-and-a-half years, we have a big population of young men who can work only as military. They are very good at killing. And after seven-and-a-half years, we are very aware who are the Sunni and who are the Shia. We are very aware who are the Arabs, the Kurds and the Turkmens and the rest of the ethnicities. We are very aware of all the reasons that could fight—that could start a civil war at any point. We have been given very strong lessons in the so-called democracy. They have very good reasons to kill each other for no reason at all.

AMY GOODMAN: Yanar Mohammed, I want to thank you for being with us, president of the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq. And, of course, we’ll speak to you when you’re in Iraq, as well.

Interview d’Amjad Ali

Amjad Ali, un des porte-paroles du Congrès des libertés en Irak (IFC), est interviewé dans l’émission d’aujourd’hui sur Realnews (en anglais):

Transcription:

PAUL JAY, TRNN: Welcome to The Real News Network. I’m Paul Jay in Toronto. And in the days following the Iraqi elections, the fight over who will be prime minister continues. Now joining us to help us understand the struggle further his Amjad Ali. He’s the international representative for the Iraqi Freedom Congress. Thanks for joining us.

AMJAD ALI, IRAQ FREEDOM CONGRESS: Thank you.

JAY: And you also represent a coalition of Iraqi unions abroad as well.

ALI: That’s right.

JAY: So tell us about the Iraqi Freedom Congress, first of all. What is it and how did it come into being?

ALI: Iraq Freedom Congress is an organization, it’s an umbrella organization, formed in 2005 because of the issues in Iraq. The religious groups and religious parties and nationalist parties were fighting over power, who wanted to divide people according to their national or ethnic background or religious background. We decided in Iraq Freedom Congress to establish an organization, an umbrella organization that bring people together to be another part of the society that denounce all ethnic divisions and religious divisions.

JAY: It’s nonsectarian? It’s Shia, it’s Kurdish, it’s Sunni?

ALI: It’s nonsectarian. We have everyone involved into Iraq Freedom Congress—Muslims, Christians, Yazidis, [inaudible] These are the minority religions there. We do have Shiites, Sunnis, we have Kurds, we have Arabs, we have Turks, and all these [inaudible]

JAY: And what are some of the organizations that are members?

ALI: We do have the General Federation of Worker Councils. This is a major part of the backbone of it. We have the—.

JAY: Which involves which unions?ALI: Unions of rail workers, part of oil workers, part of electricity workers, construction workers, teacher unions, all these people, they are involved into Iraq Freedom Congress.JAY: And roughly the numbers of the Freedom Congress, total numbers of people involved.

ALI: We don’t have a fixed or an exact number, but it goes from 50,0000 to 60,000 members.

JAY: So in the recent elections, what did the Freedom Congress think of the elections, and what does the Freedom Congress think of the results?

ALI: We have issued our statement prior to the election, and we said this election is not going to bring anyone else but the same people who are in power today. They are militias, or they still have their own militia. The Kurds do have their own militias. The Dawa party have one, which is the government. And the Islamic Supreme Council, they do have their own militias, or they say [inaudible]

JAY: People have often said the government’s militia includes the U.S. army.

ALI: This is part of it. And we do have, like, a lot of special security forces there who are coming from Blackwater and whatnot. So these are part—each one has his own armed groups. And we said right in the beginning or right—prior to that election we said the same people who are now in power, they are going to be back in power. And that’s why we saw, like, the decline of the number of voters who cast a ballot from the first one. That was 68 percent, as they said, back then in 2005, but today they say almost 50 percent. But even to certain areas it has not reached to that number, actually, and some ballots there were even zero percent participants in that election.

JAY: Now, there also were some participants who didn’t know they had participated. What’s your story?

ALI: I’ve been living here in Canada since ’95. And prior to the election, two months prior to the election, I called my brother, who lives in Kirkuk, and he told me that he received my election card, which—this is the card, you bring it to the—when you cast a ballot, you bring it to the monitors, and, you know, you vote. And I said, well, how did they find my name? It’s been 15 years, or almost 15 years. And he said, well, I got your card, and anyone can vote for you. And I said—and instead of me. And I said, well, this is crazy. He said, well, there’s a lot—a lot of cards were distributed to those people who are not here. And it happened. It happened. They tick off your name.

JAY: So it raises the participant level, but also means you can have some fraud because people can use those cards any way they please.

ALI: Absolutely. I have my sister-in-law. She’s one of the monitors in Baghdad, and particularly in Adhamiyah district, which is a Sunni-dominated district. And she was telling me she had those people who represent a number of factions participate in that election, and she said they were ticking off the names even if they were not there. They are putting, like, fake names there. If you are not there, they tick off your name and they put you as voted to this faction or that faction.

JAY: Now, Maliki’s been accusing his opponents of doing this, but is there any reason to think they did it more than he did?

ALI: You know what? They’re all part of this game. Maliki himself, prior to election results, that was interesting when he said, well, there are some frauds, but it will not—or he doesn’t think, he didn’t think back then it would affect the election result. This is what he said exactly.

JAY: ‘Cause he thought he was going to win.ALI: Yeah, exactly. But after the election, he decided, no, this election is a fraud, and he has to do a recount, a hand recount.

JAY: Just for people, in case, who haven’t followed it, Maliki actually lost to his opposition by—what? Three or four seats, I think.

ALI: Actually, Allawi himself got 91 seats, and he himself got 89 seats, and they decided [inaudible] recount. The recount started Monday, last Monday. And right after they were started, they said, well, there is an irregularity there, and the reason why, because they had to match the names with the list.

JAY: Now, one of the most controversial things that happened before the election—and it’s been happening afterwards—is this attack on candidates that had something to do with the Ba’ath party in the past, Saddam’s party. I believe a couple or two, or a few, at least, who were actually elected are now—they’re trying to disqualify, and there were many candidates they wouldn’t let run. What’s the attitude of the Freedom Congress towards this?

ALI: You know what? We always say that those who committed crimes must be prosecuted. There is no way around that. But in order to form a government, in order to form a secular, non-ethnic government, you need all these factions to participate. But these factions must not discriminate against others, must not have committed any crime. And we don’t mind if Ba’athist, non-Ba’athists, if they want to come with a real intention to, or a sincere intention to form a society that free of discrimination, free of racism, free of killings and crimes and corruption and all these things. So Iraq Freedom Congress does not discriminate against those. There are former Ba’athists—most of the Iraqis were—must have had to be Ba’athist. I am one of the people who, when I was in university back in 1984 and I was in the College of Education, in order to finish my college I had to be a Ba’ath member. There is no way around it. You are not—if you don’t want to be a Ba’ath member, okay, you have to leave the college. And there is—if you leave college, there is another way you have to go: you have to be in the army. Back then, between ’80 and ’88 we had a war in Iraq, between Iraq and Iran. So if I had to leave the college back then, I had to go to army and I could have been killed. That was possible. One million casualties were in that war. So I am one example in millions of examples back in the ’80s.

JAY: Maliki knows that by going after these candidates it helps facilitate and create the conditions for more conflict with the Sunnis, and potentially, you know, the grounds for a kind of civil war. So what is Maliki’s objective here?

ALI: Well, here the thing is, when we talk about Maliki and if he cares about the election, if he doesn’t care about the people, if he cares about what—the entire government, those people who are in power today, they don’t really care about people. We’ve seen that. We’ve seen that since 2003. We’ve seen that in this kind of sectarian war in 2005. They did not care about people. Thousands and hundreds of thousands were killed, were displaced, were kidnapped. The government back then did not do anything about it, did not even move one step towards reconciliation. That wasn’t the—the attitude of the government, we know, in Iraq, that these are not pro-people, that each one has his own agenda, and that’s why they’re—.

JAY: Iraq has enormous oil reserves. The leaders of all these various ethnic factions are sections of the Iraqi elite who are fighting over who’s going to divide up this enormous wealth. There’s a lot to fight over, and it has been very violent in the last few years. What are the possibilities—or how serious is the threat of civil war in Iraq?

ALI: Civil war is always on the verge. Iraqi people are always on the verge—not the people, actually; those factions. As I mentioned earlier, the issue of armed groups, it’s still there. Each faction has its own armed group and wants to get to a point that they cannot resolve their problem, their disputes, they resort to weapons, they resort to killing each other. And it happened just prior to the election—a number of candidates were assassinated in Mosul. It happened in Baghdad prior to the election, when the government security forces went to Adhamiyah district, which is a Sunni-dominated area. They arrested a number of people there for no apparent reason. They were jailed, and they were released after the election. The election result right now, nobody got the majority. Nobody can form a government by himself. They are in the face of each other. Just yesterday there was a meeting between the Islamic Supreme Council group or faction with [Ayad] Allawi faction, Allawi who had 91 seats, who had the highest number of seats in the Parliament today. He said, I must—and this is what—I’m quoting—he said, I must form the government because I do have the highest seats in the Parliament. The other faction, which is the Islamic Supreme Council, who formed another faction with al-Maliki, they are trying to be a mediator as to who’s going to form what and what sort of government it’s going to be, who’s going to be the prime minister. There are a number of ministries or posts they are going to fight over, just like happened in 2005. The Ministry of Defense, the Ministry of Interior, they call it, the Ministry of Oil, the Ministry of Finance, these are the ministries that there will be major issues among these factions.

JAY: It’s often said in the American press that it’s the American troops—and the U.S. says this quite officially as well, that they think it’s the U.S. troops that are preventing this civil war from breaking out. So to what extent is that true? And if in fact the U.S. does leave at the end of 2011, is that actually going to create the conditions for the beginnings of this kind of conflict?

ALI: Well, actually, no, that is not true. The American troops were in Iraq since 2003, and we saw a version of sectarian conflict and of kind of civil war in Iraq. The American troops did not participate, did not prevent that. They were just watching the whole issue. They wanted to know—this is what we think they wanted to know—who’s going to win in the end. They did not have a serious intervention as to be a mediator to solve this conflict. They never did that. And what happened, who settled that, and this is what we strongly believe who settled that, is the people themselves did not want to be part of the civil war. They did not want to be part of the killing and kidnapping. It is right that we saw a lot of people were displaced from their neighbourhood to somewhere else.

JAY: Millions of people.

ALI: Yeah, millions of people. But when it comes to if they were helping each other, yes, they still help each other.

JAY: Well, how much is that still the fact, then? If these elites with their militias want to have a fight to see who’s going to control the state, can they get the people to participate?

ALI: They tried, hardly. I think they failed miserably. They could not get the people involved into that killing, and it happened. We had al-Sadr militia. We had al-Maliki’s militia. He had his own militia. Islamic Supreme Council. Tariq al-Hashimi, he’s the vice president of Iraq; he had his own militia. They were fighting each other. They tried to bring the people on board of that civil war. People did not want to participate.

JAY: The Kurdish leader Barzani, who did fairly well in these elections and became, I think, the clear-cut leader of the Kurdish section, anyway, he says the only way to avoid an all-out civil war is to have a federated Iraq. What does the Freedom Congress that you represent, what do you think of this idea of a federated Iraq?

ALI: We believe that the federated Iraq is not going to be like Canada, as based on, like, a geographical area. What happened is they want to divide Iraq based on ethnic background and—.

JAY: So it’s more like a Lebanese type of situation.

ALI: Exactly. And it never worked out. The Lebanese had this issue since 1943, when they formed a government. They formed areas, like, this is Shiites’, this is Sunnis’, this is Muslims’, this is Christians’, and whatnot. It never worked out.

JAY: So you institutionalize the sectarian differences.ALI: Exactly. Well, this—they tried to do this in Iraq. It will never be successful, because once you divide people based on their ethnic bakground or religious background, you will always have tensions. And we’ve seen that. We’ve seen Yugoslavia, we’ve seen Lebanon, and whatnot.

JAY: Well, is part of this—and you can see this in Lebanon, too, for people watching our series on Lebanon—a lot of this is that they don’t want the society divided based on workers or class or economic interests. They’d far rather have it divided based on these religious and ethnic divisions. And does that play itself out in Iraq?

ALI: No. As I said, Iraq—.

JAY: No, I mean that the elites prefer the ethnic division.

ALI: Absolutely the elites prefer. And the Islamic Supreme Council had been calling for a Shiite federal—like, a southern federal region for the Shiites. And the Kurds wants that in the north. The Arabs themselves, they don’t want that to be, because they think this is the beginning of dividing Iraq into three separate geographic areas. They think that the Kurds will form their own state, the Shiite will join Iran, and Iraq will be smaller than before.

JAY: And what do the Americans seem to want? I mean, Joe Biden was always a big proponent of this federated [inaudible]

ALI: That’s right. Joe Biden had—he was the architect of that federalism in Iraq and the Shiite, Sunni, Kurds. But at this point what do the Americans want? They just want to pull out with less loss in Iraq. They have lost a lot, and they did not accomplish what they went for. They did not find the WMD. All these reasons they went for or pretexts they went for, they could not find it. Now Iraq is just a mess, as worse than before. They think that there is no war in Iraq and it’s stable. It is not stable.

Manifestations ouvrières en Egypte

Manifestant malgré une loi d’urgence, les travailleurs d’Égypte demandent un relèvement du salaire minimum à 1200 livres (162 euros) et l’indexation des salaires sur le taux d’inflation.

L’armée américaine aide la répression des syndicats du textile en Haïti

Interview vidéo (en anglais) de Didier Dominique, syndicaliste et un des porte-paroles de Batay Ouvriye:

(Émission TheRealnews du 29 avril 2010)

Irak: Interview de Yanar Mohammed

Interview de Yanar Mohammed sur Democracy Now!, 19 mars 2010. [Seven Years of War: On Anniversary of US Invasion, Iraqi Feminist Yanar Mohammed Says Iraq Is No Different Under Obama than Bush]

Télécharger l’interview en MP3

Amy Goodman (Democracy Now!):

Pour marquer le septième anniversaire de la guerre en Irak, nous nous ouvrons à un point de vue rarement entendu dans les médias américains: celui d’une femme  iraquienne, Yanar Mohammed, présidente de l’Organisation pour la liberté des femmes en Irak. Je l’ai joint hier par téléphone à Bagdad et ai commencé par lui demander de décrire la situation en Irak, sept ans après l’invasion américaine de son pays.

Yanar Mohammed:

The situation now, after the end of seven years of invasion, is at a point where we have many questions at hand. The first one is we are waiting now every day for the final result of the elections. And there is some competition between the Prime Minister’s list and Iyad Allawi’s and other groups. But mainly they are mostly the same groups that had started off in the first place.

The other side of the issue, which not many people are talking about, is the economic agenda in Iraq, the privatization, the heavy privatization, that’s happened in Iraq in the last two years, where tens of thousands of workers have been laid off, with no work to go to, with no social insurance to support them, while in the same time there is an economic agenda of supporting foreign investment in a way where there is protection for foreign investment, but there is no labor law, no unemployment insurance for people. And in the same time, we are being surprised by the Ministry of Finance telling the Iraqis that we need to have a loan from the World Bank, which will put the Iraq policies under such pressure, and it is a surprise to everybody because the revenues of oil are so high that we do not really need a loan from the World Bank. So, economically, it’s a rollercoaster here in Iraq—privatization, no security for the working class, much investment for multinational countries, and, in the same time, a democracy which has brought forward groups which are transformations of the first political forces that started off with militias, but now they are politicians and they are sitting in the Green Zone.

So it’s a very strange scene that we are in Iraq now. High poverty among women, very high poverty, especially among the millions of population, the millions of widows of war and orphans of war, who do not have sufficient social insurance to support them. And there are no social programs to tell us what to do with these millions who do not have a place to go or a economy to support them. And in the same time, the oil law has been signed already, big investment for foreign companies. We do not have any promises of a good labor law.

And the Constitution has established a state of inequality for women. There is an article in the Constitution, Article number 41, which has cancelled, almost cancelled for good, the civil rights, the minimal civil rights which women had under Saddam, under what was called the personal status law. And it is these civil rights are being substituted with Islamic sharia and other religious laws that are of minorities in Iraq.

There is a quota for ethnicities, according to ethnic groups, some for Christians, some for other religions, for Assyrians. And this was a message to the Iraqis that representations are upon religions, upon sectarian lines and upon ethnicities, and not upon political affiliations. So it’s finally, after eight years, the Bush’s agenda of representing the Iraqis upon very backward representations has become a reality. And it’s a very bad form of democracy that we have to live in in Iraq. The ethnicities has grouped us all upon ethnic lines, and it only—such a situation needs only a little bit of sparkling to start a civil war anytime, could happen anytime.

Amy Goodman: Yanar Mohammed, can you compare the war under Bush and under the current president, Obama?

Yanar Mohammed: Inside Iraq, a citizen, a citizen inside Iraq, a woman in Iraq, or a worker or even an official, you would absolutely see no difference. We did not feel any difference inside here. People are so exhausted economically that there isn’t much hope that something very good could happen soon. There are hopes that maybe on the long run we could—our struggles could get us something, but for the time being, the extreme privatization of Iraq, the oil revenues that go to places we don’t know where they are, 80 percent unemployment among the women of Iraq, the extreme poverty that’s pushing women to being trafficked and prostituted, it’s all a situation that’s overwhelming. It would be hard for me to have a very clear vision right now.

We just want to have some relative security to us to organize our ranks for the coming times. And we are optimistic that if the American—if the US Army leaves us, we may be able to have the dynamics of the people and to make the wheels go the other way around to the way that will help us have—claim our resources again, our oil again, and our lives again.

Voir aussi:

• Les femmes irakiennes luttent toujours pour la liberté et l’égalité (12-2009)

Iran: une révolution féminine

Intervention d’Azar Majedi (en anglais) à la conférence internationale de Göteborg (Suède) le 8 mars dernier. Dans cette vidéo, elle parle de la situation en Iran, du rôle des femmes et du mouvement de libération des femmes dans le récent soulèvement contre le régime islamique en Iran.

Voir aussi:

• 2009-04 Il n’est pas suffisant d’être laïque videos
• 2009-06 Iran : Mythes et réalités [+ port ]
• 2009-08 Iran: Une révolution féminine, un défi fondamental à l’Islam [+ en pdf ]
• 2010-03 Vidéo de l’Organisation pour la Libération des femmes – Iran

Le bilan (J. Ferrat)

Jean Ferrat est mort aujourd’hui. Voici la chanson avec laquelle il répondit en 1980 au "bilan globalement positif" de l’URSS selon Georges Marchais, secrétaire général de l’époque du PCF:

Ah ils nous en ont fait avaler des couleuvres
De Prague à Budapest de Sofia à Moscou
Les staliniens zélés qui mettaient tout en œuvre
Pour vous faire signer les aveux les plus fous
Vous aviez combattu partout la bête immonde
Des brigades d’Espagne à celles des maquis
Votre jeunesse était l’histoire de ce monde
Vous aviez nom Kostov ou London ou Slansky

Au nom de l’idéal qui nous faisait combattre
Et qui nous pousse encore à nous battre aujourd’hui

Ah ils nous en ont fait applaudir des injures
Des complots déjoués des dénonciations
Des traîtres démasqués des procès sans bavures
Des bagnes mérités des justes pendaisons
Ah comme on y a cru aux déviationnistes
Aux savants décadents aux écrivains espions
Aux sionistes bourgeois aux renégats titistes
Aux calmniateurs de la révolution

Au nom de l’idéal qui nous faisait combattre
Et qui nous pousse encore à nous battre aujourd’hui

Ah ils nous en ont fait approuver des massacres
Que certains continuent d’appeler des erreurs
Une erreur c’est facile comme un et deux font quatre
Pour barrer d’un seul trait des années de terreur
Ce socialisme était une caricature
Si les temps on changé des ombres sont restées
J’en garde au fond du coeur la sombre meurtrissure
Dans ma bouche à jamais le soif de vérité

Au nom de l’idéal qui nous faisait combattre
Et qui nous pousse encore à nous battre aujourd’hui

Mais quand j’entends parler de "bilan" positif
Je ne peux m’empêcher de penser à quel prix
Et ces millions de morts qui forment le passif
C’est à eux qu’il faudrait demander leur avis
N’exigez pas de moi une âme de comptable
Pour chanter au présent ce siècle tragédie
Les acquis proposés comme dessous de table
Les cadavres passés en pertes et profits

Au nom de l’idéal qui nous faisait combattre
Et qui nous pousse encore à nous battre aujourd’hui

C’est un autre avenir qu’il faut qu’on réinvente
Sans idole ou modèle pas à pas humblement
Sans vérité tracée sans lendemains qui chantent
Un bonheur inventé définitivement
Un avenir naissant d’un peu moins de souffrance
Avec nos yeux ouverts et grands sur le réel
Un avenir conduit par notre vigilance
Envers tous les pouvoirs de la terre et du ciel

Au nom de l’idéal qui nous faisait combattre
Et qui nous pousse encore à nous battre aujourd’hui.

The Socialist Revolutionary Process

Intervention de Simon Wigley à la "Summer School" du Parti socialiste de Grande-Bretagne en juillet dernier (en anglais):

Vidéo de l’Organisation pour la Libération des femmes – Iran

A l’occasion de la journée internationale des femmes:

"On bosse ici ! On vit ici ! On reste ici !"

Film réalisé par le Collectif des cinéastes pour les "sans-papiers" pour appeler à la régularisation des travailleurs sans papiers en grève et signé par plus de 300 cinéastes.