Power of solidarity

Whether, as the Chinese foreign ministry insists, the cargo was part of a long-standing commercial agreement is largely immaterial.

There can be little doubt that, given the sharp differences and escalating tension with regard to Zimbabwe's elections, such a large shipment to one side of the conflict would have posed the temptation of a military solution. And preventing that has been the intention of South African President Thabo Mbeki in his attempts to help secure a peaceful resolution of Zimbabwe's differences.

Gordon Brown used his speech to the Scottish TUC earlier this week to laud the Durban dockworkers' initial boycott decision, declaring that solidarity lay at the heart of labour movement values.

As delegates pointed out, this government's anti-union legislation would have made similar action by British dockers illegal, opening their union to financial sequestration and their leaders to imprisonment.

Indeed, when Scottish train drivers refused to transport armaments for the illegal invasion of Iraq, government lawyers jumped all over their union ASLEF.
The British, US and other imperialist meddlers in Zimbabwe have only two priorities there - defending the interests of white farmers against land reform and helping to install a compliant puppet government in Harare. That is not what the people of Zimbabwe fought their liberation war for. It is not what they and their neighbours want or require.

African National Congress president Jacob Zuma's assertion that Britain and the US have disqualified themselves from playing a meaningful role because of the virulence and self-serving nature of their pronouncements is surely correct.

It must be regional politicians who continue their quiet diplomacy to promote discussions between Zimbabwe's interested parties to bring about either a national unity government or an administration acceptable to the vast majority of citizens.
Howells all at sea

IT is difficult to know whether to be pleased that Foreign Office Minister Kim Howells has finally caught on that trade unionists are being slaughtered willy-nilly in Colombia or to be angry that it has taken him so long.

But the man who put the lives of Colombian trade unionists at risk by falsely alleging that solidarity body Justice for Colombia supports the FARC liberation movement is still all at sea.

He calls on the Colombian government to ensure the safety of trade unionists, as though unaware that President Alvaro Uribe has been hand in glove with the death squads of the army and the landowners' rural militias.

In Colombia, the government is part of the problem, but our government is blind to this fact because of its slavish subservience to Washington's views.

Howells all at sea

IT is difficult to know whether to be pleased that Foreign Office Minister Kim Howells has finally caught on that trade unionists are being slaughtered willy-nilly in Colombia or to be angry that it has taken him so long.

But the man who put the lives of Colombian trade unionists at risk by falsely alleging that solidarity body Justice for Colombia supports the FARC liberation movement is still all at sea.

He calls on the Colombian government to ensure the safety of trade unionists, as though unaware that President Alvaro Uribe has been hand in glove with the death squads of the army and the landowners' rural militias.

In Colombia, the government is part of the problem, but our government is blind to this fact because of its slavish subservience to Washington's views.