KARACHI: Labour leaders condemn occupation of Iraq
By Our Reporter
KARACHI, Sept 3: South Asian labour leaders on Wednesday condemned the “savage attack” on and occupation of Iraq on lame excuses, violating all international laws, and bypassing the United Nations.
Before leaving for home, they adopted a resolution demanding immediate withdrawal of all foreign troops from Iraq and expressed solidarity with the people of Iraq in their struggle for self-defence.
The conference also appealed to the peace-loving countries to stand by the people of Iraq who were resisting imperialist occupation of their country.
The delegates also introduced certain amendments to the Karachi declaration calling upon South Asian governments to stop harassment, arbitrary arrest and indefinite detention of fish workers crossing the boundaries of maritime territories and to evolve an effective permanent regional mechanism to deal with these issues.
The conference also demanded immediate release of all the fish workers currently under detention in these countries.
They also demanded unfettered exchange of information — newspapers, magazines, books and other publications among the South Asian countries.
It also called for rejecting privatization and disinvestment of public sector enterprises and withdrawal of the state from social, economic, education, health, housing, civic services and welfare spheres and the thinking that the private sector is more responsive and more efficient than the public sector.
It also resolved that all public assets related to the infrastructure sold through the privatization process should be re-nationalized.
It also maintained that the “imperialist debts,” whose principal had been returned many times over, should be considered fully paid back.
During the conference strong reservations were expressed against WTO demands on Third World countries to open up their markets without accepting any responsibility for the damage caused to the working class and economies of these countries.
While the focus was on devising strategies for countering WTO conditionalities, delegates were opposed to its social clause and demanded laws for penalizing the multi-nationals for the damage caused by them in the developing countries.
It was suggested that working class of the regional countries should evolve a strategy for resorting to worldwide boycott of the products of the MNCs if they failed to ensure protection to the working class.
Delegates also emphasised the need for taking the social clause seriously.
While the IRO 2002 was deplored by the participants as anti- working class legislation in Pakistan, it was also proposed that there should a UN convention to declare such countries, who do not give their working class their due rights, rogue states and they should be removed from the list of civilized states.
The need for taking a futuristic view of the mega-business operations in South Asian region, it was suggested that regulation of this MNCs business was essential and they had to take into account cultural and consumption patterns.
Ashim Roy of India suggested that it was time that labour movements within South Asia worked in such a way that the MNCs were not able to shift from one country to another if the working class of a particular country was struggling against them.
He drew the comparison between payment capacity of the MNCs and the national companies. He was of the view that most of the ILO declarations were not good enough to deal with the MNC problem as they never visualized such entities.
He suggested that we could make the countries in which the MNCs were registered responsible for bearing the burden of the misdeeds of these companies who otherwise went scot-free. He stressed the need for linkage of the home state to the MNC.
The conference also expressed concern over the negative impact of globalization as a result of which sufferings of the people had reached its height. It has also increased the inequalities in the region of South Asia.
Kaiser Bengali noted that despite comprising one-and-a-half billion people, South Asian countries have not created any trading group. In fact, two of these countries — Pakistan and India — do not even trade with each other.
He regretted that in South Asia, which is home to the largest concentration of poverty in the world, economic well-being was not a priority; ideology, politics, nationalism, religion, sectarianism, caste, tribalism, ego, pride, vanity, honour etc, were priorities.
Mr Suneet Chopra said the region’s vast majority of the working population was in the unorganized informal sector. He further said the land belonging to the government was the land of the peasantry and it should be distributed among them.
Dr Saba Gul Khattak said that in domestic peace system with both local and urban factors was important in developing interstate peace initiatives. She said women participation in trade unions was very poor and all the major trade unions were male-dominated.
Jaya Shrivastava said that globalization had not resulted in the reduction of many of the problems our countries had been facing, such as outcome feudal practices, fundamentalism, jingoism, casteism and patriarchy. Instead capitalism had used these archaic and unjust relationships and values to further its interests.
