The Greek people choose
Tony Simpson
Inside the Parliament, I met with Alexis Tsipras, the 38-year-old leader of SYNASPISMOS, part of the SYRIZA Coalition of the Left, which is attracting support from increasing numbers of Greek voters, as the general election on 6 May clearly showed. SYRIZA won almost 17% of the vote, up more than 12 percentage points since 2009 when it polled 4.6%. Now it has 52 MPs, four times more than previously. This vote put SYRIZA within just 2% of the Conservatives, New Democracy, the largest party. Under the Greek electoral system, the largest party automatically receives an additional 50 seats, so New Democracy, although its vote declined by 14 percentage points on Sunday, now has 108 Members of Parliament, an increase of 17 since 2009! This 50 seat ‘bonus’ masks the sharp decline of the Conservatives who, having lost the 2009 election with 33.5% of the vote, have now lost a further two-fifths of their voters. A large part of the Conservative loss (10.5% of the vote) went to the Independent Greeks, a new party on the democratic right, which campaigned on a staunchly anti-IMF platform. PASOK, the Socialist party, saw its vote decline by 30 percentage points (from 43.9% in 2009 to 13.2%) and its Parliamentary representation shrink from 160 to 41. The KKE Communist Party’s vote rose slightly to 8.5%, adding five more MPs to make a Parliamentary Group of 26. The new Democratic Left party, which split from SYRIZA in 2009 and absorbed some of PASOK’s recent losses, won 6% of the vote and 19 seats. Several smaller parties, including the Greens and the Social Contract (a splinter from PASOK, on similar lines to the Independent Greeks’ splinter from New Democracy) collectively received some 19% of the popular vote, but individually received insufficient support to cross the 3% threshold required to enter the Parliament. The nationalist LAOS (5.6% in 2009) also dropped to 2.9% and failed to win representation, while Golden Dawn, an anti-immigration fascistic party, polled almost 7%, gaining 21 seats as it entered Parliament for the first time. Turnout was about 65%, so that one in three electors didn’t cast a ballot. This drop in voter participation is partly attributed to economic difficulties which prevent the poorest voters from travelling from larger population centres to their own towns to vote. Photo: At the Greek Parliament: Maria Sotiropoulou of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, Tony Simpson, Alexis Tsipras, and Panos Trigazis of SYNASPISMOS.
The Spokesman 116 - A collection in honour of Ken
Coates
Tony Simpson from his Editorial
This new issue of
The Spokesman
can be bought from our sister website. Khatchatur Pilikian is a long-time friend
of the Russell Foundation whose insights are greatly appreciated.
The Israel-Palestine situation demands truth and reconciliation. We hope to aid that process Desmond Tutu and Michael Mansfield,
guardian.co.uk
The full article is available on our
Russell Tribunal
page.
“No Peace Without Justice” By Frank Barat and Michael Mansfield QC Countless United Nations Security Council
and General Assembly resolutions have been
passed and violated; The Goldstone Report
has been attacked and dismissed and the
recent UNHRC fact finding Mission on the
Freedom Flotilla incident, condemning Israel’s
actions in the strongest possible terms,
has been rejected as biased by Israel and
was hardly mentioned in the higher spheres
of the UN. The reason most often given to
explain this lack of political action being
that ‘it will harm the peace process.’
The clean lines of the Parthenon, high up on the Acropolis, stood out clearly in the early March sunshine. Down below, outside the Greek Parliament, a man pushed his supermarket shopping trolley down the hill towards Syntagma Square, where much of the public drama of Greece’s contemporary tragedy has played out prior to the recent general election. Balanced across the trolley was a discarded metal bath, on its way to be sold for a few euros. So it is that some residents of Athens eke out their existence in 2012.
Resist Much, Obey Little
We dedicate this issue of The Spokesman to Ken Coates, the journal’s editor for forty years, from 1970 to 2010. During those decades he oversaw the publication of more than one hundred issues, notching up the ton in 2008 with this comment about the military industrial complex and NATO:
‘If we continue to generate another hundred issues of this journal, while we have breath left, we shall resist these embodiments of militarism, and continue to devote our energies to laying the foundations of the peaceful commonwealth which will come into existence with the abolition of war.’
So it is that we begin this little collection with two previously unpublished
pieces from Ken’s own hand. They may have been works in progress, but they
have all the hallmarks and attributes of luminous Coates’ prose. (Ken was
very heartened when he heard that his friend, the playwright Trevor Griffiths,
had said ‘no one writes like Ken Coates’.)Turkey versus Democracy
His recent paper
Turkey versus Democracy given on the 3rd February
at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University
of London can be read in full on the Russell Foundation website.
The full article is available as a
PDF.
The Russell Tribunal on Palestine can promote peace, truth and reconciliation
Thursday 3 November 2011
Opportunities
to break seemingly intractable and deadlocked situations
are rare – especially on a scale which has rapidly developed
this year from the beleaguered cries of citizenry across
North Africa and the Middle East. There is a palpable consensus
that the provenance of this movement is lodged firmly in
the fundamental prerequisite for meaningful democracy: self-determination.
All conventions on human rights have this tenet as a core
rationale. Where it is repeatedly denied and suppressed
there will never be peace or justice, let alone stability.
Ayse Berktay imprisoned in Turkey
Ayse
was one of the main animators of the World Tribunal
on Iraq, which held sessions in Brussels, Tokyo
and New York before concluding in Istanbul in 2005.
She proposed the Tribunal in 2002, at a meeting
of the European Network for Peace and Human Rights,
which the Russell Foundation convened in the European
Parliament in Brussels. She works as a translator,
and her Turkish translation of
Black Beauty
has been widely acclaimed.
Russell Tribunal on Palestine
The London Session of the Russell Tribunal
on Palestine
We are made to believe that the Israel/Palestine
conflict is a never ending one and that,
when it comes to this issue, International
Law is irrelevant.
But civil society knows better. This conflict
is about International Law and nothing else.
Not harming the peace process means not
harming more than 17 years (from the Oslo
agreement in 1993 until now) of settlement
building, bombing, murder and assassination,
Israeli army aggression, land grab, US vetoes,
dispossessions and humiliation of the Palestinians
living in the West Bank, Gaza and Israel.
Civil society also knows that under a facade
of bland statements ‘condemning’ Israel’s
actions, the EU, the USA and the whole international
community are in fact actively complicit
in those crimes.
That’s where the Russell Tribunal on Palestine
(RToP) comes in.