SAUDI A
GULF WAR
SAUDI ARABIA In the camp of democracy ACCORDING to Amnesty International, thousands of Yemeni immigrants in Saudi Arabia have, since August 1990, been subject to arbitrary arrest, persecutions and torture, for no other reason than their nationality, and their assumed hostility to the Saudi government's position on the Gulf War.
Thousands of them have been arrested in the street or in school, at home or at their place of work, notably in Jeddah, where there is a large Yemeni community. Some of them, according to the Amnesty report, have been subjected to torture by electricity, beatings on the head and body, being forced to stand for long periods of time, sleep deprivation, total immersion in water and the falaga - blows on the soles of the feet, a favourite with the Saudi regime. These tion centres, from which the victims are returned to their country, without any legal proceedings.
Besides, as is well known, Saudi Arabia is a country where the Sharia (Islamic law) is applied; amputations and floggings continue to take place. Arbitrariness and torture are commonplace, as well as the holding of political prisoners, secretly and without legal proceedings. * JORDAN Support for Iraq JORDAN is one of the Arab countries where the masses have most clearly expressed their solidarity with Iraq. The explanation for this is that the majority of the population originates from the territories occupied by Israel in 1948.
Here is an extract from a communique by revolutionary Marxists in Jordan, issued at the start of the assault on Iraq:
tortures take place in provisional deten-
Oil slicks - who is responsible?
"To overcome this aggression, it is necessary to construct the broadest possible front, supporting the people in arms. Those who are today calling for restraint, under the pretext that they do not have the means to enter the
WHILST warnings from opponents of the Gulf war about its potentially catastrophic environmental effects were scorned by western governments before January 15, Iraq's alleged pumping into the Gulf of enormous amounts of oil has now become yet another justification for the frenzied assault against the country.
The February 3 edition of Le Journal du Dimanche, a French weekly newspaper generally considered on the right of the political spectrum, carried some interesting information on the background to the oil slicks currently threatening the delicate environmental balance of the Gulf. According to its correspondent ClaudeMarie Vadrot, "none of the five existing slicks in the gulf have resulted from a voluntary act of piracy, and four out of five are the responsibility of the allied forces"
The first slick dates from the allied bombardment on January 19 of three oil tankers. The second originates from the Kuwaiti reserves of Arabian Oil, bombed on January 20 by French and British planes. A third slick can be attributed to the bombardment by the Iraqis of the reserves of Al Khafji. The fourth is due to the bombardment by the allies of the reserves of Al Ahmadi, and the fifth stems from the bombing by British planes of reserves close to the island of Boubyane.
Vadrot adds "the films shown since last Sunday and the photographs published do not show the famous Kuwaiti oil slick ... some of the images are those of the small oilslick of Al Khafji and probably date from
1983". The current slicks, estimated at around 500,000 tonnes of crude oil, are smaller than those created in 1983 as a result of the Iran-Iraq war, which reached about 600,000 tonnes.
battle, aid the imperialist and Zionist plans for the isolation of Iraq, and are responsible for not having prepared for the war....Our slogan is: "no to the isolation of the Iraqi army and people' '. Every territory can be a front of the combat and the theatre for the struggle against imperialism and Zionism." * SYRIA/FRANCE THE following communiqué was issued in Paris on February 13, 1991, by the National Democratic Assembly of Syria, which includes the Syrian Communist Party, dissident Syrian Ba'athists and others. Among other organizations expressing support for the appeal are the Communist Action Party of Syria, the Tunisian Communist Party and organizations of immigrants from the Arab region in France.
"We, political parties and Arab associations, signatories of this communiqué, forcefully condemn the aggression against Iraq, and all the more the genocide being perpetrated against the Iraqi people. The media disinformation machine in Europe have tried to make us believe that the massacre of over 500 civilians on Wednesday February 13 was due to an error in the surgery of the imperialist war machine.
"We denounce these warmongering pseudo-democrats who, in the name of human rights and international law, massacre a people, and we call on all those with a democratic consciousness to mobilize to put an end to this 5 so-called clean war".
JAPAN
Undermining the
"peace constitution"