During the last elections, the PSR made a particular effort in direction of those voting for the News Reports. first time in the urban centres with a high concentration of young people. We won between 3 and 5% of this vote. For the Portuguese section, organising the camp Is an opportunity for mobilising a large number of young people and establishing political and personal contact with new activists. • Why are you proposing the question of Europe as a central theme? 1996 is the year of revision of the Maastricht Treat, the time for a balance sheet on the practice and perspectives of European neoliberalism. We conceive of Europe as a space for solidarity: which puts the struggle against Maastricht, against the attacks on workers rights, against social exclusion, on which monetarist Europe is based, at the top of our agenda. By organising the 1996 camp around the central theme of Europe, we hope to open space for a discussion around themes more linked to the daily activity of the youth organisations affiliated to the Fourth International. Anti-racism and immigration policies, ecology, women's struggles will of course be central themes of the camp. Above all the goal is to make the camp into a place for education and preparation so that young activists are better prepared for the next period of struggle. In a Europe where we have to develop political alternatives to neo-liberal regression.
International Viewpoint n° 276 35
News Reports. S. News Reports... News Reports Big start to Rifondazione's election campaign Over 200,000 people demonstrated in Rome on Saturday 24 February, in response to a Communist Refoundation Party call to oppose the "authoritarian" reform of the country's political institutions. Centre-left and right-wing parties had earlier agreed to establish a French-style semipresidential system, and implement electoral reform designed to reduce the number of parties in parliament. But when this agreement fell apart in mid-February, the demonstration became, in effect, the opening meeting of "Ritondazione's" electoral campaign: "putting social questions back at the centre of the debate". What a start! At the end of the 20th century, the construction of a mass communist party is not just a dream for a nostalgic few! The extraordinary participation on February 24th was much higher than at similar Rifondazione meetings in 1992 and 1994. The following day, the party's 250-strong National Political Committee approved a non-competition pact with the centre-left Olive Tree coalition. This is expected to guarantee the party fifty deputies and senators. The link with Olive Tree is weaker than in 1994, and the two parties will stand for election under separate logos. The militant base of Rifondazione is hardly enthusiastic about the deal, but sees no alternative. The left wing within Rifondazione refuses that such an electoral alliance be made, as if nothing has happened since the last time. After all, the Democratic Left Party (PDS), which is at the centre of Olive Tree, agrees with the right on the kind of constitutional reform needed. And it is the centrists who are strongest inside Olive Tree. With the result that Lamberto Dini, former Director of the national bank, and Treasury Minister in the Berlusconi government, has now associated himself with the centre-left coalition, along with other technocrats linked to finance capital. "We need to reinforce Rifondazione's autonomy," Fourth International supporter Roberto Firenze told the party s
National Political Committee on February 25th. "And the party should work towards the construction of a third pole in italian politics," a combative alternative to both the right and the centre-left.
A majority of committee members eventually approved the proposal of party president Bertinotti. But, for the first time since June 1995, nine leaders of the left, including the former leaders of Proletarian Democracy and the Italian section of the Fourth International, abstained. Eight representatives of a minority current voted against the document.
Alessandro de Robertis, Rome.
Youth conference in Uruguay
Over fifty youth organisations are expected to participate in the First Conference of the Southern Cone for Human
Rights and Against Repression, in Colonia, Uruguay, from
3-7 April. Organisers expect 3-4,000 participants, including
Fourth International comrades from the Youth Front of
Uruguay's Socialist Workers' Party (PST) and the young women's group Teindira, as well as our comrades from
Socialist Democracy (DS) from the Brazilian state of Porto
Alegre.
Workshops will include Police and Institutional Repression;
Abortion; Drugs; Alternative Means of Communication
Education; Land and house occupations; Marginalised social sectors; Games and recreation; Work and 36 International Viewpoint April 1996 unemployment; Urban security; Marginal culture; and Social ecology. Contact: fax: (598 2) 95 02 47, e-mail: [email protected]. The PST can be contacted at fax: (598 2) 48 10 62 Ukrainian miners' strike Coal miners in Ukraine returned to work on February 16 after one of the hardest-fought strikes in the former Soviet republic in recent years. The resumption of work followed an agreement by the government to negotiate with the miners on their demand for the payment of wages owing since October, and after an initial pay-out offer had been substantially increased. As the government tries to meet insistent IMF demands for reductions in the state budget deficit, miners' wages have fallen repeatedly. By late January, the coal unions put the total unpaid wage bill at the equivalent of US$122 million. Some disability payments to injured miners had not been paid since July. The latest strike began on February 1. A total of 142 mines, accounting for more than 70% of industry output, shut down entirely. At almost all the remaining mines, workers refused to load coal for shipment. Trade union sources put the number of miners and other coal industry employees on strike as high as 800,000. The stoppage affected pits not just in the traditionally militant, mainly Russianspeaking Donbass region of eastern Ukraine, but also the mines of Lviv province in the Ukrainian-speaking west. As well as payment of wages owed, the miners demanded that the government pledge US$1.5 billion in subsidies in order to renovate the industry. On February 12, the feared energy crunch arrived, when the Russian government cut off electricity sales, after the frequency of the current in the Ukrainian network fell to critical levels. Extended blackouts followed in most areas of Ukraine. In the industrial centre of Dnipropetrovsk, electricity supplies were cut by 40%, forcing the closure of most plants. By this time, threats and promises from the government had eroded the strike to the point where the miners were no longer capable of forcing a decisive victory. On February 13 union sources reported that only 40 mines remained fully shut down, with workers in another 87 refusing to load coal. The government's options were limited by an extensive solidarity movement. On February 14 it was reported that the Coordinating Council of Trade Unions of the Machine Building and Defence Complex, and the Association of Trade Unions of Basic Industrial Sectors, had called for an all-Ukrainian protest action on February 21. This was to include a general one-hour stoppage, around demands that included meeting the miners' claims. Nevertheless, the miners were forced to drop their call for massive state support to the coal industry, and to limit their demands to the payment of wage arrears. On February 16, with 25 mines still fully on strike, the miners' leaders announced that they had decided to suspend the stoppage and take up a government offer of talks.
The miners' movement has emerged from another hard-fought conflict with its militant traditions and popular backing recharged. For the government and the IMF, eager for the implementation of a long list of anti-worker policies, the combativity in the mining centres presents an obstacle that will not be easily overcome. But the steady collapse of the Ukrainian coal industry places a question mark over the miners' longer-term prospects.
The output of Ukraine's coal mines fell by a further 11% in 1995, to a figure less than half that of 1990. Once a leading centre of the Soviet coal industry, Ukraine is now a coal importer. The refusal of the government to invest in the coal industry has made work in the mines mortally hazardous. On February 18, three miners in the
Donetsk region drowned when a cage was lowered into a shaft that had filled unexpectedly with water. The miners' deaths brought the number of fatalities in the Ukrainian mines this year to 43. The death toll continues to rise, even as output plunges. *
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