Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit LOVE AND RAGE Electronic Edition FEBRUARY/MARCH 1993 Part 2 THE REAL AGENDA IN SOMALIA by Mitchel Cohen "To give food aid to a country just because they are starving is a pretty weak reason." -- Henry Kissinger MONTHS BEFORE THE UNITED STATES sent troops to Somalia to supposedly protect food supply lines from the pilferage of evil warlords, Italy was completing arrangements to ship that nation's toxic wastes to Somalia, with nary a protest from the US. UN environmental chief Mostafa Tolba then said that the dumping could aggravate the destruction of Somalia's ecosystem and threaten further loss of life in the ravaged nation. Africa, writes Silvia Federici, a professor at Hofstra University and editor of the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa's newsletter, is being turned into the chemical/nuclear dust-bin of the world, the region where expired pharmaceutical products, toxic wastes, and materials banned in other countries, from medicines to pesticides, are dumped. Combined with other information gleaned from first-hand accounts but generally unreported in the corporate press, a much more insidious picture of US involvement in Somalia is emerging, one closely paralleling the odious, but accurate, observation by Henry Kissinger, even as US Government officials try to paint a more benign humanistic portrait of its motives for public consumption. How badly we long to even need to believe that the US Government would, maybe this time, actually feed people because they are starving, no strings attached! We want the government to work that way; but it doesn't, and it won't. Nor will it reveal its own role in creating all the misery to begin with. It's time we took Henry Kissinger's maxim at its face as an accurate representation of how US policy works, and stop fooling ourselves into believing the lies spun for us which enable the ruling class to slip in its murder and mayhem by riding the Trojan Horse of our suddenly eager morality. Although people have been and continue to be desperate for food in particular areas of Somalia, the country as a whole is not racked by generalized mass-starvation, chaos and random violence. In fact, explains Rutgers professor Said Samatar, who is from Somalia, these horrors are occurring only in a limited portion of Somalia, notably in the ... southwest between Mogadishu, the capital [where all the press are clustered], and the regions surrounding Baidoa and Kismayu. The rest of the country is relatively peaceful and well-governed by an alliance of traditional elders and local leaders that has re-emerged in the wake of the collapse of the central authority ... In the entire country there is only one [`warlord'] General Aidi is worthy of the name. And even he does not exercise supreme authority over a horde of followers whom he can deliver either to the field of battle or to the negotiating table. We cannot allow the US Government the luxury of framing the issues for us (mass starvation, warlords, chaos), and thereby orchestrating our emotions and controlling the terms of the debate. Here's an example of how such manipulation works: The US claims that up to eighty percent of all relief is being stolen which is the current justification for sending the troops. But Rakiya Omaar, who had been the director of Africa Watch until the middle of December (before she was summarily fired by Human Rights Watch Aryeh Neier for not mouthing his approved liberal version of the government's line), cites relief organizations such as Save the Children and the International Committee of the Red Cross as enduring a loss rate of only five to ten percent, a fairly constant figure in all famine relief. Right now, reports Omaar, Mogadishu which was in the most desperate situation of all the Somalian cities and is the focus of US media attention is totally flooded with food and anybody can buy rice; it's very cheap. The mortality rate, she says, had dropped and the overall situation had been improving before the troops were sent. Many relief workers in Somalia go even further, complaining that their efforts are being hindered by the US military intervention: We can't get to people we used to, and they are dying, said James Fennell of CARE. Before the troops hit the beaches, relief agencies had hired guards to ride shotgun on trucks, losing some supplies to looters but also reaching many thousands of people who were too weak to seek help in feeding centers. [But] the Marines first move in Baidoa was to disarm the airport security force, tough exsoldiers CARE had hired as escorts. ... Tibebu Haile Selassie, deputy director of UNICEF in Mogadishu ... said, `the situation is worse than it was before.' Much of Somalia's economic life is organized around the growth and export of cattle (traditionally camel meat, although that is changing), which utilizes the large pastoral spreads provided by nature in that region. Throughout Africa, the vastly different natural landscapes, social and economic arrangements, and deposits of natural resources make it inappropriate to apply certain generalizations about the continent to individual African societies. Nevertheless, the policies of the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and international capital such as the forced development of export crops, even though that destroys local self-sufficiency and dispossess small-plot farming, concentrating the ownership of land in a few giant corporations are a universalizing force on the continent, and resistance to them is widespread despite or, possibly, because of the variety of societies. This common imposition enables us to apply to Somalia, today, observations Silvia Federici had written several years ago about Africa in general: Africans' resistance to capitalist discipline must be emphasized given the tendency in the US to see Africans either as helpless victims of government corruption and natural disasters or as protagonists of backward struggles revolving around tribal allegiances (a myth perpetrated by the Western media). In reality, from the fields to the factories, the markets and the schools, struggles are being carried on that not only are often unmatched for their combativeness by what takes place in the `First World,' but are most `modern' in content. Their objective is not the preservation of a mythical past but the redefinition of what development means for the proletariat: access to the wealth produced internationally, but not at the price capital puts on it. European colonialism's failure to break the back of the village structures in Africa, including much of Somalia, had cut deeply into world capitalist profits from that continent. Beginning in 1977, when Somali dictator Siad Barre was dumped by the Soviet Union and became a client of the US, the International Monetary Fund has imposed a series of stringent regulations on Somalia. And for 15 years, villagers throughout Somalia have resisted the hardline US/IMF policies. Only in those areas around the capital mentioned above, where IMF measures were able to break down the traditional structures and be fully imposed, do we find the kinds of hunger, disease and disruption of peaceful village life that so powerfully stir our compassion. And even there, the starvation was caused by the imposition of a brutal central authority in Somalia, not by its collapse (contrary to the current US government/media/liberals' line); all the misery we're called on to fight today in those areas are a direct result of US/IMF measures. Of course Somalis are resisting the foreign attempts to dump toxic wastes there and to forcibly proletarianize their communities. That resistance, over the past decade and one-half, prompted the US government to arm troops loyal to now-deposed Somali dictator Said Barre. The situation is reminiscent of the US arming of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and Noriega in Panama. These were US clients, owned and paid for by American tax dollars. And, like Hussein, Barre often turned those US and Soviet-made weapons against dissident Somali movements. As Alexander Cockburn reported, Somalis do not forget Siad Barre's massacres in the late 1980s of some 150,000 northerners in the former British Somaliland, or his near total destruction of northern towns like Hargeisa with the help of South African bomber pilots and US logistical backup and diplomatic protection. More than half-a-million Somalis were rendered homeless and forced across the desert into Ethiopia. Cockburn goes on to detail some of the resistance to the imposition of capital a resistance rooted in the village social structures that so frustrates the US and IMF elites: Although devastated by Siad Barre in the 1980s and in urgent need of seed and agricultural assistance, Somaliland is not in the desperate straits of sections of the south, and its chief political organization, the Somali National Movement, makes a decent case for exercising its right to self-determination. In May of 1991 the S.N.M. convened a congress of some 5,000 people and chose an interim government with an interim legislative assembly of 140 people. Although the Isaak clan is dominant, the S.N.M. has reached out to minority groups. Los Angeles-based Sael Samater - his brother Ibrahim is the president of the interim legislative assembly - regards US/UN intervention as `John Wayne' talk. He outlined for me the suspect motivations of various players, including [UN Secretary General Boutros-Boutros] Ghali, Islamic fundamentalists backed by Saudi Arabia and the Emirates, and even Italy, whose interest in the affairs of its former colony is as intense as Germany's toward its former dependencies of the Nazi years, Croatia and Slovenia. Among its hidden rationales, then, military intervention provides a way of annulling the rebirth of Somaliland and, in the same breath, the force needed to roll back the enormous gains won by the national liberation front of Eritrea, after decades of war there against Italy and Ethiopia, and the military hardware of both the Soviet Union and the US. As images of US troops in foreign lands again fill our t.v. screens, we in the US are being primed for the latest round of imperialist colonization under the pretext of feeding starving people at the point of a bayonet. From the start we were inundated with breathless propaganda about evil Somalian warlords, soon to be exposed, no doubt, as worse than Hitler, just in case Somali resistance forces put up a fight against the uninvited machine-gun toting guests. Thus, already in place are the quick rationalizations required to rally American liberals around US policy despite their occasional squeamishness over the bloodier aspects of imperialism. Unfortunately, many progressive people living in the US and in Europe still cling to notions of progress that entail destroying other people's antiquated ways of living in order to make things better for them and to save them from themselves. This 20th century version of the white man's burden is capitalism's ideologically liberal complement; it seeks a cleaner imperialism one hopefully without death-squads and it launches its crusades against militant resistance by demonizing those who just can't see the light. It calls for, as non-violently as possible, removing the weapons from the hands of those natives who, not knowing what's best for them, resist attempts to modernize their communities and pull them into liberalism's version of the 21st century, by any means necessary. And so we now find American newspaper coverage of Somalia laced with terms like warlords, gangs, violent bands, chaos, random violence - a way of framing the situation that is accepted and regurgitated by progressives as much as by the government. The white supremacy concealed in North Americans' demonization of bad Negroes versus those seemingly more docile and compliant with the interests and intentions of international capital is used to justify armed intervention, all the while remaining well within the boundaries of the dominant liberal ideology. Clearly, whatever hunger exists in Somalia is a direct result of US/IMF/World Bank policies over the years, policies that have spawned a strong resistance movement in Somalia, like everywhere else - although we hear nothing of it in the press. None of capital's goals can be accomplished without first crushing (or co-opting) those movements. Consequently, there's more to the US invasion of Somalia than meets the stomach. Progressive people in the US cannot allow ourselves to be seduced into endorsing the schemes of capital, which has learned to conjure up morally-appealing pretexts precisely for that purpose, when: 1) Hunger wouldn't exist there in the first place if it was not for capital's economic intervention over the last decade; 2) Mass-starvation in Somalia is limited to those areas where capital was able to fully implement its programs, and not throughout the society, contrary to what we're being led to believe; 3) The food-supply lines are not under particularly heavy attack, certainly no greater than anywhere else in the world; 4) US troops were not invited by Somalia, or any Somalian regional councils or authorities; in fact, Somalis were themselves specifically not invited to participate in any talks concerning armed intervention; 5) Troops are used to disarm all resistance to the imposition of a US-mandated central authority; and 6) The US, along with the former USSR, is responsible for arming Somalia to begin with, arms the US troops may soon be facing in battle. What are capital's real goals in Somalia? In a phrase, the recolonization of Africa, which includes: 1) establishment and strengthening of military bases; 2) dumping of toxic wastes; 3) rolling back the successful liberation struggle in Eritrea and the growing movement in northern Somalia; 4) guarding the oil-shipping lanes; and 5) deepening the proletarianization of the African working class in order to generate cheap, dependable labor and the extraction of precious natural resources. Thus far, the meaningful ways in which daily life is organized in Somalia's supposedly chaotic, decentralized traditional villages have circumvented most prior attempts by international capital and colonial powers - unloved, uninvited and making no pretext of their need for a non-chaotic central authority - to impose capital's wholly unnatural rhythms on African life. The US, under the pretext of feeding starving people (a situation it caused, along with the IMF and World Bank, to begin with), is attempting to use its might to Latin Americanize Africa by busting apart the communal village networks once and for all as England had done to collective usages of land at home by military enforcement of the Enclosure Acts of the 1600s making the continent fit for capitalist accumulation. The New World [Bank] Order's hot toxic breath is blowing up the hunger in the sands. -30- EUROPEAN NEWSBRIEFS Italy: Jewish Youth Invade Nazi Headquarters [Not published in the printed Feb/Mar issue, but interesting] ROME, ITALY -- On November 6, 1992, group of Jewish youth ransaked the headquarters of a neo-nazi group - smashing windows, confiscasting nazi paraphernalia, and physically fighting fascists. That was the third time in three weeks that Jewish Italian youth, mostly in their teens and early twenties, went on the offensive against fascists. The leader of the Western Political Movement, the neo-nazi group whose office was smashed, vowed revenge, but the youth promised to fight back! from Profane Existance #18, which cites the NY Times -30- Rallies Mark Anniversary of Franco's Death THE ANNIVERSARY OF THE death of the Spanish state's former fascist dictator, Generalissimo Francisco Franco, was marked by rallies and memorials around Spain on November 20th. While rallies honoring Franco have been fairly routine since his death in 1975, what's disturbing is the number of young people participating in these events recently, and the rise in the level of racist violence in the last few years. While many of the older generation lament the days of law and order under the old regime, younger fascists, perhaps taking the lead from their German counterparts, are going on the offensive. Attacks on immigrants, leftists and anarchists are rising throughout the peninsula. In Zaragosa, on November 20th, 800 people attended a church service in memory of Franco and ex-dictator Primo de Rivera. The eulogy was crashed by 300 skinheads who shouted slogans throughout the service against immigrants, the monarchy, and the police, as well as Viva's to Franco and other fascist contemporary heroes. The skinheads followed up the church service with a march to the Casa Okupada de la Paz, a squat which houses anarchist groups like Ateneo Libertario (publishers of El Acratador) and Insumismos (draft resisters). The police surrounded the house while fascists and squatters threw bottles, bricks and hurled insults at each other and the police. There were only about 20 people in the house at the time. The fascists were dispersed by police and later returned to the house, but 200 anarchists, Insumisos, and leftists had gathered in the meantime with a stockpile of bottles, chains and sticks. They squared off in the street in the middle of traffic until police reinforcements arrived. For more info write (perferrably in Spanish): Ateneo Libertario Casa Ocupada De La Paz (Sagasta 52) Apdo. 3.141 50.080 Zaragosa, Spanish State -30- Neo-Nazis Set Up Shop in Poland DZIEWKOWICE, OPOLE VOIVODSHIP, POLAND - A group of neo-nazis from Germany, the National Offensive, has set up headquarters in this southwestern Polish village. Nazi literature is sold in local stores. Throughout the region, memorials with German-language plaques have been erected to nazi soldiers killed in combat. The National Offensive claims their aim is to restore a "Greater Germany," stretching all the way to Lithuania. So far no specific acts of violence have been linked to the group, but Poles in the area are concerned. -- from the Polish-American Journal, January 1993 -30- Anti-Nationalist Serb Shot [NOVI SAD, CROATIA - Petar Babic, a Serb and a member of the Extra- Nationalist Commission, was postering the following text when he was beaten by a Serbian mob in October 1991. In November 1991 he was found dead, killed by a bullet.] The reemergence of nationalism throughout the world is a phenomenon of importance too great to be ignored. Nationalism will define us, divide us, and dominate us; it has no place in the struggle towards self-realization, free global interaction, and liberty. Categorize humans you cannot. Nations are false divisions. We are one because we are all human beings. We are separate because we all recognize the viability of free personality. Where and when we were born is nothing but a cosmic accident. Independence movements are the veneer of national hatreds and political trickery. Don't buy the lie. Your oppressor isn't just there. It's all around you. It might even be yourself. Power to the people, not to their nations. The borders we build are the borders we will have to live behind. --from the Extra-Nationalist Commission -30- Women in Black Against War BELGRADE, SERBIA -- Every Wednesday since October 1992, Women in Black Against War, an anti-fascist group, has demonstrated on the streets in protest of all nationalist politics. Their prime target is the fascist Serbian regime. They call on all women to engage in all types of civil disobedience. The following is text excerpted from a Women in Black demo flyer: "Fascist leaders of Serbian politics continue to destroy all positive inter- ethnical communications. They have segregated streets, classrooms, families, and cities. They are drawing lines on mountains and corridors through the countryside... They have stopped all electricity, water, and telephone systems in Bosnia-Hercegovina. People die by the minute. No matter which names they have, they die of the cold, illness, and hunger... [The Serbian leaders] have been ceaselessly killing, torturing and raping for a year and a half already. They have banished more than three million lives... We are left without words to express our horror and anger. They haven't stopped yet... The misery in which we live should not frighten us, but incite us to resistance. It is strange that we have not yet started to scream." Women in Black Against War c/o Stasa Zaja Dragoslavia 9/10 11000 Belgrade Serbia Center for Anti-War Actions Prote Moteje 6 11000 Belgrade Serbia -30- Fascism on the Rise in Bulgaria Among the youth here there have recently appeared disturbing nationalist, neo-fascist, racist and anti-semitic tendencies. In Sofia, as in the west, this has occured mainly with skinheads. They support neo-fascist ideas and endorse racism and violence. Groups of these youths attack other, innocent youths on the main streets of Sofia. They provoked the terror at Club 113 of the University of Sofia. There is nothing left for us to tell you except: "HIT THE NAZIS IN THE MUG!" Federation of Anarchist Youth Antonio Grozdev 18 Nikola Slavkov St., ET.3, Ap.6 Sofia 1463 Translated from French. Originally appeared in Action Newsletter, # 1 -30- SPANISH ANARCHIST NEEDS SUPPORT GERARDO, A 27-YEAR-OLD ANARCHIST and CNT (Anarcho-Syndicalist union) member from Barcelona) has just been jailed for six years two months and one day for burning the Spanish flag way back in 1983. He had lost his final appeal. On August 7, the CNT held a noisy demo through Barcelona to support him, blocking traffic on main roads and throwing fireworks at banks and the Ritz. No one from the demo was arrested. Just before the demo, Gerardo was moved to a far off penetentiary from the Modelo prison to prevent a protest at this notorious jail. The CNT is calling for a pardon especially, since on July 3 a court let off twelve Catalan Nationalists for burning flags in 1988. The difference is that Gerardo burnt the flag because he is against all states, not to fight for a new Catalan one. We call on all supporters to act! Call the nearest Spanish Consulate or Embassy and raise Gerardo's case. Send Letters and cards of support to: Gerardo C. Ferre C.P. Brians, Aptdo de Correos 500. 08760 Martorell, Barcelona, Catalunya, Spain -- info from International Solidarity Network & London Black Cross -30- ANTI-FASCIST-ACTION FIGHTS THE RIGHT IN BRITAIN by Rachel Rinaldo [Not published in the printed Feb/Mar Issue, but worth reading] SEVERAL YEARS AFTER THE militant poll tax riots and demonstrations, it looks like political resistance in Britain is at a low point. Few serious squats remain, most of the anarcho-punks have been disillusioned or caught up in the New Age Traveller's movement, and even Class War could not raise a contingent for a demonstration at the European Summit in Edinburgh. As in the rest of Europe though, fascism is alive and well here in Britain, recruiting on the housing projects of cities like London, Glasgow, Manchester, and Edinburgh. Anti-Fascist-Action (AFA) has chapters throughout England and Scotland and is probably one of the most active groups around these days. They are dedicated to fighting fascists, such as the British National Party (BNP) and nazis, through propaganda and, if necessary, physical confrontation. AFA started the autumn with a successful action in London, where they prevented hundreds of nazi skinheads from getting to a Blood and Honour gig where the band Skrewdriver was playing. I've been involved with AFA Edinburgh for several months, but they formed about a year ago. In that time AFA has: plastered the city with stickers and graffiti (and wiped out BNP graffiti); held gigs at the Unemployed Workers' Center; had stalls at local clubs; picketed a bookstore for selling a book by a nazi revisionist historian; and written letters to the local BNP members. AFA Edinburgh and Glasgow also attended an annual anti-racist march in Glasgow, which twenty-five sieg- heiling BNPers tried to disrupt. Most recently, we've put up posters all over town, with a picture of local BNP members and their addresses and phone numbers, urging people to write nasty letters and harass them by phone. AFA members have been known to make annoying phone calls to local fascists and nazi skins at odd hours of the morning. AFA is an alternative to mainstream/liberal groups, most of which won't even recognize the existence of fascism in Britain. Groups like the Anti- Nazi-League are mainly fronts for various left parties and do little besides hold placards at big demonstrations. AFA especially concentrates on rooting out fascism in working class communities, the favorite recruiting place of the BNP. The mostly wealthy fascist leadership targets disaffected youth in such areas, turning their anger away from the establishment and towards neighboring minority communities. Not surprisingly, AFA gets a lot of criticism from the so-called left. An editorial in the University of Edinburgh left student newspaper called groups like AFA the violent fringe and leftist thugs. Other groups within Edinburgh have sharply criticized the anti-BNP posters and our confrontational tactics. But it is a pipe dream to think that merely by distributing leaflets and holding demonstrations, the fascists will go away. This kind of thinking on the majority of the left has fed the recent rise in fascism in Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and even Sweden, where Jewish cemeteries have been desecrated. Mass demonstrations are important, but the reality of fascists on the streets must be dealt with before they can terrorize the local community and recruit vulnerable youth. -30- MEXICO CITY ANTI-COLUMBUS DAY ACTIONS The majority of anarchist collectives from the Mexican capital gathered in two meetings (September 20 and October 6) and decided to organize an anarchist contingent in protest of Columbus Day. We decided to participate in an all night vigil in front of the National Palace in the Z¢cala (public square) on the night of October 11. And we decided to hold a protest march from the Palace to the Columbus monument, on the Paseo de la Reforma, on the morning of the 12th. These actions were part of the coordinated activities of the Love and Rage Network. And so on the 11th at 9 pm we began to gather in front of the National Palace. The collectives participating were: Colectivo Brigada Subversiva, Colectivo Cambio Radical, Grupo de Apoyo Amor y Rabia, Colectivo S¡ntoma, Colectivo Ideolog¡a, Expresi¢n y Acci¢n, Colectivo Acci¢n Libertaria, Colectivo Destrucci¢n de Ideolog¡as, and KUT. At midnight we pitched a tent that gave us shelter throughout the night. The palace was surrounded by two reactionary groups, the Escuela Filos¢fica de la Nueva Mexicanidad (The Philosophy School of the New Mexican) and a group of concheros (dancers) contracted by the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party, the party/dictatorship in power). Despite a heavy rain we remained there until 9 am, when we began the march to the monument of the Genovese murderer. The flyer we produced calling for a Black Block was more effective than we had anticipated, with many showing up at the last minute. More than 70 people participated, including some foreigners a woman from Spain, another woman from Germany, and a man from Food Not Bombs! in San Francisco. The crowd seemed ready for anything, and we were surprised to see our desires materialize. On leaving the Z¢calo we took the streets. The police (and the grenadiers) didn't know what to do. They talked among themselves and then asked us unexpectedly: Where are you going? What party are you from? What march are you part of? Our responses were chants: Salinas and Columbus to the firing squad! We're gonna resist, not celebrate! Death to the State, Long Live Anarchy! We're Indians and Anarchists and we don't celebrate the quincentennary! Death to the church, down with the celebration! I'll shit on the celebration! Only fascists celebrate genocide! We took the Paseo de La Reforma after blocking traffic leading onto it. We jumped on the monument to the imperialist bully, painting the sculpture in red and throwing whatever we could at it to try and destroy it. We put up banners and surrounded the monument, repeating our chants. The Mexico City, national, and foreign press mobilized to cover what was the first demonstration against the celebration, while the police (and the invariable grenadiers) decided to keep watch around us. After giving homage to the great admiral, we headed back to the Z¢calo, handing out flyers to all the passersby and decorating all the luxury cars in our path with counter-quincentennary stickers. Once back in the square we interrupted with shouts the celebrations and rituals of the Escuela de la Nueva Mexicanidad The yellow and bourgeois press, while they accused us of being vandals, marginalized elements, and gang members, were obligated to report on a black block that marched to shouts of A, A, Anarchy!" -30- AFTER COLUMBUS DAY, ACTIONS CONTINUE IN MEXICO AFTER THE MARCH of the anarchist Black Block on October 12th against the Quincentenial, various anarchist collectives from the region agreed to organize two demonstrations in coordination with the Love and Rage Network. The first to occur was on the 23rd of October at 3 pm in front of the yankee embassy, calling for the release of American political prisoner, Kenny Tolia, and for the repeal of Mumia Abu-Jamal's death sentence and his release. About 30 people participated. For over 4 hours, protesters yelled anti-state and anti-imperialist slogans and called for the release of the imprisoned comrades. They waved banners and placards at motorists and passersby on the Paseo de la Reforma, during rush hour on Friday, while others passed out leaflets and gathered signatures. Then on October 30, we demonstrated for the release on Peruvian anarchist prisoner Andres Villaverde. The collectives Cambio Radical, Fuerza Positiva, Brigada Subversiva, Ideolog¡a, Expresi¢n y Acci¢n, Zyntoma, and the Love and Rage/Mexico Supporting Group organized a picket outside the Peruvian embassy, calling for an immediate review of the case of Andr‚s Villaverde and his release based on the lack of evidence against him. With banners and placards, demonstrators blocked the street, by sitting on the pavement, while others passed out flyers and collected signatures. After three hours of civil disobedience, we abandoned our position to deliver petitions to the embassy. To close out the month of solidarity and action, on November 1st some anarchists carried out a direct action against McMurders (McDonald's) in the Arag¢n Central Commercial Plaza in the wee hours of the night. Bricks and other objects were used to break the windows of the imperialist restaurant, and anarchist, anti-imperialist, and animal liberation graffiti was left all over the commercial center. -30- EMMA GOLDMAN ANARCHIST WIMMON'S COLLECTIVE FORMED ON SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 7, a meeting of wimmin with common anarchist politics took place in Mexico City. As a result, we young wimmin formed the Emma Goldman Anarchist Wimmins' Collective. At the meeting we created a declaration of principles. Anti-authoritarian, anti-state, anti-capitalist, anti-racist, revolutionary, and anti-sexist positions were stated. On this last point we made clear our rejection of patriarchy, that is the sexist society in which we live, the sexual violence and the everyday abuse that wimmin are subjected to. We outlined our belief that our struggle is for liberation, emancipation, self-determination, and self-management for wimmin. We explicitly stated our unquestionable right to reproductive choice, the inalienable right to abortion, and the right of access to health care for all wimmin without exception. We manifested our rejection of the imposition of the authoritarian heterosexuality of the patriarchal family and the traditional adoption of sex roles. We supported attempts to move towards a plurality of human-sexual relations, including the recognition and support for the struggles of lesbians, bisexuals, and gay men. We plan to produce a bulletin containing the decisions made at the first meeting, including the Declaration of Principles. The goals and purpose of the bulletin are to spread anarcha-feminist ideas and to win over more wimmin, so that our movement can strongly develop here in Mexico. Another important focus of the collective, given the problems confronting wimmin due to the prohibition of abortion, is the wimmin's health question. Because of a lack of sexual education, and reproductive rights, we plan to helpspread, practice and educate about alternative methods of abortion, like menstrual extraction. Information on this page from Grupo de Apoyo Amor y Rabia, Mexico For more information write the collective: Amor y Rabia Apartado Postal 11-351 C.P. 06101 Mexico D.F. MEXICO -30- @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ @ _Love & Rage_ is a Revolutionary Anarchist newspaper produced @ by the Love and Rage Network. The Love and Rage Network is a @ continental network of groups and individuals in Canada, Mexico, @ and the United States. 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