Meeting features reports on world struggles

An International Action Center meeting on Oct. 25 featured dynamic eyewitness reports from three epicenters of struggle—Honduras, Pittsburgh and Gaza.

From left: Dave Welsh, Judy Greenspan and Clarence Thomas. WW photo: Brenda Sandburg

Dave Welsh, a member of the San Francisco Labor Council and an activist with the Haiti Action Committee, recently returned from a fact-finding visit to Honduras with the IAC. Welsh reported that the struggle against the coup and for the immediate return of President Manuel Zelaya is alive and well. “The people’s resistance movement is broad and tireless, young and old, and right up in the face of the police and the army.”

Welsh said the IAC delegation was well-received wherever it went and its solidarity banner was very popular. “Young people and women are an important part of the leadership of the resistance movement in Honduras. The labor movement there is class conscious and at the center of the struggle to return Zelaya and dismantle the present government, which was responsible for the coup.”

Welsh described a meeting that the delegation had with a representative from the U.S. Embassy in Honduras. “It’s clear that the U.S. is maneuvering to maintain its hold on Honduras and all of the other countries of the region,” Welsh added.

Clarence Thomas, a leader of the International Longshore Workers Union Local 10, talked about the Sept. 20 National March for Jobs that took place in Pittsburgh at the beginning of the G-20 summit. Thomas said the march was held to expose “the face of U.S. imperialism at home.”

Thomas reported that the local and federal governments both worked hard to prevent demonstrations during the Pittsburgh G-20 summit, a meeting of the richest countries of the world. It was the hard work of the Bail Out the People Movement in reaching out to the local communities that enabled the march and Tent City to happen, according to Thomas.

“The Tent City [organized by BOPM to focus attention on the life and death issues faced by the workers and oppressed] became a magnet for the media,” Thomas stated. He added that even a Wall Street Journal reporter came around to “investigate” the workers’ fight back movement.

“It was the Bail Out the People Movement that overcame the climate of fear that the G-20 summit and the government tried to spread,” said Thomas.

Judy Greenspan, a member of the San Francisco IAC, spoke about her trip to Palestine this summer with the Viva Palestina U.S.A. Convoy to Gaza. Greenspan, along with about 250 other activists and supporters, broke through the U.S.-backed, Israeli-imposed blockade of that embattled city and was able to spend 24 hours in Gaza delivering medical humanitarian aid.

She described the devastation that the Palestinians suffered last December and January at the hands of the Israeli military, which intentionally destroyed much of the infrastructure of Gaza—schools, hospitals, clinics, government buildings and mosques—in a well-orchestrated terror campaign against the Palestinian resistance to the Zionist state of Israel.

The IAC representative described the warm welcome that the Viva Palestina delegation received from the Palestinian authorities and how the government, with so few resources, was able to organize an unforgettable visit for the convoy. “Even though we came to Gaza with only one-half of the material aid that we had purchased, because Egypt confiscated our vehicles, the Gaza government officials told us that our presence in Palestine was what counted,” Greenspan explained.

The meeting ended after a lively discussion linking the resistance movement abroad from Honduras to Palestine with the growing struggles at home against foreclosures, joblessness and lack of health care.