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International Socialist Review Issue 44, November–December 2005
N E W S & R E P O R T S
STAN "TOOKIE" WILLIAMS
Countdown to a legal lynching
By PHIL GASPER
ON THE morning of October 11, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that it would not hear the case of Stanley “Tookie” Williams, clearing the way for the state of California to set an execution date for the most famous inmate on San Quentin’s death row.
Last February, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals turned down Stan’s request for a new hearing by a vote of fifteen to nine. But the minority issued a blistering dissent, condemning the “blatant, race-based jury selection” in Williams’ original trial, and arguing that the majority’s decision “sends an unmistakable message that the dictates of Batson [the Supreme Court ruling that declared race-based jury selection unconstitutional] may be disregarded with impunity.”
Williams’ appeal reached the U.S. Supreme Court in May, where it has been sitting ever since. A decision was originally expected earlier, but the court delayed, reportedly to allow its new chief justice, John Roberts, an opportunity to weigh in on the case. Now it has spoken in no uncertain terms. By refusing to accept the appeal, the Roberts’ Court has effectively given the green light to prosecutors who exclude jurors on the basis of race.
The office of California Attorney General Bill Lockyer, a Democrat, wasted no time following the decision, announcing the same day that it would be seeking a December 13 execution date for Williams. The countdown to a legal lynching has begun, and the only thing that can stop it is a massive campaign by Stan’s thousands of supporters around the state and the world.
In 1971, at the age of seventeen, Stan Williams co-founded the Crips in Los Angeles, which rapidly became the city’s most notorious street gang, spawning imitators around the country and eventually the globe. Eight years later, with the Los Angeles Police Department eager to find any pretext for getting him off the street, Williams was charged with four murders. In 1981, he was convicted and sent to San Quentin. In prison, Williams faced hostility and racism from the authorities and eventually served several years in solitary confinement. During this time, he began to rehabilitate himself and made the decision to leave the Crips and speak out against gang violence.
In the 1990s, with the assistance of journalist Barbara Becnel, Stan wrote a series of award-winning books for school-children, warning them against gangs, crime, and prison. He also set up the Internet Project for Street Peace, which encourages street gangs to stop fighting each other. Stan’s work has had an enormous impact in schools and inner-city communities. Last year, for instance, gang members in Newark, New Jersey negotiated a truce based on the “Tookie Protocol for Peace,” which has remained in effect ever since. His Web site has also received tens of thousands of e-mails, many from young people who have left gangs as a result of Stan’s advocacy.
This work has earned Williams a series of Nobel Prize nominations since 2001. It also led a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit to make the unprecedented statement in 2002 that his anti-gang initiatives made Stan a strong candidate for clemency from the governor. Former Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Archbishop Desmond M. Tutu wrote of Williams: “I salute him for his courage and determination to overcome his circumstances.” After interviewing Stan at length for a book about gangs, Lewis Yablonsky, emeritus professor of criminology at California State University, Northridge, wrote “Williams is the only person I know of—gangster or criminologist—who has come up with any kind of articulate insight into black-on-black violence.”
Since Jamie Foxx played Stan in last year’s made-for-TV movie Redemption: The Stan “Tookie” Williams Story, many people have heard about his amazing anti-gang work. But the movie steered clear of seriously addressing Stan’s original conviction, and so far fewer people are aware that he was framed for crimes that he did not commit.
The main evidence against Stan was the testimony of jailhouse informants who claimed that he had confessed to them. All of these “witnesses” were facing serious felony charges and had strong motivations to make a deal with the police to reduce their own sentences. In fact, in its 2002 ruling, even the Ninth Circuit admitted that these informants had “less-than-clean backgrounds and incentives to lie in order to obtain leniency from the state in either charging or sentencing.”
Since the original trial, another prisoner has come forward to say that he witnessed one of the informants being given the file on Stan’s case by members of the sheriff’s department so that he could learn details about the murders. None of the physical evidence found at the two crime scenes, including fingerprints and a boot print, matched Williams. A witness’s description of a person seen leaving the scene of one of the crimes did not fit him either. A shotgun shell supposedly matched a weapon he had bought several years earlier, but that gun was in the possession of a couple that was also facing serious felony charges. After they claimed that Stan had confessed to them, however, the investigations against the suspected felons were dropped.
To get the charges to stick, the prosecutor in the case, Robert Martin, used blatant racism. The trial was moved from Los Angeles to Torrance, a predominantly white, highly conservative area. All the African Americans in the jury pool were dismissed and Stan’s case was heard by an all-white jury. In his closing argument, Martin compared Stan in the courtroom to a Bengal tiger in the zoo, and said that “in his environment” (i.e., South Central, L.A.) he would behave like the tiger in its “habitat.”
Despite the fact that Martin was later censured twice by the California Supreme Court for his racist practices—which led to death sentences in two of the cases he prosecuted being overturned—and despite the fact that the American Civil Liberties Union, the NAACP, the Mexican American Legal Defense & Educational Fund, and numerous other groups, filed an amicus brief on Williams’ behalf, the Ninth Circuit twice rejected the claim that his constitutional rights were violated. Now the U.S. Supreme Court has upheld these decisions.
After years of inadequate legal representation, Williams now has a top legal firm working on his behalf, which claims to have uncovered fresh evidence of his innocence. They will be attempting to get the courts to reopen the case while simultaneously preparing an appeal for clemency to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger—who showed no mercy in the execution of Donald Beardsley, a severely brain-damaged prisoner, at the beginning of the year.
But the legal strategy is hopeless without enormous outside pressure. Stan’s case exemplifies many of the key problems with the death penalty—racism, inadequate counsel, and the reliance on jailhouse snitches—all of which may soon result in the execution of an innocent man. Stan Tookie Williams urgently needs our support.
For information about what you can do to help save Stan’s life, visit http://www.savetookie.org. Phil Gasper is a member of the ISR editorial board.
EGYPTIAN ELECTIONS
A movement for change
by LAYLA BADAWI
AS EXPECTED, the presidential elections in Egypt returned President Hosni Mubarak to power, while the legislative elections guaranteed him command of parliament. The state aims to accelerate the implementation of neoliberal policies, especially privatizations. But this doesn’t take into account the Movement for Change [a coalition of political groups opposed to the reelection of Mubarak] and the revival of workers’ protests, weak though they might be.
According to the interior minister’s official figures, 23 percent of registered voters participated in the 2005 presidential elections, of which 88.6 percent supported presidential candidate Hosni Mubarak. Accepting for the moment the reliability and accuracy of these figures, this would mean that the president was elected by a mere 19 percent of eligible voters, that he only received the endorsement of one-fifth of the electorate—a far cry from a simple majority.
This is assuming the numbers are an accurate reflection of reality. But what if they aren’t? In fact, all the accounts by ordinary citizens, all of the reports from human rights organizations that supervised the election, agree: tampering occurred on several levels during the election process, functioning according to a machine that has been well oiled over the past twenty-four years. To begin with, the voter rolls are full of errors. Thousands of deceased voters’ names were never deleted, new voters aren’t included, and many names are misspelled or repeated several times—a situation that either stops citizens from voting or fills ballot boxes with phony ballots.
Secondly, tens of thousands of functionaries were directed to the polls, strongly “encouraged” to vote for the incumbent with envelopes containing twenty Egyptian Pounds ($3.50) along with a small tract picturing Mubarak. The ink used to mark voters’ fingers after they have voted to make sure they don’t vote again, washed off easily with ordinary soap after one or two washings. All this shows that the president received considerably less than 19 percent of the votes, and that his re-election is therefore null and void.
That was the protesters’ message on September 7, the day of the elections; on September 10, when the results came out; and on September 27, the day the president was sworn into office. Unlike previous demonstrations, these protests restored confidence to the Movement for Change. Each time, in fact, there was the same scene: at the gathering point, there wasn’t a single cop. Not one of the tens of thousands of security forces activists had become accustomed to since the first demonstration organized jointly by Kefaya and the Movement for Change on December 12, 2004, under the slogan “No to a fifth term for Mubarak, No to handing over power to Gamal Mubarak” [Mubarak’s son].
Since there were no cops, there was no longer any reason not to march. After some hesitation, the demonstrations took to the streets downtown and grew as they entered the commercial district where thousands of bystanders watched them go past. The majority remained spectators, taking photos with their cell phones, glancing in amusement, surprised or skeptical, others encouraging the protesters. Sometimes protesters met a man or woman who, contrary to all expectations, showed signs of hostility or began defending Mubarak hysterically. Were they just citizens or members of Mubarak’s National Democratic Party (NDP)? Were they chance spectators or people put there on purpose, encouraged by a twenty pound bill? Either way, it makes no difference. This handful of killjoys didn’t stop the demonstrations from growing from an initial 1,000 people to over 5,000. The protesters couldn’t help feeling uneasy as they advanced, the absence of police being too unusual not to raise many questions. On September 7, this uneasiness proved warranted as demonstrators suddenly saw hordes of NDP thugs attack the demonstration, throwing broken bottles and cobblestones, violently beating up the most visible leaders of the march.
In spite of this uneasiness, taking to the streets was intoxicating. Not only because it was finally a real demonstration rather than just a spontaneous gathering, but especially because these marches are concrete proof that the bogus reelection of Mubarak galvanized the movement, and didn’t break it as many had feared. In fact, the “That’s Enough Mubarak” (Kefaya) movement had suffered some pre-election difficulties. The boycott campaign was compromised with the participation in the elections by two candidates from the right-wing liberal opposition, Ayman Nour (7.6 percent of votes) and Nooman Gomma (2.9 percent).
Today, the entire political chessboard is preparing for the November 2005 legislative elections. Opposition forces are engaged in bitter discussions over a plan to share the voting districts. For the Muslim Brotherhood, these elections will come at an important time. Before the presidential elections, the Brotherhood had taken a more aggressive line towards the state by organizing massive street protests “for lifting the state of emergency and for the liberation of all political prisoners,” first in March, then again in May 2005. One protester died in these demonstrations and thousands of the Brotherhood’s activists and leaders were arrested. Even if most of them have been released, some still wallow in state jails, including Esam al Iryan, a young leader known for a political stance more radical than that of the Supreme Council. Today the Brotherhood has nineteen deputies in parliament, and they hope to increase this number through an election that will undoubtedly strengthen parliamentary opposition. Other associated movements are preparing to organize boycotts of specific candidates, among them those who participated in establishing Qualifying Industrial Zones [special duty-free zones] with the U.S. and Israel.
While there are heated debates within the opposition, there’s a veritable internecine war at the heart of the NDP between the old guard and the young, power-hungry wolves in the policy committee, led by the president’s youngest son, Gamal Mubarak. The legislative elections will be an important battle in this war; Mubarak will name the new ministerial cabinet after the elections, and the “youth” aim to increase their current “quota,” already comprised of ten portfolios, including, for example, Mahmous Mohie al Dine, the thirty-nine-year-old investment minister, who recently declared that “none of our industries should be considered strategic.”
He was referring to the Hélouan iron metallurgy factory (where 14,000 workers are still employed in the south of Cairo) and the Nag Hamadi aluminum plant, in Upper Egypt. Mohie al Dine has in fact launched a media campaign aiming to mould public opinion to support privatization of all the large bastions of industry bequeathed by the Nasser years. In addition to these industries, the privatization of railroads, the postal service, and the great media empires (print and audio-visual) are on the table.
Unlike the old guard in the NDP that is frightened by the potential for popular explosions that these measures could provoke, Gamal Mubarak stated that “the interior minister has only to do his job,” when addressing the issue of eliminating public subsidies on basic foodstuffs.
These plans for privatizations will not pass without resistance. The pace of workers’ protests, both blue- and white-collar, accelerated in 2005, especially in the public sector, after privatizations were announced. This was the case for bank employees, one of the sectors the government insists it is determined to sell off. Other movements have benefited from this political boiling point, tied to the impact of the Movement for Change and the creation of several professional groups like “Lawyers for Change,” “Doctors for Change,” and, most importantly, the impressive judges’ movement. Thus, air traffic controllers completely blocked the Cairo airport in May 2005 to protest layoffs of several of their coworkers. Most recently, doctors in the Zakazik public hospital (in the Delta) organized a hunger strike because of their desperation caused by rampant corruption that makes it impossible to treat patients in decent conditions. Workers at the Ora Misr factory, “the asbestos workers,” are among the few to have won gains after twelve months of bitter struggle, nonetheless, a generalized grumbling has taken hold throughout Egyptian society.
Artists and intellectuals are not exempt. They have organized several meetings demanding that the ministers of the interior, of health, and of culture resign in the wake of the tragic fire at the Beni Soueif Theater on September 5, where more than forty people, including public figures involved in independent theater, were burned alive in a hall where none of the standard safety measures had been observed.
Every day, small movements appear, showing a generalized rejection of corruption and the deteriorating conditions of life. Journalists have also shown this rejection by overwhelmingly re-electing Galal Aref as head of their union on September 30, 2005. Faced with a government candidate, they opted instead for the independence of their union and the fight against corruption; a choice in the interests of the Movement for Change as a whole, given the importance of the journalists’ union that has welcomed the many demonstrations and protests.
Layla Badawi submitted this report from Cairo, Egypt.
GERMANY
New openings for the left
by JEFF BALE
NO SOONER was Angela Merkel announced as the new chancellor of Germany than she and her conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) started to sharpen the axe. Her planned attacks on social spending come on the heels of elections in which millions of Germans voted against neoliberal policies and provided the Left with its best showing in a generation.
German politics have been turned on their head because the September 18 elections provided no clear winner. Neither of the main parties, the Social Democrats (SPD) nor the CDU, won a majority, even in concert with their usual coalition partners.
Three weeks of wild speculation about the new government ended with a widely anticipated “grand coalition” in which the CDU and SPD will form a government, with Merkel as chancellor and the SPD in charge of eight key ministries. The one missing piece is former SPD chancellor Gerhard Schröder, who resigned from the government.
While speculation about the outcome droned on, the real story of the German elections invariably was overshadowed: It was a huge victory for the German Left and a sound defeat for the neoliberal policies embraced by the other parties.
The newly formed Left Party garnered just below 9 percent of the vote in their first election. This means they won 4.1 million votes, and with that fifty-four seats in the new government. They took 20 percent of the unemployed vote as well as some 20 percent of the votes from the poorest one-third of the German electorate. Even though much of their support was in the East (where they received on average 25 percent), the Left Party still took 18.5 percent of the vote in Saarland in the West, as well as 6–8 percent in Bremen and Hamburg, two major northern cities.
The fact that the Left Party did so well—and that neither of the two major parties won anything close to a majority—underscores the extent to which Germans had rejected Schröder’s “Agenda 2010” of massive cuts to unemployment benefits, workplace rights, and other social programs enacted over the last seven years.
In fact, the only reason that the SPD wasn’t trounced in the elections, as had been expected, was that Schröder & Co. tacked left during the campaign, claiming to be the standard bearers of social justice. In other words, they campaigned against their own record of cuts for working Germans and tax breaks for corporations and the rich.
Although the solution of forming a grand coalition was widely anticipated, it only consummates what has been an illicit agreement between the two parties for some time. Both parties openly embrace — although to varying degrees—the bosses’ demands of dismantling Germany’s welfare state, creating a “flexible” labor market, and reducing the costs overall of doing business there.
Some on the German Left had actually welcomed a grand coalition as a lesser evil to the CDU blocking with other conservative parties. The idea was that, while there still will be cuts, at least with the SPD in the leadership, they might be less draconian cuts.
This logic is already being put to the test—and failing. One of Merkel’s first speeches as chancellor-elect called for “reorganizing the budget” so that it fits the restrictions of the European Union. These restrictions limit the federal deficit of member countries to 3 percent of GDP, a ceiling that Germany has surpassed for each of the last four years. Merkel’s call to bring the German deficit back to within the 3 percent limit is in effect a call for deep cuts to the federal budget.
The SPD—far from acting as the social conscience of the new government—has already jumped on board. Peer Steinbrück (SPD), likely to be the new finance minister, has called for cutting between 14.5 billion and 22.5 billion euros (between $17.5 and over $27 billion. Furthermore, he declared the SPD ready to join the CDU in the fight against the “misuse” of unemployment benefits and has called for increasing the national sales tax.
This political merging of Germany’s two dominant parties has opened up a huge vacuum on the Left. The Left Party has only just begun to fill that void. It has already taken a firm opposition stance as it prepares to send its fifty-four delegates to Berlin. Party leaders held a press conference after the grand coalition was announced, criticizing the pact as “a coalition of corporate interests.”
However, the maneuvering in parliament still leaves the critical question of what the Left Party is to become. The party itself was only recently formed out of a somewhat uneasy partnership between the Electoral Alternative for Social Justice (WASG in German) and the successor party to the East German Communist Party, the PDS.
To be sure, the PDS has little to do with its East German predecessor. Still, the PDS has joined the governments in Berlin and in the state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. Consequently, it has been part of critical cuts to social services, especially in Berlin. This has cost the party not only respect, but many members as well.
The WASG, on the other hand, is composed largely of former members of the SPD, many of them from the trade-union movement. Additionally, the WASG is attracting some former major players in the SPD and sending them to Berlin as part of their parliamentary delegation. This has led to a political sense of nostalgia for the “golden days” when the SPD really stood for workers’ rights.
However misplaced that nostalgia might be, the reality is that the WASG only became a prominent political force in spite of its connections to the SPD and because of the role it played over the last eighteen months in organizing the massive protest movement against the SPD’s Agenda 2010.
The future of the Left Party lies in rekindling and building on such a movement on the ground. To be sure, they can accomplish much in terms of politicking with their fifty-four seats in parliament. But those delegates will have much sharper teeth if they are backed up with thousands of unionists, immigrants, students, women, lesbians and gays, and other working-class Germans organizing in the streets and in workplaces to push back Agenda 2010 and calling for a more just Germany.
Activists in the party have called for a strategy conference November 19–20, where precisely this question of what’s next for the Left Party will be addressed. One thing is certain, the huge victory of the Left Party in this election has shifted the political mood of the country back to the Left. Merkel and her SPD sidekicks have thrown down the gauntlet in announcing new cuts, which means now is the time to turn that mood into action on the streets.
Jeff Bale is a high school German and ESL teacher in Phoenix, Arizona.
ITALY
Berlusconi and Bush
by YURII COLOMBO
OVER THE past four years, Italy’s right-wing government, led by TV tycoon Silvio Berlusconi, has followed a policy of “close friendship” with the Bush administration. The Berlusconi government not only openly supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003, but along with José María Aznar’s Spain, was one of only a few Western European countries to agree to send troops to Iraq after the fall of Baghdad. Italian troops were deployed for a “peace mission,” conveniently, in Nasiriyah, where the largest Italian oil company, the National Hydrocarbons Agency (ENI), signed various contracts, some before Saddam Hussein’s toppling by U.S. forces.
The last few months have shown how Italy’s subservience to its American “Big Brother” points to its status as a country that posseses “limited sovereignty”—one increasingly similar to any Latin American republic in the seventies. The most dramatic and glaring example of this state of affairs was the kidnapping of Giuliana Sgrena—the Iraq correspondent of Italy’s left-wing daily Il Manifesto—and the tragic events that followed. Sgrena was taken captive by a group of alleged Iraqi insurgents in February. When she was finally freed, at the beginning of March, American soldiers riddled with bullets the car taking her to the airport to be flown back to Italy. Nicola Calipari, an Italian state agent sitting close to Sgrena died instantly, while she was wounded. Faced with this situation, the Italian government was forced to ask the American ambassador in Rome for a formal explanation. The explanation of a “tragic error,” did not prove “completely plausible” even to the former fascist foreign minister, Gianfranco Fini. The question is: Did someone order that Sgrena should be prevented from returning to Italy?
A few days after the shooting, the most authoritative Italian daily newspaper, Il Corriere della Sera, revealed that it had proof that in February 2003 Abu Omar, an Egyptian imam, had been kidnapped by the CIA in Milan. Through the American military base of Aviano, he was taken to Egypt, imprisoned, and tortured. Initially silent, the Italian government has been forced to confirm these revelations, albeit denying any previous knowledge of the facts. According to the official line, U.S. intelligence never informed the Italian government, acting totally behind the back of a presumably sovereign government.
The deportation is only part of a campaign by the far Right as well as the right wing of the government coalition to fuel hatred against Muslims. Thanks to a new repressive law passed by the Berlusconi government on September 11, Muslim citizens are continuously being deported without any shred of evidence of links with fundamentalist terrorists.
This summer another news story appeared on the front pages of newspapers in Italy. Forty-four American congressmen have asked the Italian government to intervene and take action against the Anti-imperialist Camp and the Free Iraq Committee—both European networks of anti-imperialist and left groups mainly based in Italy—because of their unconditional support for the Iraqi resistance. According to these U.S. congressmen, these networks are helping in the organization of terrorist attacks in Europe. The American ambassador in Rome visited the Italian Ministry of the Interior and asked precisely what action Italy intended to take against these “terrorists,” whose main activity consists of participating in demonstrations against the occupation of Iraq, and organizing a series of meetings with representatives of left groups within the Iraqi resistance that are living in Europe.
The congressmen made a specific attempt to impede the latest initiative of the Free Iraq Committee—an international conference planned for October 1–2, entitled “For a just peace with the Iraqi resistance.” Six representatives of the Iraqi opposition against U.S. occupation accepted invitations, as well as Haj Ali, the man who is depicted in the now notorious photo in a hood with electrodes attached to his hands at Abu Ghraib prison. Many Italian intellectuals, such as Giorgio Bocca and Gianni Vattimo, and notable representatives of the radical and more mainstream Left in Italy—from the COBAS, a grassroots union, to the main left-wing parties—also agreed to attend.
Despite the fact that none of the spokespeople for the Iraqi opposition invited to the conference have been accused of, let alone convicted of, any crime in their country—as a result of U.S. pressures—the Italian government has denied them entry visas “for reasons of national security.” The members of the Free Iraq Committee responded with a three-week hunger strike that met with widespread solidarity throughout the Left. Many members of parliament and regional councilors of Rifondazione Comunista (Communist Refoundation) signed petitions. In some cases entire branches of Rifondazione, but also of Democracy of the Left (DS) and the Green Party, signed petitions in support of the protest.
This pressure compelled the Italian government to grant a visa for Haj Ali. But even this turned out to be a trap. Minutes before boarding his flight for Italy, where he was scheduled to speak at various events throughout Italy and other European countries, Ali was denied a visa on bureaucratic grounds. Officials told him that his visa could not be granted in Jordan, where he is currently living, and that he must return to Iraq to apply with Italy’s diplomatic representatives in Baghdad, inside the American Green Zone. “They’ve put the hood back on his head!” said Leonardo Mazzei, spokesman for the Free Iraq Committee. “They don’t want that the whole of Europe should start talking again about the torture and abuses Iraqis endure every single day under occupation.”
Stymied by the Italian government’s refusal to grant visas, the organizers were forced to postpone the antiwar conference “Leave Iraq in peace—support the legitimate popular resistance.” Instead, on October 2, in spite of attempts to isolate those who support the Iraqi resistance, more than 300 activists from fifteen countries met in Rome for an international protest gathering entitled “Face the Truth.” In attendance were many important Italian cultural leaders, including Gianni Vattimo, a world-renowned philosopher and ex-MP for the DS party, and Domenico Losurdo, a university lecturer and visiting professor in the U.S., alongside several components of the anti-occupation movement, such as leaders from Rifondazione and COBAS.
Katrina Yeaw of the Campus Antiwar Network (CAN) was also present and received a warm welcome. She spoke of CAN’s work on American campuses against military recruiting. Yeaw received a standing ovation when she concluded with the words that no internationalist should ever forget: “It is not our job to dictate to the Iraqi people what form their resistance should take, but instead to oppose our greatest enemy which is at home!”
In the months to come, the initiatives against the imperialist occupation in Iraq will not be the only item on the agenda for the Italian Left. Italy is not immune from the current economic crisis, and the attack by Berlusconi’s government against living conditions in Italy point to a hot autumn—starting with a national metalworkers’ strike scheduled for mid-October.
Unfortunately, more moderate forces within the Left seem interested only in booting out the Right in the general elections next spring. But Berlusconi and his policies must be beaten not only in the polls but also in struggles across the whole of the country that pose a real alternative to the Right. A new center-left government that falls back on neoliberal policies—as Schröder in Germany and Jospin in France did—will only pave the way for neopopulist protests by the radical Right.
Yurii Colombo is the editor of the Italian socialist publishing house, Giovane Talpa (Young Mole) in Milan.
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