Strike plunges Lebanon into chaos
Jan 23 2007 13:24
Quote:
Thousands of Lebanese demonstrators have paralysed much of the country, barricading roads as part of a strike aimed at toppling the government.
Jan 23 2007 13:49
#2
Yeah but its more complicated than that afaik. Anyone understand the situation more fully?
Think the media in the Uk etc. like to latch onto the Hezbollah thing a lot without fully understanding how the whole thing works.
Jan 23 2007 14:01
#3
in brief, from what i've read Hizballah is a strange beast that tends to play a mediating role between genuine working class anger and the government, obviously trying to harness that discontent into their own aspirations to state power. In the 2004 general strike they tried to get strikers back to work when the protests became rather autonomously militant (with soldiers firing on strikers, killing several).
their origins were in the working class shi'a communities during the israeli invasion of '82 (their founding manifesto was full of leftist rhetoric alongside the islamsim), though now they are very much a cross-class movement and seem to have ditched the pan-islamism in favour of a pragmatic nationalism.
thats about all i know about them. lebanon is well complicated.
Jan 23 2007 14:12
#4
The strike is about austerity measures being introduced by the government before the Paris III conference. It is covered in detail in the Arabic press, in English I found this from Al-Ahram, which is a general article about the situation:
Al-Ahram wrote:
The reforms outlined are vague, but include, most controversially, raising VAT by two per cent next year and later up to five per cent, along with privatisation and "corporatisation" of state-owned enterprises, particularly the wasteful Electricite du Liban, estimated to cost the government about $1 billion a year. With the flat rate of income tax expected to remain unchanged at 10 per cent, regardless of earnings, the plan's detractors claim that the government's indirect taxes -- through VAT that will raise already inflated prices up by14 per cent -- will hurt the working class, and prise ever wider the gap between rich and poor.
http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2007/828/re83.htm
There is also more detailed information in the English language Beirut based Daily Star:
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/home.asp
I think that the strike is definitely on a class basis. Of course different bourgeois factions will try to use it for their own ends, but that doesn’t obscure the fact that this is a workers’ struggle.
Devrim
Jan 23 2007 15:42
#5
Ah well that's very good to hear.
Says it was called by Hezbollah: