WOMEN Against Pit Closures are keeping up their 24-hour vigils outside seven of the ten most-threatened pits in England and Wales.
Rufford pit camp is planning a maior demonstration in the Nottinghamshire coalfield for February 28, while a delegation of Irish women from Derry visited Vane Tempest pit camp in the North East.
Women at Trentham pit camp have condemned british Coal moves to seal up one of the colliery's grounds. Activist Brenda Proctor argued: It's just another excuse to shut the pit."
Support for the women is growing, with meetings and socials being organised in the run-up to the coal Last Sunday saw almost all of Brisome sane ano come dians, including Jo Brand Eclair, Donna McPhail and Kit Hollerbach, stage a WAPC benefit concert at London's Hackney Empire theatre.
Donations and messages of support for the pit camps: WAPC pit camps, clo Street, Sheffield S1 2GT. Tel: 0742 766900 x255.
International WOMEN'S DAY 1993 RAPE takes place in all wars. The dislocation of normal social life, and the power relationship which huge numbers of armed men have in relationship to civilians, means that even the minimal obstacles to rape in class society are cast aside.
Probably no army in history has been entirely guiltless. But imperialist armies, for example in Algeria and Vietnam and numerous other colonial wars, with their racist contempt for all 'native' civilians, have been particularly guilty of rape.
But is that all that there is to it in Yugoslavia? That men rape, that armies have almost total power over women in their vicinity, and that therefore rape inevitably takes place? In our view that is too sweeping and simplistic an explanation.
For evidence is growing that in ex-Yugoslavia that rape is being used as an instrument of policy, by the Serb Chetnik forces, for the purposes of 'ethnic cleansing', of demoralising and terrorising the civilian population, especially in Bosnia.
All rape is horrendous; but mass rape as an instrument of policy is a particularly vicious crime.
The campaign against it must be linked to the demand that rape be made an internationally recognised war crime. Women All wars lead to rape but in ex-Yugoslavia rape has become an instrument of policy Rape: an old problem returns in a modern conflict