IN FEBRUARY a 17-year old Algerian woman school student, wearing western clothes, was gunned down in Blida, 30 miles from Algiers. Her friend, dressed in hijab (veil) was not touched. In Meftah, another suburb of Algiers, 14-year old Katia was killed. In Sidi Bel Abbes a school-student was executed. At the end of March, 18-year old Razika Meloudjemi and 19-year old Naima Kar Ali were gunned down at a bus stop in Boudouaou, near Algiers. These are just some of the 30 women who have been murdered in Algeria in the last few months for not wearing the veil. Other women have been raped or abducted.
These crimes against women followed the circulation of a leaflet by Islamic fundamentalists stating that after the end of Ramadan (March 12) any woman not wearing "Islamic dress' would be sentenced to death.
Here SANADJA, a member of the PST (Socialist Workers Party, supporters of the Fourth International in Algeria) explains the war against women and how the fight back is being organised. Algerian women face continual attacks on their rights WOMEN were very active in the 1954-62 war of national liberation to drive out the French. After the 1962 victory many of them returned to their homes, encouraged by the governing National Liberation Front (FLN). Women had no leading positions in the state apparatus, even though it purported to be a socialist state.
The FLN created a 'mass organisation' for women which did nothing to raise their political awareness.
Worse still, at the end of the 1970s they tried to introduce the Family Code which reinforced the traditional subjugation of women within the family. After a wave of opposition demonstrations the code was withdrawn temporarily but reintroduced in 1984.
Family code
People have the impression that it is only since the rise of the fundamentalists that women's rights have been threatened. Yet the Family Code allows polygamy, women do not have the right to demand divorce, they have no legal right to their own home. There are a hundred and one things which mean women have no place in our society.
Women in Algeria make up a little more than four percent of the workforce. This is the lowest level in the Mahgreb. In Tunisia it is more than 20 per cent and in Morocco more than 15 per cent. Today even these small gains are threatened.
The climate of fear is such that many women are forced to wear the veil, give up their jobs and stay in their homes. The situation is much worse than people outside Algeria believe.
The FLN government has done nothing for women, and the terrible situation we are now in is because of them. On every level - democracy, education, the economy - they have failed.
In the early 1980s the funda100,000 women demonstrated in March this year mentalist Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) criticised mixed schools and women wearing jeans or trousers. All the sermons in the mosques were directed against women: women must stay at home, wear the veil, only work under certain repressive conditions.
Segregation
When FIS won a majority in the 1989 municipal elections, in certain areas they imposed segregation on the buses between men and women. They attacked women who lived alone, arguing that women should either be married or living in their father's family. They even burned to death a woman living alone.
The FLN government didn't even consider such actions newsworthy. The FIS openly attacked the young women's university campus during Ramadan. The response of the government was to close down the university.
After the elections of December 1991 - the government stopped the second round of elections which should have been held in January 1992 - a wave of repression WaC launched against the fundamentalists. Several hundred were put into concentration camps and held in deplorable conditions. People were arrested solely for their political views.
If the fundamentalists came to power the first to suffer would be women. It would affect every woman, not just socialists and democrats. Even those who live 'normal' life would the mos suffer.
Many women have decided to wear veil and support the fundamentalists. But there are also a lot of women with grave reservations, including devout Muslims. I have sisters and women friends who regularly say prayers but also go to the beach and wear shorts.
Most women are Muslims but that doesn't mean they want laws which restrict them because of their sex. That is why there was a demonstration in Algiers on March 20 this year of 100,000 women in defence of their rights. Among those who demonstrated were women wearing the veil and women wearing jeans - a cross section of Algerian women.
Unfortunately the opposition - feminists, socialists and campaigners for democratic rights -are very divided on how to respond to the war against Many, including our party, believe that the violence is not solely the responsibility of the fundamentalists: some acts are committed by the ruling party which needs the present instability to preserve its power. It does not have sufficient confidence in its ability to win to call new elections.
On the question of elections the left is also divided. A section, particularly the former Stalinist party, are in favour of the army taking power. On the March 20 demonstration the Stalinist-controlled Algerian Assembly of Democratic FEATURE Women demanded the government make no concessions and hold no discussions with the fundamentalists.
I would like to remind those women that when we fought in 1988-89, when we fought against the Family Code, it was against this government, not the fundamentalists. We cannot possibly call for support for this [To be concluded in the next issue]
SOCIALIST OUTLOOK No.62, May 14 1994, Page 12 In our last issue we published the first part of 'Bosnia: The scandal of the British Left' by Alan Thornett and Dave Packer. The article focused on the Socialist Workers Party. Here we look at different currents in the Labour Party. THE FAILURE of the British left to build a mass campaign for the right of Bosnian self-determination after two years of war despite fhe anguish and sympathy existing at grass roots level, is a scandal it will not easily live Many just bury their heads in the sand, while others vacillate, searching for reasons not to sponsor the International Workers Aid to Bosnia (IWA) campaign, the only democratic, working class and socialist campaign in Britain.
At one level this failure of leadership by the left, including the two largest organisations on the far left, is a reflection of an historic anti-theory, narrowminded economism, which has always existed in the British Isles (with notable exceptions in Scotland and Ireland).
But this has been compounded in the Labour Party by other conflicting factors, which has deeply divided the left.
Ken Livingstone has publicly supported the right of Bosnia to survive and crucially, has called for lifting the arms embargo directed against it. But at the same time, he is gung-ho for a big UN military intervention against the Serbian forces.
DEBATE This majority view, held by many in the soft-left, is similar to that of the Labour leadership, except that the shadow cabinet is not even for lifting the arms embargo.
These views reflect illusions in the United Nations as an independent force, which is capable of acting in the interests of the workers in the region.
On the other side of the divide are those who correctly oppose UN or NATO intervention, which could only be in the interests of Western capital. But often this is in the name of defending the old Yugoslavia, which they claim was shattered by imperialist pressures. Such people have often allowed themselves to become apologists for the Serbian war of aggression.
The latter view has much in common with the Communist Parties of Britain, Serbia and the Russian Federation.
Implicit in their political framework is a view usually referred to as 'campism', a simplistic Stalinist inspired idea that sees the protagonists in most struggles in the world falling into two camps: the pro-imperialist camp, or the camp 'of actually existing socialism' (sic) - the bureaucratic states of the ex-Soviet bloc.
These ideas within the Labour left point up the continued influence of the Stalinism and the CP 'fellow travellers'.
Examples of this latter view IWA picket of Foreign office can be found in the Morning Star (favourite reading for Labour's hard left), but also in Jim Mortimer's article in the March, 1994 issue of Southwark Trade Union News (STUN).
Mortimer, formerly General Secretary of the Labour Party, now delegate to Southwark Trades Council writes that he is opposed to the aims of IWA because in a one-sided way it is 'in favour of the Muslim led government of Bosnia...The need in Bosnia is to stop the killing and to negotiate a settlement which recognises the rights of each of the cultural groups. Threats of bombing or the lifting of the present arms embargo do not offer a solution'.
After denouncing the IWA for having similar viewsto Margaret Thatcher, Jim Mortimer shows that he in fact has similar views to Douglas Hurd and the majority of the UN who, in the name of 'stopping the killing', wish to force the Bosnian government to the negotiating table to sign a 'peace' which recogInternational TO AID nises the reactionary ethnic 'cantonisation' of Bosnia. In effect, recognising the war-gains of Serbia!
This view is promoted in the Morning Star which, along with its sponsored campaign 'Labour Action For Peace', calls for a negotiated settlement, but generally avoids exposing the crimes of Serbian aggression.
Dishonest
A campaign to force the Bosnians to sign an unjust 'peace' and accept 'ethnic cleansing' is a dishonest cover for Serbian aggression and will never bring peace to the region.
Of course, every socialist is in favour of recognising the rights of each cultural group. But the minority Serb population of Bosnia had full political and cultural rights in the Republic of Bosnia, including representation in the government, this is why hundreds of thousands of Serbs still support the existence of a multi-ethnic Bosnia and fight in its army.
It is why 500 delegates, representing nearly 200,000 Serbs opposed to ethnic cleansing and separation on an ethnic basis, met in Sarajevo on March 27. These Bosnian Serbs have not emigrated but want peaceful coexistence based on 'non ethnically defined' cantons.
Jim Mortimer refuses to face up to the fact that it is the Serbian forces who have massacred and 'ethnically cleansed' the Muslims from the two-third of Bosnia they now hold! He even blames today's Muslims for the "The Ottoman Turkish empire, which governed much of the region in a very oppressive manner for centuries, (which) represented Muslim domination'.
Avoiding all the horrors of the rise of Milosovic during the 1980s on a tide of great Serbian chauvinism and the threat it represented to all the other repub'ethnic' groups, Mortimer sinks back into a sentimental description of the 'great achievement of Tito'.
Actually, despite the absence of real workers' democracy in Tito's Yugoslavia, his 1974 Constitution did recognise the right of self-determination for the republics!
According to Jim Mortimer, the responsibility for the breakup of Yugoslavia was not the revival of a right wing nationalism, particularly in Serbia, but 'the Western powers, particularly Germany...Hitler, it should be remembered, also broke up Yugoslavia..and created the puppet state of Croatia. The very substantial number of Serbs who live in Bosnia were understandably deeply concerned at the break-up of Yugoslavia and the majority of them did not want to live under a Muslim-led government?
This passage confuses several issues. First, Croatian nationalism is not the same as Croatian Fascism or the horrors of the Ustache state. Croatian national liberation movements were fighting the rule of the Serbian monarchy before the intervention of the Nazis.
Old hatreds
Jim Mortimer is simply justifying the slogans of Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic and his 'Bosnian Serb' sidekick Karadzic, which were designed to stir up old hatreds to bounce the Serbian populations into line behind their reactionary Greater Serbia project.
In any case most of the Bosnian Serbs were already living with little conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina.
The whole tenor of Mortimer's article, like those in the Morning Star and other splinter groups, represents a justification of Serbian aggression.
Of course there are many socialists who refuse to slide into either a pro-imperialist camp, or into a de-facto pro-Stalinist camp. These comrades represent a third genuinely internationalist pole. They must take the plunge and join in the IWA campaign to defend Bosnia, but at the same time oppose any military intervention into the Balkans.
Against the Market: Political Economy, SOCIALIST OUTLOOK No.62, May 14 1994, Page 13 Marx showed that it is impossible to have