the rural areas clean water, electricity and roads are scarce.
Woren have been adversely affected by state withdrawai of household rations and child care facilities.
Children
Many have been forced to stop paid employment in order to look after children, grow vegetables and make home products for sale in the market.
Foreign investors grumble about bureaucratic hurdles, rampant corruption. the under ing the praises of Nicaragua's radical new health svstem, setup by the Sandinista government after the ousting of the Somoza dictatorship.
Now, with 70 percent of the population living below the UN's poverty threshhold, and with 70 percent of schoolchildren mal nourished, this system has been swept aside by the right wing regime. Health care spending has been slashed in half. and nümbers of health workers cut 12 percent in an IMF scheme.
87 Nicaraguans died of cholera in the first half of 1993; and the infant mortality rate is up to 72 per 1,000 births, and rising. Vaccination schemes are collapsing, and charges have been introduced for drugs, with a single paracetamol tablet selling at 55p. The average salary is just £37 per month.
SOCIALIST OUTLOOK No, 65, 25 June 1994, Page 12 DURING the last week in May and the first week in June a major conference of solidarity with the people of occupied East Timor occurred in Manila - despite systematic attempts by the Suharto government in Indonesia and the Ramos government in the Philippines to stop it happening.
In fact the Asia Pacific Conference on East Timor blew up in the face of the Suharto regime, whose troops have occupied East Timor since 1974, turning into a major public relations disaster. The 500-strong conference became front-page news throughout Asia.
Throughout May the Indonesian government carried out a sustained campaign to pressurise the Ramos government in Manila to suppress the event. Initially it appeared that Ramos would allow the conference to go ahead, but keep out foreign guesls.
However, on May 27 a previously unknown organisation, the Philippines Indonesia Society Inc., successfully filed an injunction against the conference at Quezon City District Court.
The conference organisers immediately announced they would defy the injunction and continue with the conference: but the University of the Philippines, where the conference was due to be held, announced that because of the injunction the conference would not be able to use its facilities. However, the dean of the Faculty of Law immediately appealed against the ban in the Supreme Court.
On May 30, ten of the foreign participants held a press conference expressing their concerns over the genocide of the people of East Timor, and their determination to attend the conferIn the wake of the press conference the government announced that foreign guests would be arrested and deported.
The next day, while the Supreme Court was sitting to hear the appeal against the banning of the conference, hundreds of peopie were gathering at the University of the Philippines campus and prepared to march to the Facuity of Law where the conference was due to be held.
As rumours spread of arrest orders being issued for foreign guests, a cordon of security guards, mainly workers and political activists for Mindanao. was formed around the march.
At the head of the demonstration, in addition to prominent civil liberties lawyers, were Ronald Llamas of the socialist organisation BISIG and Tony JAMOS o pestlens Philippines boss, ex-General Ramos, failed to avert embarrassment for Indonesia Cabardo of the SANLAKAS front of mass organisations;
Cabardo is associated with the Manila branch of the Philippines Communist Party, which is leading a fight in the name of democracy and Leninism against the Maoist leadership of that organisation.
As the demonstration was about to march, the news came through that the Supreme Court had overturned the injunction but upheld the government's right to ban foreign visitors.
By this stage, many visitors from Europe, North America and Asia had already arrived and promptly participated in the opening of the conference in the Law Faculty.
On June 1, with even more foreign guests arriving, this time from Thailand, South Korea and Japan, the Ramos government announced that it had issued deportation orders against 10 foreign participants, LITO including Max Lane. Others ordered out included people from the US, Portugal, Argentina, Holland and India.
Further legal moves against the 10 have failed to get them deported, and in the end the revocation of the visas of the 10 named participants was itself revoked - another humiliation for the government and yet more publicity for the conference.
The conference was a huge success. the ham-fisted attempts by the Indonesian government to prevent it happening turned into disaster for them.
Together with the impact of John Pilger's film on Timor, Death of a Nation, the conference meant that the message about the occupation and genocide in Timor rang out loudly in many countries around the (Abridged from Green Left Weekly).