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Int’l Call Out: British CEO’s Actions Threaten Union Rights in Lebanon

Employees at the Lebanese branches of the supermarket chain Spinneys are being fired from work, physically assaulted, and psychologically terrorized for daring to set up a legally sanctioned independent union, the first such union in Lebanon in decades.

Spinneys British CEO Michael Wright, in cahoots with Lebanon’s powerful elites, has unleashed a vicious campaign to stop the newly-formed union from operating in a safe and conducive environment. The latest escalation by management comes ahead of the union's first general election later this month. Wright and the Spinneys management are also relentlessly trying to silence activists, journalists and anyone else supporting the workers.

Activists are calling on all international media outlets, labour unions, and human rights activists to draw attention to the plight of the workers and to their resilient struggle for their right to dignified work and fair compensation in light of their contribution to the company’s growth and success. The actions of the company are a clear violation of international labour law and basic rights of workers.

Spinneys must not be allowed to persist in its extra-legal bullying campaign with impunity. Exposing the company’s practices on the world stage is crucial to protecting the workers from further harm. Lebanon has yet to ratify the International Labour Organization (ILO) Convention no. 87 that guarantees the freedom of association and the right to union organizing. Pushing for its ratification is one step towards building a strong and vibrant union movement in the country.

Last August, the ILO issued a strongly-worded letter protesting the company’s appalling treatment of its employees. But the letter appears to have fallen on deaf ears. The company has recently escalated its campaign of intimidation ahead of the union’s first general elections scheduled for November 18, 2012. To show the workers they are not alone, a solidarity rally will be held in front of one of the company’s branches in Beirut’s Achrafiyeh neighbourhood next Monday November 12, 2012 at 5 pm.

To read more about the struggle of Spinneys workers and their working conditions, check:

http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/7799/unionizing-in-lebanon_the-struggle-is-elsewhere

Media Contact:

Friends of Spinneys Workers

Email: dianakallas@gmail.com

Tel: (+961) 76 124244

Women in Revolutionary Syria: Fighting for the Right to have Rights

A rose in the Desert, the title Vogue America’s Joan Juliet Buck chose for an article on Asmaa Al Assad, Syria’s first lady. So embarrassed was the magazine from the shower of criticism it received that it’s no longer in their archives. In a country of shadows, she says, Asma Al Assad runs her household democratically. It was no standalone phenomenon; western press positioned Arab first ladies (Queen Rania of Jordan, and Sheikha Moza of Qatar) as important public figures presented as models of Arab womanhood. Any superficial analysis of both western and local regime media reveal the systematic institutionalization of the First lady- rendering it a site of ideological contestation of public women and their political roles, constructing boundaries of empowerment and containment. Buck quotes Asma Al Assad stressing the importance of the Syrian youth engaging in “active citizenship”, and the role her NGO’s played in building that culture. Civil society was limited to islamicized forms of charity organizations, going to the rural and marginalized areas where Asma takes a photo standing next to hungry children with smiles. This discourse legitimated the brutal dictator and his regime as one that is modernizing, western, and progressive- chique, witty, and English speaking. After the eruption of the Syrian revolution in the southern governorate of Daraa in March 2011, locals took to the streets after 14 children were arrested and tortured for writing on the walls of their schools the slogan of the popular uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt: "The people want the downfall of the regime."They wrote the graffiti because their school teacher was arrested for expressing her wish that the revolution would start in Syria.   Many have rushed to make statements on the role of women in the revolution. Accounts range between the rosy and the lame, the former claiming that there is a revolution within the revolution, a feminist emancipatory one, the latter complaining that in liberated Syrian cities cadres of the self administration authority created by local residents are of a predominantly male character. Such simplifying statements depend on one of the most dominant binary oppositions through which Arab society is perceived and understood; the public/private divide. Two realms that are dichotomized along mutually exclusive gender divides. It is entirely unrealistic to deny the gendered nature of space, but accounting for the complexity beyond the public/private binary is absolutely necessary to give justice to revolutionary women in Syria. Women from all walks of life have joined the revolution, the actress, the lawyer, the doctor, the engineer, the artist, the filmmaker, the novelist, the psychoanalyst, the intellectual, the mother, and the daughter. Razan  Zaitouneh, a human rights lawyer who formed what is right now called the Local Coordination Committees (LCC), archiving regime violations against citizens and disseminating the most dependable information to the world. She is now in hiding in Syria, having been accused of being a foreign agent. In search for her, security forces detained her husband and brother-in-law for weeks.  Some women have become iconic to revolutionaries, such as Muntaha Sultan al-Atrash, a human rights activist and grand-daughter of the Syrian hero Sultan Basha al-Atrash, a commander of the Syrian revolt against the French between 1925 and 1927, is added, who was amongst the first to publicly proclaim that the regime needs to be toppled. Marwa Ghamyan, a young woman who helped organize one of the first protests in the city of Damascus, long before the city joined the revolution in most of its quarters. It was symbolic in its strength precisely because Damascus was yet to become revolutionary. She was arrested and detained several times, and now lives in exile.   Thwaiba Kanafani, an engineer by training, left her family in Canada, and joined the Free Syrian Army to help in tactical and strategic plans of strikes. Lubna al Merhi, speaking as an Alawite, the sect of Assad, was active in the revolution from day one until an arrest warrant was issued in her name and she fled to Turkey- in an escape arranged by the FSA. After appearing in a televised interview, her mother was arrested pressuring her to return to Syria.    Hanadi Zahlouta poet, and an engineer, was arbitrarily detained, attacked by regime lawyers in court both physically and verbally. Hanadi was charged with violating three articles from the Syrian penal code: establishing an organization that aims to change the social and economical entity of the state, weakening the national sentiment, and awakening sectarian and ethnic tension, and spreading false news that weaken the soul of the nation. She was sentenced for fifteen years of jail, without a fair trial. How is one to work for women rights, engage in activism that has feminist politics and self organization at its heart while it is presumed to be a crime to “establish an organization that aims to change the social and economic entity of the state”? The names of women are numerous, and too many to account for in any article. To speak of a public space defined by the exclusion of women in Syria is misleading. The primary exclusion by which public space is characterized is the exclusion of the political. Women in revolutionary Syria are not excluded from the plurality that acts. Bodies congregated, moved, and spoke together as they laid claim to a certain space as public; a space which is in no way given, but disputed and fought over when crowds are gathering. Women angered, indignant, and rising up, are resisting in politics saturated by power relations, in a process that includes and legitimates as well as effaces and excludes. When the available political and organizational bodies that have claimed to fight for women’s rights are co-opted by the regime, it is essential that they attempt to re-situate their rage and destitution in the context of an ongoing social movement. Women in Syria are fighting for their right to have rights, a right that comes into being when exercised. In demonstrations that often follow facts of public mourning, where crowds of mourners became the target of military destruction, we can see how the existing public space is seized by those who have no existing right to gather there collectively, and whose lives are exposed to violence and death in the course of gathering as they do. Traditionally, funeral processions are exclusively male. After the revolution, they often turn into anti-regime demonstrations where women are present, exercising a right that is being actively contested and destroyed by military force, and which in resistance to force, articulates its persistence and its right to persistence in an alliance that enacts the social order it seeks to bring out. It is in this context that the role of women in Syria is particularly revolutionary- as even demonstrations do not just appear in a vacuum, they also seize upon an already established space permeated by existing power- seeking to sever and disrupt existing norms that dictate right to public space. It is not a rarity to hear that many women in Syria have split with their own families and neighborhoods after the revolution. Yara Nseir, a young woman from the Christian quarters of the old city in Damascus, was arrested while handing out revolutionary pamphlets against the regime in her neighborhood.  Her neighbors caught her, detained her in their house and called upon security forces to arrest her. She was kept in for a month and a half, after which she was released and fled to Cairo to join the Syrian National Council’s media office. The importance of this particular example is that women revolutionaries are “defecting” for ideological/ political reasons, and joining a network where their primary affiliation is a sense of comradeship rather than the comfort of kin. Women were outside politics and power and are now living out a specific form of political destitution, one that is in a revolutionary process of fighting for a democratic space that allows them to confront the other as a political opponent. They are part of the acting plurality, fighting for the right to have rights, those rights that predate and precede any political institution that might codify or seek to guarantee that right. Clearly, the paradigm of politically castrated activism that Asma al Assad, with much help from American and French PR campaigns, attempted to disseminate failed to serve as a role model for Syrian Women. Nonetheless, it would be rather romantic to claim that Syrian women right now are experiencing a feminist revolution within the revolution. In a revolutionary process, they are discursively changing every paradigm in question, fighting multiple fronts; with the husband, the brother, and the dictator, laying claim to a public space as their own, in tandem with a social revolution asserting a popular will against the regime. Written by Sara

My Name Is Bashar al-Assad, and Children like to play with me

..Free Cartoonist Akram RUSLAN

The Criminal Assad regime has arrested and detained a journalist and cartoonist whose work was highly critical of the regime, and whose artwork has been published throughout the ongoing Syrian Intifada

AkramRuslan, was arrested on October 2ed when Assad intelligence seized him from his office at the newspaper Al-Fidaa in Hama

His detention has been confirmed by the Syrian Journalists Association and a number of posts on Facebook, but his exact whereabouts or the situation he is currently facing are unknown

Ruslan, whose work has been published on numerous pages on Facebook among other locations, has been producing work criticizing the Criminal government, the Intifada and the state media over the past year

His latest cartoon (top) depicted dictator Bashar al-Assad surrounded by flames, holding a sign declaring “Al Assad or we burn the country.”

The DCMF- Doha Center for Media Freedom- issued a statement urging the Syrian authorities to release the cartoonist

“The DCMF strongly condemns the detention of the cartoonist, Akram Ruslan, who is currently being held by the Syrian authorities for exercising his right to freedom of expression. The centre urges the Syrian authorities to release Rslan immediately and to put an end to the ongoing targeting of journalists and critics of the Assad regime. The government must do more to ensure that members of the media are protected and do not face intimidation, harassment or detention as a result of carrying out their work

DCMF has expressed solidarity with Syrian journalists who are working in some of the most difficult and dangerous conditions anywhere in the world at the moment, and we urge the government to ensure that Akram Rslan and any other journalists under detention are released immediately and face no further persecution”

Earlier on August 25, 2011, Ali Ferzat, the 60-year-old famous cartoonist was dragged and beaten by three masked men, who then also broke his hands

It was only a matter of time before Ruslan was arrested as he continued tocriticize the regime and its oppression, going so far as to attack the President himself
Ruslan did not hide and he remained in his home and at his job in the Hama-based Fedaa newspaper. The regime eventually lost its patience with him and arrested him from his workplace on Monday, October 2, 2012. Since then, there has been no information about him

Akram Rslan, born in 1974 in Soran, Hama, (mid-east Syria) is an 1996 literature graduate. He is one of the many, many members of our revolution who prefer to struggle away from the media and the limelight, and whom we know little about until they get arrested or martyred. Freedom for the artist Akram Ruslan

See selection of Rulan's work

Criminal Syrian Regime Prevents Syrians From Entering Syria

..An Eyewitness Story

Since we started our journey from Beirut at 4:30 in the afternoon we were told that the road is packed 

Syrian guy who works with me called me from his Syrian phone and told me that the Lebanese are not cooperating with them and they closed the doors of the frontiers office and not stamping any documents for any one

After a while he calls to tell me that he’s at the Syrian borders and the security there are asking them to buy an exit visa and go back to Lebanon and they are treating people aggressively and that he saw a man being hit by the back of the gun. He called for a third time saying that he paid 1500 SYP to pass

We reached the Lebanese boarders and there were lots of people coming in from Syria. I asked the soldier at the checkpoint he said it’s been like this since very early in the morning as lots of people are coming back from the Syrian borders and specially from those cities like Idlib, Homs, Aleppo and so on

In the middle of the nomansland, the line of cars started and we saw people walking back in Lebanon’s direction. It was when we decided to walk to the Duty Free to use the toilet. We asked some of the people going back about their story, they said they are from Idlib and they were denied entry and are forced to go back and that they were at the borders since 6 in the morning. Vans packed with family were returning same direction as well and children are crying

Near the duty free, there was a young soldier with a gun and he asked us where are you going so I tld him to the bathroom and I asked him what’s going on here, he said we are ordered to check severely as there are new about Sa’ad Al Hariri smuggling terrorists and weapons to Syria and he said with his accent (بدي قلك مع انه ما لازم قلك) we were informed that there are 2000 armed men in Anjar! I asked him why Syrians are going back to Lebanon, he said those people just remembered they love their countries and they are coming to make troubles

We went to stamp our papers and I asked the officer at the counter what is happening, he said it’s Wa’afeh and there are lots of people and we are working maximum capacity. I asked him is it true you’re asking people to go back; he said no it’s a lie! Then another one of higher rank said the other frontiers are closed (north) that’s why there is so many people

We waited for our driver to get out his care around 2 hours and he finally came and we moved to the customs checkpoint but before we reached it there was a huge line of cars waiting at a checkpoint with security armed men stopping car by car and checking papers and asking some people to return back to Lebanon as simple as this. I came down of the car as our driver went to stamp the car papers and started smoking a cigarette and was watching what’s happening. One of the armed men came to us and he asked for alight. And I asked him why people are returning he said only the people who are not supposed to come this way, like the northern regions, they should go from the other borders points as it’s safer for them, I asked him, are they opened? He said yes

A bunch of poor guys were forced to wait at the side of the road I sneaked and talked to them, they said they are from northern regions and they are asked to wait and denied entry to Syria. A guy from Daraa said we are letting us in as well as people from Sweida

A full bus from Idlib just returned to Lebanon in from of our eys! It was so sad

All buses and vans are checked one by one and ID’s are separated and people are walking either back or onwards depending on their ID

   

From Russia with BLOOD

From Russia with BLOOD

free Razan