Obituary: Aristobulo Isturiz 1946 – 2021
Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! and the Revolutionary Communist Group note with sadness the passing of Venezuelan revolutionary Aristobulo Isturiz on 29 April, aged 74. ‘The professor’ Isturiz began his political activism as a teacher in the 1980s, playing a key role in Afro-descendant led struggles against neo-liberal IMF policies imposed on Venezuela. Isturiz held several important posts throughout his life. In 1992 he won the Libertador mayorship and supported the Movement for the Fifth Republic which mobilised to achieve the victory of Hugo Chavez in the 1998 presidential elections.
In 1999 Isturiz was the vice president of the Constituent National Assembly, promoting mass popular participation in the drafting and adopting of a new constitution. As education minister he oversaw Mission Robinson, Venezuela’s flagship literacy campaign launched in 2003 with support from Cuban educators. Within two years nearly 1.5 million Venezuelans had learned to read and write, leading to UNESCO declaring Venezuela an ‘illiteracy free territory’ in 2005.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, Isturiz created ‘a school in every family’ using TV and radio to support home learning during lock-downs. In recognition of his lifetime of revolutionary work, Isturiz has been posthumously awarded the First Class Order of Libertadores and Libertadoras Venezuela’s highest distinction. As an educator and a revolutionary, his contribution will light up the struggle for socialism in Venezuela for future generations. Isturiz presente!
Housing and the crisis
I have subscribed to FRFI for a year now after it was recommended by a comrade in prison. I find FRFI’s coverage of Covid-19 in the UK and Cuba most interesting. I also find the coverage of the decline and fall and betrayal of the Labour Party of great interest. I enjoy reading coverage of the struggle of comrades in prison.
I would like to see in FRFI more coverage of the housing crisis including the expanding tenant’s rights movement and the fight against homelessness and overcrowding. We need to build one million council houses per year and end the so-called ‘right-to-buy’. All land should be nationalised along with the banks and the big ten private house-building companies. At the same time, we need rent controls with rents being set at no more than 5% of net income. We should requisition all empty houses and flats to house the homeless and the overcrowded.
Finally, a more frequent FRFI is essential in the coming slump.
John Smithee
CAMBRIDGESHIRE
FRFI in Maghaberry
For the first time since the illegal occupation of Palestine, an anti-imperialist Palestinian languishes in a gaol with Irish Republican anti-imperialists.
Your paper is a beacon countering imperialism’s false narrative and for us imprisoned anti-imperialists it is a breath of fresh air. Your paper is welcomed, devoured, analysed and endlessly debated with vigour. You give a welcome class consciousness which is vital if anti-imperialism is to progress from mere sloganising.
Davy Jordan
Davy Jordan is a Republican political prisoner. The Palestinian political prisoner mentioned is Issam Hijjawi.
Send letters of support to:
Davy Jordan / Issam Hijjawi,
Roe 4 Landin,
Maghaberry Gaol,
17 Old Rd,
Lisburn BT28 2PT
Fightback against oppressive policing
The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill represents a fundamental change in the nature of policing in Britain, and a radical shift in the balance of power between the state and an increasingly disempowered population.
The British criminal justice system was forged in its repression of the most marginalised and disadvantaged groups in society, whose experience of the police was almost as an occupying paramilitary force, especially in communities and districts largely populated by ethnic minorities.
Policing by consent was usually a privilege afforded to compliant white working class and middle class communities, whilst poorer socially and racially marginalised communities were policed in an almost colonial way, evidenced by the high rates of death in police custody in those communities and the disproportionate use of stop and search powers to harass and intimidate. A huge proportion of the British prison population is composed of young men of ethnic minority origin, who were targeted and criminalised by the police at a young age and imprisoned; their lives are evidence of an institutionally racist criminal justice system and police force that, under the guise of ‘law and order’, inflicted violence, death and repression for the purpose of social control.
So-called criminal justice legislation before the current Police Bill was always focused primarily on a criminalised underclass – the other – and both Labour and Tory governments zealously empowered the state to create an apparatus of punishment and repression in an atmosphere of populist ‘law and order’ and the replacement of the welfare state with a carceral state in dealing with increasing numbers of poor and marginalised people and groups.
Significantly, the Bill extends beyond criminalising the usual scapegoated groups and now further empowers the police to criminalise political protest and dissent, and employ an apparatus of state repression against political behaviour once considered a basic human and civil right in an apparently democratic society.
In an increasing atmosphere of political repression and police authoritarianism, so-called policing by consent is now increasingly replaced by the form of brutal colonial type policing long experienced and suffered by the dispossessed and voiceless. More than ever, solidarity and identification with the struggle of that group is vital for the freedom and liberation of us all.
John Bowden
Kenmure Street shows the way!
A determined crowd gathered on Glasgow’s Kenmure Street on 13 May to prevent the racist detention and deportation of two Indian men, Lakhvir Singh and Sumit Sehdev. Both men have stayed in Scotland for over ten years but were denied visa renewals and leave to remain and the pandemic disrupted their appeals. On witnessing the immigration enforcement van parked outside, a neighbour immediately wedged himself under it and contacted others to stop the van leaving. Police Scotland was deployed en masse in an attempt to intimidate and disperse the growing crowd, with three arrests made, attacks on protesters and the removal of a car blocking the van’s only exit route. Militant youth responded with chants of ‘Racist police off our streets!’ and stood their ground. After an eight-hour stand-off, immigration enforcement and the police were forced to release the two men who were escorted to a nearby Gurdwara to the cheers of the crowd, now numbering over a thousand. FRFI supporters were present all day, holding an open mic and encouraging the militant spirit of the protest.
Tory politicians like Home Secretary Priti Patel described the crowds as a ‘mob’ defending ‘criminals’; she has since vowed Singh and Sehdev will still be deported. The SNP defended the role played by Police Scotland. To anyone present it was clear Police Scotland was actively complicit in defending this racist dawn raid by the Home Office. The people are not stupid. This victory must now be built on to confront the racist immigration system and all those who defend it!
Dominic Mulgrew
GLASGOW
Prison death no accident
The death of Winston Augustine in the punishment block in Wormwood Scrubs, having been deprived of food and medication, wasn’t a tragedy, an accident or simply neglect. It was as racist a murder as if prison officers had knelt on his neck for nine minutes.
I was in Wormwood Scrubs block in the 1990s when 27 staff members were charged with numerous assaults on prisoners. I witnessed numerous acts of brutality, abuse, racism and neglect. If you are black, Asian, gypsy, mixed race or Irish you were getting a beating and would be abused for every second that you were in the punishment block.
Several of the officers charged were imprisoned and Sir David Ramsbotham’s inspection report on the prison found ‘a destructive, uncooperative, and self-seeking attitude amongst a minority of officers that managers found difficult to combat’.
What I found was much darker. These people weren’t involved with a ‘culture’ of violence or trapped in a regime that ‘lost’ control – they were willing participants! The system is broken; we need change not just in prison but in society as a whole.
Paul Blackburn, former wrongfully convicted prisoner
Schools fail ‘zero tolerance’ test
Racism, sexism and homophobia are just a few of the prejudices that make their way around the corridors of UK education establishments. We see ‘zero tolerance’ policies paraded around and used as selling points at open days but, in reality, these policies are not enacted, they are a smoke screen.
Schools are tasked with setting up young people to be successful in the wider world. If they can’t prevent discrimination, which can reach the level of hate crime, then they are failing in that task. We call for schools to sufficiently educate their students on discrimination, and for the school system to truly enforce ‘zero tolerance’ policies.
James and Olivia
Secondary school students
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 282 June/July 2021
