KARACHI MEET

South Asian TUs To Confront Imperialism

 Suneet Chopra

NEARLY 170 trade union leaders and NGO activists from Pakistan, Sri Lanka and India (including AIAWU joint secretary Sunnet Chopra, CITU secretary Abdul Gafoor, and CITU women’s leader Panchadi Roja) met at Karachi on September 1-2 at a Labour for Peace conference. The event was organised by CEA of New Delhi and PILER by Pakistan. They discussed the important problems facing them, their origin and the solutions that needed to be addressed jointly.

The conference discussed and passed a Karachi Declaration whose significant features are as below. It pinpointed the role of international arm-twisting by imperialist powers now working in collaboration with multinationals to plunder South Asia’s resources, increasing unemployment and attacking the home markets, while the ruling classes of these countries, instead of defending the people, are removing all forms of protection from them. They have opened up their markets, privatised the public sector, lowered tariffs drastically, ended subsidies and dismantled the structures of state support for the public distribution system, public health and public education. This has affected the livelihood of over 100 million people in the region.

 To cope with this, the Declaration calls for starting a process of “demilitarisation and move towards global and regional denuclearisation and elimination of foreign military bases and weapons of mass destruction and the arms race, and ensuring that no such bases are allowed to be set up in future in South Asia.”

Further, it calls for “reduction of defence budgets in orders to minimise the risks of armed conflicts and wars, and promote a sense of security and mutual confidence.” It noted how defence budgets had little to do with actual tensions prevailing between states in our region and more with the interests of global arms corporations that keep tensions alive between states to profit from. To strengthen this resolve, the Declaration asked that “imperialist debts whose principal has been returned many times over” must “be considered fully paid back.”

Mincing no words, it characterised the WTO’s prescriptions as “a subtle and pervasive form of recolonisation” and called for a rejection of the public sector’s privatisation and disinvestment. It proposed initiating agrarian reforms and rejected the option of both contract and corporate farming while calling for cooperative farming. It also demanded that a proper legal framework be evolved to ensure the people’s “rights of custodianship of natural resources” like water, forest and land.

The Declaration called for the governments in the region “to withdraw all anti-trade union laws and anti-worker laws and administrative measures” and to “mobilise labour against all hatred, prejudices and divisions based upon ethnicity, race, caste, religion or national chauvinism.” This mobilisation envisages a coalition of Left and democratic political parties, trade unions and NGOs “to ensure the free political participation of workers and peasants and all the people, to determine their destiny.”

The conference also discussed the movement of labour, now under attack from anti-labour immigration laws being passed and strengthened by the advanced capitalist countries and appalling condition under which “guest labour” works in a wide range of countries from West Asia to Europe, Canada and Australia. It pressed for “the right of people to move freely across the world and the region to earn livelihood” through a system of non-discriminatory work permits. The trade unionists further addressed the issues of child labour, gender discrimination, oppression of immigrant labour and the increasing casualisation of labour.

The conference revealed a set of common problems imposed on the whole of South Asia by the WTO and imperialism. The question of Kashmir, far from being uppermost in the minds of the Pakistan people, scores low in priority, coming after issues like jobs, trade and free movement between India and Pakistan. Only a few members of parliament raised the issue during the conference.

The delegates (including two from BMS) passed the Karachi Declaration unanimously. The declaration envisages expanding the preparatory committee of the South Asia Labour Forum formed at Kathmandu, but has also mooted a South Asia Labour Commission of 4 or 5 eminent persons, especially jurists, to ensure the implementation of ILO and UN conventions apart from national labour laws.

The conference was a historic coming together of organisers of the working class at a time when it is under attack from the ruling classes in the subcontinent as a whole. It was a timely coming together and will, one hopes, lead to effective resistance to the inroads of imperialism, the attack of the ruling classes and the division among the workers themselves.

The conference also raised the cross border problems of fishermen. Significantly, the Pakistan government announced the release of 254 Indian fishermen during the conference itself, the timing reflecting the importance Pakistan gave to this regional meet on its territory.