Lalit

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By Rajni Lallah January 28, 2017 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal reposted from Pambazuka News — The last general election in December 2014 brought an unexpected landslide victory for the Peoples’ Alliance of the Mauritian Socialist Movement (MSM) – Mauritian Social Democratic Party (PMSD) - Liberating Party (ML, split from the Mauritian Militant Movement), cobbled together in haste just before the Labour Party Prime Minister Navin Ramgoolam dissolved parliament in preparation for the general elections. Since then, in the space of 18 months, no less than three finance ministers in turn have been appointed, removed and replaced by the new Prime Minister Aneerood Jugnauth. The new government in the space of two years has become more and more unpopular as its inability to come up with the “economic miracle” it pledged to bring during the 2014 electoral campaign becomes clear. The 86-year-old Aneerood Jugnauth is due to retire as Prime Minister and to be replaced by another minister, his son, who is the leader of the MSM, the largest party in the Alliance. This situation has generated conflict between the two men as leaders, as father and son, between clans in the MSM organised around the two leaders, and between different parties within the government Alliance.
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By Lindsey Collen

July 20, 2012 -- Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal -- Victories, even partial, are rare in these times. The revolutionary socialist party LALIT ("Lalit" means "struggle" in Kreol) would like to share with you an important development in the class struggle and struggle for women’s emancipation in Mauritius. LALIT is the only political party in Mauritius that has, over the decades, campaigned for abortion decriminalisation, and finally last month parliament passed a new abortion law to replace the 1838 total ban on any abortion. Everyone in the country knows that this is a LALIT struggle, as our stand on abortion decriminalisation had often been used “against” us. So, it is like getting accumulated “support”.

This victory comes less than a year after another victory accredited to LALIT: the introduction into schools of the mother tongues, Kreol and Bhojpuri, for the very first time in 2012.

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By Lalit de Klas

June 2011 – Lalit [the revolutionary socialist party in Mauritius] sees the natural universe, whether it be the air above us, the sea around us or the Earth we walk upon, and all that lives upon it, and even outer space, as being our collective heritage as human beings. We are part of it, and also the guardians of it. This natural universe, our Mother Earth, is now endangered.

Our planet is already suffering irreversible damage, damage so serious as to threaten the very existence of the totality of human civilisation in all its varied forms. We humans have the minds to know this.

The threat is posed by our own human-made forms of agricultural and industrial “development”. This is serious because it is our way of survival that has become this destructiveness.

The main damage has been done in the past 250 years. Increasingly serious damage is being done. And yet most of us are oblivious to it, and once we know, we are “helpless”. We sit and watch a potential meltdown of a nuclear plant in Japan, as the capitalists who run it admit their own helplessness.

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US warplanes take off from Diego Garcia.

[Read the Mauritian socialists' open letter to Greenpeace -- `Don't help cover up colonialism's crimes on Diego Garcia' HERE, warning the organisation that it is being manipulated by the US and British governments. This has now been confirmed by Wikileaks.]

By Clency Lebrasse

December 17, 2010 -- Rabble.ca -- Six months ago, I wrote a piece for rabble.ca describing the appalling treatment of the people of the Chagos Islands [which includes Diego Garcia] in the Indian Ocean by the British government.

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Diego Garcia from a satellite. The US base in visible in the top left of the atoll. Photo from NASA.

By Ram Seegobin, Lalit de Klas

February 8, 2010

Dear leaders of Greenpeace [UK],

We understand that your organisation has taken a position in favour of the British government’s outrageous plan to create a “marine park” on territory which is not its own, thus tricking ill-informed people into supporting the British state on rather vague grounds of “the environment”, while they are in fact banishing the people who lived there and flaunting the Charter of the United Nations.

Below Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal publishes a range of statements from left parties and groups around the world. More will be added as they come to hand.

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Respect's George Galloway on January 8, 2009, addresses a London meeting organised by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign

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December 27 demonstration in Bethlehem against the massacre in Gaza (Photo: Ghassan Bannoura-IMEMC)

By the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions National Committee

Occupied Ramallah, Palestine -- December 27, 2008 -- Today, the Israeli occupation army committed a new massacre in Gaza, causing the death and injury of hundreds of Palestinian civilians [latest reports place the death toll at more than 200], including a yet unknown number of schoolchildren who were headed home from school when the first Israeli military strikes started. This latest bloodbath, although far more ruthless than all its predecessors, is not Israel's first. It culminates months of an Israeli siege of Gaza that should be widely condemned and prosecuted as an act of genocide against the 1.5 million Palestinians in the occupied coastal strip.

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US-occupied Diego Garcia

By Lindsey Collen, Lalit (Mauritius)

October 26, 2008 -- Five separate judgments were handed down in the House of Lords’ October 22 judgment on the appeal of the British government against the Chagossians’ right of abode on Diego Garcia. Lords Hoffman, Rodger of Earlsferry and Carswell found against the Chagossians’ right of abode, while Lords Bingham of Cornhill and Mance found in favour. In this article, we’ll summarise the arguments the judges relied upon and also briefly comment on the numerous mentions of Lalit in the judgment, before moving on to the question of Diego Garcia in more political terms; the illegal military occupation of Diego Garcia and the Chagos islands by the British and US, which is the reason for the horrendous banishment of the Chagossians from their home islands is an eminently political problem.

By Lalit de Klas

July 16, 2008 -- According to attorney-at-law Robin Mardemootoo, who represented the Chagos Refugee Group at the House of Lords Judicial Committee, which acts as the ultimate court of appeal in London, last week, the Mauritian revolutionary organisation Lalit was referred to during one hour of pleadings by the UK government legal representative Jonathan Crow, QC. There are not official transcripts of this kind of hearing.

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