| From Unity, 17 March 2007 |
Jailed for wanting a better societyby Hermann Glaser-BaurThe 17th of March is connected to St Patrick by most people on these shores and to St Gertrud by many on the Continent. When asked about the 18th of March a majority on both sides of the waters would probably have to think twice. The old and politically important significance of the day has been forgotten; the bourgeois media are trying their best to keep it that way.Until the 1920s the 18th of March was commemorated as the Day of the Commune, because of the start of the uprising in France on 18 March 1871. 25,000 people lost their lives and more than 3,000 died in the prisons of the French ruling class after the bloody defeat of the Commune. Remembering them and the almost 14,000 revolutionaries who were sentenced to life imprisonment was a central task of the commemorations; and when the Fourth World Congress of the Communist International decided in 1922 to found the Red Solidarity movement (in some countries it was called Red Help), the 18th of March was chosen as the worldwide day of solidarity with political prisoners. Despite repeated attempts to ban it, illegalise it, and brand it as an invention by the “enemies of the state” and terrorists, the 18th of March remained a day of many huge demonstrations of solidarity with political prisoners all over the globe. Sacco and Vancetti’s lives couldn’t be saved, but others were, and the huge impact of the “Red Help” made it one of the first organisations to be banned by the German, the Italian and later the Spanish fascists. It took until the 1980s for the German Rote Hilfe to be rebuilt, and in 1996 they decided (along with Libertad, an anarchist group) to revitalise the tradition of the day of the political prisoner. Much needed it is, at a time when Guantánamo Bay is only the tip of an iceberg of jails in which people are stripped of any human rights, tortured, and murdered. In Germany, to give but one example, Christian Klar, one of the early members of the “Red Army Fraction” (often referred to as the Bader-Meinhof Group), has been imprisoned for more than twenty-four years. His request for pardon is likely to be refused by the German president because he sent a message of solidarity to this year’s Liebknecht-Luxemburg gathering in Berlin. This has been viewed by the authorities as proof that he is still an enemy of the state. Imagine: one of the leading “democracies” of the world denies a man pardon after twenty-four years in isolation and high-security prison, simply because he dared to send greetings to a gathering of 80,000 people who came to remember two working-class leaders who had been killed by elite soldiers of that very state. Klar’s case is in the centre of the Red Help publication for 18 March this year. The term “political prisoner” has been given a strange tinge here in Ireland. People on either side of the sectarian divide would view members of “their” community as prisoners of war and political prisoners, whereas those on the other side are often looked upon as gangsters. Communists have a much clearer definition: “a political prisoner is a person who is being jailed for wanting a better society and fighting for a better life for the people” (Fidel Castro, 1997). Those people need our solidarity on 18 March and beyond—worldwide. |
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