From: ww@nyxfer.UUCP
Newsgroups: soc.culture.african.american
Date: 24 Dec 92 15:49 PST
Subject: Forum Targets Racism from NY to Ber
Nf-ID: #N:7w8awB15w165w@nyxfer.uucp:-1663717374:000:4329
Nf-From: nyxfer.uucp!ww    Dec 24 15:49:00 1992


Subject: Forum Targets Racism from NY to Berlin
From: nyxfer!ww (Workers World Service)


Via The NY Transfer News Service * All the News that Doesn't Fit


Meeting targets racism from New York to Berlin

by John Catalinotto
New York

On Dec. 19, a packed meeting hall at the International Action 
Center here heard a panel of speakers from around the world 
target racism "from Crown Heights to Germany." 

Though from different backgrounds and nations, the four speakers 
and the chairperson agreed that capitalism is the source of 
racism, and that the capitalists use racism to keep the working 
class divided.

Farhad Besharat, the secretary of the International Federation of
Iranian Immigrant and Refugee Councils, told of the rise in armed
racist attacks against immigrants and people of color in 
Germany--from 700 in 1991 to over 2,000 in 1992. He faulted 
German Chancellor Helmut Kohl for chasing racist votes.

That hundreds of thousands of people in Germany demonstrated 
against racist violence encouraged Besharat. He said he expected 
anti-racist support from the German working class to grow. The 
IAC audience applauded Besharat's call for "armed self-defense" 
of immigrant communities.

Besharat pointed out that there are really 25 million unemployed 
in Europe. "Workers fear having no job. People are angry, and for
good reasons. This anger," said Besharat, "must be directed 
toward the source of the problem: capitalism. Even if all the 
Turks are thrown out of Germany, Daimler-Benz will still lay 
off."

Monica Moorehead of the Movement for a Peoples Assembly and an 
organizer for the Job is a Right National Campaign brought this 
same issue back to the United States.

Despite all the fanfare from President-elect Bill Clinton's 
economic summit, said Moorehead, "there was another summit--the 
boardrooms of IBM and GM--where there was no discussion on saving
jobs." Only through the media did workers find out that GM was 
laying off 38,000 workers and IBM--a global, non-union 
corporation--25,000.

"We need to build a national A Job Is a Right Campaign. Racism 
stands in the way of unity. We have to show the link between 
fighting for jobs and fighting against racism," said Moorehead.

Ruben Quiroz, director of the Northern Manhattan Coalition for 
Immigrant Rights, explained how since the Carter presidency the 
world has undergone a redistribution of wealth. Countries send 
people abroad instead of commodities. "Immigrants are the most 
exploited and least protected.

"The laws have created two kinds of labor force. One kind have 
paper rights but no real rights. One kind has no rights at all. 
Immigrants are scapegoated for unemployment, for drugs, for 
crime, for AIDS. We cannot accept that. The answer lies in the 
need to destroy capitalism and build socialism."

John Black, retired vice president of the National Union of 
Health and Hospital Workers, was also a member of the anti-Nazi 
youth movement in Nazi Germany. Black has been jailed for 
organizing in both countries.

Black showed how it was the intense class war in Germany after 
World War I that led big capital to turn to Hitler's fascists in 
1933 in order to crush the workers' movement. He contrasted that 
to the situation today. He contrasted the 14 year history of 
intense class struggle in 1933 with today's events. What is 
threatened now in Germany, he said, is "not the rise of fascism 
but vicious racism against foreigners.

"In 1987 the only crime in the socialist German Democratic 
Republic that could be punished by death was the advocacy of 
racism," said Black. "The success of world capitalism in 
strangling the GDR is what reopened the door to racism."

Rachel Duell of the Jersey City All Peoples Congress chaired the 
meeting. Most of Duell's extended family was killed by the Nazis 
in concentration camps. She expressed solidarity with the Black 
people in Crown Heights in Brooklyn and with the Palestinian 
people.

(Copyright Workers World Service: Permission to reprint granted if
source is cited. For more info contact Workers World, 46 W. 21
St., New York, NY 10010; email: ww%nyxfer@igc.apc.org; "workers"
on PeaceNet; on Internet: "workers@mcimail.com".)
 

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