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Pakistanis join anti-capitalist protests
The Australian - October 29, 2011
The group, born out of the country's previously fractured leftist parties, has formed an Occupy Pakistan Facebook page exhorting Pakistanis to support the global movement by "holding meetings in your homes to discuss Occupy Wall Street".
Rally organisers conceded that protest numbers in Islamabad, Lahore, Karachi and Hyderabad were small, with a few hundred people turning up at each event bearing "Down with Capitalism" placards and calling for an end to the CIA drone campaign in the tribal areas.
But Nisar Shah, Pakistan Labour Party secretary-general and co-ordinator of the newly formed Anti-Capitalist Committee, told The Weekend Australian he expected protest numbers to grow as millions of Pakistanis unhappy with the government's privatisation program discovered their political voice.
Pakistan's major cities have been gripped in recent months by popular protests against rising electricity bills, frequent power cuts and mass worker lay-offs as a result of the privatisation of national corporations such as Pakistan Telecommunications.
"We are the 99 per cent. We are against the capitalist system that has failed to deliver justice to the people," women's rights activist Farzana Bari told Occupy Islamabad demonstrators on Wednesday before the group marched to the World Bank premises.
Demonstrations on Wall Street, which began earlier this month to protest at the concentration of wealth in the hands of 1 per cent of Americans, have spread to more than 80 countries.
In London, the senior priest who welcomed anti-capitalist demonstrators to camp outside St Paul's Cathedral has resigned, saying he fears moves to evict the protesters could end in violence.
Other senior clergy and politicians have urged the campers to leave peacefully, as the cathedral announced it would reopen yesterday after a week-long closure triggered by demonstrators' tents.
Canon Chancellor Giles Fraser told The Guardian newspaper that he had resigned because he believed cathedral officials had "set on a course of action that could mean there will be violence in the name of the church".
In South Africa, more than 2000 people marched yesterday through Johannesburg to demand jobs and a greater share of South Africa's riches, led by the embattled youth leader of the ruling African National Congress.
Protesters were brought in from around the country to support the Youth League leader Julius Malema, who accuses his party's government of not doing enough to create jobs and fight poverty in a country with 25.7 per cent unemployment.
The Occupy Pakistan movement had given leftist parties a forum from which to regroup and regain a political voice drowned out in recent years by the more organised conservative Islamic lobby, Mr Shah said.
"We are not against American people but American imperialistic policies whereas most religious parties and fundamentalist groups are against America," he said.
"Here in Pakistan, we are also facing the effects of imperialism and global capitalism in the shape of privatisation and globalisation.
"We are talking with our American comrades, who are showing solidarity with us. It's very hopeful for them that in Pakistan, which is the hub of imperialist policies – especially in the context of the Afghan war, there is this movement."
National Students Federation Punjab general secretary Alia Amirali said the Occupy Wall Street movement was a natural fit not only for Pakistan's leftist parties but across the broader population who were increasingly resentful of US interference.
"Occupy Wall Street is opposing the very system that America tries to impose all over the world and that's why it's seen as an ally."
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