Weekly Worker 565 Thursday February 24 2005

Free Giuliana

Italian communist journalist Giuliana Sgrena was kidnapped in Baghdad on February 4 and has been seen pleading for her life and demanding an end to the occupation on a video delivered to Associated Press in Iraq.

Like many other victims of the islamist resistance comrade Sgrena was taken simply because she is a westerner and therefore considered fair game by her kidnappers, Mujahedin Without Borders.

Comrade Sgrena writes for Il Manifesto, a paper sympathetic to the Communist Refound-ation Party (Rifondazione Comunista). Her writing is characterised by trenchant, partisan reporting against the imperialist occupation of Iraq. This can be read at the paper’s website (www.ilmanifesto.it).

The foreign/peace department of Rifon-dazione Comunista has issued an international appeal calling for her immediate release and is requesting signatories, to be emailed to alfio.nicotra@rifondazione.it, with a copy to rifondazione@fsmail.net.

It is essential that in Britain the Stop the War Coalition in particular acts urgently in solidarity with this militant working class opponent of the occupation. At the time of her kidnapping she had been interviewing families who had been forced to flee the US bombing of Fallujah.

Giuliana has been visiting and reporting from Iraq for many years, where she has documented the suffering of its people, caused first by the imperialist embargo, and later by war and invasion. Il Manifesto campaigned consistently against the war and provides a working class voice against the occupation.

Rifondazione is also calling for the release of Florence Aubenas, a journalist working for the French social democratic newspaper Libération, who disappeared in January in similar circumstances.
Alan Fox

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