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Feb 11, 2005 Mumia action Statement The Global Women's Strike has endorsed and is joining this Action to demand justice for Mumia, thus upholding his and everyone’s right to a fair trial, and for the evidence finally to be heard and win his release. March 8 – International Women’s Day – is coming up soon, when women in the GWS network take action in over 60 countries calling for the end of military budgets. Mumia is one outstanding person calling with the Strike for governments to Invest in Caring Not Killing. He has consistently opposed the draining of communities to pay for war, the cuts in welfare, health, education, and other community resources, even veterans’ services, that are criminalizing thousands, putting more and moreof us, particularly if we are people of color, unjustly behind bars, creating a poverty draft while billions are poured into our killing people of color in another country. In defending Mumia and exposing the racism which has kept him inside for so many years, we are defending ourselves as women, particularly women of color, and our children, who not only pay the highest price for cuts and war, but who are the backbone of movements to defend and change our communities and our world. [And talk about women in defense movements - we must recognize Lynn Stewart today who was falsely convicted yesterday of aiding and abetting terrorism. We take her conviction as an intimidation of any of us who defends others of us targeted by the administration.] NB Mumia is one of the few theoreticians of the movement for change who recognizes women’s contribution. His message to the 5th Global Women’s Strike in 2004 reads: "Fighting for payment for housework, for clean safe water resources, for housing, education, gender justice, and peace. In a world where war is now our norm, the Global Women's Strike is part of the vast throng against war and occupation. Not only in Iraq, but in Palestine, in Colombia, in the Congo and in Kashmir. Their organizing slogan, which unites strikers from a broad array of struggles, is deceptively simple: ‘Invest in Caring not Killing’. Hmm, what a concept. From Death Row this is Mumia Abu-Jamal." We noticed too that the majority of the local committee that put on this event are women, especially as time went on. It is always women who pick up the pieces when people are unjustly imprisoned – doing not only the relentless campaigning work to get them out, but also the day-to-day work of keeping them alive while they are in prison, and keeping together the families and communities they leave behind. Selma James, international coordinator of the GWS recently visited Mumia in prison and whose impressions of that visit are in the press packet. But in 1985 – not long after Mumia was put on death row - Selma wrote: While it is public knowledge that Black people, and particularly young Black men, are regularly harassed, falsely arrested and beaten by the police, there is rarely a mention of the women – mothers and sisters, wives and lovers – who go back and forth to courts and prisons, who organize defense committees and attend meetings, sometimes on winter nights after long days cleaning hospitals, or who deliver to prison cells along with home cooking and cigarettes (and at times unwelcome words of advice), the laundered shirts so that the accused, - son, brother, husband or lover – can appear before his persecutors dressed in the community’s care and support.” This demonstration today is another way we are letting his persecutors know that Mumia is wrapped in the community’s care and support, and that we call for a new trial, a fair hearing, abolition of the death penalty, and the release of our brother Mumia Abu-Jamal. Mumia Abu-Jamal, Ona Move!
Greetings to the Global Women's Strike 2005 (Copyright
2005 Mumia Abu-Jamal) Mumia Abu Jamal : Doing the movement's work from inside women from the UK visiting Mumia in prison, 11 February 2005 Mumia's message for March 20, 2004 "End Occupations!" "What Women Want" Mumia Abu-Jamal, speaking from death row in support of the Strike, 26 Feb 2004 |