In late January the students welcomed Lawrence Mikesh to hear about Róger Calero and his fight against exclusion from the United States. Stefan Karlsson wrote a letter to the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) on behalf of the group, in which he stated, "We wanted to let you know that we support Mr. Calero, and that we protest against the highly unfair treatment that he has received."

On February 1 Mikesh participated in a march of 100 people in the town of Filipstad. The action protested the deportation of a family that had immigrated from Chechnya. At the rally afterwards he spoke about the Calero campaign. A local newspaper mentioned his remarks in its coverage of the protest.

Mikesh was a guest on a student radio talk show in Gothenburg and spoke at public meetings there and in Stockholm. Ida Sundén, one of the young fighters from Hagfors, shared the speakers platform at the Gothenburg meeting.

Together with other supporters of the defense campaign in Sweden, Mikesh also staffed campaign tables at college campuses and high schools, meeting a lot of interest in the defense effort. Many stayed for extended discussions about the fightback against attacks on the rights of immigrants and workers in different countries.

Workers in one Stockholm meatpacking plant, most of whom were immigrants, were ready to sign the petition. A couple said that the German government is also conducting sweeping expulsions of immigrants. Workers from Yugoslavia told about relatives living in Germany threatened with deportation.

Following Mikesh’s visit supporters signed up people at demonstrations on February 14 against the war in Iraq. The actions drew 35,000 people in Stockholm and 25,000 in Gothenburg. One of those who signed was Medhi Ghezali, who is campaigning to get the Swedish government to demand his son’s release from the U.S. concentration camp at the Guantánamo Naval Base in Cuba. A Swedish citizen, he has been held at the camp for more than year.
 

The relatives were here to attend the Saville Inquiry on the massacre that is under way in Westminster. Mikesh sat through part of the testimony of one officer who had commanded a regular army unit in the area.

Over lunch Mikesh met Jean Hegarty, whose brother Kevin McElhinney was one of the victims. In a room with a video link set up for the relatives, he met others, including Linda Roddy, whose brother William Nash had been killed. In a previous inquiry, she said, their loved ones were labelled gunmen and nail bombers; one of the relatives’ aims is to clear the names of the unarmed civil rights fighters.

Once the truth of the events is known the relatives want to establish where the responsibility for the killings lay, said Roddy.

Mikesh spoke about the Calero defense campaign, and extended solidarity to the relatives involved in the fight.
 

"No," replied Mikesh. " I’ve just come from London and Stockholm, and found that what Calero faces is a familiar story for immigrant workers around the world."

The worker smiled in recognition and replied with one word in English: "capitalism."

The 10 participants included workers from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Zimbabwe. The group had been formed out of demonstrations two years ago that protested the murder of a Kurdish asylum-seeker on the Sighthill housing estate in Glasgow.

Mohammed Asif said that there are some 8,500 people in Glasgow who are seeking asylum. Last year tens of thousands of people came to the United Kingdom seeking work and residency. Most are denied the right to legally work and are expected to sustain themselves on miserly weekly state benefits. At any given moment up to 150 are being held at a jail in Dungavel, south of Glasgow, awaiting deportation.

The day after the action group meeting, Mikesh travelled 60 miles south of Edinburgh to the Barrie Knitwear plant at Hawick. Workers there had staged two strikes at the end of last year to protest the company’s attacks on their conditions.

Several workers stopped to talk with Mikesh outside the plant after he was introduced by Militant sellers. Later he met union steward Rob Readhead, who endorsed the campaign and said that he would circulate the brochure and petition round the plant.

Back in Glasgow that evening, Mikesh spoke with members of the Volunteer Tom Williams Republican Flute Band. The band plays at marches in Ireland and Scotland in support of the fight to force British withdrawal from the north and for a united Ireland.

"What are Calero’s chances?" asked band member Paul Steele.

"All we can do is try to make the immigration authorities pay the maximum price," said Mikesh.

The flute band members are protesting the banning of a January 25 Bloody Sunday march in Wishaw, a town near Glasgow. The action would have commemorated the massacre of 1972.

One participant in the discussion described how the Irish in Scotland are still given the derogatory name of "tattie (potato) pickers." Many Irish were forced to emigrate to Scotland some 160 years ago after the potato famine, to find the only work open to them was potato picking.

Kelly Phinn endorsed the Calero campaign on behalf of the band. She suggested that supporters return to the bar where the band regularly plays and put up a table and display to win further support.
 

During his stay in Reykjavík Mikesh got the opportunity to visit three local high schools. At lunch breaks, he briefly recounted the facts of the case. Students listened carefully, and afterward gathered around the table of revolutionary literature to talk.

"It is important that things like this are being made public, because I know they happen everywhere," said a student at Kvennó high school while signing the petition.

A young woman at MH-high school said she thought it was "unbelievable that a supposedly highly civilized country could deport someone for no obviously justified reason."

As well as signing the petition, students bought copies of the Militant and donated money to the defense campaign.

Mikesh also addressed a public meeting on the case, and talked about the fight with Hjalmar Jónsson, the president of the Union of Icelandic Journalists.

He also met Sigurdur Bessason, the president of the Efling trade union, and Thrainn Hallgrimsson, the editor of the union’s paper. The two men were particularly interested in Mikesh’s account of the fight for a union at the Dakota Premium meatpacking plant in St. Paul, Minnesota--a fight in which Calero participated while working at the plant, before taking the position on Perspectiva Mundial. Mikesh explained how the union local has led the way in building support for Calero’s defense. Bessason decided to send a letter to the INS to protest the deportation threat.

Efling organizes unskilled workers in Reykjavík, including food workers, and has a membership of around 20,000, some 2,000 of whom are immigrants. Immigrant workers in Iceland have increased 46 percent from early 1998 to early 2002, when they reached 4.6 percent of the workforce. Recently the parliament passed a law saying that immigrants must study Icelandic to be eligible for a residency permit.

At the close of his tour, Mikesh went with two other supporters of the campaign to meet Katrin Sigurdardottir, who had participated in a January 10–11 sit-down protest at a health clinic in Keflavík to demand improved health services (see article in the February 17 Militant.) After signing the petition, Sigurdardottir said good-bye to Mikesh by raising her fist and saying, "we must fight, fight, and fight!"

Young Socialist Claudia Overesch contributed to this article.
 
 
Related articles:
Workers in Chicago join campaign against deportation of Róger Calero  
 
 
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