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	Workers Hammer No. 199	Summer 2007

London rally affirms: Mumia is an innocent man!

Partisan Defence Committee

Close to a hundred people attended a Partisan Defence Committee (PDC) rally at the University of London Union on 5 May to demand freedom for Mumia Abu-Jamal, a former Black Panther and MOVE supporter who has spent almost a quarter of a century on death row following his conviction on false charges of killing Philadelphia policeman Daniel Faulkner in December 1981. The PDC, a legal and social defence organisation associated with the Spartacist League, called the rally as part of an urgent international campaign to revitalise mass, labour-centred protest on behalf of Mumia on the basis that he is innocent and that he is the victim of a racist, political frame-up. A similar event was held a week later in Berlin by the PDC’s fraternal organisation in Germany, the Committee for Social Defence. These mobilising efforts were given added urgency by the 17 May Appeals Court hearing in Philadelphia which heard oral arguments from prosecution and defence lawyers and could signal the final stage of legal proceedings.

Underscoring the importance of the PDC’s London rally and the resonance which Mumia’s case continues to have among working people and the oppressed was the impressive array of speakers and participants at the event and the seriousness of their commitment to Mumia’s cause. Speakers included three trade union representatives: Paul Moffat, Eastern Region Secretary of the Communication Workers Union (CWU); Glenroy Watson, Chair of the Finsbury Park branch of the Rail, Maritime and Transport union (RMT) and General Secretary of the Global Afrikan Congress; and Stephen Hedley, also a London Underground RMT member. The trade union speakers were joined on the platform by noted civil rights lawyers Gareth Peirce and Matthew Ryder, who are particularly known today for opposing repression carried out in the name of the “war on terror”, under whose rubric the US and British rulers have waged devastating wars in Afghanistan and Iraq while taking the axe to democratic rights “at home”. The main rally speaker was PDC counsel Rachel Wolkenstein who was a member of Mumia’s legal team from 1995 to 1999 and who led the investigation that turned up evidence of Mumia’s innocence, including the sworn confession of Arnold Beverly that he, not Mumia, shot and killed Faulkner. Eibhlin McDonald spoke on behalf of the Spartacist League.

The participation of representatives of major trade unions was a key feature of the rally, pointing to the kind of working-class social power that can and must be mobilised to secure Mumia’s freedom. In mid-April the Scottish Trades Union Congress passed a motion declaring: “That this Congress believes that Mumia Abu-Jamal should be freed immediately from prison, as he is innocent, and the inherently racist death penalty should be abolished.” At the CWU’s annual conference in Bournemouth, held in early June, Deputy General Secretary Dave Ward signed the PDC call for Mumia’s freedom on behalf of the union, while Hedley’s London Underground Engineering Branch of the RMT sponsored and paid for a quarter-page advert in the 4-10 June issue of black newspaper The Voice demanding “the immediate freedom of Mumia Abu-Jamal, an innocent man”.

Down with Labour’s racist “war on terror”!

The London rally began with taped greetings from Mumia and a showing of the PDC video From Death Row, This is Mumia Abu-Jamal. The PDC’s Kate Klein, who chaired the meeting, emphasised that “the kind of pressure that will have an impact on the courts is the social power of the multiracial workers movement worldwide demanding freedom for this innocent man”. Klein pointed out that in Britain the PDC was launched in 1989 with the campaign to raise funds for the civilian victims in the city of Jalalabad, Afghanistan. The Spartacist League hailed the Soviet Army intervention in the Afghan civil war in December 1979 against the cutthroat mujahedin as part of our unconditional military defence of the USSR, but after the Soviet Stalinist bureaucracy treacherously withdrew its troops, the people of Jalalabad were left to face the revenge of the CIA-backed Islamic fundamentalist “holy warriors”. An important campaign by the PDC in the US was the fund drive for “Aid to Striking British Miners and their Families”, raising material support for the heroic 1984-85 year-long class battle against the capitalist state.

Several speakers drew parallels between Mumia’s case and the anti-Irish frame-ups conducted by the British capitalist state. Gareth Peirce noted that she has “sent many faxes in the middle of the night on behalf of Mumia in the past. Not just for myself. I have added the names of Gerry Conlon, Paddy Hill, Billy Power, Paddy Armstrong”, referring to both the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six—innocent people framed up in the 1970s for IRA bombings, whom Peirce famously defended. Stephen Hedley noted that the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland was inspired by the black civil rights movement in the US and that the American state’s intent to kill Mumia is similar to the British state’s murderous collusion with the police and the Loyalist paramilitaries directed at political activists and also their lawyers.

A number of speakers hammered on the need to fight the rulers’ equation of political opposition with “terrorism”. Wolkenstein pointed out that the PDC took up Mumia’s case some 20 years ago because of both its opposition to the death penalty on principle and its struggle against the state’s branding of political opponents as “terrorists”. Both the Black Panther Party, of which Mumia was a leading member in his youth, and the MOVE organisation, which he supports, were considered the “terrorists” of their time, which meant that the state could simply blow them away in the dead of the night or frame up their supporters on vague conspiracy charges.

It was the question of relying on the capitalist courts for justice for Mumia that sparked controversy during the discussion period. Wolkenstein had noted in her presentation that when the bulk of the opportunist left in the US—the Workers World Party, Socialist Action, the International Socialist Organization (affiliated at the time with the Socialist Workers Party in Britain)—took up Mumia’s cause, particularly during and after the mass protests in 1995, they rejected mobilising around the call to free him. Instead, they organised centrally around the demand for a new trial. Many of these “socialist” groups now raise “freedom for Mumia” in conjunction with demanding a new trial. But their politics remain in the framework of reliance on the bourgeois state, a programme directly counterposed to mobilising working-class power for Mumia’s freedom.

Speaking from the floor, Niki Adams of Legal Action for Women argued that she and others “are calling for a new trial because we are taking our direction from Mumia, who is working very closely with his lawyer, Robert Bryan”. Adams made clear who this call is geared towards when she told a 17 May protest in London, held on the day of Mumia’s court hearing: “The demand for a new trial brings in people that may not be convinced about Mumia’s innocence but can see the trial was deeply unjust.”

Adams’ comments were a pristine expression of the strategy that had earlier demobilised Mumia’s supporters. Before the rally began, Adams distributed for signature an Open Letter to the Court entitled “Journalists in support of a new trial for Mumia Abu-Jamal.” This prompted one rally participant to intervene from the floor to say that as a member of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) he could not sign the letter since it nowhere stated that Mumia was innocent, nor that he should be freed!

Wolkenstein replied to Adams that while we vigorously oppose the strategy of reliance on the capitalist state, we have always supported scrupulous legal work on Mumia’s behalf. In fact, she said, “The current legal actions in Mumia’s case come from the work that I and Jon Piper did—the people on the legal team who are associated with the Partisan Defense Committee.” Refuting Adams’ claim that those who call for a new trial are “following Mumia’s lead”, Wolkenstein stated, “I have known and worked with Mumia Abu-Jamal since February 1987. I visit him regularly—before I became his lawyer, when I became his lawyer, after I stopped being his lawyer, including a week ago. He knows perfectly well every word I said here.” She continued, “He sent greetings to this rally, brief though they were, making the point that he was fighting for his freedom. That is not an accident.”

Wolkenstein pointed out that in earlier struggles on behalf of class-war prisoners, the call wasn’t “New trial for the Guildford Four, or for Angela Davis, or Huey Newton.” Wolkenstein made clear that “the quarrel here is when people basically subordinate a political movement, which should be about demanding Mumia's freedom, to a particular legal tactic—Mumia having court proceedings—something which nobody here is opposed to—not me, not the SL, not the PDC. The point is those court proceedings are not going to be the source of justice for Mumia.” In regard to calls for unity, she explained that we advocate united-front defence—common actions around agreed-upon slogans with full freedom of criticism. “In our opinion”, she continued, “the unifying theme is ‘Free Mumia. Mumia is an innocent man. Abolish the racist death penalty!’”