Vienna/Austria, wish all the best and freedom for your birthday!
Our Viennese committee was founded in 1998 in view of new threatening execution against you as "Solidarity committee Free Mumia Abu Jamal" . Our Activists come from trade unions, from the CP, left Socialdemocrats, Prisoners Aid organisations and anti-capitalist left groupings. Colleagues of Amnesty International later joined our committee, but demanding only a new and fair court process for you and refusing the demand "Free Mumia!". Therefore we've changed our committee name. Nevertheless we cooperate with Amnesty and demand now both -according to your defence (Mr. Robert.R. Bryan): A principal new trial and your release! We regularly visite the U.S. embassy in Vienna in order to hand over resolutions in solidarity with you. Other successful actions were demonstrations, street theatres and rallies. Maybe you know that you became appointed honorary member of the Austrian Journalist Trade Union in 1999! The president of the Austrian Trade Unions Federation ÖGB and president of the European Trade Unions Federation EGB appealed to the U.S. president Bill Clinton to support a new court process. In 2009 our committee motivated the Austrian Trade Union Youth to send a resolution to the governor of Pennsylvania Edward Rendell demanding your release.
2005, two activists of our committee visited comrades of the "Familiy & Friends of Mumia Abu Jamal" in Philadelphia. Comrade Kevin told us that although you are happy about all these solidarity activities, you are even more interested in worldwide political matters, in resistence against repression and exploitation in the whole world. Because of this information we want to tell you finally only briefly about the situation in Austria: Of course, the capitalist crisis has also reached Austria. But the Austrian Trade Union, dominated by the Socialdemocrats, has so far succeeded in restricting worker meetings and demonstrations f.e. of the metalworkers, printers etc. against wage cuts, dismissals and unemployment not to spread all over the country. However the Austrian students started a fight against the neoliberal Bologna Education System last autumn! They organized huge demonstrations with 15 - 20.000 participants and a big counter-summit against the international Bologna Conference in Vienna in March 2010. Quite a number of comrades of our committee are also engaged in hopefully uprising protests and strikes of the Austrian working class against the crisis and capitalists under the slogan: We won't
pay your crisis!
Birthday greetings from Vienna
in deep solidarity
Free Mumia!