A call from the World Peace Council to the peace movements of the world
Hans Modrow, 1928-2023: Son of the German Democratic Republic
The man who oversaw the peaceful yet tragic end to state socialism in the east, then stayed to fight for the working class in the newly unified Germany, passed away on February 10, aged 95. KEITH BARLOW salutes his life and career
DR HANA SAADA asks why a war crime against innocent children on this scale does not dominate the world’s coverage of the US-Israeli war on Iran
From the colonial oil plunder of 1909 to the current threat of a regional inferno: Western interference in Iran forms a chain of coups, puppets, and cynical geopolitics centered on oil, says MARC VANDEPITTE
As tensions escalate over Iran, CAROL MOCHAN MSP argues that Britain must finally learn from the disastrous legacy of Iraq and choose diplomacy over another catastrophic conflict
While Wes Streeting claims Britain lacks a growth strategy, his own NHS plans reveal one – turning the health service’s vast troves of patient data into a commercial asset for tech giants, investors and private healthcare firms, says HELEN MERCER
The mass killing of Iranian schoolgirls should have dominated global headlines. Instead it became another example of how civilians — especially women and children — are targeted in war, writes CLAUDIA WEBBE
HIGHLY regarded by the many who knew and knew of him, it would be no exaggeration to say that Hans Modrow was the son of the German Democratic Republic, of which he was the last-but-one Prime Minister. Only five when the Nazis came to power, his generation was overshadowed by hatred, fascism and war. He trained as a machinist. Towards the end of the war, he was conscripted into the Volkssturm (a mass militia set up by Hitler in 1944).
He was taken prisoner of war by the Red Army and went to the Soviet Union. There he attended an anti-fascist school. In 1949 he returned to the east of Germany, the part which then became the German Democratic Republic (GDR). He worked again as a machinist and joined the GDR’s Free German Youth organisation.
He soon joined the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) – founded in 1946 through a unification of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) and the Social Democratic Party (SPD) on the territory of the future GDR.
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