The struggle will continue as long as oppression continues. We greet these movements. Your life is also our life, your pain is also our pain, your joy is also our joy, your losses are also our losses, and your victory we will celebrate.
BY PATRICK MAC MANUS
Denmark
ALTERNATIVE READER
Posted by Bulatlat
Vol. VIII, No. 10, April 13-19. 2008
We should greet all movements of the world that seek to break with history and give power to the people.
A long struggle, full of pain and hope, full of both defeat and success, the fall of members and leaders, a struggle of courage and patience.
The struggle will continue as long as oppression continues. We greet these movements. Your life is also our life, your pain is also our pain, your joy is also our joy, your losses are also our losses, and your victory we will celebrate.
We greet the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a democratic front whose founder George Habash we have respected and now have lost. It too is designated as a terrorist organization by the United States, the European Union, Canada and Israel. Ahmad Sa’dat, as new secretary general of the PFLP was arrested in 2001 by the Palestinian Authority and imprisoned in Jericho Prison. The prison was stormed by Israeli troops where he with others was removed to an Israeli prison where he still is held.
We support the PFLP in its struggle for a secular state of the land and the people from the river to the sea, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean.
A democratic state for all, both for those who have occupied and ruled and those who for so many decades have fled and been oppressed. There is no other way. The expansion of the Israeli state has cut through the land, dividing it, isolating its towns and its people. The Hebrew image of apartheid transforms the expectation of Palestinian national independence into useless fiction. The solution is and can be no other than one nation. No matter how difficult and distant this still would seem.
We greet Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) whose attempt to participate in the democratic process was met by the death of thousands of its candidates, of its members and supporters. They arose as an army of peasants and of the poor, of intellectuals who made their choice: to stand by the peasants and the poor.
FARC has again returned to the forest. Their voice would not be heard, silenced by a government of landowners and its militia. A government policy that defends the interests of the United States in the exploitation of the people and the land. A government reflecting a colonial past and its distain for the people of the land. This must reach an end, an end in our time.
A small step is the removal of FARC from the “terrorist list,” enabling it to participate in a democratic process creating a better life for the poor and the oppressed majority of the land.
But only recently Raul Reyes, its spokesperson and negotiator, was executed by Colombian and USA forces across the border in Ecuador. He was engaged in contact and communication on the release of prisoners as a step towards negotiation and change. The state and its forces wish no change; the destruction of resistance is their only goal.
We greet the Partiya Karkarén Kurdistan, the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) on its recent removal from the European “terrorist list.” The Court of First Instance (CFI), the European Union’s second-highest court, judged that the European Union had not properly justified its decision.
Years of resistance have led to thousands of victims of Turkish denial of the rights of the Kurdish people. Their language and culture suffer under constant state persecution. With the break up the Ottoman Empire after World War I, Turkey had signed an agreement on the establishment of an independent Kurdistan under Article 64 of the Treaty of Sèvres (1920). The treaty was never ratified and the autonomy clause was eliminated in the Treaty of Lausanne (1923). There was no longer any reference to the Kurdish people. They were divided, written off and isolated by the colonial borders of Iraq, Iran and Syria.
This time must end. The people must gain their right to be themselves. To speak and to write and to work and to sing their own song. We will listen and support them. As long as discrimination and oppression remain, Turkey cannot be seen as a legitimate member of the European Union. It will remain a land that is cruel to a people that do not belong, homeless and threatened within its borders.
We express our sympathy with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) which recently has been added by the European Union to the “terrorist list.” The European Union’s decision to list the LTTE as terrorists was taken after similar decisions by the USA, Canada and India. The Sri Lankan government now believes it has a free hand to take on the rebels who fight for a homeland in the island's northeast. A struggle that has left at least 60,000 victims behind. Violence has escalated dramatically with intensive military operations in several locations in the North and East. The Jaffna peninsula is now reaching crisis levels of hunger and illness because of government military aggression. An aggression encouraged by the “terrorist list.”
And here will we say again: remove LTTE from the list, let there be room for the wishes of the people, let there be room for a land that is their own, room for negotiation on independence and respect in a future cooperation of peoples and nations on that great island.
The Philippines is also in our heart, the New People’s Army (NPA), the founding and exiled chairman of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and the chief political consultant of the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP), Jose Maria Sison. He lives in exile not far from us and we greet him. In 2004 the NPA withdrew from peace talks in reaction to President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo administration’s appeal for their inclusion in US and European Union terrorist lists.
Last year, the CFI has struck similar blows in connection with the European terror list as in the case of PKK. In July last year it overturned a decision by member states to freeze the assets of Jose Maria Sison in The Netherlands. The court found that the European Union had breached his rights by not informing on why these assets had been frozen.
The present Arroyo strategy is an all-out war against the NPA as opposed to promoting peace talks in order to find a long-lasting solution to the roots of armed struggle in the country. For the present administration such peace talks would not be a solution, they would only undermine its power.
It is an administration responsible for unending issues of corruption, betrayal of public interest, election fraud and massive killings of political opponents since Arroyo assumed the presidency in 2001. Her all-out war for political survival has led to a continued increase in extrajudicial killings, summary executions and abductions. Close to 900 people, mainly activists, have been murdered by state security forces since she came to power.
It is a reflection and repetition of the past. Since occupation by the United States during the Philippine-American War (1899-1902) against Spanish colonialism, the people have been victimized. It was the USA itself that became the new imperial power. While the Filipino elite has benefited, the masses have suffered continual indignity, violence, extreme poverty, racism and lack of basic reform.
The resistance to US interference has always been intense: nationalist movements and armed struggle from the early occupation period to the Hukbalahap guerrilla movement after World War II and on to the NPA of today. In every instance, the US administration and military have worked with their Filipino government and military counterparts in a ruthless oppression of such movements.
The struggle continues. We will follow it and tell of it and support its resistance to the corruption of government and the violent repression of the Philippine people. They deserve a future that does away with a violent past, a past and a present due to and dictated by USA foreign policy. Its power too must be broken and sooner or later that will also happen.
The last to be mentioned here is the Irish Republican Army (Óglaigh na hÉireann) and Sinn Féin (Ourselves alone). A history of the land Éire accelerated by the Easter Rising in 1916 led by Pádraig Pearse with whose name I was baptised so many years later. He and the others were executed at Kilmainham Jail, another was hanged in London. They were my land and my life until I was forced to leave. And I return there at times. The goddess Éire and her sisters all wanted to name the country they lived in after themselves. They held a race and Éire won.
After years of resistance the Irish Republican Army or IRA (Óglaigh na hÉireann) broke the power of discrimination of the North, in the Six Counties as they were called. There was armed struggle and the hunger strikes where so many died, there was courage and sacrifice and all the faults and mistakes that no movement can escape. At a time, there were some who proposed the inclusion of the IRA in the “terrorist list,” others were more rational and negotiations arose, secret at first but growing through the years. But even if the IRA had been included in that list, the struggle would have continued. Today things are changing in the North. A hatred and violence that lasted for decades, and whose origin is centuries old, gives way to acceptance and respect.
In those resistance years there was close contact between Sinn Féin, IRA and Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA, the resistance movement of Euskal Herria). There was much they had in common, the defence and creation of a national tradition and culture that was threatened. ETA too has been ‘listed’ as ‘terrorists’ and has not always had control over the activities of its members.
During the fascist era, ETA was supported even beyond their own Basque people who suffered more than many under the regime. ETA drew international attention to their cause and violent repression by the Franco regime. Their assassination of Almirante Luis Carrero Blanco <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luis_Carrero_Blanco> took place in 1973. He was appointed by the dictator as Prime Minister to rule after the dictator’s death. The transition to democracy from 1975 and the continual radicalization of ETA led to a steady erosion of support from the people.
In March 2006, ETA declared a "permanent ceasefire". Talks were opened by the Spanish Presidente del Gobierno Zapatero. Later in the year a bomb was detonated in a parking lot at the international airport after three confusing warning calls from the movement. Two Ecuadorian immigrants were killed. ETA has itself been unable to administer the ceasefire it had itself declared. The Presidente del Gobierno released a statement stating that the "peace process" had been discontinued.
ETA has returned to a form of action that no longer assists their people. It has lost the rationality of resistance and that is always possible. Both power and resistance can be marked by destructive irrationality. Time will show how long it will take them to learn.
Appeal
We appeal to all movements for democracy and international solidarity to join us in challenging the policy of power. To join us in challenging national and supranational terrorist legislation, international “terrorist lists” and the so-called “global war on terror.”
Through present anti-terrorist legislation, states have attempted to curb the freedom of expression and the political rights of their citizens, including the right to extend moral and material support to resistance and liberation movements throughout the world.
Such support is now at risk of prosecution within the terms of anti-terrorism legislation. The role of international solidarity, which in the past has made an important contribution to conflict resolution, is under severe threat.
This erosion of political and human rights is driven by a neo-liberal state strategy where the liberalization of economies and markets is accompanied by repressive state regulation of political activity and expression. Within this perspective, the “war on terror” is a global project seeking to contain and crush popular resistance to the expropriation of essential resources by increasingly deregulated market forces.
Resistance is now redefined as an expression of “international terrorism.” Several states have grasped the opportunity to define resistance movements in terms of the so-called “global war on terror,” thereby seeking to confer upon themselves a guise of international legitimacy. The threat of state terrorism is today the most immediate and lethal threat against the peoples of many nations.
Together we must challenge the political paradigm underlying the so-called “global war on terror” and the proscription of organizations through so-called “terrorist lists.” Such terrorist lists can only contribute to the marginalization of social and political movements, excluding them from an international political dialogue, which in itself is a necessary step towards a negotiated political resolution of the conflicts of which they are a part.
There is a law beyond all laws, a law beyond all laws of the state: the human right to resistance for those who have no other way. And now and in the future we must defend:
· The right of peoples to resist illegitimate government and foreign occupation;
· The right of peoples to take up arms against oppression where all other means have been exhausted;
· The right to create new forms of people’s power which serve the economic, social, political and cultural aspirations of the people; and
· The right of citizens of all nations to extend their support, material and otherwise, to these struggles for economic, political, social and cultural emancipation.
We must go on, we cannot go back. The world still waits for change. It waits too on environmental change, a threat of hunger and flight to the poor and powerless. The crops will die, the prices rise, and the suicides of the poor have already reached a desperate level. The hungry who survive will flee from continent to continent. They will drown in seas and be met with walls and wires and weapons and all the barriers of power.
Without their revolt and a model of change that serves the basic interests of humanity and of the earth itself, the world and its future will be formed by present power, its continual exclusion of the poor and powerless, its mistreatment of the earth itself. In its history it has taken the lives of those it conquered and continues in taking the life of nature, accelerated faster now than the process of nature itself. In their own time things have changed throughout millennia, now the death of nature is from day to day. There are forms of life that never will appear again, we have seen many for a last time.
It is this last time that must change. And in all of this, liberation movements seem in themselves insufficient any more. They can no longer struggle only for the life and future of humankind. They must secure and liberate the needs of the earth, its life and the future for all its kind. We need the revolt of a humanity that wishes to live and continue living long on this living, moving and so unique a planet which we call the Earth. Posted by Bulatlat
