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.
