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.
