Workers Solidarity Movement

War is hell. In September 2015, the heartbreaking image of Alan Kurdi went viral. The picture of the little Syrian-Kurdish boy lying face down on Ali Hoca beach in Turkey highlighted Fortress Europe’s racist response to those refugees fleeing conflict in the Middle East.  Abdullah Kurdi, Alan’s father, returned to Kobane to bury his wife and two sons. He wrote to the world: ‘I am grateful for your sympathy for my fate. This has given me the feeling that I am not alone. But an essential step in ending this tragedy and avoiding its recurrence is support for our self-organisation’. Kurdi was referring to the emergent experiment in popular democracy sweeping Rojava, the most hopeful thing to have happened in the Middle East for a very long time. A popular, anti-authoritarian rebellion is struggling against the death-world of capitalist modernity. And for now, it seems to be winning. 

On Wednesday the 1st of February there was a solidarity vigil for Umut Firat in Dublin, Ireland. Umut is a writer for the recently jailed in Turkey and on the 53rd day of a hunger strike. Anarchist Meydan Newspaper Anarchists and supporters of Umut’s hunger strike gather outside the Turkish Embassy. Turkish embassy staff came out to mock the protesters. Embassy staff called the police to have get the protesters to remove a banner that was tied to the fence of the embassy. The banner said FREE UMUT FIRAT! SOLIDARITY FROM IRELAND. The police stayed on till the vigil was over.

Meanwhile on Twitter Trump is losing it again. It's really not surprising he'd hate whistle blowers, is it?

The wave of repression unleashed by the Turkish state against the left and the Kurdish freedom movement that has seen tens of thousands fired from their jobs and thousands jailed, including many HDP MPs,has also hit the anarchist movement there. We heard last night that Hüseyin Civan has been sentenced to 15 months for editing the anarchist paper Meydan Gazetesi.

About 50 people gathered in the Teacher’s Club on Monday evening for a public meeting organised by Rojava Calling.

Speaking at the meeting were Faysal Sariyildiz, People’s Democratic Party (HDP) MP in Turkey, and Calvin James, a Dublin born DJ and activist who spent 6 months as a volunteer medic in northern Syria in 2016. Faysal joined the meeting by Skype from Brussels as the Turkish state recently cancelled his passport.

The nation state backed capitalist system can only offer us increasing surveillance, increasing poverty, increasing social problems and the rise of the national security state which is necessary to protect the tiny minority of people who have stolen so much of the worlds wealth from the rest of us, who generate it.

Over the first couple of weeks of November we have witnessed intensification in British state repression and intimidation on the streets of the North primarily directed at republican activists.  The widespread use of stop and search powers, house raids and use of sophisticated surveillance techniques is an attempt not only to criminalize republicans from the wider community but anyone who dissents from the status quo.

This upsurge in stop and search powers comes after the revealing of recent internal PSNI report describing the culture in Garnerville police training college as “more associated with a pseudo-militaristic training environment."(1) From the training to the streets, the RUC/PSNI remain a heavily armed paramilitary force in working class communities whose first priority is to defend the interests of the status-quo. While MI5 maintains controls over issues of ‘national security,’ PSNI is only accountable in name only.

Over the night of 3rd November the Turkish state moved to deepen the repression directed against the HDP, the party that got the 3rd largest share of the vote in the last two elections. Arrest warrants have been issued for at least 15 of that parties members of parliament including it’s two co-chairs. At the same time the state moved to shut down social media in the country with access to Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Instagram and WhatsApp being blocked.

Hundreds of people marched through Dublin on Saturday to protest the conviction of a Jobstown teen for false imprisonment.  He had been part of a protest which delayed Labour Party leader Joan Burton who had made an unwelcome visit to the community resulting in a sit down in front of her car as she left the area.  The delay in her being able to leave resulted in dawn raids on the houses of activists across Jobstown and in the trial of many of them for false imprisonment.

On Saturday 24th of September the Anti-Internment Group held a protest outside RTE (Irish television and radio station) studios in Donnybrook south Dublin. The protest was held because of RTE’s censorship against the case of the Craigavon 2. The Craigavon 2 have been in jail since March 2009, Brendan McConville and John Paul Wootton (who was only 17 years of age at the time) were accused of the shooting dead of a Police officer.

Their trial was a farce, not only was it a non jury trial, all evidence used in the case used by the prosecution was either circumstantial or witness evidence from a witness whose statements were totally contradictory but also his own father came forward and said he is “walter mitty” (a walter mitty is well known slang in Ireland for a liar).