The third camp statement below (translated from French) has been published by two branches of the French anarchist trade union CNT. They are looking for further signatories - website http://cnt25.over-blog.com
Bombing in Lebanon, invasion of Gaza, firing of rockets into Haifa and the north of Israel, chaos in Iraq, threats of war with Iran...
Against the generalised chaos in the Middle East, develop the camp of the workers!
The massive bombings and the ground invasion by Israel of Lebanon are a new stage towards a generalised chaos in the Middle East, adding new deaths, new suffering and new destruction in an area already touched by the chaos of the sectarian civil war in Iraq, the bombings and bloody military interventions in the Gaza Strip and increasingly inhumane blockades in the West Bank.
On both the Israeli side and that of the Hezbollah militia, the leaders speak of "defending their populations". But the Israeli military interventions, far from guaranteeing the safety of the people of the country, have only led to more rockets raining down on the towns and villages of the North, in particular in Haifa, where eight railworkers were killed. As for Hezbollah, its capture of Israeli soldiers has served as an excuse for the colonial forces of Israel to launch a destructive and murderous frenzy against the whole Lebanese population.
This new military escalation in the area must be seen in the context of the total chaos of sectarian war and occupation which bloodies Iraq, the Afghan morass under its occupying forces, and the current conflict between Iran and USA over the question of nuclear power.
Beyond the current atrocity of these wars, we are right to fear that the whole region may be sucked in, with, possibly, the military intervention of Syria, even of Iran, or the transformation of the Iran/USA conflict by their proxies (Hezbollah and Hamas on one side/Israel on the other) into open war, with, once again, massacres, bombings and suffering for millions of human beings.
In this bloody military escalation, between on the one side the imperialist forces of the USA and Israel and on the other side the reactionary militias of political Islam, the workers, and more generally the people of the area, have nothing to gain but everything to lose.
The generalised chaos of civil war between rival armed bands, the application of a constitution based on the sharia with the blessing of the White House and the other occupation troops in Iraq, the maintenance of cruel practices like stoning and locking up of women under the burqa in Afghanistan, not to speak of the racist discrimination and daily vexations at the check-points in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, clearly demonstrate that a victory of the imperialist troops does not bring the least improvement with regard to the most basic human rights. In the same way, the pressures of different political Islamist gangs, whether to impose the veil on women, or to install a veritable sexist apartheid and deny fundamental human rights to the populations under their yoke, remind us that these are not any kind of liberation forces, but just armed gangs seeking to replace one oppression by another.
This military escalation in the Middle East only serves the ruling classes and the leaders of the armed gangs. In Israel, touched by a social crisis (20% of the population live below the poverty line), the ruling class seeks by the military escalation in Lebanon and Palestine, among other things, to avoid an explosion of workers’ struggles. In the same way, for the reactionary gangs of Hamas and Hezbollah, this war is a blessing, justifying the existence of their militias and increasing their grip on the population. As for Iran, the conflict with the USA is a gift fallen from heaven to defuse the recent rise of workers’ and feminist struggles.
Just as we firmly denounce this military escalation, calling for an immediate cease-fire, and an end to the bombings, and withdrawal of Israeli troops from Lebanon and the Occupied Palestinian Territories, we believe, as internationalist workers, that one of our urgent tasks is to support the development of a third camp - the camp of the workers - in the Middle East, at one and the same time against imperialist domination and against Islamist oppression. We reaffirm our total solidarity with the organisations that fight, in the Middle East, like us in Europe and elsewhere in the world, for workers’ interests, for complete equality between all the peoples of the region, for women’s emancipation against reactionary traditions and religious currents, for secularism and, beyond that, for the creation of another future free from wars, atrocities, racism, sexism and capitalist exploitation.
Union Locale CNT de Besançon and Syndicat CNT interco 39 (Jura)
http://cnt25.over-blog.com/
