Internationalist conference on the 12th anniversary of the Syrian Revolution

Speech by Carlos Munzer, member of the Editorial Committee of "The International Workers' Organizer"

Stand up alongside the exploited and martyred masses of the heroic Syrian revolution!

Greetings to all the comrades who are present at this international conference; to the delegates of the National Committee of Struggle of the Regions of Peru, to the young rebels from the working-class neighborhoods of Lima, to the youth of the front lines of Colombia, to the migrant workers in Black Vests who are taking part from France. Greetings to all the comrades who have sent their solidarity, like the revolutionary Marxists of the JRCL-RMF from Japan. A fraternal greeting to the comrades of the UTC trade union center from Colombia, to the leaders of the Solidaires trade union from France, to the comrades of Democracia Obrera who, year after year, from Argentina, have been playing a key role in support of the heroic Syrian revolution.

From our current, the Collective for the Refoundation of the Fourth International / FLTI, we have traveled the world seeking to set up an international solidarity so that the workers' organizations would be the ones to go directly to the battlefield in support of the great revolution that was developing in Syria. We travelled to the Pacific and to plenary meetings of trade union centers such as the CSP-Conlutas in Brazil. We took the proposal to trade unions in Spain and hundreds of workers' organizations around the world so that they would be the ones to send funds and volunteers to fight in Syria. This was  the way for the working class and its fighting organizations to take solidarity with the Syrian revolution into their own hands. This meant contesting openly the control exercised by the Sunni bourgeoisie and the businessmen who, from the rear of the liberated areas, managed to hand over the rebel cities one by one.

To the revolutionary fighters of the Syrian resistance we want to say that they were not and are not alone, despite the brutal campaign of slander and defamation against the Syrian revolution and the fighters who left their lives to confront the fascist al-Assad.

It was the dog Bashar who, together with his partner, the butcher Putin, and the murderous theocracy of Iran, did the "dirty work" of massacring the masses on behalf of all the imperialist powers. As you have all denounced, today all of them are gathered together with Turkey and the rest of the Arab bourgeoisies to support on their shoulders the government of al-Assad after the genocide he descended over Syria.

After 12 years, the curtain in Syria has been lifted and what we can see is hundreds of thousands of exploited who have been massacred, tens of thousands of political prisoners and disappeared and millions of refugees who continue to live in tents in the middle of the desert or in miserable conditions in neighboring countries and in Europe itself.

The Syrian partisans had to endure a campaign of the fifth column of the traitors of Stalinism and the world social-imperialist left who accused them of being "terrorists". The same thing imperialism said about all the revolutionary workers and peoples who rose up in the world. It is the perfect excuse of the imperialist powers to rob, occupy and plunder oppressed nations and to attack their own working class in a state of revolt. We see this in Europe, where they accuse those who "dare" to break the boundaries of the bureaucracies and labor aristocracies that subject the proletariat to their executioners of being "terrorists" and "vandals".

Today the truth is coming to light amidst a sea of blood, with the Syrian masses taking to the streets in the liberated areas, to denounce the pact of the Sunni bourgeoisies, Turkey, the US, and the whole "international community" which, no longer needing to hide anything, publicly support al-Assad as the only recognized government of Syria.

This is also paid for by the Kurdish people who, far from achieving their liberation, have been isolated, subjected to the bayonets of al-Assad, and stay under the command of the US military bases. They were brought there by the Communist Party of Kurdistan, which brought them to their knees and to the feet of their oppressors... A truly miserable bunch.

Dozens of anarchist groups and also renegades of Trotskyism proclaimed that "libertarian communes" had existed there. This is a lie. Unless they believe that the villages controlled by the US centurions are "libertarian"... So much "fighting against the US, supporting al-Assad", as they claimed, and it turns out that they all ended up under the discipline of NATO and its military bases in northern Syria. An infamy.

They have left the Kurdish people bound and subjected now to the chains of al-Assad, his pact with Turkey, Putin's boots, and under the orders of the US bases. This is what Stalinism's subjugation to imperialism is all about. A real tragedy for this oppressed people.

The question is clear: al-Assad and Putin, with their military base in Latakia and their missiles, guarantee the "7 sisters" - that is, the biggest oil companies on the planet - the sucking of the oil riches of northern Syria and guard the gas and oil pipelines that go from there to Turkey. Most importantly, al-Assad is in charge, as was his father and his infamous regime, of guarding and safeguarding the Golan Heights for Zionism. .

We will not tire of denouncing the truth. It is high time for it to be known that the Syrian masses staged a great revolution 12 years ago that was crushed in blood and fire by al-Assad and Putin and given up from within by the Sunni bourgeoisie, Turkey, and other Arab bourgeoisies. It is these same acts that today, in a counter-revolutionary pact, are dividing up Syria and its business, on the basis of a sea of blood, repression and misery of the revolutionary masses.

With its counter-revolutionary offensive in Syria, imperialism sought and still seeks to punish all the masses of the Middle East who rose up in 2011 and the second intifada that is trying to stand up with the radicalized and revolutionary struggles of the exploited of Iraq and Iran, as before were those in Sudan and Algeria, with the return to struggle of the Tunisian masses and the uprising of the workers and the people of Lebanon against the government of Hezbollah and its pact with the pro-US Maronite bourgeoisie.

The bourgeois and collaborationist leadership of the Palestinian National Authority kept these heroic people as "neutral" during the massacre in Syria. Zionism did its work: with its fascist methods it redoubled its oppression, occupation and plunder of the Palestinian nation a thousandfold...

In the Syrian revolution, the reformist and social-imperialist world left turned off the light so that fascism could murder the workers and poor peasants who rose up 12 years ago against hunger and the ferocious dictatorship of al-Assad.

So our revolutionary salute goes to the partisans of Syria who resist not only the counterrevolutionary war of Al-Assad and the shots in the back of HTS and Turkey, but also the isolation imposed by all the traitorous leaderships of the planet.

Our current is in Syria. We have been and will continue to be the spokesmen of this heroic struggle. We have left there our fallen comrades and drawn the lessons of that enormous revolution. As many Syrian revolutionaries used to say: today it is Syria; tomorrow it will be your country, your city, your neighborhood, your home...

Some conclusions to bear in mind 12 years after the start of the Syrian revolution

12 years on, we revolutionaries have come to denounce this united front of servants of imperialism, led by the henchman al-Assad, for waging a real "proxy war" to crush a great revolution.
We affirm that the masses gave everithing they had during the revolutionary uprising in Syria. They were encircled at the international level and surrendered from within by Sunni clerics and religious chiefs, partners of the same Arab countries that like Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates today, and after massacring in Yemen, openly support the continuity of al-Assad.

We denounce the bourgeoisie and Stalinism that separated the Palestinian revolution from the fighting in Syria and broke the front of struggle against al-Assad of the 2011 uprising, supporting the Kurdish bourgeoisie that made a pact with the dog Bashar to strangle the revolution.

We denounce the social-imperialist left that, together with the bourgeois leadership of the FSA, made the Syrian masses believe that al-Assad wouuld be defeated with the "support of NATO", with "the USA liberating the skies", with the mobilization of the "international community"...

With these siren songs, the aim was to disarm the masses and impose surrender on them in order to be part of the hand-out and partition of Syria.

The spokesmen of this policy are silent today about their own ignominy. Perhaps today they will make some act of the "international community" but it will only be to wash their dirty linen.

We revolutionary socialists affirm that only by the method of socialist revolution, expropriating the capitalists, uniting the entire Syrian working class for the demand of bread and land, expropriating the businessmen in the rear and putting all forces to smash al-Assad in Damascus, could we advance towards the victory of the Syrian revolution.

We reclaim the coordinating committees of workers, the poor people and the rank-and-file soldiers who in 2011 broke al-Assad's army, armed themselves and organized themselves. These were the organisms of power of those at the bottom. That is what the counter-revolution was all about: crushing them so that the workers' and peasants' revolution that would defeat al-Assad and expropriate the expropriators of the people could not triumph.

With a revolutionary policy of the working class and the exploited of Syria, the struggle of the Tunisian, Algerian, Lebanese working class and the powerful Iranian and Iraqi proletariat that are today in great revolutionary struggle maneuvers, would have been coordinated.

The Syrian revolution was set back and suffered heavy counter-revolutionary blows not because the masses lacked heroism, but because they were brutally betrayed and surrendered and an overabundance of traitorous leaderships isolated them and separated them from the intifada of the whole Middle East and the uprisings of the European, US and world working class.

If they had carried forward towards the Syrian revolution a considerable part of the solidarity actions that were carried out with the Palestinian nation or against the US war in Vietnam or Iraq, the Syrian masses would have been installed in Damascus long ago, with al-Assad's head in their hands.

Internationally, renegades of Trotskyism, Stalinists and social democrats made the workers of the world believe that what was fighting in Syria were "terrorists", "ISIS", "agents of the US that were invading "... We denounce them because they are  who isolated the Syrian revolution from the world working class. They are fundamentally responsible for the defeat and isolation of the Syrian masses, as are those who called for relying on the support of NATO and the US to liberate themselves when today it is clear that the UN with the US, Putin, China, France, England... all of them recognize al-Assad.

We tell them: Your lies have fallen. It is time for you to face up and take responsibility for the massacre in Syria, one of the biggest genocides of the last decades, just like in the Balkans, Chechnya, and Congo.

For the workers of the world, it is a decisive task to learn from these lessons of the revolution and counter-revolution in Syria.

The lessons of Syria are crucial to guide us in the face of the war of occupation imposed by big Russia against the Ukrainian nation and people. The traitors who support Putin in his war against Ukraine claim that "the enemy is NATO" and not that this same NATO and the US let Great Russia invade Ukraine. They silence that the dead are the Ukrainian working class and the Russian working youth, sent as cannon fodder to die on the battlefield. They keep silent that the one being occupied and annihilated is an oppressed nation, plundered a thousand times by the IMF. They hide that all the pro-US and pro-Russian governments that have been ruling Ukraine for the last decades were the biggest servants and lackeys of the IMF and the World Bank. The Yanukovych government, which was overthrown by the masses in 2014, is just one example of this.

Today it is already clear that the US handed over Ukraine like a pawn for Putin to leave it devastated, but not to win himself the war definitively. Thus the US will be able to keep a destroyed Ukraine and its working class defeated, while economically, politically, and militarily wearing down Russia in order to go after it in the future.

The Ukrainian working class, like the Syrian masses, has as its first task to confront Putin and his lackeys and defeat their war machine, which has been defending the business of the imperialist transnationals and big capitalists in all the former Soviet republics, in Eurasia and in Russia.

The Ukrainian workers hold the key to victory in their struggle to expel all occupying troops from their nation, which is the unity with the Russian youth and workers who refuse to go and die for Putin and his billionaire oligarchs, partners in the manu militari plunder and oppression of the whole of Eurasia.

The Ukrainian working class has common demands against the Zelensky government that has banned the right to strike and ripped away all workers' gains, while Putin has not paid the wages of the Donbass miners for months. Uniting the working class all over Ukraine for their demands is the task of the hour. This would allow them to set up a proletarian leadership of the war to take in their hands all the economic and military resources to defeat Putin and break with the IMF, imperialism, and NATO, to make the big capitalists, Monsanto, Cargill, Arcelor Mittal and the gas barons, who are making millionaire business out of the death and hunger of the people, pay for the war.

Ultimately, victory against Putin and a break with the IMF can only be guaranteed by a soviet, socialist and independent Ukraine. Everything else is a lie and a betrayal.

The whole European social-imperialist left -which lives on the crumbs that fall from the table of the banquets Maastricht and US imperialism enjoy thanks to the exploitation of their colonies and semicolonies- claims to be "confronting imperialism"... But today, when the French workers and people are up surging against one of the most powerful governments of NATO and Maastricht, they are all going to save Macron to prevent a new victory of the exploited, as the Paris Commune was a century and a half ago.

Today in France, as in the fighting that has begun in Latin America, the future of the resistance of the Syrian, Palestinian and Middle Eastern masses is at stake.

In Latin America, a wave of revolutions twinned with those in the Middle East has broken out. It struck in Ecuador, Chile, Bolivia, Colombia. A real revolutionary tide that has also emerged in deep Peru. Imperialism today is trying to stop it with siren songs. But we know that in the midst of one of the deepest crashes of the world capitalist system, in order to take the lithium, minerals and the wealth of the oppressed peoples, imperialism is preparing and will prepare new counter-revolutionary blows, wars and fascism, as it did in the Middle East for oil.

Learning from the lessons of the Syrian revolution is a mandate for every conscious worker. To distinguish who are really the allies and who are the enemies of the revolution becomes decisive to open the way to the next victory. This is the fundamental task of revolutionaries.

From Europe, we must set up an International Committee of solidarity for Syria.

Today we see that in different countries of the Middle East, the masses are returning to the streets as in Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Morocco, Sudan... but already Syria, for now, is defeated and in a phase of resistance. The same is happening in martyred Palestine.

International support to the Syrian and Palestinian resistance becomes indispensable to strengthen the exploited of the whole Middle East who have launched a new offensive against imperialism and its regimes of opprobrium.

The Syrian revolution cannot remain like this, nor the Palestinian masses suffering a thousand inequities because of the Zionist invader. The revolutions in the Middle East today must take the support to the Syrian and Palestinian resistance into their own hands. Their own lives are at stake.

The role of the traitorous leaderships of the workers and oppressed peoples of the world around Syria was to confound the masses and poison their consciences in order to pass off their allies, the uprising Syrian people, as their enemies, and their real enemies, al-Assad and Putin, as their friends. Meanwhile, others claimed that their real allies were NATO and the US who would supposedly "deliver weapons to the rebel masses". A lie, as has already been demonstrated. US imperialism will never be a force to help liberate the oppressed peoples. It is the biggest oppressor on the planet.

Today, when everything is clear after 12 years of genocide, all the scoundrels who did that are silent, so tomorrow this play will be re-enacted by massacring another revolution.

Our struggle is day by day so that the workers of the world take as their own the demand to stop the massacre in Syria.

This same struggle, for example, we are promoting in Latin America, so that the working class of each country sees that the struggle is one to break with imperialism and the IMF and defeat their governments and infamous regimes; that the ally is among the workers of the USA to stop the imperialist plunder in their "backyard".

As the comrades surely know, we are therefore fighting for a big Latin American Congress of Workers’ organizations to coordinate and centralize the fight against imperialism in the whole Americas.

The struggle to re-establish militant internationalism in all the workers' and oppressed peoples' organizations of the world is the task of the moment. In this lies the strengthening of the mass uprisings that are underway for the victory of the revolution.

Solidarity with the Syrian masses cannot remain scattered country by country. The day of struggle for Syria cannot be once a year, on the anniversary of its revolution. It is decisive to make a leap to support the Syrian resistance that is already winning the streets again against the infamous pact of Turkey and HTS with al-Assad, Putin and the US to guarantee the survival of the dog Bashar at the head of the Syrian government.

The Syrian intifada is an inseparable part of the Palestinian intifada to expel the Zionist invader.

The committees of solidarity with Syria in Europe, which rallied and marched on 15 March in Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, France, Spain, and Finland, have the possibility to call for the immediate establishment of an International Struggle Committee of Solidarity with Syria and the heroic resistance of the Palestinian people.

Unfortunately, this proposal was not heard in any of the events that took place in solidarity on this 12th anniversary. If we wait for the 13th anniversary, there will be tens and tens of new massacres and millions who will see their martyrdom worsened. The concrete solidarity must be here and now.

We propose to all workers', human rights, and anti-imperialist organizations to coordinate concrete solidarity in support of the Syrian and Palestinian masses; and to organize a big movement in Europe to expel all ambassadors of al-Assad and Zionism. They and the imperialist regimes are the real terrorists!

Why don't the organizers of these acts of solidarity from the European capitals call for an international committee of solidarity with Syria to go to all the trade unions and call on all the workers' organizations to support the Syrian revolution? Why only on the 15th of March? It can't go on like this.

From "The International Workers' Organizer" we affirm that the experience that thousands of refugees made to put pressure on the UN and the "civil society" is over. These institutions are all supporting al-Assad. They do not feel moved by our martyrs, tortured, disappeared, prisoners, refugees. They are part of the problem and not the solution.

Therefore, we propose to call, without delay, for an international meeting to set up in Europe an International Committee of solidarity for Syria, which among other things should guarantee that no more refugees will die crossing the Mediterranean, neither Syrian, nor Afghan, or Moroccan. Never again! Papers for everybody, now!

After 12 years, a new generation has entered the international combat and political life against the oppressors. A new generation has also been born, which has suffered bombs and massacres as children and today is a very important part of the resistance against the genocidist al-Assad. These lessons of that heroic revolution must be known so that the workers and oppressed peoples of the world can definitely affirm that the enemies of the Syrian people are al-Assad, Putin, Turkey, and the cowardly Sunni bourgeoisies who, together with the US, have divided Syria, plundered its wealth and massacred its people and that their real allies are the heroic resistance of the oppressed masses that are now winning back the streets, as well as in the whole Middle East and internationally.

The banner of the Syrian resistance must be raised on the streets of Paris, just as it has been raised on the streets when the battles in Chile, Colombia, and all of Latin America. It must also be at the forefront of the fight against the murderous Putin's occupation of Ukraine, where it is the working class that is dying, not the national-war surrendering oligarchs of Zelensky and his associates.