International Event on the 13th anniversary of the Syrian revolution

Abu Muad, from the editorial board of the paper
“The Truth of the Oppressed”

Syria: A huge revolution that was betrayed and massacred
From Gaza to Idlib and in the whole Maghreb and the Middle East, one and the same struggle

It is an honour to be at this event that we make every year to commemorate the glorious Syrian revolution. Especially on this 13th anniversary, in a Time when a massacre is being carried out by Zionism against the Palestinian people in order to wipe them off the face of the earth. This is something that we warned about and we are not at all satisfied that we were right.

We knew that if the massacre in Syria was perpetrated, it was only a matter of time before Zionism would go all out to massacre in Palestine.

We want to give an account of the genesis and the start of the Syrian revolution. Let’s go back to 2008, to the world economic crisis, where the prices of grains and food went through the roof. Inside the US the working class broke out and forced the president of that time, Barak Obama, to withdraw the troops from Iraq. A revolutionary uprising was coming then in the oil-producing countries of the Middle East, which were importers of wheat and saw the price of bread increase by 200-400%.
This is how this chain of revolutions began in Tunisia in 2011, continued in Egypt, advanced in Bahrain, Morocco, Libya, Syria... The masses lashed out and blew up the control devices that imperialism had imposed throughout the region.
In Libya, the masses went as far as in Syria. They succeeded in setting up their self-organizing bodies and in arming themselves. They broke the armies horizontally. In the case of Libya, they made roll down the head of one of the biggest tyrants of the region, Muammar al-Qadafy.

In Syria, the masses set up coordination committees in city-by-city insurrections, took the army and with those weapons formed self-defence committees. Here a key struggle of the chain of revolutions in the Maghreb and Middle East was posed, because Syria shares borders with the Zionist-fascist state of Israel, which is the gendarme of imperialism in the region. Had the Syrian regime fell, this border would have immediately been broken and the revolution would have united together with the Palestinian masses to expel this gendarme of imperialism.

Imperialism had to act, but it could not do so directly because the US working class prevented further direct invasions. Zionism could not attack either, since it would have unified all the insurgent peoples in a single struggle against it, for its destruction.

At that time, the reformist left internationally went out to slander and stain the revolutions in the Maghreb and the Middle East. They said that there were "barbaric", "backward", "terrorist" peoples, and that there was no working class in there. They were the first to separate these revolutionary processes from the struggle of the working class in the imperialist countries against the imperialist crisis. The reformist left then was  first in throwing its "weapons", its poison on the working class, in favour of imperialism and against the Syrian revolution.
On the other hand, imperialism sent a bourgeoisie that dressed up as "democratic". Basharist generals claimed to break with Bashar and went over “to the side of the people” in order to control and hand over the Syrian revolution from inside. But this did not stop the masses in Syria that were constantly threatening to enter Damascus and take the head of the dog Bashar.
The PKK, the Kurdish Stalinism, broke the front of that great Syrian revolution, which took to the streets shouting "bread and freedom", by making a pact with Bashar. It divided the Kurdish people from the rest of the exploited people and started to push back the revolution.
However, this was not enough, and imperialism had to stir up "Islamic jihadism", the Wahhabist bourgeoisie, to go and contain and sell out the Syrian revolution from within. They entered the arena with the banners of having been the ones who had confronted imperialism in Iraq and Afghanistan.

This did not stop the masses, so once again imperialism allowed Iranian Guard and Hezbollah Gurkha troops into Syria to prop up Bashar who was about to fall. It also freed the skies for Putin's planes to bomb and massacre mercilessly. He strengthened the dog Bashar with all these troops to massacre the Syrian masses. We are living a real massacre operation, to drown the Syrian revolution in blood, in the worst genocide so far in the 21st century.
Even the American planes bombed, more than anything else the north and east of Syria, where the oil wells are located, which today they control with their military bases and troops of the YPG that have become the real security guards of the imperialist oil companies.

To top it all off, the left held the World Social Forum meeting in Tunisia and aligned itself with imperialism. It entered as the caboose of the "anti-terrorist front", saying that "the enemy is terrorism", a worse foe than Bashar and Zionism.
To "put the icing on the cake" the leadership of the Palestinian resistance called for neutrality with the Syrian revolution because they also wanted to get the "support" of Bashar al-Assad. And the latter, together with the Iranian ayatollahs, Lebanon's Hezbollah and Putin, guarded the borders of Zionism, massacred the Syrian revolution and the more they advanced, the more firepower Zionism regained and the more it went against the Palestinian masses.

We had warned that if this isolation of the Palestinian people from the whole of the revolutions in Maghreb and Middle East was imposed, it was going to be a catastrophe for the revolutions and for the Palestinian masses. And this is what we are going through today, revolutions crushed, massacred, and the Palestinian masses today are suffering a genocidal attack by Zionism, similar to the massacre in Syria.

But it does not end here. We are in the 13th anniversary of the Syrian revolution, and the masses have burst again on the streets wanting to get rid of the scum that held back and surrendered their revolution from inside, both the "Islamist" as well as the "liberal" bourgeois that stopped the advance of the masses.
We are seeing a Palestinian resistance coming out from under the earth, under the rubble, and resisting Zionism to the end.

Today, after 13 years, we can see that as a result of this counterrevolution, the nation is bloodied, divided, occupied by the US imperialism, Turkey, Iran, Zionism in the Golan Heights and even by the army of Bashar al-Assad, which are occupation troops on behalf of all imperialist powers. That is why in Syria we speak of "liberated zones" as distinct from "occupied zones". But today the whole of Syria is occupied, and they have divided it up by that counterrevolutionary pact that was the Geneva conference.
As part of this counterrevolution, imperialism is coming to massacre Palestine. To occupy Palestine. The genocide is already underway by Zionism. It is already occupied. Now they are going for Gaza.
That's why Gaza, this massacre that has been going on for more than 165 days, is a continuation of the genocide in Syria. And a battle today of the Syrian revolution is being fought today in Gaza.

In the face of this fact, once again we see the traitorous leaderships of the world working class, those who slandered and fenced the Syrian revolution, saying that Bashar al-Assad is a friend of the masses of the world. They say the same about Putin. They said the same in the Syrian revolution and that is why they called to support them, when they were massacring the revolution on behalf of imperialism.

Today they say that they are friends of the Palestinian masses, when in reality they are supporting Zionism, guarding its borders so that it can complete the massacre.
They are fencing Gaza. They have not given a single ammunition to the Palestinian masses who are resisting the fire of Zionism, instead they have dedicated all their resources to massacre the masses in Syria. We are talking about the Iranian ayatollahs, Putin, the PLO itself in the West Bank, Hezbollah in Lebanon. All of them fencing Gaza and letting Zionism massacre.
It was the masses who fought and gave their lives and souls. It was their leaderships who betrayed them, who supported their executioners. They have to explain so much betrayal that has allowed drowning un blood the working class movement in the Middle East.