September 8th
International day of struggle for the freedom of the Syrian revolution prisoners

Rally-tribute in Buenos Aires

 

Speech of Leandro, correspondent of the paper The Truth of the Oppressed

"The fight to free the Syrian prisoners has always been a banner of the revolution"

On this International Day for the freedom of the Syrian revolution detainees we will pay tribute to the 100 thousand tortured to death in the prisons of the fascist Al Assad, who uses the worst torture methods, which would make even Videla, Pinochet and even the very Nazi Gestapo go pale. Those are the prisoners of the revolution who are in the prisons of Al Assad.

Since 2011, for all the Syrian exploited one of the most important things has always been to rescue the prisoners from Al Assad’s prisons and form the torture they were suffering. Furthermore the slogan “We will not forget our martyrs and our prisoners” was raised in banners in the mass demonstrations that took place in Hama city in 2011.

I remember that when I was covering the events in Syria, particularly in Aleppo, there was the so-called “Aleppo central prison”, which was on the outskirts of that city, surrounded by working-class neighborhoods. In 2013 there was a workers uprising there, and the jail was surrounded. Several times those workers tried to reach the prison to free their fellows, but Assad’s guards executed the prisoners as soon as they saw any attempt to free them.
Then, the workers self-organized themselves with their tools to dig a tunnel to the prison and thus free the prisoners. But then, the army parties of the Sunni bourgeoisie arrived saying that they had military experience and knew how to do a military operation, but in their “great attempts” to do their military actions, which did not give any result, they gave away where the tunnel was... And first the troops of Al Assad made it impossible to be used, they flooded it, they covered it; and after that, the dog Bashar reinforced his troops in the prison and used the tunnel as one of the ways to launch a counter-offensive that ended up in a massacre against the workers surrounding the prison.

The fight to free the Syrian prisoners has always been a banner of the revolution... they were raised by the masses and even by the prisoners themselves fighting inside the prisons. In “Homs central prison” the prisoners rioted in 2017 against all the jailers of that fascist army of Al Assad. Those prisoners soon brought in the solidarity of all the Syrian exploited who fought for the revolution, inside Syria and outside as well.

However, some of those who spoke in the name of the revolution and also of the defense of the Syrian prisoners abroad, only sought the path of submitting petitions to the United Nations. For seven and a half years of brutal massacres, while all those who were in the Syrian revolution gave their lives to rescue the prisoners from the claws of Al Assad and Putin, these gentlemen from outside, in 5 stars hotels, just filed petitions to the UN, and the UN only turned a blind eye.
That’s because in the UN there’s United States, France, Germany and Russia, supporting Al Assad... They all support the brutal genocide of Al Assad, including his torture of prisoners in the jails.

Our current, from the very beginning, fought against the massacre on the Syrian masses, so that the revolution is not isolated and for the freedom of all the prisoners in the jails of Al Assad. As part of this struggle, we presented motions to mass organizations, such as to CONLUTAS of Brazil, a trade union federation that groups about 3 million workers, which declared to support the Syrian revolution. At CONLUTAS we proposed to get material help to the Syrian masses, collecting one day-wage per worker, to send food, medicine, supplies, etc., to go to the refugee camps, to fight to free the prisoners ... But unfortunately their leadership responded that they would only make a statement of support for the Syrian masses on paper.
That leadership belongs to a current, LIT-CI, which always stated that the US was the one to break the siege on the Syrian revolution. They even asked US imperialism for weapons, when the US was the one that freed the skies so that the planes of Al Assad and Putin attack and bomb the Syrian exploited.
This deception is being paid today by the working class of the Syrian revolution, the Maghreb and the Middle East and internationally.
Moreover, the US bombed Syria with its planes saying it “attacked ISIS”, when the only thing they really bombed was ISIS prisons in Raqa and Deir ez Zor, where the prisoners of the Syrian revolution were imprisoned by ISIS... who was the “Islamic guardian” that imperialism sent to control the masses when they rose so that the oil wells in Syria, in these oil areas of Raqqa and Deir Ez-Zor, were not taken over by the masses.

After 7 years and a half, it is already clear who the US and the UN are; and that the only way to do justice and to free the prisoners is by defeating Al Assad. And Bashar can only be defeated with the victory of the revolution.