In Athens’ rebel neighborhoods…

In the buildings taken over by them to work in solidarity with the refugees…

Conference introducing the book “2013-2014, SYRIA UNDER FIRE; a bloodied revolution” by Abu Muad, a co-autho

A meeting in Athens for diffusion of and debate on the international struggle for uniting the ranks of the world working class against the Geneva III “Great Coalition”.

Presentation by Leandro Hofstadter from Greece, Correspondente of El Organizador Obrero Internacional

Our fight to break the siege to the Syrian revolution in Greece

After suffering firsthand almost 5 years of a massacre carried out by Syrian dictator Dog Bashar and his allies Russia, Iran and Hezbollah -supported by “Black Bush” Obama, who together try to wipe off the face of the Earth the Syrian vanguard and its spectacular revolution, I came to Greece.
I came as one of the spokesmen of this resistance, this revolution and this fight against genocide, following the path of thousand hundreds of refugees seeking to reach Europe for escaping the counter-revolutionary war and saving their lives and those of their families; I was sent here by a brigade in the rebel areas, the Leon Sedov Brigade.

Here, in Athens, the Greek capital, I found a huge movement of solidarity with the refugees. There were many Greek young people and workers, but also from the rest of Europe and the world. They receive the refugees upon arrival at the shores of the Greek Islands, ensure their safe landing when they see that the boat is in danger of shipwreck, provide them shelter against the cold, and also food, lodging, medical care and clothing... moreover they try to so do in every stage of the journey from the Greek South - where the Islands are- to the North, where the refugees keep trying to cross the border in order to get to Germany.

 It is a massive, great movement of solidarity with refugees that has its origins in the 2008 uprisings, when in the Exarcheia neighborhood (a neighborhood located in the center of Athens known for its historic resistance against the military dictatorship in the ' 70s) riots began that spread across the country, in response to miserable living conditions imposed by Greek capital associated with European and USA capital. Young people -even with a college degree- suffering 60% unemployment -when not a miserable wage of 400 euros per month-, were in the forefront of this process by the Greek workers, leaving their martyrs in the streets -as Alexis Grigoropoulos. Today, 52 of these young people, a symbol of this struggle, are locked in dire prisons of the Greek State under a Government that disguised as "left" to win the election.

The very workers and young people who rose up against "austerity", the entrenchment, the attack that the capitalists were throwing on them since 2008 are now who receive refugees from the Middle East as class brothers and sisters. They are those who defend them against the attacks of fascist gangs and the State; who fight for their rights; who have taken these buildings to be used as centers of the struggle for them.

"To one and other side of the Mediterranean we are the same class" they claim. I had the opportunity to participate in their mobilizations to the detention centers, fighting for their closure, for freedom to all refugees with full rights and legal papers, where they thundered this slogan. And thus also feel the comrades who are deprived of their freedom; when I met them while they attended the multiple trials they are facing, they took advantage of the few minutes we had to talk to express their support for the Syrian masses and ask about them. "We are part of the same fight" they claimed. "Both them and us wanted and still want to change this life and this unfair system, that’s why we are twinned".

Fighters from the rebel Greek youth took the call of the presenters of the book “Syria Under Fire” in their own hands.

They called for this act publicly announcing that the Syrian people are suffering genocide at the hands of the regime of Assad, while ISIS wins power in the Eastern portion of Syria, and that mass protests that burst in 2011 were the start of a revolution that has not finished to date. They invited to a debate, to demonstrate that this is not a proxy war of foreign interests (USA vs. Russia) vying for power, but a class war, because there is a revolution being massacred by both sides. And many comrades from other places, collectives, groups, etc. participated in this act also.

For this reason, this activity on 31 January was a day not only for "counter-information", but it did clarify completely that "fuzzy picture" that Stalinism had created in the minds of this sector of the Greek vanguard.

Before dozens of young people and workers who were present, we made it clear that in Syria which had begun in 2011 was a real revolution. They got to know that is was a revolution for bread, freedom and a dignified life as part of a chain of revolutions in the entire Maghreb and Middle East, as the most advanced process of the uprisings that come happening since 2008 in the world in response to the global economic crisis that erupted that year.

Syria is the place where imperialism has concentrated forces to crush and cut out that string of revolutions. For the imperialists Syria should not be another Libya, much less Bashar have the same fate as Gaddafi. For this reason they have let Bashar Al-Assad to do for 4 years the dirty work of massacring the insurrected Syrian masses.

Tons of soil have been thrown over the eyes of the world working class to prevent their international unity and solidarity with Syrian revolution; many comrades expressing in their own way the confusion promoted by the treacherous leaderships of the masses and imperialism, asked us whether the civil war in Syria was an inter-religious or cultural problem.

Surely in Syria there are different cultures and religions –we explained the audience while drawing a synoptic graphic showing them; but what is often hidden is that the 70% of the Syrian population is Sunni and also Sunnis comprise the most part of the workers and poor people there. On the other hand, Alawites, Shiites, Christians and Kurds are other 30%.

Though, save for the Kurds, the rest of the minorities and specially the Alawites (branch of Islam to which dog Bashar belongs), are the bulk of the Syrian possessing/ruling classes that, as the Alawites have been in power for more than 30 years now.
Then –we continued explaining- those who sell us the “religion war” are simply concealing that who rebelled there were the vast hungry masses for bread, against the bourgeois state headed by Al-Assad and his dictatorial regime and government that were to the service of the imperialist powers.

Huge mass mobilizations arose all over the country demanding a decent life and Jobs to be able to eat. They made the army of the dictator break in its base. What did the Syrian bourgeoisie and imperialism do regarding to this? What policy did imperialism follow to contain this process of bourgeois state disaggregation and widespread armament of the popular masses only a few kilometers from Jerusalem?

The same as in the beginning of the mobilizations, the Sunni bourgeoisie received an order from imperialism to mount over the masses so to contain the masses and deviate their fight; this plan failed noisily because far from retreating, the masses advanced and took over the army barracks for winning over the rank and file soldiers: revolution started. So this bourgeoisie began to call in a hurry the… Sunnite! generals and officers from Assad’s army to form the “opposition” to the regime, so to put in place the so called Free Syrian Army to prevent the masses from generalizing their armament and passing to the stage of self-organization and coordination, which they had begun achieving in the “coordination committees”.

Thus imperialism sent Sunni bourgeoisie and generals to change sides in the last moment for controlling the revolutionary masses (which in their indisputable majority are Sunnis) through the creation of the FSA; we insisted, that was achieved by generals coming from within Bashar Al-Assad officers’ caste. They created a party army where that bourgeois sector plays the role of “opposition”. When all this was not enough, many of these Sunni generals got their bear growing long and set up new party armies as for example the Al-Nusra Front, with an anti-imperialist discourse and asserting they are “Al-Qaida in Syria” which fought against USA in Iraq. Thus they try once more to deceive and contain the masses.

Inter-sectarian or inter-religious feud?  No, comrades –we told the audience: Class struggle, revolutionary struggle for bread vs thousands of deceptions and conspiracies against the masses in order to prevent them from succeeding in their enterprise. Something happened in the course of our presentation: we felt as if the enormous smokescreen set up by the reformist left, the WSF and the rest of the enemies of revolution were dissipating before the eyes of the world revolutionary vanguard.

Thus the masses were encircled and separated from the whole of the world proletariat, and the dog of imperialism Bashar Al-Assad, reinforced with troops and weaponry from Russia, Iran, Lebanese Hezbollah, paramilitary troops of the Iraqi bourgeois-led Shiite mercenaries, etc. could perform this huge genocide with impunity and has killed 500,000 people and expelled more than half of the country from their homes; the displaced (more than 10 million) having to live as refugees under some rubble in the razed cities or towns, in tents in the middle of the desert, in the Syrian borders and in neighboring countries; a few of them were coming to Europe. And when they arrive on Greek soil, are chased unmercifully or laid to chill in the open by the EU Member States. So, we explained how all of us exploited were brothers in a same struggle with the revolutions of the Maghreb and Middle East through solidarity with the refugees.
As co-author of the book in the midst of the battlefield where the Syrian masses fight, I could see during the conference what meant for the European workers the arrival of thousand hundreds of refugees.
We could feel the disposition, the anxiety for knowing about the revolution that their bravest and more determined youth defend in the Greek coasts.

had people fighting and giving their lives for a cause, and that was the reason for the genocide. Due to the popular solidarity they woke up, we could take advantage of this presentation for sweeping away the myth that in Syria there is a proxy war, that various "local players" representing "global interests" are killing one another, and we could demonstrate that what we can see there is different bourgeois actors seeking to control the masses in a portion of the territory with their political parties (which, in war zone, take the form of army-parties), and that they all gather in Geneva to agree on their business, while the masses are massacred, because the imperialists and the bourgeois factions they command will not stop before making Syria a graveyard, not leaving stone upon stone of the revolution.

How the presentation of the book “Syria Under Fire” was organized

From the moment I arrived to Athens I could interview the prisoners in the jails of Syriza. There is the best of the brave and active of the Greek youth. I was there and took part in their fights, shared their goals, knew of their courage in the combats, their insatiable query for finding a way to the victory, their sensitivity thst allowed them to recognize the best elements, the allies to their fight… I received the warmth of the “Athens spark”, we felt one in the same struggle we that fight in Syria and the Maghreb and the whole Middle East with the workers and youth that are fighting in Greece and the whole Europe. I felt at home.

In the meeting of the collectives in which I took part there, I commented to the comrades that I had come to Athens precisely with this same war cry that sounded within the Syrian areas freed from Bashar regime.

Nearly a month of my arrival in the Greek capital, another comrade fighter in the Libyan and Syrian revolution and co-author of the book Syria under fire under the pseudonym Abu Muad, came with a call made by our internationalist comrades of the Syrian resistance. In this appeal the need was expressed to break the isolation circle surrounding the Syrian resistance and to unify the forces of all those who fight against imperialism and the genocide in Syria and confront the concentration of counterrevolutionary forces in the various international conferences (Vienna, United Arab Emirates, New York, Geneva, etc...). Accompanying actions for the refugees, together we expressed this appeal to different meetings being held to coordinate the struggles for refugees and against social injustice; we also brought it to comrades that until today are kept locked up by the Greek State keeps for fighting against a oppressing system.

When hearing the appeal many were surprised, even shocked; they confessed they were unaware of what it was about and that what we brought was something new and unknown to them. They also said that in Greece a huge mantle of confusion had been thrown around the Syrian issue. They were helping refugees fleeing from what they believed was a war between various local interests (Bashar Al-Assad against the FSA) responding to various international interests (Russia and the United States, respectively); they had been informed that in the middle of that war "Islamic terrorism" had emerged, whose maximum expression was ISIS, which "was attempting to destroy the great Kurdish revolution in Rojava ".

Many comrades began to invite people to this conference-debate; a center working with the refugees lend us their local. The meeting for discussing the Syrian revolution was ready to start.

Comrades found in Greece warned us about the "confused image" created especially by the PKK, the Stalinists, the betrayer Renegades to Trotskyism and of course all the mainstream media in the world. These comrades said the fight to unite the fight in the Middle East with that in Europe was difficult, but it was the way to go because "every day that the rebels are losing ground is a bad day for a revolutionary wherever it is". Others translated that appeal to their language and published it for everyone to know.

So we arrived at an Assembly in the self-organized “Solidarity Initiative to refugees / immigrants”, where this proposal elated many other comrades. They showed their enormous willingness to act when telling us that we should make an open presentation to "establish the truth and demystify the concepts that were handled up to then within the Greek vanguard", so that we could promote our fight to break the isolation of the Syrian resistance more forcefully. That is how we made this presentation, at the building that this initiative has taken up, called "Dervenion" (for the street in Exarcheia where it is placed, NT).
The voice of the revolutionists in the Syrian resistance reached Athens where the fire of revolution is still lit. Here are the forces for starting to break the siege of silence and confusion encircling the revolution in Maghreb and the Middle East.

This was an important clarification in the presentation, as it was carried out at a time when the Geneva Conference III was being held, a Conference in which neither the revolutionary masses, nor their interests and their struggle were represented. True fighters of the revolution weren’t there, but generals without battle that is just a disguise that bourgeois merchants wear for times of war. So we called to put in place an international Assembly, and presented a proposal to the audience to go back and consider in their assemblies, working places, fighting organizations the motion to unify the struggle that all of us have been doing with the refugees and against the Troika in Greece, with that against Dog Bashar to stop the massacre and win the war. It is actually a fight against all the imperialist powers and their lackeys who are now together in Geneva.

The PKK (Kurdish Worker Party) and Stalinism try to deceive people for many months to make the European working class not to recognize Bashar Al Assad as the biggest genocidal enemy of the Syrian revolution

 The Kurdish question was very much debated in the meeting, including with the presence of many Kurdish brothers and sisters. Unfortunately, due to the leaderships, the Kurdish area has become a place where the fabric is woven to make the screen that covers murderous al Assad to hide his infamous role. So that we were very patient and spent all the necessary time to explain and debate the point meticulously.

We began telling the comrades that we are for the right to self-determination of the Kurdish people; though we believe the victory of the revolution in Syria, Turkey and the entire Maghreb and Middle East is the only way to conquer that self-determination. We also said that this way of unifying the struggle of the Kurd with the Syrian and Turkish struggle, was effectively which the Kurdish masses followed from 201 together with their Syrian and Turkish brethren; but this way was time and again muddled and destroyed by the Kurdish bourgeoisie and Stalinism.

We only had to share with the audience what we had seen with our eyes and felt in our skin to the sight of so much betrayal to this oppressed brave people. The commanders of the YPG and the leaders of the PKK, have made agreements with all the oppressors of the Kurdish people, especially with Syrian genocidal dictator Bashar Al-Assad, who all of us Arabs and Kurds confronted at the starting of the revolution in early 2011.

We brought to the fore an example of those days we were fighting together; we told the audience a dialogue with a Kurdish comrade that was part of the coordination committees, who told us that every month before the revolution started the Kurds demonstrated against Bashar burning pictures with his face; they could not understand how their leaders were now agreeing in a non-aggression treaty with the worse oppressor of the Kurds. So Stalinism and the Kurdish bourgeoisie stabbed in the back the Syrian masses in their struggle against murderous Bashar and at the same time they were stabbing in the back of their own people that were fighting for self-determination.

Sad story of the Kurdish bourgeoisie we saw already in 2003 with leader of the Kurdish Peshmerga in Iraq, Barzani being a great ally of Bush in the invasion of this country. This story of betrayal is repeated with Öcalan, leader of the guerrillas of the PKK in the mountains of northern Iraq, who always said they expected the "miraculous day" in which the Turkish masses would rebel in their land, thus the PKK could join them with its military apparatus to defeat the oppressive Turkish State and get once and for all the liberation of the Kurdish people.

The day arrived, Kurdish and Turkish exploited masses rose and defeated militarily the filthy police of the Turkish State. The main squares of major cities of the country were taken in an insurrection that touched even the rank and file soldiers of the Turkish army that sent press releases in solidarity with the uprising. What did the Kurdish leaders in Turkey as Öcalan do? They signed a treacherous Pact with Turkish President Erdogan where the struggle and blood of the Kurdish masses were yielded in exchange for a pair of seats in the Turkish Parliament.

Who are we? On behalf of whom we fight? 

They took advantage of the exploited Kurdish masses in the uprisings of the 2011 having defeated the forces of Al-Assad by themselves, expelling the regime’s army from their cities (which are in a stretch of the Syrian Northeast on the border with Turkey); so they mounted above the masses and now manage that area (called "Rojava"); they use its checkpoints to collect taxes, especially through the border crossing to Turkey. Thus this Kurdish bourgeoisie became in other army party that quartered the Syrian revolution, dividing the oppressed Kurdish people from their class brothers in the rest of the region, and taking control of a piece of the business.

Other comrades told us that in Greece the fact had been hidden that there was a resistance by brigades that were independent from the various bourgeois army-parties, or that these very same - as it is the case with the FSA or Jabhat al Nusra - cannot control completely rebel areas or their own rank and file.

In this sense one of the participants of the meeting asked us: "who are you"? To which we responded: "we are part of the masses in resistance, which as thousands more do not undergo any bourgeois variant, and we are opposed to the dictatorship under which we come starving for 30 years; we are those who strive to get the bread in full revolution of the 2011 and are now fighting to defend our house, our family, our neighborhood. Those who strive to survive. We are part of the resistance that even though in the last trench strives to overcome. And they were thrilled to know this reality. We are also those who say that, to win this war, we must defeat Al-Assad and for that purpose it is necessary to expropriate the oil, the imperialist corporations and all capitalists and to return to build coordination councils of workers and soldiers as those which emerged in 2011, in order to coordinate and centralize a true Council of the revolution that truly represented the resistance and the millions of refugees that in the borders of Syria and in Europe are also fighting for overthrowing Al Assad.

We are the ones who say that victory in Damascus is impossible solely with the forces that we have today. Seventeen armies invade Syria. The UN, NATO and murderous Putin assassin are supporting dog Bashar... We are the ones who want to put up a coalition of the exploited, which fights for a generalized intifada from Tunisia to Jerusalem. And we are in Europe following the path of our brothers, the refugees, because they are those who started to revolt the European working class in support of our revolution.
We know that most of them are now in refugee camps, real prisons in the open in the Europe of the Maastricht Treaty. Ten thousand children, children of our refugee brothers, are wanted by their parents and are used, as different organizations of human rights in Europe denounce, as child labor, for prostitution or to be sold as slaves.

This reaction which today hangs over our Syrian brothers here is the daughter of the enormous betrayal of all the Union bureaucracies of the social-imperialist parties, that snake-oil sellers as Syriza, which openly supports Bashar Al-Assad, or the scoundrel Hollande who organized an attack in Paris with his intelligence services, denouncing the ISIS as the author, just to create a feeling and opening a river of blood with the refugees who came to Europe and had raised a huge feeling of solidarity among the masses of the Old continent.

Therefore we could not less than welcome that they had given us this possibility. We were with battle-hardened and militant youth of Athens, who are part of that 30% of unemployed youth, some of them technicians or engineers. Nothing different to young Bouazizi and the sufferings of unemployment and martyrdom people is living in Tunisia and throughout the Middle East.
We feel in this presentation that the spark of Athens still lives, as Tunisia’s, which today has again entered into a series of uprisings to regain the revolution that had been expropriated from them. "It was enough to look in the eye to the auditorium to realize that there were forces to regain the Greek revolution... after so many years of huge battles and great betrayal."

Our proposal for putting in place an International Counter-conference for breaking the iron fence that encircles the Syrian revolution, and antagonizing the Geneva Conference and all those that invade Syria and massacre the Syrian people.

This led to a conclusion for the meeting, that is, there is already an agreement on the need to come together and stop the war ... but how, what is the project, which is the program? We insisted we had our opinion, forwarding to them Leon Sedov Brigade’s point of view: the need to expropriate oil wells and refineries, the central bank, the factories, etc., to control the Syrian riches and starting there, to rebuild the cities to get all refugees back, convening to a revolutionary Congress of delegates from all cities, to march on the Golan Heights together with the Palestinian people to finally expel the Zionist gendarme, and make peoples’ insurrection surge again throughout the Maghreb and Middle East. But we also clarified that this position could be discussed together with all those who want to end the genocide and defeat Dog Bashar in an international Assembly convened in common.

This last was the proposal for all those that are with us in this side of the struggle to unite and discuss a plan for fighting as a sole fight in an international assembly, as so much soil threw to the eyes of the world working class by the bourgeoisie, the union bureaucracies and the reformist left pursues the objective of covering genocidal Bashar al Assad and his NATO bosses so as to make the masses in the world incapable of stage a general uprising in defense of the massacred Syrian people.
We cannot allow for it one minute more; the struggle to conquer this international assembly becomes an urgent task for the world working class. This presentation was undoubtedly a step forward to conquer it.