LALIT's Solidarity message to antiwar movement in Japan
11.08.2024
LALIT sent a message of solidarity to the International Antiwar movement on the occasion of the 62th Antiwar assemblies held in Tokyo and 6 other cities in Japan. The message was translated in Japanese language and read to all participants attending the assemblies in different cities.
MESSAGE
Comrades,
On the occasion of the 62nd International Antiwar Assembly in Japan, LALIT is pleased to send our revolutionary greetings to the Organising Committee and to all students and workers attending the Assembly.
The International Antiwar Assembly is being held in this very moment when we are in a middle of a genocide that the Israeli State is committing against the people of Palestine. These atrocities are solidly and totally backed by US president Joe Biden’s regime and a Congress subservient to the American Israeli Political Action Campaign lobby and other business interests especially in the military industrial complex. The USA supports Israel in many ways – by the constant supply of weapons, by immense amounts of funding and by the use of diplomatic power, including the UN Security Council veto. Since the 7th October incursion into Israel by Hamas and other Palestine resistance organizations, the response of the Israeli state has been to murder more than 40,000 civilians in Gaza and West Bank, mostly children, women and old people, and to run a campaign, including a campaign of invented atrocity propaganda, to attempt to justify this mass murder. New estimates put the real death toll at twice this figure or more. Bombs are being dropped on schools, hospitals, roads, water and electrical supplies, sewerage treatment plants, public records offices and museums, universities and blocks of housing – all on the pretext that the Israeli forces are looking for Hamas fighters. The Israeli propaganda relies on weaponizing international law to actually commit genocide e.g. it gives orders for hundreds of thousands of people to displace themselves, supposedly to protect them from bombs, whereas they are being hounded out of their land on purpose instead, one of the means of perpetrating genocide. Humanitarian aid conveys are being blocked and Palestinians are left starving without basic health care. Epidemics are now rampant. The aim of the Israeli regime is to implement a policy of genocide aiming at the elimination of Palestine people and to thus complete their illegal occupation of Palestine. This is clear, and then exposed totally by the Israeli acceleration of forced displacement in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.
These acts of barbarism of the Israeli regime are being condemned by all the world through street demonstrations, encampment in Universities, workers refusing to load and unload military equipment, and other actions of all kinds. Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine, including Gaza, is further condemned by The International Court of Justice (ICJ). This Court has given interim judgments condemning “plausible” genocide from January this year. And this month, in its Advisory Opinion on another case against Israel, on 20th July, ruled, as it was requested by the UN to rule, that since 1967, Israel’s presence in the occupied Palestinian territory is unlawful and that Israel is under an obligation to bring an end to this illegal occupation. Israel has the obligation to make reparation for the damage caused to all the natural or legal persons concerned in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. The ICJ called on the UN General Assembly and Security Council to consider modalities and further actions to bring an end as rapidly as possible to the unlawful presence of the State of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. Meanwhile the International Criminal Court (ICC), a different Court, has applied for arrest warrants for Prime Minister Netanyahu and his top aides. Ironically, after such damning positions from the ICJ and the ICC, the US Congress has welcomed Netanyahu to address them, and proceeded to give standing ovations, like puppets on Israel’s strings, to a ‘war criminal’ as US Senator Bernie Sanders rightly describes him. Thousands of people on the streets in Washington DC have been protesting against this visit and also against the US Government role in funding and arming the Netanyahu Regime in their atrocities towards people in Gaza. American Jewish organizations have protested inside the Rotunda of the Congress.
At level of State’s actions, there is the initiative of the South African Government referred to above calling on the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to condemn Israel for committing Genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, in violation with the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948). In Mauritius LALIT’s members in the Women’ Liberation Movement initiated a campaign, supported by all Opposition political parties in Parliament, to add their voices to LALIT and SOMALP’s appeal to the Mauritian Government to support the South African case at the ICJ. The Mauritian Government made a statement in reply to a question in Parliament that they participated in the Oral Hearings at the ICJ on the illegality of Israel occupation of Palestine, which is true, and a direct result of pressure from local pro-Palestine groups including LALIT, and then added that the Government does support the South African initiative at the ICJ on Israeli Genocide against people of Palestine. We have not yet managed to make them join this second case, as they had joined the case against illegal occupation.
LALIT’s actions in Mauritius aim to mobilize people in opposing the US imperialism and its allies in their agendas to escalate wars in the world for their geopolitical and military interests. There is a close link between struggle against Israeli illegal occupation of Palestine territory and the struggle in Mauritius against the illegal occupation of UK and US of the Chagos Archipelago. Both represent, in additions, fault lines in Western imperialism, and the residual colonization through military bases.
In 2019, the UN General Assembly condemned UK for the illegal dismembering of the Chagos Archipelagos and called on it to end its illegal occupation in a time frame of 6 months. But, UK persists in the occupation and started negotiation between with Mauritian government, which has abjectly asked for rent money for the US base on Diego Garcia. In return, the UK continues its delaying tactics and the USA keeps its base. All this to say that our struggle on Chagos continues, focusing on (a) the complete decolonization and re-unification of Mauritius territory, including the right to Chagossians as well as other Mauritian citizens to visit or settle on all the Chagos islands (b) the dismantling of the US military base of Diego Garcia and the cleaning up of any nuclear and other military waste, and (c) full reparations to the State of Mauritius for illegal occupation for over 50 years, and reparations to all Chagossians who have suffered from the displacement forced upon them.
The Diego Garcia military base is right now being used by USA for illegally detained refugees originally from Sri Lanka and who are held in an open air prison since 2021. The USA recently barred and refused access to the British Judges supposedly with jurisdiction to go to Chagos for the court hearings to which the detainees are entitled by UK law. The US imperialists now outrageously impose their rules, or lack of rules, upon a land stolen by UK itself in 1965, prior to Mauritius Independence, and then sub-let in part (Diego Garcia) to the USA, and now the USA prevents the UK Courts from operating!
LALIT also demands that the Russian army immediately withdraw from Ukraine and that the military pact NATO, led by US imperialism, stops arming Ukraine for what is essentially the United States’ proxy war of expansion, for the moment aimed at encircling Russia. NATO’s aim is its own expansion, which was begun in earnest in such a treacherous fashion when it was formally agreed that NATO would not expand when the Warsaw Pact was closed down. The arms-makers and arms-sellers are capitalists with enormous power. They are the driving force behind NATO’s mad desire to expand. They are the ones that need military expenditure to rise, and they do this, in part, by NATO expansion, in part by sheer actual war. This way, the USA, has gradually undermined the sovereignty of all the NATO countries in “its” treaty. All this only leads to further escalation which will bring more suffering and death among civilians.
Wars are not in the interest of working class and oppressed people of the world, but serve only the interest of the ruling class which stands to gain in military investments, in looting the people’s resources, in destroying life of civilian populations, and from causing immense military pollution. A new nuclear Armageddon is looking us in the face, as NATO continues to expand towards Russia’s borders. A new conflagration in a US war cooked up against Iran, is looking us in the face.
Our struggle against imperialism and the capitalist system in Mauritius, here in the Indian Ocean cannot be separated from struggles happening all over the world, struggles by working class people and their revolutionary organisations. Our struggles are linked and we are fighting the same enemy of the people.
Working people of Japan, students and comrades, on this occasion of the 62nd Antiwar Assembly LALIT wishes you lots of success to gather strengths in your future actions to fight against the imperialist wars and the capitalist system.
LALIT
26.07.24
Website: lalitmauritius.org
