Communique from the EZLN
January 2013

Communiqué from the Indigenous Revolutionary Clandestine Committee – General Command of the Zapatista National Liberation Army
Mexico.
December 30 2012.

To the People of Mexico:
To the People and Governments of the World:
Brothers and Sisters:
Compañeros and Compañeras:

In the early morning hours of December 21, 2012, tens of thousands of indigenous Zapatistas mobilized and took, peacefully and silently, five municipal seats in the southeast Mexican state of Chiapas.

In the cities of Palenque, Altamirano, Las Margaritas, Ocosingo, and San Cristóbal de las Casas, we looked at you and at ourselves in silence.

Ours is not a message of resignation.

It is not one of war, death, or destruction.

Our message is one of struggle and resistance.

After the media coup d’etat that catapulted a poorly concealed and even more poorly costumed ignorance into the federal executive branch, we made ourselves present to let them know that if they had never left, neither had we.

Six years ago, a segment of the political and intellectual class went looking for someone to hold responsible for their defeat. At that time we were, in cities and in communities, struggling for justice for an Atenco that was not yet fashionable.

In that yesterday, they slandered us first and wanted to silence us later.

Dishonest and incapable of seeing that it was within themselves that there was and still is the seed of their own destruction, they tried to make us disappear with lies and complicit silence.

Six years later, two things are clear:

– They don’t need us in order to fail.

– We don’t need them in order to survive.

We, who never went away, despite what media across the spectrum have been determined to make you believe, resurge as the indigenous Zapatistas that we are and will be.

In these years, we have significantly strengthened and improved our living conditions. Our standard of living is higher than those of the indigenous communities that support the governments in office, who receive handouts that are squandered on alcohol and useless items.

Our homes have improved without damaging nature by imposing on it roads alien to it.

In our communities, the earth that was used to fatten the cattle of ranchers and landlords is now used to produce the maize, beans, and the vegetables that brighten our tables.

Our work has the double satisfaction of providing us with what we need to live honorably and contributing to the collective growth of our communities.

Our sons and daughters go to a school that teaches them their own history, that of their country and that of the world, as well as the sciences and techniques necessary for them to grow without ceasing to be indigenous.

Indigenous Zapatista women are not sold as commodities.

The indigenous members of the PRI attend our hospitals, clinics, and laboratories because in those of the government, there is no medicine, nor medical devices, nor doctors, nor qualified personnel.

Our culture flourishes, not isolated, but enriched through contact with the cultures of other peoples of Mexico and of the world.

We govern and govern ourselves, always looking first for agreement before confrontation.

We have achieved all of this without the government, the political class, and the media that accompanies them, while simultaneously resisting their attacks of all kinds.

We have shown, once again, that we are who we are.

With our silence, we have made ourselves present.

Now with our word, we announce that:

First – We will reaffirm and consolidate our participation in the National Indigenous Congress, the space of encounter with the original peoples of our country.

Second – We will reinitiate contact with our compañeros and compañeras adherents of the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandón Jungle in Mexico and the world.

Third – We will try to construct the necessary bridges toward the social movements that have arisen and will arise, not to direct or supplant them, but to learn from them, from their history, from their paths and destinies.

For this we have consolidated the support of individuals and groups in different parts of Mexico, formed as support teams for the Sixth and International Commissions of the EZLN, to become avenues of communication between the Zapatista bases of support and the individuals, groups, and collectives that are adherents to the Sixth Declaration, in Mexico and in the World, who still maintain their conviction and commitment to the construction of a non-institutional left alternative.

Fourth – We will continue to maintain our critical distance with respect to the entirety of the Mexican political class which has thrived at the expense of the needs and desires of humble and simple people.

Fifth – With respect to the bad governments – federal, state, and municipal, executive, legislative, and judicial, and the media that accompanies them, we say the following:

The bad governments which belong to the entirety of the political spectrum without a single exception have done everything possible to destroy us, to buy us off, to make us surrender. PRI, PAN, PRD, PVEM, PT, CC and the future political party RN have attacked us militarily, politically, socially, and ideologically.[i] The mainstream media tried to disappear us first with opportunist and servile lies followed by a complicit and deceptive silence. Those they served, those on whose money they nursed are no longer around and those who have succeeded them will not last any longer than their predecessors.

As was made evident on December 21, 2012, all of them failed. So, it’s up to the federal, executive, legislative and judicial governments to decide if they are going to continue the politics of counterinsurgency that have only resulted in a flimsy simulation clumsily built through the media, or if they are going to recognize and fulfill their commitments by elevating Indigenous Rights and Culture to the level of the Constitution as established in the “San Andrés Accords” signed by the Federal Government in 1996, which was at the time led by the very same political party that today occupies the executive office.

It will be up to the state government to decide if it will continue the dishonest and despicable strategy of its predecessor, that in addition to corruption and lies, used the money of the people of Chiapas to enrich itself and its accomplices and dedicated itself to the shameless buying off of the voices and pens of the communications media, sinking the people of Chiapas into poverty while using police and paramilitaries to try to brake the organizational advance of the Zapatista communities; or, if instead, with truth and justice, it will accept and respect our existence and come around to the idea that a new form of social life is blooming in Zapatista territory, Chiapas, Mexico. This is a flowering that attracts the attention of honest people all over the planet.

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Turkey, Qatar, KSA behind increasing violence in Syria: Nasrallah
Shia Post – 4 January, 2013

The Hezbollah Secretary General says Turkey, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia are responsible for fueling violence in Syria and the increase in casualties.

Seyyed Hassan Nasrallah made the remarks in a televised speech in the southern Lebanese town of Baalbek on the occasion of Arbaeen, which marks the 40th day after the martyrdom anniversary of Imam Hussein (PBUH).

He said Turkey, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia are arming and funding militants fighting the Damascus government.

Nasrallah said the crisis in Syria has a political solution and cautioned that the continuation of the Syrian conflict would have dire consequences.

“If Syria’s battle continues, it will be long, bloody and destructive,” the Hezbollah secretary general pointed out.

Nasrallah said Lebanon in the most affected country in the Middle East by the Syrian crisis, calling on Lebanese political factions to refrain from any moves which would throw the country into turmoil.

He went on to say that the influx of Syrian refugees in Lebanon indicates a major humanitarian crisis, which must not be politicized.

The Hezbollah secretary general stressed that division is the most dangerous threat the Muslim nations face, saying Takfiri extremists are the product of the US seeking to sow discord among Muslims.

He said Takfiris are behind countless massacres and bombings in Muslim countries and particularly Syria.

Nasrallah called on the incumbent Lebanese government to devise a strategy to safeguard the country’s oil and gas resources and said the Hezbollah Resistance Movement is ready to undertake the task of protecting such resources.

He concluded that despite US and Israeli efforts to “isolate, blacklist and demonize Hezbollah such efforts against the resistance movement will get nowhere.” …source

The West Bank’s 2012: The Year of the Israeli Settlement
By Karl Vick – 31 December, 2012

At the start of 2012, the Israeli advocacy group Peace Now, which seeks a two-state solution, warned that the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was building Jewish settlements on the West Bank at a pace that, if allowed to continue, would carve up the land to a point that would doom the possibility of a viable Palestinian state. Twelve months later, that pace has nearly quintupled. In one week of December alone, Netanyahu’s government pushed forward plans for 11,000 homes beyond the Green Line that marked Israel’s 1967 border — nearly as many settler homes as were approved in the previous 10 years combined. The explosion in activity has made 2012 the Year of the Settlement, inspiring a new level of war-themed rhetoric from settlement opponents. “Unprecedented Planning Strike on East Jerusalem,” says the Peace Now website, “6,600 units in 4 days,”

Netanyahu makes no apology for the surge in promised building, despite waves of opprobrium from Europe and the U.S. Israelis go to the polls on Jan. 22, and the most serious challenge to Netanyahu’s campaign has come from a new party that champions settlements. The Prime Minister summoned the mayors of West Bank settlements to his Jerusalem office last week to make sure his efforts were getting noticed. “It’s obvious to all of you that this government has done a great deal in the past four years for the settlements in Judea and Samaria,” Netanyahu said, referring to the West Bank by its biblical name. “And we’re asking you to help spread the information among the residents of your districts.”

The most controversial move was to push forward plans to build on the last usable patch of Palestinian land east of Jerusalem, a parcel known as E1. (Plans to build on E1 have existed for 14 years but have been kept on hold; now, among other new steps, demolition orders have been issued for Bedouin homes and animal pens there.) Foreign diplomats, Palestinian officials and Israeli peace advocates warned that filling that space with Jewish homes amounted to the “doomsday” scenario, effectively destroying the possibility of ever building a Palestinian state on contiguous territory — the stated goal of the Oslo Peace Accords that since 1994 have defined the blueprint for ending the conflict between Jews and Arabs who have both claimed the same territory for more than a century.
…source

Syria “salvation” party announced in Beirut
3 January, 2013 – The Daily Star

BEIRUT: A group of Syrian activists and figures launched Thursday the “Patriotic Movement for the Salvation of Syria,” a party they say seeks to expose extremist groups at work in their country and combat and expose foreign meddling in the Arab state.

“We seek to fight all means of violence in Syria and fight all sectarian calls in the region as well as in Syria and stand in the way of all plans aimed at dividing the country,” Nabil Fayyad, a political activist, said during a news conference at the Marriott Hotel in Beirut.

He said the party, which he described as a “civil, Arab, and modern movement,” sought to rescue his country from the months-long crisis, which the U.N. said Wednesday had claimed so far the lives of over 60,000 people.

He added that the nascent movement seeks to repair the image of Sunni Muslims in his country that extremists “have distorted” through violence.

Fayyad also urged that Lebanon, Syria, Tunisia and Egypt all work together to combat “the plan by Turkey and Qatar.”

Qatar and Turkey have openly backed Syrian rebels against the rule of Syrian President Bashar Assad.

Fears of the rise of extremists in Syria have increased recently, particularly after the U.S. designated the radical Islamist Syrian rebel group Jabhat al-Nusra, an important element in the opposition struggle, as a foreign terrorist organization in December.

Last year, Washington claimed that the group was trying to hijack the rebellion on behalf of Al-Qaeda in Iraq.

Fayyad did not direct any accusations against the Syrian government but did oppose a return to the pre-uprising status quo.

“We oppose a return to a pre-March 15 Syria,” he said.

March 15, 2011, is widely regarded as the beginning of the uprising against Assad who has been in power since 2000.

Syrian MP Omar Oussi, another speaker at the news conference, read the party’s manifesto which slammed what it described as the “Doha opposition.”

“We work to expose the link between Doha’s coalition group and armed groups from Al-Qaeda that are devastating the Syrian people,” Oussi, the president of the National Initiative for Syrian Kurds, said.

“We should take note of all the speeches and statements by politicians of the Doha Conference that link them to Jabhat al-Nusra,” he added.

Several opposition groups gathered in the Qatari capital late last year and formed the “National Coalition” in order to secure tangible foreign backing.

Reading the statement, Oussi also warned against attempts to harm the Syrian Army, saying it was “a red line,” and the only body that could safeguard the country’s unity.

Asked about whether the new group would agree on Assad remaining in power, Oussi said: “The Syrian people are the only ones who can decide that.”

He said that the party’s manifesto also seeks to expose violations of human rights in Syria by extremist militant groups and fight foreign intervention that “contradicts Syria’s sovereignty.”

Oussi, a Kurdish delegate at the first national dialogue meeting in Damascus that was held last year in a bid to contain the crisis, also said that National Dialogue and reconciliation were the only means to end the conflict.
…source

Soaring Syria death toll brings intervention no closer
3 January, 2013 – By Yara Bayoumy, Alistair Lyon – Reuters

The death toll in Syria now exceeds 60,000, the United Nations says. Another 100,000 may die this year, warns U.N.-Arab League envoy Lakhdar Brahimi. About 220 were killed on Wednesday alone.

“When numbers get serious, they leave a mark on your door,” goes a song by American musician Paul Simon.

But in Syria those bloody notches show no signs of braking a headlong struggle to the death watched from afar by divided outside powers, most of whose leaders seem convinced that the risks of direct intervention outweigh any possible rewards.

Syrians realise they are essentially on their own, and 21 months after the start of protests against President Bashar al-Assad inspired by Arab revolts elsewhere, some of the civilians caught up in what has become a civil war are near despair.

“It’s all nonsense,” said Adnan Abu Raad, an elderly man wrapped in a scarf against the cold, as he watched fresh graves being dug after 11 people were killed in a weekend air strike in the rebel-held Syrian town of Azaz near the border with Turkey.

“Neither the Free Syrian Army nor Assad’s forces can protect us. The two factions are fighting each other, but no one is dying except for the innocent, the children, women and elderly.”

Abu Raad derided the peace efforts of Brahimi and his predecessor Kofi Annan as hypocrisy and dismissed reports of even limited outside help for the rebellion against Assad as fiction. “No one has sent us a single bullet. It’s all a lie.”

Some Western countries have provided what they call non-lethal aid to rebels, while some Arab states are reported to have sent weapons, mostly channelled through Turkey. Fighters complain of a dearth of ammunition even for the arms they have acquired.

Without a negotiated solution, Brahimi said on Saturday, Syria may soon resemble Somalia as a failed state plagued by warlords and destabilising its neighbours. But the opposition National Coalition rules out talks until Assad goes, while the Syrian leader says he will not give in to his foes.

The insurgents have grabbed swathes of countryside in the north and east, as well as holding parts of Aleppo, Syria’s biggest city, and some suburbs of Damascus, the capital.

Yet Assad’s power base is more cohesive than that of his fractious opponents. He controls the armed forces, using air power and heavy weaponry to contain rebel advances or to pound any towns or urban districts that slip out of his control.

In Azaz cemetery, Abu Bahri, a 45-year-old in a black coat, accused Assad of seeking to sap rebel support by targeting civilians and depriving them of water, electricity and bread.

“Hurt the people and turn them against the Free Syria Army. It’s a calculated move,” he said, as the grave-diggers’ spades gouged at the soil to lay the next victims to rest.
…more

Global Powers define terrorism, democracy based on interests
3 January, 2013 – Islamic Invittion Turkey

Secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) Saeed Jalili says world powers define terrorism and democracy based on their interests.

“For some powers fighting terrorism is not important, but protecting their interests is essential and therefore, in some regions, they create crisis centers,” Jalili said on Wednesday.

He added that the approach taken by these powers to the Afghanistan issue in the past years and to the Syria crisis over the past two years testifies to this claim.

“Why is it that after 10 years of the occupation of Afghanistan by American and NATO forces, terrorism as well as production and smuggling of illicit drugs have not been uprooted?”

The United States and its allies invaded Afghanistan in 2001 as part of Washington’s so-called war on terror, removing the Taliban from power. More than a decade later, insecurity is rising across the country despite the presence of thousands of foreign troops.

Commenting on the ongoing crises in Syria and Bahrain, the Iranian official described democracy as the “most sustainable solution” to crises in these countries.

“Regional cooperation is necessary to guarantee peace and stability in the region,” Jalili added.

Syria has been scene of deadly unrest since March 2011 which has claimed the lives of thousands of Syrians including a large number of Syrian soldiers and security forces.

Also in Bahrain, people have been holding anti-government demonstrations since mid-February 2011, calling on the US-backed Al Khalifa family to leave power. …source

Iran: Democracy Most Enduring Solution to Crises in Bahrain, Syria
3 January, 2013 – FNA

TEHRAN (FNA)- Iran underlined that implementing the principles of democracy in Bahrain and Syria is the most sustainable solution to the problems in the two Arab countries.

Secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) Saeed Jalili made the remarks on Wednesday. He stressed that democracy is the “most sustainable solution” to the crises in Bahrain and Syria.

“Regional cooperation is necessary to guarantee peace and stability in the region,” Jalili added.

In relevant remarks in December, Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi renewed Tehran’s call for a negotiated solution to the existing crisis in Syria and Bahrain, and called on all parties to show commitment to talks.

Salehi said “national dialogue” and parties’ commitment to it will be the best way out of crisis both in Syria and Bahrain.

Anti-government protesters have been holding peaceful demonstrations across Bahrain since mid-February 2011, calling for an end to the Al Khalifa dynasty’s over-40-year rule.

Violence against the defenseless people escalated after a Saudi-led conglomerate of police, security and military forces from the Persian Gulf Cooperation Council (PGCC) member states – Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Oman and Qatar – were dispatched to the tiny Persian Gulf kingdom on March 13, 2011, to help Manama crack down on peaceful protestors. So far, tens of protesters have been killed, hundreds have gone missing and thousands of others have been injured.

Salehi pointed to the recent developments in Syria, and stressed the necessity for finding a political solution to the present crisis in the Muslim country.

Syria has been experiencing unrest since March 2011 with organized attacks by well-armed gangs against Syrian police forces and border guards being reported across the country.

Hundreds of people, including members of the security forces, have been killed, when some protest rallies turned into armed clashes.

The government blames outlaws, saboteurs, and armed terrorist groups for the deaths, stressing that the unrest is being orchestrated from abroad. …source