Blood-Baath in Syria and proletarian direct action

Blood-Baath in Syria and proletarian direct action
by Anonymous – Anti-Capitalist Movement – 15 February, 2012

It was thirty years ago, in the city of Hama in Syria… On February 2nd, 1982, the population responded to calls for insurrection against the government, against misery and repression. The insurgents were joined by 150 officers of the army and seized control of the city; they destroyed centres of repression, they executed more than 300 mercenaries of the regime, as well as a first unit of paratroops sent to subdue the revolt. The state retaliated while besieging the city and bombing it with heavy artillery during 27 days; even cyanide gas was used. The final assault reminds us of the “bloody week” during the Commune of Paris when the last bursts of proletarian resistance were equal to the state terror: young “kamikaze” women exploded their bombs amidst tanks and soldiers sweeping district, house by house. The repression was terrible, a sheer bloodbath: between 25,000 and 50,000 are estimated to have died. Media didn’t relay the information about these events, or not much, no indignation rose abroad, especially as the thesis of Islamite plot was put forward everywhere to better hide the social nature of these struggles, like any struggle of our class.

This uprising was not a bolt from the blue: strikes, demonstrations, sabotages, riots, bomb attacks, executions of army officers and VIPs of the Baath regime, mutinies in jails, various massacres, it was since months and years that important clashes had been setting Syria ablaze. Moreover the country was situated in a region that was laid waste by many problems – the struggles of our class were mixed with conflicts between various bourgeois factions: let’s remind the Lebanon war in 1982, as well as the bloody repression in “Palestinian” refugees camps where proletarians were slaughtered once by the Israeli army, once by various militias, if not directly by the PLO cops and their “national liberation”; let’s remind the “Iranian revolution” from 1977 to 1979 and its transformation into an inter-bourgeois war between Iran and Iraq that will make about a million of dead in eight years; let’s also remind the struggles against this war, sabotages, revolutionary defeatism, army regiments of both belligerent countries that deserted their respective camps and got united to take actions against their own bourgeoisie, against both states; let’s remind the wave of proletarian struggle that swept through Egypt in 1977; let’s remind… …more