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Aug 13, 2011, 8:27:36 AM8/13/11
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"George Galloway .com" <georgegall...@gmail.com> Aug 13 09:35AM +0100
^
* It's time to end this siege for good *
*
*
Viva Palestina is returning to Gaza with our sixth major international aid
mission to bring an end to the illegal siege. Much has changed for the
Palestinian people and the wider region in the 11 months since our last
convoy. Dictatorship has fallen in Egypt. Palestine has moved up the
international agenda. Yet the siege on Gaza remains. Israel recently blocked
the second international flotilla. Major aid agencies report that the
situation in Gaza is as bad as ever. Civil society organisation and NGOs in
Gaza have issued an appeal to the transitional Egyptian authorities to open
the Rafah crossing for the free movement of people and goods.
A promised partial opening earlier this year did not go far enough and has
largely been reversed. Meanwhile, the condition of Palestinians living under
occupation in the West Bank and Jerusalem continues to deteriorate with
ongoing illegal settlement building and the construction of the
apartheid/separation wall. Outside Palestine, conditions for three million
Palestinian refugees living in camps remain desperate, despite UN and
international recognition of their right to return to their homes. The VP
convoy will be highlighting the call to open Rafah and also the conditions
facing Palestinians in exile and under occupation. It will aim to arrive
just after Christmas, on 27 December, the third anniversary of the beginning
of Israel's Operation Cast Lead attack on Gaza.
At this time of year, the world's Christian communities and many others are
particularly focused on Jerusalem and the crisis facing the inhabitants of
that ancient city will also be part of our message.
All four of VP's previous convoy's have successfully entered Gaza. As well
as bringing millions of pounds of desperately needed medical and
humanitarian aid, we have been told by people in Gaza and by supporters of
the Palestinians in Egypt that they have helped play a role in highlighting
the unjust policy of the now ousted Mubarak regime in maintaining the siege.
The democratic upsurge in Egypt opens the prospect of ending that siege for
good. We will be working in partnership with humanitarian organisations in
Egypt to help to bring that about before another year of unnecessary
suffering is inflicted on 1.5 million people subsisting in what British
prime minister David Cameron has described as the world's largest open air
"prison camp".
We ask you to join us in this mission, which again will enjoy widespread
international support. Experience has shown that successful missions to Gaza
require a high level of organisation and planning. The VP management team
has built up that experience with hundreds of volunteers who have taken part
in our previous convoys and other events. So everything from decisions on
what aid to bring to what volunteers should expect of themselves and the
mission as a whole is based on those successful convoys and nearly three
years of experience.
We believe the time is ripe to finally end this siege with a massive
return convoy, with considerable Egyptian participation, and to raise the
underlying reasons for the humanitarian suffering of the Palestinian people
as a whole.
* We will be opening registration shortly. Please send an email to
to...@vivapalestina.org to register your interest, and we will let you know
when registration is open. *
*
*
We will be heading off from London at the end of November to arrive in Gaza
on 27 December. International participants will be joining en route. Further
details will be coming out over the coming weeks, so make sure you are on
our mailing list.
Not everyone can take part in the convoy directly. But tens of thousands
have supported our efforts and without them the convoys would not have taken
place. You can raise money and send it to us to purchase the medical and
humanitarian supplies. You can spread the word about the convoy through your
networks. You can volunteer to help with vehicles, fundraising, outreach and
other areas. The people of Gaza deserve the highest quality materials and
professionalism. What they need above all is the end to this blockade and
the restoration of trade and commerce ties that can allow them to rebuild
their economy.
With your help, we aim to assist them in achieving that - this Christmas.
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george-galloway-ma...@googlegroups.com
Aug 15, 2011, 8:09:22 AM8/15/11
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"George Galloway .com" <georgegall...@gmail.com> Aug 14 07:37PM +0100
^
*Statement on the situation in Syria, by George Galloway*
The news this morning that the Syrian navy were shelling the water-front of
Latakia - including the Palestinian refugee camp there - shook me to the
core.
Not just because I lived in that camp last year, on that water-front, when
the then dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak was stalling about letting the Viva
Palestina 5 convoy sail for Gaza (after more than a fortnight of Syrian
hospitality the convoy sailed though I was banned). The people of Latakia, a
beautiful seaside holiday resort, were good to me. I cannot be silent about
their suffering now.
More importantly the news was shocking insofar as it calibrated how close we
now are to a full-scale civil war in "the last Arab country" as I described
Syria in a speech in the Assad library five years ago, just after the
Israeli attack on Lebanon was repulsed by the Syrian backed resistance led
by Hezbollah.
Historically, I was never close to the Syrian regime, I'm writing this from
my house which I called Tal-al-Zattar after the Palestinian refugee camp in
Lebanon which suffered a massacre facilitated by another Assad more than
thirty years ago and carried out by his then Phalangist allies.
I was with Yasser Arafat in his long struggle to keep the PLO free from the
dead hand of the Syrian Ba'ath Party. I stood with Iraq when 29 countries
tried to destroy it in the first Iraq war in 1991. One of those countries
was Assad's Syria.
But in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king and by 2006 Bashar al
Assad was the last Arab leader standing. Syria was hated I said that night
in the library not because of the bad things it has done but because of the
good. I adumbrated them thus. Syria has refused to sign a surrender peace
with Israel, refused to abandon its territory on the Golan to the illegal
occupiers. Syria has refused to abandon the Palestinian resistance,
continuing to give safe haven for the leaders, and fighters, of virtually
the whole gamut of resistance organisations. Syria has insisted on
supporting the Lebanese resistance, has refused to allow its territory to be
used as a base against the resistance in Iraq and so forth. It was all true
of course but it was not the whole truth.
The dark side of the Syrian regime, its authoritarian character, its police
state mentality above all its deep-seated corruption fantastically
exacerbated by the regimes neo-liberal turn with its attendant
privatisations, substituting state property for private ownership by the
regime's comprador, by and large. This was another part of the truth though
partly concealed by the Arab nationalist anti-Imperialist character of the
Syrian people and their government. This has been the lived experience of
most Syrians for over forty years. That's a lot of darkness.
It was possible to judge Syria by the nature of its enemies - Israel, US,
British and French imperialism, the Arab reactionaries, the Salafist
sectarian fanatics - for as long as the Syrian people remained either
supported or were largely quiescent behind the regime even if only for fear
of something worse. And as long as the President, Bashar al -Assad, held out
hope for real reform towards democracy open government and an end to rampant
corruption, much of it concentrated around his own family and close cronies.
That hope now dangles by a thread.
To describe the mass uprising in Syria, day after day for months and
undaunted by the steadily rising price in blood being paid by the
protestors, as the actions of "terrorists" and "gunmen" is a gross
distortion. In fact the regime itself looks more and more like the
terrorist, certainly the gunmen, in this picture. This is a genuine popular
uprising taking place in Syria even if it is heavily infiltrated by all of
Syria's enemies - the enemies of all the Arabs in my view.
The biggest problem is that the longer fighting on this scale continues on
the greater the scope for these enemies to engineer an outcome favourable to
them. An outcome which takes Syria out of the traditional national camp and
into the camp of collapse, surrender, sectarianism and indignity.
That's why I must say it looks like five minutes to midnight in Syria for
me. For years the President has talked of reform. But the more he talked the
faster his relatives counted their ill-gotten gains.
He has talked about the lifting of states of emergency whilst presiding (one
assumes he's still presiding) over the mother of all emergencies in his
country. He has talked about ending the Ba'ath's constitutional monopoly as
the "leading force" in the country but it still exists, at least on paper if
not on the streets. He has talked about elections but of those there is no
sign and how could there be amidst the carnage?
The risk of open imperialist intervention in this situation increases almost
by the hour. The enemies of the Palestinians and all the Arabs are rattling
their sabres. The Syrian people, always the heart of Arab nationalism cry
out in their slogans even as they are shot down against any such foreign
interventions, but the vultures circle nonetheless. Such a fate for the
great Syria, must be avoided at all costs. At all costs.
Unless the Syrian regime can conclude an urgent agreement to proceed to
elections, a free media, legal political opposition and an end to what has
now become a massacre, the state is going to be invaded or is going to
collapse under the weight of the bloodshed. And amidst the ruins of that,
the rats of reaction, sectarian hatred and treason will certainly run free.
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