CICG - Pétition (anglais)

No to the Imperial Crusade

Crusade against Jihad: the new Holy War has begun
This war is not ours. In the name of the law and the morality of the strongest, the western armada is administering its celestial justice. On the pretext of punishing the guilty, this counterattack against the crimes of 11 September has become caught up in the process it claims to want to avoid and has already precipitated a humanitarian catastrophe. In his speech of 20 September, George W Bush promised a secret war against terrorism, a behind-the-scenes war with no holds barred. He has thus decreed exceptional powers that are all the more unlimited as each bomb dropped is helping to mass-produce future Bin Ladens, just as the terror of the Israeli state nourishes religious fanaticism to the detriment of secular resistance.
Yet again, our governments are falling into step with the imperial legions. Yet again, under the pretext that it is not a war but a police raid, they are eluding the Constitution and refusing the parliamentary vote which would oblige elected representatives to assume their responsibilities, individually and publicly.
Neither imperial crusade nor Taliban terror! We refuse the trap of a binary logic ("if you're not with me you're against me!") of a lesser evil which often proves to be the shorter road towards the greater. Unambiguous condemnation of the crimes of 11 September justifies neither a call for lynchings nor lex talionis (an eye for an eye). The struggle against the Taliban regime does not advance through bombardments and terror but through supporting the rights of women and the resistance of the Afghan people itself against a dictatorship armed by the USA, which cynically used the Noriegas and the Pol Pots before hatching Bin Laden. During this time western powers did all they could to crush democratic and secular movements in Arab countries.
To escape from the trap of the logic of war and cut the ground from under religious fanaticism, it is urgent that the embargo against Irak be lifted, and that Israel be made to return unconditionally the territories it occupied in 1967 and recognise immediately a sovereign Palestinian State.
Economic recession, social injustice and poverty, as consequences of liberal counter-reforms, do not date from 11 September, even if a number of companies are using this as an excuse to accelerate their antisocial plans and even if governments are taking advantage of it in order to reinforce the prison and penal State to the detriment of the social-welfare State. To get at the roots of violence, it is now time, after Seattle and Genoa, for the organisation of solidarity between the social movements of the global North and the global South, an alliance of anti-war movements and resistance to market globalisation. This is the road to a new internationalism, the only way to break the fatal chain of holy wars and secular crusades.

First signatures