DAY OF INTERNATIONAL SOLIDARITY WITH THE WORKERS AND THE PEOPLE'S UPRISING OF COLOMBIA
From "The Truth of the Oppressed", the newspaper of the socialists of Syria and the Middle East
A contribution of the Syrian revolutionaries to the exploited rebels in Colombia:
“Coordination became our best weapon...
it allowed us to strike as one fist and held us together”
“But you have to have a clear program, because the same thing that happened to the youth of Syria can happen to you: they saw victory in their hands but unfortunately the leadership crisis led to a backtracking…”
Abu Muad: First, I want to greet the colleagues from Colombia. I am one of the comrades who, together with several comrades of the FLTI, had the honor of having arrived on the battlefield in Syria. It’s an honor for us to be present this afternoon with our comrades from Colombia, who are currently starring one of the most important revolts in Latin America in recent years.
Colombia and Chile were presented to all Latin Americans as the role model, and the masses have given their verdict. They can't stand the regimes directly controlled by US imperialism.
To us, who were in Syria, it seems important to emphasize that the combats that the youth in Colombia are having today are the same or similar to those that rebel youth have been giving in the Maghreb and the Middle East, especially in Syria, against regimes that are supported 100% by imperialism and are put there to protect and guarantee the business of the USA and European imperialist powers.
I want to mention one of the comrades who have been accompanying us for years, Comrade Andrey from Russia. Greetings to him who is present at this meeting.
At this meeting we also have comrades who are on the battlefield in Syria, where the revolution, over the course of 10 years, has suffered several attacks. It started as a riot. It turned into a civil war. There was a near triumphant revolution. The state and the regime led by Bashar al-Assad trembled. The masses managed to arm themselves, made their own coordination committees, and fought to the end. But imperialism leaves nothing to chance or the fate of the masses and launched a fierce counterrevolution.
The crisis in the leadership of all these movements led, little by little, to the revolution to be partially defeated. Still, the masses in Syria have not given up. They continue to present battle. Today the epicenter of that revolution is concentrated in Idlib. In this city the best of the revolutionary vanguard of Syria conglomerate. There are the young people who, at the age of 17, were forced to take up arms to defend their families, their homes, their neighborhoods, their sisters, their uncles, their cousins and themselves.
Therefore, I am going to give the floor to these comrades, who are enthusiastic about what they see in Colombia and see themselves reflected in the youth who are fighting there. They will try, from Idlib, to give a vision that contributes, with their experience, to the process that is being lived today in Colombia. We hope that this process will be generalized throughout Latin America, as it happened in 2011 in the revolutions throughout the Maghreb and the Middle East.
Abu Mustafa: Greetings to all who are present at the meeting, especially to the siblings from Colombia. Throughout these 10 years of Syrian revolution, we have been able to draw some conclusions.
In the first three years of our revolution, mobilizations were the main protagonists, taking thousands and millions of people to the streets. It took us 3 years to understand that the reality was that we were fighting against the bourgeoisie, and that we had to extirpate and extract from them what they had stolen from us for a long time. Little by little we became conscious of it.
We took into account that the main thing was to coordinate with each other so that no one was isolated and we can all fight as one fist. Coordination became our best weapon. We got together in the neighborhood to find out what to do, to know where to put each of the checkpoints. The coordination allowed us to hit as one fist and kept us together.
Little by little, the coordination committees became aware that they had to arm themselves. First with a knife, then with a shotgun. Little by little we came to understand that our safety was a priority.
The mobilizations always started from well-known places and reached emblematic places. The idea was that our claims were seen all over the world.
Coordination and mass mobilizations, with hundreds of thousands of people in the streets, allowed us to disarm the police, since we vastly outnumbered them. As the police stations fell one by one, the police began to surrender. They no longer came out to confront us because they saw that we outnumbered them and that we were armed.
This is a brief account of what has happened in those 3 years, to be able to transmit it to the comrades. I salute you again. It’s an honor for me to be here. We are at the disposal of everything that comrades may need, and the knowledge that we have acquired in the last 10 years is also at their disposal.
Abu Muad: Now we will give the floor to a very active comrade in the Syrian revolution. He was in the city of Homs, which is an icon worldwide and within Syria, because it was one of the cities that suffered one of the biggest attacks. It was fenced for more than 5 years, where nothing was allowed to pass. The masses had to manage to eat, even having to eat grass, because not a gram of food entered. It was one of the first cities to rise up and one of the hardest hit in the Syrian revolution.
Yezen Al Homsi: Greetings to all present, especially to the people and youth of Colombia. First I want to share with you an experience that I had recently. From Syria we are in coordination with comrades from Palestine. We are two groups of young people, because we are the Youth of Homs and we are in discussion with a group of young people within Palestine, since there these days, there have been riots around the Al Aqsa mosque, a sacred place that in these times of Ramadan the Palestinians often visit. The Zionist occupier has gotten tired of beating them. The Palestinian people have responded with a combat similar to the one that is taking place in the streets of Colombia these days and to the one that took place at the beginning of the Syrian revolution.
With these comrades from Palestine the debate on weapons was opened. But immediately it emerged as a need to debate who leads the riots. It’s known that in Palestine there are movements, such as Hamas or the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine or Fatah, who are the ones who lead and speak on behalf of the revolution and the Palestinian cause. Those movements sent people to Syria to fight against the people.
That is why, in this debate with young Palestinians, the betrayal of these leaderships, which are even armed, came to light. They claim to have their weapons in favor of the people, but what they do is preventing the common people from arming themselves and preventing the struggle of the Palestinian people, to end up surrendering the Palestinian cause.
In Syria, after the beginning of the mobilizations in Daraa, which was where the marches of the Syrian revolution began in 2011, mobilizations began to take place in Homs. They were spontaneous mobilizations where no one coordinated with anyone. Only among a few by phone to meet and from there we grew in number of people, who were leaving almost spontaneously from our homes. We always went to the same place, which was the center of the city. The marches were peaceful.
The Bashar government responded to these marches at first with rubber bullets and tear gas, like in the Western countries. Later they were putting plainclothes inside the mobilizations, and between 5 or 6 they grabbed someone unprepared and beat them, kicked them, tore out their eyes.
When we began to see that the regime was making a huge deployment of its repressive forces, we made a peaceful mobilization to a police station and we were able to recover weapons that were in the possession of the police in favor of the entire people. In this way, a group of young people went out to protect the mobilizations.
However, we didn’t dare to show the weapons, much less use them. We hid them and we kept them as a precaution.
One day, the regime began to respond to our mobilizations with bullets. We saw that each day more of us died. One day it was 10, another day it was 20, then 30. But we still didn’t dare to use weapons.
We started to coordinate between various cities, Homs with Hama, Daraa, etc. and we decided to go out all armed to protect the mobilizations. Thus, we were able to liberate almost 80% of the entire country, even taking 90% of the city of Damascus, which is the capital.
But I want to convey to you a mistake we made, so that you can learn from it and not make it. We didn't have a program. We didn’t know what to do. We had 80% of Syria in our hands. We left a lot of weapons stores unused, because we thought we had won. We had not coordinated with anyone to create field hospitals. We couldn't offer real resistance because we didn't have a real program to follow.
To finish, I want to send a huge greeting from Idlib, from the shattered walls where Aziz al Asmar painted the Colombian flag with a sign that says "From Syria to Colombia, a single revolution." From the entire Middle East to Colombia, a single revolution!
I believe that it’s time to set up self-defense committees, to coordinate them, that each of the neighborhoods put 50 armed comrades, so, when the fascist gangs come out, you can defend yourselves against those people or make sporadic attacks if they require it, for example, to police stations. It’s necessary to be one step ahead of them with the coordination and the defense committees, away, if possible, from the mobilizations, so that bullets don’t run between the masses and the defense committees. Little by little, when these defense committees grow and the police recede, we must get to the generalized weaponry.
I close with these words, and thank you for listening.
Abu Muad: These were in a few words the experience acquired, after ten years, by the comrades inside Syria. In summary, I think they teach us how to coordinate among ourselves, especially the comrades who are in Colombia. Much coordination is needed among those who fight, according to the comrades from Syria, to be able to advance at least to defend yourselves from this fierce attack launched by the bourgeoisie in Colombia.
Apart from the coordination, keep in mind that we have to be clear about a program, because the same thing that happened to the youth of Syria can happen to you; at one point they saw that they had 80% of a nation in their hands, but unfortunately the leadership crisis led to the failure to seize power and the situation retreated, unfortunately, because the regime was still in force and was supported by imperialism worldwide, as well as by the treacherous leaderships of which Yezen Al Homsi spoke. These leaderships were the ones in charge of speaking in the name of the revolution, but to shoot it in the back.
This is our humble contribution, on behalf of the comrades who have been in Syria. We remain at your disposal. It has been an honor.
Greetings from the Cali comrades to the Syria comrades
Alberto: To the comrades from Syria, we want to give them a warm greeting from Colombia. We have learned a lot from you. You are a school and a great teaching for us, about what we are living.
We pay tribute to you for what you have done and what you have fought for. We want to tell you that we are with you; that we accompany you; that you continue to be our references; that we take very seriously what you have raised and the struggle that you have developed.
Thank you comrades from Syria! Long live the Syrian revolution!
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