“During the impending turbulent days the only viable way for the left in defending and excercising the rights and interests of the working classes is -to repeat Lenin- to raise itself to the position of the vanguard of all oppressed.” told HDP Honorary Chair Ertuğrul Kürkçü addressing the 6th Congress of the European Left Party in Malaga, Dec. 13-15. The full text is below.
Dear comrades,
I am honored for your invitation to address the 6th Congress of the European Left Party on behalf of Peoples’ Democratic Party.
I am bringing you the warm salutations of our peoples and working classes from Turkey and Kurdistan. I am conveying you the greetings of tens of HDP MPs and co-mayors, hundreds of journalists and intellectuals, thousands of grassroots from across Turkey’s prisons and exile in Europe. Particularly thanks to their courage and endurance Turkey and Kurdistan can staunchly deny the full and final victory to fascism and push back the Erdoğan regime, inflicting consecutive defeats.
Peoples’ Democratic Party -the historic political alliance of the Kurdish liberation movement with Turkey’s democratic and socialist forces- having survived all violence, incarcerations, bans, purges, media control, harassment and hate speech remains as a solid rock on Erdoğan’s road to fascism. With HDP’s unconditional support with 6 million votes popular democratic forces deny the Islamo-fascists a single party government. We, after Rosa Luxemburg, proudly repeat the words of revolutionary German poet Ferdinand Freiligrath: “I was, I am, I shall be!”
In our fight for democracy and social liberation against fascism and colonialism, we have always felt the close solidarity and support of the European Left Party and of the member parties.We have always found your delegations’ shoulders by our shoulders in front of prisons, court houses and election observations. We have heard you raise the battle cry against Turkish invasion in Êfrin, Gre Spi and Serekaniye in Rojava. We are heartened by your initiatives from within or from without the European officialdom to defy the removal from office of our mayors in Kurdistan. This is comradeship! The sprit of internationalism is there and our ears are burning with your whisper: “You will never walk alone” !.
I would like to express my special thanks to President Gysi, who during his adress yesterday provided a splendid bird’s eye sketch of the general situation in Europe within the context of global imperialist rivalries: A stark contradiction between the eventual rise of national selfishness, greed, racism, and xenophobia in individual countries on the one hand and of the global climate crisis on the other hand, which unless addressed with international cooperation might bring the nature as we know to its very end. His remarks relieves me of the burden of futher analysis of the general situation as such.
Nevertheless I would like to make a concluding point, a genereal guideline verified in our particular struggles in Turkey and Kurdistan. During the impending turbulent days the only viable way for the left in defending and excercising the rights and interests of the working classes is -to repeat Lenin- to raise itself to the position of the vanguard of all oppressed. The identity of the oppressed classes in the 21st century necessarily integrates with the oppressed genders, oppressed peoples, oppressed cultures and with -if we may say so- with the oppressed species… The “metabolic rift” reaches to such a degree that the contradiction between the capital and labor finally translates into capital and humanity in general.
Looking back at the stunning loss of left in Britain, we may rethink if there existed an “economist” tone in the Corbyn campaign -that most of us liked so much- what might have overshadowed its possible attraction for those suffering also from other forms of oppression than that of the economic. This defeat needs further elaboration albeit Labor is not a member party.
On this occasion I am pleased to invite all member parties and the European Left Party as such to our fourth congress in February 2020 in Ankara. We can take this opportunity to visualise that the Europe of the Peoples is ever extending whereas the Europe of rival and competing states shrink -and some formerly European or would be European countries drift away towards the USA or Eurasia as is the case with UK and Turkey.
I would like to end with the popular call of Turkey’s anti-fa struggles.
Hombro a hombro contra el fascismo,
Shoulder to Shoulder, Fascism We Counter.
Thank you.
Yorum yazabilmek için oturum açmalısınız.