Afrin, you are more than just the horrible pictures of wounded men and women and children that make me cry.

You are more than just a synonym for an evil propaganda war that doesn’t know the difference between people defending their lives and democracy and “terrorists”.
You are more than just the target of a double standard politics of dirty arm deals.
You are not “just” the place where war crime is taking human life away, every day.
You just don’t deserve this.
Because:
You are the courageous women and men who are defending their land and their communities from being brutally whipped out.
You are Saleh Muslim, who is now a free man again.
You are the shining light that shines through the dusty skies of modern passivity.
You are all the people who are gathering around this planet to express their solidarity.
Afrin, you proof, that we are collective agents of history.
We, in the Democracy in Europe movement, Diem25, can only tell you, that we stand behind you with all our humanity inside us.
And we can tell you, that we know, that we will not have democracy in Europe, as our name says, if we don’t have democracy in the middle east, in Latin America, in Africa. This would be a utopia in the true sense of the meaning.
Very much we find ourselves in a quite dystopian moment. In Europe we seem to be stuck in a dangerous double bind between an extreme right, or lets just call them fascists – and a neoliberal version of “there-is-no-alternative-politics”. The one produces the other.
But its just a partial truth.
As the experience of Roj´ava in its radical context has shown, is that people can resist their deep dehumanization, and simultaneously build alternatives in the here and now.
We resist and create at the same time, but we will not be radical, if our actions aren´t rooted in communities, as Dilar Dirik reminds us. We can no longer think as individuals. Our time is together-making.
This, is why
We resist in our communities in Thessaloniki and Athens against the deprivation of our lives through harsh austerity politics and we can tell you, that a better Europe is possible, if we show the political will.
We resist today on the streets of Leipzig on so called “Womens Fight Day”, because we know that we will not change anything if we don’t center womens struggle at the core of our agenda and political culture.
We resist in our communities in Belgrade against the privatization of public goods, the so-called Waterfront project and an inherently corrupt government and we will run in the city elections tomorrow as an alternative.
We resist every single day,
in our art, in friendship and love against the ongoing colonization of our minds.
And as Emma Baker famously said, those who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes.
All we can say, deep from our heart is: defend Afrin; we shall overcome.

Elisa und Kasia hielten diese Rede auf der Afrin-Demo in Berlin, an der tausende Menschen für ein Ende der türkischen Angriff in Nordsyrien demonstrierten.Während sie diese Worte an die Demonstration richteten, wurde erneut von Toten in der Region berichtet.
 

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