Lefteast
Note from the LeftEast editors: this account by Caoimhe Butterly, currently in Belgrade, has been reprinted from facebook with the permission of the author.
We spent last night in Belgrade’s main train station with families from Damascus, Aleppo and Deir al Zoor and a larger group of fellow travellers that they had befriended along the way. They (and we) had tried unsuccessfully to convince various hostels to rent them rooms and instead they slept on the benches and ground of the empty station.
Note from the LeftEast editors: this article has been written by Mathias Fiedler, currently in Istanbul, for BorderMonitoring.Eu. The article is reprinted here with the permission of the author. We also insert a video which the Marxist website Marksist.Org has published (below) with the voices of the Syrian refugees at the Edirne bus terminal.
It has been in planning for some time. While many people are trying to escape at Izmir and Bodrum via boat for quite a long time now.
This past weekend a stroll through a middle-class section of Turkey’s capital revealed nothing out of the ordinary besides a somewhat unusually high number of flags in store windows. Beneath the crescent and star against a blood-red background there appeared occasionally messages of grief for fallen soldiers and condemnations of “terror.” Terror is a good word for what the Peoples’ Democracy Party (HDP) Parliamentarian Mehmet Ali Aslan (Mardin) reports from the Kurdish city of Cizre under police curfew:
“All through the night artillery and mortar fire continued.
We, the undersigned academics, are deeply concerned about the escalating violence after the general elections held on June 7th in Turkey. After these elections, AKP, the previously ruling party, has lost its absolute majority status and yet appears to act as if its status has not changed, undermining the electoral votes. The transition government put together with the AKP-appointed ministers has embarked upon a military and political campaign within and outside of Turkey. The horrific suicide bombing in Suruç, Turkey, appears to be used as grounds for the justification of the recent military operations.
Turkey is increasingly drifting into a civil war. Politics of violence have escalated after the general elections of June 7 led by the AKP provisional government. Today, the peace and negotiation process between PKK and the Turkish state has come to a halt and war has started again.
Just within the last month, severe clashes have taken place in many Kurdish cities such as Silopi, Lice, Şemdinli, Silvan, Yüksekova and Cizre where the civilian population has been targeted by state forces.
source: J.Borocz’s blog GlobalSocialChange
Here are the conversations that are NOT happening:
The European Union is not giving any clear signals just what it actually wants the Schengen states most exposed to the refugee inflows–not only Hungary, but also Greece, Bulgaria and Italy–to do. It is completely obvious that, if anybody actually cares about alleviating the crisis, they would have had to have much more of a hands-on approach to this. By NOT doing this, the EU is cynically opening space for local strong men to build their political capital through anti-immigrant propaganda.
Today’s economic crisis has affected all spheres of life in Russian society. The processes we witness in economics, politics, and ideology look like constant escalation of unreason. The unending sequence of media scandals obscures the reality of mass poverty, growing unemployment and the unannounced but already palpable austerity policies of the state.
We see the sunset of the social populism of the Putin era, marked by the quiet forgetting of his “May orders,” a long list of economic promises to the population he made as part of his 2012 Presidential campaign.
The question of autonomy in the Donbass has fractured the fragile coalition, but the government must start thinking of solutions – not point fingers at paramilitaries
anti-autonomy protests in Ukraine (in pictures)
by Volodymyr Ishchenko
The Guardian, 05.09.2015
Violence erupted outside the parliament building in Kiev this week during protests against constitutional changes which could grant more autonomy to pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine.
Proposed by president Petro Poroshenko, these changes would decentralise power in Ukraine, allowing local self-government in “certain districts of Donetsk and Lugansk regions”, to be determined by a separate law.
(Source: ENTITLEblog)
In their recent article, “Banking Spatially on the Future: Capital Switching, Infrastructure, and the Ecological Fix” (2015), Noel Castree and Brett Christophers make an important analytic connection between the climate crisis and the financial crisis. They focus their attention on the unprecedented scale of capital-intensive infrastructure projects (from housing to road to energy and water provision) that will be required to address the effects of climate change as they intensify. They also see how such investments can provide a positive and socially progressive response to the current financial (and more broadly, economic) crisis: by drawing some of the vast reserves of financial capital away from speculative, short-term investments into more productive, sustainable and long-term investments the financial system can be moved to benefit society at large.
