Lefteast
Ilya Budraitskis: It has been several days since the start of the Russian military operation in Syria and the goals and strategy of this operation are still unclear. The explanation coming from Russian officials is unclear. On one hand they put an anti-ISIS agenda as the main reason of the operation, and on the other they present it, like Putin did at the UN, as an aid to the legitimate government of Assad. What do you think is the real goal of this operation?
Note from the LeftEast editors: this article was originally published in Serbian at Mašina. Rs . It was translated into English for LeftEast by Vladimir Unkovski-Korica.
The commemoration of the October 5th Revolution on its fifteenth anniversary has been reduced to a marginal event. One public meeting, several round tables and an equally small number of statements and wreaths, were enough to generate a couple of boring media reports about the importance of this date. Few mourn before the faded image of October 5th, least of all the once divided political elites who today all serve the same economic elites, and, pooling their forces, continue to implement neoliberal reforms.
At 9:30 yesterday morning Turkish citizens opposed to their government’s war policies gathered at the Ankara Train Station for a demonstration organized by a broad alliance of organizations: the country’s two main oppositional labor unions (DISK and KESK), the national Chamber of Architects and Engineers (TMMOB), the Medical Association (Tabipler Birliği) and the June Movement (Haziran Hareketi) formed in 2013 to give lasting organizational form to the Gezi Park protests, to name a few. Shortly before ten o’clock the group began its march toward Sıhiyye Square where from 12:00-16:00 they were to hold a rally titled “Stand Up to War, Demand Peace Now!”
Hundreds, sometimes thousands of people have come to our towns and cities in the last week seeking a safe place to live. They escape dire economic and political situations, and many have lost all they had in violent conflict, loved ones and their homes.
It is 15 years to the day since the toppling of the Milošević regime. In Serbia there is much disillusionment with the results of the revolution. But here are some reasons to continue to celebrate it.
First, as Lindsey German showed at the time in the article posted below, industrial workers were central to the uprising that finally toppled a regime that claimed to defend socialism. This shows that even after years of economic crisis, ideological manipulation and international intervention, the working class remained a central actor in society.
On August 30, tens of thousands of people (120,000, according to organizers), protested outside the Japanese parliament against new military legislation that would allow the military to fight abroad. This would happen for the first time since World War II to Japanese troops. According to its constitution, Japan is barred from using force to resolve conflicts except in cases of legitimate defense. But a re-interpretation of the law will now allow ”collective self-defense”- using force to defend allies under attack.
Note from the LeftEast editors: On October 1 the former finance minister of Greece Yanis Varofakis gave his keynote speech at the 6th Moscow Biennale. Ilya Budraitskis briefly interviewed him for their website. This is a reprint of the interview from the Moscow Biennale’s website.
Earlier you spoke about the window of opportunity to change the unfair rules of the game in the European Union that had opened for Greece in the beginning of this year.
Video reportage from eastern Europe, towards the transnational meeting in Poznan. An overview on precarity, austerity and movements from outside the eurozone.
The peripheries of Europe are the centre of the austerity measures of current endless crisis and, at the same times, the centre of social turbulences of migrations. These war zones – like the border of Ukraine and of Turkey – are facing an original “becoming centre” of the margins that reduce the old dichotomy periphery/centre into a quite old analytical tool: a new space, quite multifarious and not linear at all, is emerging.
