Lefteast
Dear Comrades, We write to express our solidarity with you in these trying times. Your country is burying a hundred or so dead, demonstrators and policemen, and hundreds more wounded are still in its hospitals. The specter of a civil war has not yet left Ukraine. While not the defeated party, most of you cannot […]
The dead of Kiev’s Maidan are not only Ukraine’s dead; they are the dead of “post-communist” Eastern Europe. It hurts everywhere, but differently. An open wound cannot be closed with words, yet one can shout in solidarity that this may be the other end of the post-communist transition, the so-called bad side of the “successful” […]
“Always bear in mind that the people are not fighting for ideas, for the things in anyone’s head. They are fighting to win material benefits, to live better and in peace, to see their lives go forward, to guarantee the future of their children.” –Amilcar Cabral Reading the news tonight (Feb 14), you could perhaps glean […]
An interview of James Robertson with Tetiana Bezryk. 1.In the past few weeks we’ve seen the government make significant concessions to the protests – the repeal of the anti-protest laws and the resignation of Prime Minister Azarov. Why has the government decided to make these compromises? Does this have anything to do with the recent […]
A note from the editors of LeftEast: This is the third article on Turkey we have published over the last two weeks. With this series, we wish to introduce our readers to the dynamics of Turkish society beyond the Gezi protests and to expand our traditional geographical coverage to other zones of peripheral capitalism. To […]
An open letter to the international community in Bosnia and Herzegovina, signed by 130 academics and scholars from around the world. A shorter version of the letter appeared on The Guardian. For more than two decades, the international political community has viewed, interpreted, and acted upon the political landscape in Bosnia and Herzegovina almost […]
Political analysis from Ilya Budraitskis written as he visited Kiev in the midst of revolution. Back in mid-December, our estimate of Ukraine’s political crisis as a “revolutionary situation” resulted in a lot of critical reviews. Further, the use of the word “revolution” in the context of Ukraine was condemned as a kind of sacrilege, because […]
War has returned to the cities of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Not the nationalist wars of partition of the 1990s, or the cold war of nationalist politicians within an ethnically divided federation presided over by a colonial style High Representative of the Great Powers, but a social war, an uprising of the people. Beginning with the […]
SARAJEVO PROTESTORS Regarding yesterday’s protests across Bosnia and Herzegovina and the media’s attempt to discredit this justified rebellion, this informal group of citizens and protest participants repeats our demands to the government. IN THE NAME OF CITIZENS ON THE STREETS OF SARAJEVO We declare: We, the people who went out onto the streets of Sarajevo […]
DECLARATION 7 February 2014. Today in Tuzla a new future is being created! The [local] government has submitted its resignation, which means that the first demand of the protestors has been met and that the conditions for solving existing problems have been attained. Accumulated anger and rage are the causes of aggressive behaviour. The attitude […]