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“[in Germany] you’re denied as an Afghan to show solidarity with Palestine”

Interview with Zoya from the AFG Activist Collective

Phil Butland
26/11/2024

Thanks for talking to us. Could you start just by introducing yourself?

I’m Zoya from the AFG activist collective. We’re a self organized, horizontal collective that is composed of first and second generation diaspora from Afghanistan. We are fighting for the cause of a free Afghanistan, from the neighboring countries to the asylum seekers here in Germany. We also express/foster cross solidarity on an intersectional level with other Global South movements.

Could you say something about the current situation in Afghanistan, particularly for women?

Since August 2021, many people have said that the Taliban régime is different now. It’s not going to be the same black hole of 1996 to 2001. As if it is an upgraded version 2.0, more modernized. This is deceiving though. As the international media have left Afghanistan, and with a general ban on non-government media or any outlet which is not led by the régime, news doesn’t come out to the international community and people as it does to us with links and relations in the community. We still have some awareness of what is really happening through information sharing on social media and our collective tries our best to share this and make it more accessible.

Every week, there are stricter developments towards women, including what they are allowed to wear. Women are not allowed to go to parks, or work in most fields. Students have had to stop going to university, and girls cannot go to school after the sixth grade. One of the latest and frankly, ridiculous, restrictions is that women should not even hear the sound of another woman’s voice. For example, if a woman prays her voice should not be heard. People instrumentalise the Taliban for their Islamophobia, yet this fundamentalism does not represent Islam – it is rather used as a tactic of oppression. More so, it goes against our cultural habits, the Taliban do not practice or represent the vast and diverse culture of Afghanistan. Women in Afghanistan were allowed to vote before women in the UK, or before the creation of the Taliban. Therefore, the people of Afghanistan see the Taliban as a war on our culture and heritage and so much more.

So a lot has changed. The social fabric is completely dissolving—like the female gender inside of it—which is why we talk about gender apartheid in Afghanistan.

How is the population reacting to this?

In the beginning, there were many protests where women went to the streets. They had to face open fire from the Taliban into the sky, and they were lashed. The lashes were so strong that you could become disabled from them.

There were many campaigns around Afghanistan. Boys started campaigns saying “I’m not going to school without my sister”. Men didn’t go to university or refused to do their medical exams.

All these actions have faced repression. There were a lot of forced disappearances of people that spoke up, especially men like YouTubers and famous educators who publicly advocated for opening schools for girls. These are typical silencing tactics. People with leadership positions were also disappearing or even killed for their advocacy.

People still take it to the streets but after three years without support, it becomes harder and harder.

How much support does the Taliban have? Is it just ruling by repression, or does it have any popular support?

It’s hard to understand how much support the Taliban has because, in the current state, you’re not able to express your opposition. If you were interviewed in Afghanistan and asked if you support the Taliban, most people would probably say yes, just because they fear being exposed.

Now, a lot of female activists have gone inside and are protesting indoors with their faces covered and holding signs, demanding for their rights. This makes it harder to identify who they are, but that is the current state of affairs.

We also have to understand that after 40 years of war, 90% of Afghanistan is uneducated, and people are tired from being caught in the crossfire. Many have lost friends and family members, seen the explosions first hand; or are injured from them. So if you ask a farmer at this moment if they support the Taliban, they will only know the crossfire which prevented them from feeding themselves over the years, so they are probably going to say yes. But is this an informed answer which understands the geopolitical context? The answer is no.

Does the current terrible situation mean that people think that life under US occupation was good?

It’s always nuanced to understand what is good and what is bad. From one side, you have the corruption in the previous government, but to us they’re all the same because they collaborate with each other. We call it a handover. We don’t call it a Taliban takeover because they literally sat down in Doha, Qatar with the US and the international community.

They’re the same people, NATO is made up of the same people who were there for 20 years. One is the main initiator and the others back it up. For them, it didn’t necessarily make sense any more to stay and exploit when they can leave, have fewer expenses, and still gain from exploitation.

Could you say a little more about the Doha agreement? What was involved, and what has changed?

One of the demands from our collective is to have full disclosure of the Doha agreement, which is not public. Qatar played a big role in being a hub for the Taliban headquarters, which opened over 10 years ago. There has been a lot of criticism of the collaboration.

A lot of people say that 15th August came as a surprise, but at that point a large percentage of Afghanistan was already controlled by the Taliban. Even if the Taliban wasn’t officially governing, they had the land under their control.

The Doha agreement involved no Afghan civil society representation. At the end, it was a trade agreement that made them hand over Afghanistan.

At the end, we the people of Afghanistan are wondering: why did you bomb us for 20 years if you would handover the country to the Taliban anyway?

Recently, Germany declared Afghanistan to be a safe country and has started deportations again of Afghan people. How precarious is life for people from Afghanistan who are living in Germany at the moment?

I don’t think Germany declared that Afghanistan is a safe country, but they are definitely going with the propaganda in the mass media. Since an Afghan refugee killed a policeman in the south of Germany, there are stronger calls for criminals from Afghanistan and also from Syria to be deported. We see that the “center left” adopts right wing rhetoric.

They say they’re only deporting criminals, but the label criminal is used for a lot of men, also at the borders. You really see how much this is fuelled not only by what’s happening in Afghanistan, but also in Palestine. You see the dehumanization, or that the words “terrorist” and “criminal” are used for anyone that is especially from the SWANA region who are standing up for their rights and that they can be criminalized.

They’re saying that they’re only going to deport criminals, but if it’s criminal to stand up for justice and speak for people’s freedoms, or to stop an occupation or a genocide, then what is a criminal? It’s very much like the brainwashing that Arab or Afghan men are violent which has been systematically done since before 9/11.

On top of that, it seems that there are only calls for deportations to some countries and not others.

Exactly. We saw that Europe and the West were trying to manipulate the Iranian Revolution some years ago, while keeping quiet on Afghanistan—even on the topic of women. We see how geopolitical interests play a role, as well as the alliances that are formed between countries. This is the reason why some things get funding, and certain other things don’t. You can have a positioning that stands against all oppression- you don’t need to be polarized as they push you to be.

In Germany, or Europe more broadly, you really saw the strategy behind certain decolonial, anti-racist, or anti-deportation topics. “The Left” in Germany wants to express that they have an interest in this but only if they can set the storyline. You’re denied as an Afghan to share solidarity with Palestine, even though you are degraded and dehumanized the same/similar way.

There was a recent ruling by the German government only to deport men to Afghanistan and not women. What’s the implication of this ruling?

Women are now able to not go through all of the asylum processes that they have had to over the last years. In Germany, they pass the interview immediately and get protection. Of course, you are relieved about this- not happy, but you’re glad for the safety of the people who will not have to live in extreme repression. It’s much harder for women to exist in Afghanistan. They cannot exist at all, as they don’t have any rights or prospects in life.

But at the same time, it’s frightening because it reinforces the narrative that Afghan men are only abusers, and Afghan women should be protected from Afghan men. This narrative implies that they’re safe in the West, but would not be back in Afghanistan. When you understand the implications of such a ruling, the feelings become much more complex.

Can you say something about what your collective is doing in Germany?

Our collective is not registered so that we can freely express ourselves without putting anyone in specific danger. Our slogan at demos is “Ob NATO oder Taliban, raus aus Afghanistan”, which translates to “NATO or Taliban – get out of Afghanistan”.

During the 20 years of NATO’s presence in Afghanistan, the amount of money that was flowing into Afghanistan that ended up in officials’ back pockets is astonishing. It created a lot of infrastructural issues, also through the large NGO presence there. Their food programs, for example, created dependencies for a lot of people who were not previously used to these dependencies. It disrupted the self-sustaining infrastructure, increasing the cost of land and making farming harder. Once the Taliban arrived, all these NGOs left, creating a state of shock for people. Now over 95% of people in Afghanistan are dealing with food insecurity. This is a huge number— of a nation of 40 million people.

There are also huge issues at the border with Pakistan and Iran. There are millions of Afghan refugees in both of those countries that are currently being pushed back in masses in the hundreds of thousands. There are also extremely racist campaigns. People are unable to even buy bread in Iran. Then you try to start a life in Germany, and the bureaucratic process does not give you a break time to reflect and process all of these things on all of these things.

Additionally, we see how much politics are moving towards the right all over Europe. You also see how the topic of refugees is approached and the laws that are getting passed that ensure that the only thing that they experience is violence.

So Afghan people – whether in Afghanistan or outside – cannot catch a break. We need and want to create the space to speak about conflicts within ethnicities and religions, gaps between gender which, of course, affect the entirety of civil society over the last 40 years. You don’t have space to think about or deconstruct things so easily when you’re thinking about your survival and dealing with ongoing trauma. Our collective wants to express and reflect on all the complexities, not only around the political arena, but also the dynamics within the Afghan community. Essentially, we want self-determination for Afghanistan and its people.

Are you able to link up with other campaigns fighting for Syrian refugees?

We have a lot of networks between different activists and activist collectives. As the issues have intensified and we have ongoing genocides, we are well connected between the different social and activist groups, and we support each other’s struggles, even though Afghanistan has been seen as a side topic for a lot of the general masses.

But as activists, we support each other. It’s tough to do so because it’s non-stop – in fact it’s increasing. Syria, Sudan, Congo, Lebanon, Eritrea, Palestine, and countries, all over the Global South, are facing so many conflicts and wars. The only thing that we can do is to inform each other and to give each other the space to collaborate or to share information.

And what about the German Left? The German Left does do some good work on refugees, but as you’ve said, a lot of it does have a Palestine problem, which translates into a general difficulty with the Global South.

For sure. I definitely saw a shift starting last year, whenever certain German leftist organizations or NGOs, or some activists or so-called feminists would support us. This support was not genuine, to be honest. They would take a lot of space in groups about who they would support and silence us. And then when the genocide in Palestine started, we would see how those NGOs were somehow getting funded through public money, and wouldn’t share their solidarity or take a stance. So we took a stance and distanced ourselves from them.

On the social level for me personally, having grown up in Germany when 9/11 happened, I’m having a lot of deja vu. On the social level, there was this extreme taboo in schools to be from Afghanistan. You were seen as a terrorist. You would have kids bully you, or teachers brainwash you in class about being Muslim, or for coming from Afghanistan. All of these things were socially acceptable.

For a while, this was less, or there were some improvements, at least on a social level. These racist notions were not as socially accepted. And now we’re back there again. Actually, we’re not even at that standard, but much worse. The amount of dehumanization is seen through the apathy of the society of war crimes and mass destruction.

Do you think things will continue to get worse?

I don’t know. You wake up every morning and think that things will get worse, and it gets worse.

Most people just want to not have to see people die in either of these ways. But that is the reality for all people in the Global South including Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq and Palestine. Western society at this moment still refuses to understand this.

How can people find out more about your collective and what you’re doing?

We have an Instagram page, AFG activist collective, where we post our protest camps, share news, make demos, create positioning, share speeches and so on. We also organize events, sometimes by ourselves other times other groups organize and invite us. If other people want to create alliances with us that’s also supportive, that’s great. We support underground illegal schools for girls and women in Afghanistan. This is a very small thing that we’d like to continue to support because it’s very necessary.

You can also buy our tote bags at our events, or create items for us that we can sell them in markets. You can create your own actions, where we are able to just come and speak or share information. We’re not that many, and we definitely need support. We’re also not trending, so it also gets hard to get that support from outside of this activist bubble network that we have.

We also have a Telegram support group, which is where we can add you if you contact us. We like it when people come with their ideas.

Is there anything you’d like to say that we haven’t covered so far?

What’s important is being open to listening to different perspectives.Try to formulate a nuanced view. At this point, a lot of people do not have the interest to hear about things that are presented in a different way. I just hope that we will continue to be able to express and digest and deconstruct.

People should really start researching a little bit more about these geopolitical issues, and learn about anti-capitalism. People should think critically and be reflective and conscious about movements that they support. At the end it’s our working hours, our taxes here that support these destructions and exploitations over there and we do have the power to make a change. We believe in the power of the people.

Boycott of Berghain: from March 2024 to now

More and more artists are boycotting Berghain in response to Berghain’s silence on the genocide in Palestine and cancellation of artists in solidarity with Palestinian liberation

Antifascist Music Alliance
25/11/2024

photograph of Berghain club washed in red, with a photoshopped projection on top that says, "Boycott Berghain"

All images have alt text descriptions

The boycott against Berghain was organized due to its silence about the escalating genocide in Palestine that now extends to Lebanon. Aligning with the German government’s repression, the club is also actively silencing artists’ expressions of solidarity with Palestine, some of whom have shared their experiences publicly, like Arabian Panther and WTCHCRFT. We want to draw attention, as well, to Berghain’s hypocrisy in speaking out against the war on Ukraine but staying quiet on Palestine, as we’ve reported previously in the Left Berlin.

We will go over the history of the Berghain boycott and its reasoning and list some of the collectives and festivals that are disregarding the boycott. Then we will highlight some artists observing the boycott in solidarity with Palestinian liberation. And finally, we will have two short interviews, with DJ Josey Rebelle and with Ravers for Palestine.

Ravers for Palestine calls for boycott

Ravers for Palestine launched in late October 2023 with an open letter calling for musicians and collectives to, “urgently speak out against Israel’s brutal and ongoing attack on Gaza.” In November 2023, Ravers for Palestine posted a message to clubs: “A Message to Clubs: Silence = Complicity. Show up for Palestine or be consigned to irrelevance.” Later, in March 2024, Ravers for Palestine and DJs Against Apartheid called for a boycott of Berghain.

One of the parties that continues to host events at Berghain, despite the boycott, is REEF. Ravers for Palestine reached out to REEF organizers privately on October 11, 2024, asking them to withdraw. After private outreach was not successful, Ravers for Palestine made their appeal public on October 18, 2024, asking REEF to stand with their community and boycott Berghain. REEF had their party most recently on November 15, 2024. As the Antifascist Music Alliance we also reached out to artists who were on the lineup (pictured below), asking them to respect the boycott. We did not receive a response.

Screenshot from the Berghain website which reads: Friday 15.11.2024 start 22:00 REEF Berghain: Esposito spe:c, Mala, MC Yallah x Debmaster and Niño Árbol Panorama Bar: DJ Earl, Lena Willikens B2B Darwin, Nono Gigsta and Siu Mata — Screenshot from the Berghain website

Ravers for Palestine has successfully engaged with other collectives and labels that were still hosting events at Berghain. An example of a positive outcome was label party PAN, which canceled their August 2nd, 2024 party at Berghain thanks to Ravers for Palestine and outcry from the dance music community.

Instagram post from Ravers for Palestine calling on PAN to respect the boycott of Berghain

We’ve also reported on CTM’s lack of courage and solidarity with the boycott in the Left Berlin previously. CTM festival continues to host parties at Berghain. Their most recent party was on October 30, 2024 and Berghain is still listed as the main venue for their 2025 festival. CTM and REEF are only two examples of parties/festivals claiming progressiveness while holding their events at Berghain. Some other examples that we noticed include Your Love, Love on the Rocks, and queer party weeeirdos. There is no queer liberation without Palestinian liberation.

These parties and collectives refuse to stand with those in the nightlife community who are courageously and unapologetically protesting against over a year of escalating genocide in Palestine and Lebanon and repression in Germany.

Artists speaking out and refusing to play at Berghain

We know of a few DJs who shared publicly their readiness to turn down gigs or their experiences with being cancelled from scheduled lineups (such as WTCHCRFT or Arabian Panther). As Ravers for Palestine mentions in the following interview, a lot of the DJs refusing to play at Berghain are BIPOC, queer, and trans. The artists we’ve been in touch with that have shared their refusal to play at Berghain publicly are Cáit, Beatrice M./Bait, and Josey Rebelle. Beatrice M./Bait said to us by email that, “being a musical artist also means sacrificing opportunities to stand in solidarity with causes that matter more than one’s career.”

Josey Rebelle withdrew from playing at Berghain already at the start of 2024. Josey Rebelle is not on social media, so she chose to make her voice heard through her website, writing:

“at the start of the year i withdrew from all my 2024 bookings at berghain in protest against the club’s deplatforming of a pro-palestinian dj and subsequent refusal to make any apology or gesture to clarify its position on palestine as it had previously done with ukraine. for further info on the reasons some artists have chosen to boycott berghain (among other clubs), visit the djs against apartheid site.”

Even if you are not on social media, there is still a way to communicate! We interviewed Josey Rebelle about her withdrawal, which you can read below. We urge other artists and DJs to respect the boycott and to share their actions, especially those with bigger platforms, so that the brave ones who are doing this publicly are not left to stand alone. As Beatrice M. pointed out, “I think it’s important to share, that’s a point of a boycott, to give others the strength to do the same because it can be a tough decision!”

Interview with Josey Rebelle

When did you make the decision? Was that before or after the March call for boycott from DJs Against Apartheid and Ravers for Palestine?

I was upset to hear about Berghain’s cancellation of Arabian Panther’s event and the way the club had chosen to handle the situation. When this story broke in January I had just agreed to play six dates at Berghain across 2024 and so I knew I needed to have an urgent discussion with the club.

I sent the club an email to express my thoughts, indicating that I was considering leaving, and we agreed to have a phone call. In the initial email I said that my main worry was that, “the absence of any public clarification, statement or gesture from Berghain in the fallout of this situation makes it appear to the world that the club is not opposed to the genocide in Gaza, and that it is actively engaged in suppressing expressions of solidarity with Palestine, perhaps due to pressure from the state or other parties.”

I added, “In the absence of any such gesture, I feel that the onus has been unfairly placed on individual artists and their teams to reach out to Berghain and get clarification or reassurance on this matter, while the club appears to continue with business as usual.”

I asked whether Berghain intended to make any public statement or gesture to call for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza, to signal any support for Gaza as it did with Ukraine, or to align itself with the demands of the Strike Germany movement. If the answer to these questions was no, I asked if Berghain intended to take any steps at all.

While the tone of the subsequent phone call was respectful, it was clear to me that there was no remorse over the way this situation had been handled, and there was to be neither an apology nor any clarification on the club’s stance on Gaza. I was told that Berghain did not get involved in political matters. Again I pointed out that the club had been very vocal in its support of Ukraine, including setting up a dedicated page on its website, which proved that the club was absolutely able to speak up on these matters and was consciously choosing not to do the same for Gaza.

I officially withdrew from all my bookings at the club a few days later, on 31 January 2024. I allowed myself time to consider the matter thoroughly and had conversations with people I trusted to get alternative viewpoints. I knew I would be losing money and gigs from a club that had booked me frequently but I had to put all that aside and make a decision based on my own values which in this case seemed incompatible with those of Berghain. So in the end it was a straightforward decision for me to leave, and I have no regrets.

In terms of the timing of my decision, I do not think the official call for the boycott had been made, but a number of artists and promoters had already withdrawn from Germany as a whole in solidarity with the Strike Germany movement, including some artists who were due to perform at Berghain for CTM, as well as Dweller which had withdrawn its upcoming festival.

We were wondering if you’d be willing to share how Berghain and other DJs reacted to the fact that you decided to cancel your gigs there and shared it publicly.

I am not on social media and so I did not announce this news publicly, I simply added a short note to the events section of my website to let people know that I would no longer be playing at Berghain. But I did have lots of conversations with other DJs who had bookings at the club, many of whom felt upset and unsure of what they should do. A lot of pro-Palestinian artists pushed for direct conversations with the club to speak up about this situation, and I think these difficult conversations could be seen as a form of pressure because they placed the club in the uncomfortable position of having to explain itself. However the question for me was: if Berghain is not going to apologise for its actions or change or speak up about the genocide of the Palestinian people after all this, then why should I stay?

Are you boycotting the others on the boycott list (E1 in London, HÖR and://about blank in Berlin, Sweat Festival)?

Yes.

Interview with Ravers for Palestine

You announced in March a call for a boycott of Berghain, together with DJs Against Apartheid. What can you tell us about the djs heeding this call?

A broad and diverse range of DJs is now boycotting Berghain, ranging from experimental up-and-coming artists to former regulars at the club. One clear throughline is the collective withdrawal of international artists. Very few DJs from the UK and US are still playing there, for example. This is a tectonic shift. Even Berghain’s Reddit community has registered this: anxious threads with titles like ‘Why are so many well-known DJs no longer regularly being booked?’ are increasingly common.

Many of the DJs that are withdrawing are BIPOC, queer, trans. As we’ve seen in other solidarity efforts, it’s those with the least wealth, structural privilege and access that are standing with Palestine. It’s not a coincidence that these are generally also the artists that are pushing techno and other forms into the future.

How has it been so far with support for the boycott? What have you seen? What would you like to say?

Early on in the genocide, we weren’t sure if we had the numbers within rave culture to challenge the normalization of ‘Israel’, and the West’s wider attempts to co-opt us into their imperial status quo.

A year on, it’s clear these doubts were unwarranted. While nightlife institutions have largely remained silent, and, in some cases, have even repressed pro-Palestinian voices, the community itself has risen to this anticolonial moment. From boycotts of entities complicit in the genocide, to autonomous actions, the surge in PACBI nightlife endorsements, and the militancy and sacrifice of so many individual artists and ravers, we’ve shown that our culture has deep and powerful reservoirs of resistance at its grassroots. This has important continuities with how other countercultural groups are reconnecting with their roots in this moment: see, for example, Queers for Palestine and Bands Boycott Barclays.

Today, no-one can truly say how these efforts will reverberate, and what impact they will have on the trajectory of Palestinian liberation. But we draw strength and inspiration from the musicians’ boycott of South Africa, which played an important role in dismantling the cultural legitimacy of the apartheid regime.

What can you tell us about the Strike Fund?

So far, the Strike Fund has supported over 25 artists who have boycotted venues in solidarity with Palestine with over 11,000EUR. We’re privileged to have been able to facilitate this crowdfunded venture. In many cases, this resource has helped people pay urgent medical bills or cover rent. Beyond immediate material relief, it’s also modelling an alternative future for the electronic music scene: based on solidarity and a plural, horizontal ethic, as opposed to the competitive monoculture which oppresses us all today.

Mutual aid is a critical aspect of resistance. It’s powerful and moving to see how music venues in Lebanon—like Tunefork Studios and Skybar—have stepped up to support their communities. And we’re excited to see new initiatives, like Forward/Scratch, centering mutual aid in their model.

Strike fund and support

You can contribute to the Strike Fund here.
If you want to reach out to Ravers for Palestine or Djs Against Apartheid to apply for the Strike Fund or ask for other kind of support, you can do so via this form

Why is the COP29 Summit taking place in Azerbaijan?

Statement by Armenians in Berlin

Ararat Collective
24/11/2024

There is great controversy with this year’s COP held in Azerbaijan. Not only from a climate perspective, as Azerbaijan is a major exporter of gas and oil accounting for over 90% of the country’s export revenue. But also other perspectives more usually seen as outside the scope of climate justice. These are related to military expansionism, authoritarianism, settler colonialism and denial of indigenous people’s rights to self-determination. That the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) even considered Azerbaijan a suitable host for this year’s conference sends a signal to many Armenians, that it is not to be taken seriously.

An incriminating fact that Azerbaijan and its partner state, Turkey — do not want people to know – is that it is Israel’s largest oil supplier. Forty percent of oil for jets, tanks, and other military vehicles in the genocide against Palestinians and the destruction of Lebanon is sourced from Azerbaijan via Turkey. How can such a country host the world’s largest climate conference? When it is so involved in the attempted, systematic extermination of an entire population of indigenous people?

This is not the only recent campaign of ethnic cleansing Azerbaijan is immersed in. In December 2022, Azerbaijan manufactured a fake eco-protest at the Lachin Corridor. The sole aim was to create a blockade to hold an entire population of 120,000 indigenous Artsakh Armenians under siege. Azerbaijan sent fake eco-protestors armed with signs with shoddy clip art saying banal things like “save nature” and “stop pollution”. Experts denounced this protest as the cynical deployment of environmental concerns aimed at the destruction of a people on their homeland.

Only months later in Azerbaijan, a real eco-protest launched by villagers in Azerbaijan in Söyüdlü emerged responding to gold mining operations that would pollute the villagers’ water supply. Videos of Azerbaijani batoned security services beating up old women, and villagers being blockaded proliferated on social media. Did those earlier fake eco-protestors blockading Armenians at the Lachin Corridor express or show solidarity to their countrymen in Söyüdlü, where a real ecological crisis was unfolding? No. That only exposed the dirty tactics the Aliyev regime in Azerbaijan uses. It attempts to galvanize international support to blockade an entire indigenous population of Armenians in their historic home, Artsakh, by using ‘environmental speak’.

Despite the exposed hypocrisy of the Aliyev regime, the Artsakh Armenians endured a brutal blockade which inevitably rendered living conditions unsustainable. Shut off from the world with no food coming in, famine was widespread. Hospitals ran out of vital medical supplies. The rate of miscarriages tripled due to malnutrition. Children were subsisting on one potato for an entire day, their parents often on even less. To maintain the harsh conditions and pressure on the 120,000 Artsakh Armenians held under siege, Armenian farmers were routinely shot at while trying to harvest their crops in attempts to alleviate shortages in the food supply.

Armenians in Artsakh starved, while Aliyev and Azerbaijani spokespeople, cynically lied proclaiming: “there is no blockade”. Journalists reported the deteriorating conditions in Artsakh from inside the blockade. But their reports were skeptically called biased. Yes, Artsakh Armenians held under the blockade were considered unfit to report on their own suffering in the eyes of the international press. That press assigned ‘equal weight’ to the Artsakh Armenians, a starved and beleaguered population facing an existential crisis, and the words of an authoritarian, petro-dictatorship who had suppressed press freedom and had an abysmal human rights record.

As the Artsakh Armenians continued to resist, finally Azerbaijan had had enough. In September 2023, they orchestrated a massive bombing campaign to drive out the besieged indigenous Armenians from their homeland of two thousand years. This culminated in an ethnic cleansing the world witnessed.

And here we are, a year later, with Azerbaijan hosting the world’s largest climate conference. The region Artsakh, newly ethnically cleansed last year, is now promoted as — we’re not joking — a future, hi-tech “green energy zone”. This should alarm all climate justice and environmental activists, and deserves round condemnation and rejection.

The way we see it, there are two roads to go down. Either:

a genuine climate justice movement that takes indigenous peoples’ rights, their homes and their systems of knowledge seriously, or;
a false climate justice movement that tramples over indigenous peoples’ rights to their land to make way for more extraction, militarism, ecological destruction, “greenwashing”, and more of the same unfettered capitalism

We can all agree on which vision of climate justice makes the most sense, lest other indigenous peoples’ struggles around the world succumb to the same fate that befell the Artsakh Armenians.

COP29 approved by the UNFCCC, is being held now in Azerbaijan one year after an ethnic cleansing of 120,000 indigenous Armenians. Can we really trust these states to bear their citizens’ interests regarding climate justice and sustainability in mind? As sea waters begin to rise and swallow up indigenous island communities? As climate change projections forsee massive crop failures that will surely imperil many of the world’s communities? As states allow a genocide in Palestine to continue unabated, with over 85,000 tons of bombs having been dropped? This surpasses the amount of explosives used in World War II – killing tens of thousands of people, if not more – and is releasing massive amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere? And not to mention how the host of COP29, Azerbaijan, along with partner state Turkey currently supplies the Israeli military with 40% of their oil to commit said genocide.

We at Ararat Collective have released a statement in opposition to COP29 as well as COP as an institution. It is our view that COP has been co-opted by green capitalism which does not seek systemic change. Rather it gives lip service to the world community’s concerns about climate change and sustainability but does little to next to nothing to create actual workable solutions to provide a sustainable future for us all.

Azerbaijan’s purported “Green Energy Zone” perfectly encapsulates the kind of world COP will usher in: one where militarism and colonial adventuring are legitimized to further the extraction and wealth accumulation at the expense of human life, natural preservation and our collective futures.

We see the only path forward being through a decolonial ecology. One that transcends the constraints of capitalism and takes into account the inequities and unequal access to resources with respect to the world’s communities, rather than our current system where countries like Azerbaijan exploit these inequities under the paradigm of “resource extraction by any means possible”.

While we at Ararat Collective do not view COP as a legitimate forum advancing climate justice and sustainability, we are still very much aware that Azerbaijan will use its status as host this year to promote its image abroad, further its business interests, and further entrench itself within the leading forces of the global capitalist structure and its power brokers.

Our fight against this destructive system is ongoing . We must organize and work together to topple it. We must avoid a world in which an institution like COP gets to claim ownership over the discourse and action on climate justice and sustainability. For they will always be subject to or held captive by a capitalist ethos the global elites and heads of state seek to promote. As such, the only solutions that will arise out of this forum will be ones entirely contained within the domain of “green” capitalism.

We call on all comrades to raise their voices against this conference, its capitalist ethos, as well as the fake “green” agenda peddled by Azerbaijan and its partners which undermines the goal of sustainability and shifts the attention away from the real problems and solutions.

If you are interested in reading our statement, you can find it on our Instagram page (ararat_berlin). May the fight for climate justice and real sustainability continue!

Correction and Contextualisation of my Proposed Expulsion from Die Linke

Ramsis Kilani responds to the allegations made against him in order to justify his expulsion from the left-wing party for his work in the Palestine-solidarity movement

Ramsis Kilani
23/11/2024

On 21st October, 2024, Katina Schubert and Martin Schirdewan started an expulsion procedure against me from the party Die Linke. They justified it by claiming I had breached the party’s principles, referring to passages about the two state solution and “Israel’s right to exist”.

I want to first make clear that I have never assumed to speak on behalf of the party Die Linke. Nonetheless, the attack on me and my positions is not surprising. Since the beginning of the Ukraine war, anti-war positions in the party have come increasingly under fire, and these conflicts have been publicly exploited. I would appreciate, on the other hand, a Die Linke which consistently stands against warmongering, militarism and rearmament, and doesn’t look away irrespective of the size of the media headwind.

As left-wing people, our position should be on the side of the oppressed and the victims of war and imperialism. We should show solidarity with the resistance against war, occupation and imperialism. This is the basis of my positions.

Unfortunately, the people proposing my expulsion have never tried to speak to me. Instead, Schubert, as former national party Chair, has already openly attacked me — simply a party member — in Der Spiegel even before the Party Conference. Since the Tagesspiegel has been reporting the expulsion procedure over the past weeks, I have decided to make my response to the expulsion proposal public.

Rising Repression

The attempt to expel me is happening against the background of rising repression against Palestine solidarity in Germany. Government support of the Israeli genocide in Gaza and the delivery of weapons stands in contradiction to opinion polls in which a majority of German society rejects sending weapons to Israel. The connections between Die Linke and the Palestine movement are being isolated.

As an activist and party member who is deeply anchored in the movement for Palestinian human rights, I am one of the targets of a media campaign against all anti-imperialist forces in Die Linke. This campaign must be seen in the context of the growing danger of war worldwide, German militarism and the Die Linke’s focus on the ability to form a coalition with the SPD and the Greens. Both outside and inside the party, pressure is being applied to remove positions of international solidarity against war and the arms race. This attack is an attack on everyone who is standing up for peace internationally.

It is a disconcerting development that part of the party leadership is taking administrative measures instead of carrying out a political debate and asking for a personal explanation. That they want to exclude a simple party member through the use of set or merely claimed party positions, while other party members, party functionaries and elected officials regularly ignore the “No” to weapon delivery and conscription, reveals their double standards.

Democratic votes at the regional party conference in Berlin rejected positions which had tried to apply Nazi terminology to describe Hamas and Hisbollah. This resolution was composed fully without my assistance, despite what was claimed in the subsequent media campaign against me, which was fanned by Schubert. Part of the reformist wing of Die Linke left the party because it could not push through such positions, in order that they can sustain pressure from outside the party. In contravention of party decisions, they retained their parliamentary seats.

The expulsion procedure also contained terms like “eliminatory antisemitism” and “pogrom” (one-sided excesses against oppressed, defeated minorities, tolerated or supported by state power), when referring to 7th October. This historical revisionist minority position, which infers a denial of colonialism, was never part of the principles of Die Linke, and so I could not have contravened these principles.

Neither do the people proposing my expulsion shy away from using quotes from my social media accounts which have been ripped out of context by a right wing witch hunt, like that of the Tagesspiegel. In their justification for my expulsion, they repeated these falsified quotes without checking them. The Tagespiegel has already had to correct some of their reports due to press laws.

Rebuttal

Here is my rebuttal of the allegations made in the expulsion application.

I reject the claim that I would relativise taking hostages as “teaching of ‘good manners”. On the contrary, I have argued against the relativisation of torture.

This claim is based on a falsified quote which does not exist and does not appear in any of the references listed in the proposal for my expulsion. In the real quote I argued against relativising a crime as grave as the torture of captives, and in particular of children. Such relativisation was made by someone else in the discussion.

I also stand against the kidnapping and torture of Palestinian children, which has been carried out for decades. I reject such tactics, irrespective of who is applying them. As I have personally worked with children in the West Bank, who were themselves the victims of torture, my intention was to answer a false claim, and to warn against arbitrarily trivialising and diluting the meaning of the term torture.

I am against all taking of civilian hostages, particularly of children. I welcomed the hostage swap of Israeli and Palestinian children, and support a full hostage swap. I stand wholeheartedly behind the support of the petition “For a just peace in Gaza” which was supported at the Die Linke national conference, and which calls for the release of all Israeli and Palestinian hostages and those who have been illegally imprisoned.

The reality of torture in the region is close to me. International human rights organisations have reported that the Palestinian children who were freed by the hostage swap were indeed the victims of systematic torture. This applies to nearly all of the on average 700 Palestinian children who are abducted and illegally imprisoned by Israel every year.

Save the Children states that 86% of all Palestinian under-age prisoners report that they have been beaten. Nearly half (42%) have been injured at some point of their incarceration, including bullet wounds and broken bones. Some reports by international human rights organisations speak of sexualised violence and imprisonment in small cages. Studies document the torture of children, the youngest of whom is 11 years old, with the use of electroshocks, being beaten in the testicles and the head, etc. This sometimes leads to the lack of consciousness and even death.

The gruesome reality of torture in the region has been played down by false comparsions with the request to be quiet, to wait for others to take food, or to share your food with others. I do not dispute that being held hostage is a terrible experience which no child should go through. This applies to every case, even without torture.

I reject the unsubstantiated claim that I made the statement that the “status of soldier” justified crimes

The people proposing my expulsion try to make the impression, through cutting quotes in a way which distorts them, that I approved acts of violence against a female occupying soldier. This does not correspond to my opinion, nor have I written it anywhere. Rape is a crime in every circumstance.

The real context is that in reaction to a false claim in social media, I posted the correction that the story in question did not concern a civilian but an occupying soldier of the IDF who was captured after a battle in her military base Nahal Oz, from which the “remote-controlled occupation” of Gaza by military surveillance is organised. I wrote that the allegation of a possible rape should be examined by an “independent international commission”, but that Israel has refused to allow this.

Nowhere have I written that the rape of anyone under any conditions is legitimate. I reject this insubstantial and defamatory insinuation. Quite the reverse, immediately below the quote they took from me it is made clear: “if she was raped, this should be condemned in the most forthright terms — just as the proven Israeli group rape of Palestinians must be condemned.” I cannot be sure whether this part of the justification was deliberately omitted. At the very least, it reflects badly on the professionalism of the “research”.

I reject the suggestion that my fight for liberation “cannot be understood without the murder of Israelis”.

The people proposing my expulsion are here referring to a falsified published quote from a private chat which was distorted without my agreement in a right-wing media campaign against Die Linke, published in the Tagesspiegel. In truth, I argued that rather than individual killings, we should do more to build international support for an anti-colonial fight for liberation.

As a Marxist, I see individual killings as a misguided “false solution”, as I believe that real change needs something much more fundamental: namely, collective international support against colonial oppression and the structures of the capitalist system which stand behind it. I reject the insinuation made in the justification for my proposed expulsion that due to my perspective of collective and international structural changes, I would endorse individual killings.

This improper procedure has political aims. After I legally challenged the Tagesspiegel with legal support, they moved away from their original false quote and changed it. It is also worth noting that citations and distortions from private messages are illegal.

Nonetheless, the people who are proposing my expulsion are themselves working with falsified “direct quotations”. In addition, it is claimed, relating to a comment I made about 7th October, that “there is no mention of the innumerable civilians killed in the kibbuzim and at the Nova festival.” This fails to mention that my comment is in actual fact a recommendation of a video contribution by an Israeli who — in contradiction to this insinuation — deals with this and other questions in detail.

Conclusion

As a whole, the justification for my expulsion is based on selective and sometimes falsified quotes which have been ripped out of their context. It seems that the people proposing my expulsion are trying to discredit unpleasant, but legitimate and substantiated, opinions and comrades, and to spread a climate of intimidation.

At no point have I endorsed any war crime, nor have I “celebrated” one, or evaluated it as positive in any way. I have explained context, corrected incorrect assertions and used demonstrable facts in a discussion in the midst of war propaganda.

If the simple mention of freely available facts has become grounds to bring a left-wing party to defamatory accusations and administrative expulsion attempts in order to push through someone’s own positions after they have been rejected by a democratic vote, then we in Die Linke have reached a bleak point.

We need to clarify whether for us as the left, human rights apply for everyone, independent of ethnicity and religion, and whether we as Die Linke support the secularisation and democratisation of Israel/Palestine or want to maintain the existing apartheid system and ethnic segregation.

I am for the complete secularisation and democratisation of the region and for a form of society without the system which currently exists in Israel/Palestine, and which all relevant human rights organisations refer to as apartheid in legal terms. I stand up for a society in which Palestinian and Jewish people are fully equal and enjoy the same rights.

International law allows the right to resist for a people under occupation. I find it gratifying that the main resolution passed by the National Conference of Die Linke also recognised Palestinians’ right to defend themselves. I believe that making this universal right dependent on the ethnicity or religion of the occupiers or the occupied is a racist position. The universal right to self-defence under occupation according to international law is also not just valid for people who share my socialist beliefs.

Nonetheless, I criticise non-socialist orientations, because their perspective of liberation is not integrated. I criticise a military strategy for the liberation of Palestine, as can be read in my article Strategies for liberation: old and new arguments in the Palestinian left. With regards to oppression, I am also critical of individual acts of violence, which offer no perspective for a solution. Instead I emphasise the necessity of international solidarity, support, and mass movements.

Despite this I can name, explain, and interpret cause and effect, without having to excuse or endorse anything. I agree with the Zionist movement (Theodor Herzl, Vladimir Zabotinsky, etc) when they describe themselves as “colonial” and when they call their own objective in the current Israeli Nation State Law as “colonisation”. I recognise that this colonial relationship is one of the root causes of the violence in the region, and I would like to see an end to this. Stating such facts in a sincere and measured debate using scientific criteria must be possible in left spaces without bureaucratic expulsions.

Katina Schubert and Martin Schirdewan, who are proposing my expulsion, seem to be contradicting this base of evidence, and instead want to describe the situation in the region in an unhistorical manner. Phrases like “exterminatory antisemitism” and “pogrom” move and simplify the debate into the realm of Nazi fascism.

With the belief in full democratisation, equality and for a peaceful and just cohabitation, I, like hundreds of other party members, support a position which diverges from the party program’s support for an ethnically segregated “Two State Solution”. This is no longer viable, as has been officially rejected by the Israeli government and senate, who have practically buried it, while government ministers have announced the annexation of the West Bank and Gaza following the official state annexation of East Jerusalem.

For many governments, the “Two State Solution” only serves as a meaningless phrase and fig leaf, used to dodge a confrontation of Israel’s right-wing government. An alternative which orientates itself on the local realities should be possible in a pluralistic left-wing party, and sustain a lively discussion.

A resolution of the Die Linke Bundesaussschuss [federal committee] of 2015 said: “DIE LINKE stands up for a Two State arrangement, but finds that the debate about alternatives to this solution is legitimate”. If the people proposing my expulsion want to ignore this, they must consequently first be able to justify their basis for doing so.

My own background from Gaza, where an openly announced genocide, as confirmed by the United Nations, is taking place, was — like the loss of my own family by the Israeli army’s bombing of Gaza in 2014, and once more in the current genocidal war — at no point even mentioned in the proposal to expel me. This is a testament of an absolute lack of empathy for the victims of Israel’s politics of occupation and expulsion.

I reproach myself that in some contributions I underestimated the malice of actors, who intended to hurt me. But ultimately it is indefensible to use such a reversal of perpetrator and victim in order to make victims out of a media campaign which uses falsified quotes and unsubstantiated allegations against the culprits.

The witch hunt which has been kicked off against me has led to racist statements and threats against me, including demands for my deportation, and the defamation of my family members who were murdered by the Israeli army. The approach of the people proposing my expulsion stands as a cancellation of solidarity with the oppressed and left-wing principles.

This is a translated and shortened version of a text which was originally published in German. Translation: Phil Butland. Reproduced with permission.

The Occasional Knowledge-Hungry Shark

Two underwater telecables were cut in the Baltic Sea last Sunday. Who is to blame?

Rowan Gaudet
22/11/2024

The internet is under attack, and Western politicians have been quick to point their fingers in Putin’s general direction. Two underwater telecables in the Baltic Sea were cut Sunday night and Monday morning this week. One connected Lithuania to the Swedish island of Gotland, the other ran from Finland to Rostock in Germany.

Despite few details, on Tuesday a statement by Germany, France, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom claimed — without specifically mentioning the cables — that, “Russia is systematically attacking European security architecture.” The German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius also stated that, “No one believes that these cables were cut accidentally.” He then added, apparently without a hint of irony, “We also have to assume, without knowing it yet, that it is sabotage.”

This is the third alleged attack in the Baltic Sea since the war between Russian and Ukraine began close to three years ago, the first two primarily targeting gas pipelines. It is unclear who carried out the first attack in September of 2022 on a pipeline built to carry Russian gas, but they succeeded in causing major damage. The Americans and the Russians have since blamed each other, although media reports from Germany’s investigation point towards a pro-Ukrainian group.

The second attack in October 2023 was first denounced by Finland as having been caused by “outside activity”, and various European leaders hinted at Russian aggression, only for some awkward information to come to light: a Chinese tanker ship was apparently to blame. It seems to have dragged its anchor along the sea bed and damaged the pipeline, although it’s unclear whether this was due to incompetence or done on purpose.

Again this week, before events were clear, European leaders pointed to sabotage. The day following Pistorius’ bravado statements, it was reported that a Chinese bulk carrier was at the site of both breaches at approximately the times they took place. The signs are once again pointing to an accident, although as of the time of writing, neither the accidental nature nor the Chinese ship’s responsibility have been confirmed.

It would be far from the first time an undersea cable was damaged by accident. According to the telecom data provider TeleGeography, there are around 100 breaks per year, and around two thirds of these come from fishing boats trawling the ocean floor, or inconveniently placed anchors. Add to that natural wear and tear, earthquakes, and the occasional knowledge-hungry shark, and there’s little space left for international intrigue.

The spine of the internet

Underwater telecables are of major structural importance in the modern world, and so perhaps forgiveness can be extended to politicians who panic and point fingers at the possibility of attacks. They were originally used to transfer telegraphs, then telephone calls and now today the internet as well. The cables themselves, alongside fears surrounding them, have a long history — the first international treaty on the matter included the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires among its original signatories.

The underwater cables that carry phone calls and internet traffic are surprisingly thin, about the width of a medium carrot, although notably longer. Closer to shore, they are thicker due to increased protective layers. While the landing points are generally considered the most susceptible to attacks, actual attacks have tended to target sections deep underwater, where there are fewer witnesses or risk of escalation than would come with attacking infrastructure located on foreign soil.

During the Cold War, the Americans and the Soviets engaged in a back-and-forth which showed that the underwater sections of telecommunications cables were more than weak enough to be targeted. In 1959-60, five transatlantic cables near the USA were cut one after another, leading to accusations of foul play. The American Navy seized a Soviet fishing trawler which was at the site of each of the cuts, but were unable to prove its responsibility. Then, throughout the 1970s and 80s, the American National Security Agency spied on Soviet communications by having a submarine tap Soviet cables.

More recently, American and other Western political commentators have continuously raised concerns that these cables are a weak point. In 2015, Forbes ran an article titled, “How Bad Would It Be If The Russians Started Cutting Undersea Cables? Try Trillions In Damage”. In 2019, a NATO-associated journal published a detailed piece outlining the risk. Just this summer, the Financial Times published another article warning of the possibility of attacks.

There is a slight irony here, as despite all the alarming articles, the 2019 piece still feels the need to offer what feels like fairly basic advice to those who run the supposedly high-risk landing ports: they should implement “perimeter fences”, “video surveillance cameras” and “guard[s]”.

There are admittedly some good reasons to be afraid. Even today, upwards of 95% of internet traffic is run through these cables, despite all the attention given to satellites. The WhatsApp messages you send from your phone to family or friends abroad go to the nearest cellphone tower, and then straight into a cable. Add in work emails, the recipe you looked up on an Indian website, the German website you used that has servers in the USA for whatever reason, and of course, trillions of dollars in digital transactions swirling around the globe; everything from grandma sending you birthday money to grandpa’s tax-dodging offshore accounts.

All this information is primarily run through undersea cables. As seen on this map, most places have enough cables that just cutting one would be more of a costly inconvenience than an economic and security crisis, as data could be re-routed through other cables with little or no noticeable loss in service.

This is true of the current situation in the Baltic Sea, although Finnish users may find their internet slightly slower than normal. Some geographically remote places like Australia or Patagonia are exceptions, though. The Black Sea is also surprisingly sparse on cables.

Serious outages, even short ones, would prove costly to the financial markets, not to mention the cost of repairing the cables. But in times of war, any damages to communication lines could have costs ranging well beyond the economic, interrupting the flow of communications to military forces — not to mention the psychological impact such an attack would have. Youth across Europe have already been struggling with the rising costs of bread since Russia invaded Ukraine. How would they manage if Putin shut down their internet?

Privatisation and confused jurisdiction

Despite their importance and the long-standing international agreements relating to them, the actual jurisdiction over undersea cables is still quite confused. This is made worse by the fact that most of these cables are privately owned, a fact as unsurprising as it is depressing. Major corporations like Google are becoming increasingly responsible for them as well, with industry insiders claiming just last month that Meta has plans for a new around-the-world cable.

In the Baltic Sea breaches, the shorter Lithuania-Gotland cable belongs to the Swedish company Arelion. The other cable leading to Rostock was the 1173 km long “C-Lion1”, owned by the Finnish company Cinia and originally built in 2016. Cinia has said that a ship is being dispatched, and repairs should be completed before the end of the month.

The muddled political jurisdiction was shown by the response to the alleged attack on the Finnish and Swedish companies. Both countries launched inquiries from their respective national investigative bodies, although the Finnish allowed the Swedes to take the lead. This was presumably because at least one (but seemingly both) of the cuts was close enough to Swedish shores to be in the Swedish Exclusive Economic Zone, as Cinia said in its statement.

This left Germany (not to mention Lithuania) in the awkward position of wanting to be outraged by an attack on their internet infrastructure, but having nowhere to funnel this anger. It was, after all, an attack on a Finnish-owned cable on Swedish territory. The only impact it had on Germany was on its internet, leaving the state with no investigations to launch or other practical ways of showing displeasure. Pistorius had to make do with an accusatory and potentially embarrassing statement. If news comes out confirming that it was an accident due to the Chinese ship, he may end up hoping more damaged cables prevent the news from spreading this close to an election.

As mentioned above, whether Putin is behind these latest cuts or not, it certainly isn’t the first time European governments have too quickly accused Moscow, nor is undersea sabotage a new tactic. But while the ringing of war bells is a cause for concern, the largest threat to internet infrastructure over the long term may be massive corporations seizing control of our means of communication by building and purchasing the cables that connect the world. With the growing monopolisation of these cables, the main threat to the freedom of the internet may be on a Meta-level as well as a physical one.