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Category: Campaign of the week

SAOT

The Palestine Solidarity Festival in Berlin


02/06/2022

The word SAOT means sound in Arabic. The sound of Palestine has been silenced since 1948, when Palestinians were forced to live under the threat of dispossession and survive within the conditions of enforced displacement. The disappearance of most Palestinian archive materials and historical narrative, as an existing nation of own culture, language and heritage. The sound of Palestine simulates the physical characteristic of sound forces. It forever intertwines ist appearances and disappearances, simultaneously, in the process of creating a sonic event.

Why

Berlin has always been a hub for cultural and political activism. People from West Asia and North Africa have arrived in Berlin with fraught stories. Having made experiences in the wake of the past years in which they revolted in manifold waves of discontent and demanded freedom and dignity. There is a real thirst for a thriving cultural and artistic life that mirrors the languages, roots, and newly created practices of people from the WANA region. Within this wider picture Palestinian communities in Berlin, the biggest in Europe, are completely marginalized from the city’s cultural life, politics and public spaces. The collective space is further disrupted by the locally enforced fragmented geographies of Palestinian communities worldwide.

SAOT – The Palestine Solidarity Festival confronts the efforts of undoing these injustices and contributes to the decades-long battles manifested through resistance and art. As struggles for justice, in a strongly networked globalized world, are intersectionality intertwined and our identities are shaped by one another, a festival that centres around solidarity reconnects the mutual longing of the diverse diasporic communities in Berlin.

What we want

SAOT – The Palestine Solidarity Festival in Berlin is an initiative that wishes to transcend the Palestine question beyond the usual boundaries, discourse limitations and restrictions usually exercised upon it in the mainstream German Culture and Media Landscape. Thus, the festival creates a time and space where Palestine can be discussed, so it can be informed about as a contemporary political issue that holds emancipatory potential and decolonial power. Our aim is to refocus the Palestine question on people while breaking through the walls of exceptionalism imposed constantly on this question.

By creating a platform for Palestinian artists to present their art as well as historical Palestinian culture, we share and celebrate our identities with the Berlin community and initiate a collective space for Palestinians to reconnect. SAOT – Palestine Solidarity Festival extends this space for queer artists, films, literature and people to raise the question of what queer theory and Palestinian liberation share, a defining resistance to elimination and an enduring commitment to not getting rid of their own issues. As such, queer politics is and can certainly become a decolonial practice, just as decolonisation has a clear kinship with queer dissident resistance.

When and where

SAOT- the Palestine Solidarity Festival will take place in Berlin from June the 3rd to June 26th 2022 at various locations across the city such as Oyoun, Al Berlin and the Centre Français de Berlin.

What we do

The events in this festival cover four main categories:

  • Music: The festival will present and merge different musical genres. This combination does justice to the musical and geographical diversity of historical Palestine. In an act of solidarity, musical contributions from artists from other parts of the world will be presented.
  • Film: A selection of films by international and Palestinian filmmakers will be shown. These films revolve around the Palestinian cause and intersectional anticolonial topics.
  • Art: The exhibition ‘Eine Heimat mit uns’ aims to visualize variable homes through memories and relics that you have brought with you, lost or had to leave behind. For the realization of this exhibition, we ask you migrants, regardless of their origin, to share their experience with us by sending us a picture of such an object that is meaningful to them and explaining the special meaning of this object with a short text. These items are intended to represent an interpretation of the abandoned homeland. Regardless of whether this home was or is a dream or a nightmare for them. The various objects carry multiple experiences with them, with which we want to present a vision of these homes. A vision that may one day become reality.
  • Discussions and Talks: The festival will present a series of discussions and talks that take a critical and timely perspective on the Palestinian question within the local-German context, the wider perspective of global order and intersectional struggles. Cooking events, book exhibitions, Tatreez workshops, theatre performances and literary events will complement the festival activities.

Who we are

We are a collective of Palestinian artists and activists in the diaspora, who aim to mobilise around the culture and politics of the Palestinian question and intersectional struggles.

Ararat Collective

An Armenian antifascist collective founded during the Artsakh war in 2020


27/05/2022

Ararat collective was founded by Armenians in Berlin following the 44-day war against Artsakh by Azerbaijan, which together with its Turkish and Islamist allies killed over 4,000 Armenians and ethnically cleansed over 70,000 in the Fall of 2020. During the protests against the war, we realized that we needed a platform for Armenians who actively oppose colonialism, imperialism and patriarchy in all their forms, and who wish to focus on an internationalist approach to resistance—building links and practical solidarity between all of the communities targeted by Turkish fascism, including Assyrians, Yazidis, and Kurds.

Together with members of these communities we started to meet and exchange and organized several demonstrations under the call “United Against Turkish Fascism”. We found many 1st, 2nd and 3rd generation exiles from our region who are eager to engage in conversations and get to know each other here in ways that are not possible under the shadow of fascism and war in our homelands.

At the same time, Germany is not exactly a safe refuge for our communities. Besides facing deportations and racism as other migrants and refugees, there are also very real threats from Turkish fascist organizations such as the Grey Wolves (Ülkücü), which are estimated to be the largest fascist organization in Germany with 18,000+ members. More broadly, many Turkish migrants remain ideologically aligned with the nationalist, panturkish and religious-chauvinist doctrines of Turkey and Azerbaijan, such that daily racism, threats and genocide denialism are a constantly reopening our wounds in schools, the streets, and the media.

Furthermore, the German state, politicians and capital remain deeply invested in their military alliance with Turkish imperialism, and heavily police our communities and our resistance. The media here is also largely silent on Turkey’s aggressions, war crimes, genocide denialism and acts of ethnic cleansing and ethnocide. This is particularly painful given Germany’s deep complicity in the Armenian and Seyfo Genocide of 1915 as an ally of the collapsing Ottoman empire and then the Young Turk’s regime. There has been almost no official recognition of how German leadership knew of the three Pasha’s intention to annihilate the Ottoman minorities and yet continued to supply weapons, infrastructure and logistical support, while arguing that the “disloyal” Armenians deserved it.

The response of EU governments—but also of civil society and the left—to the war has been shockingly inadequate if we consider that the fact that a Turkish state that still denies the genocide it was founded upon has now gone to war with the remaining people it could not destroy and has announced its intention to “complete the mission of the forefathers”, as Erdogan recently stated, while continuing to use terms like Lebensraum at a high level of government.

All of this means it is more crucial for than ever Armenians to come together with each other and with potential allies, especially those of us who are not blinded by the hypocrisy of Western ‘humanitarianism’ and ‘democracy’ and do not succumb to the wishful thinking that after 106 years the West, or Russia or any other great power is willing to save us from this perilous moment.

Last but not least, Armenian diasporic life is a space of great potential joy and divergent experiences. We have much to learn much from one another and about the cultures and politics we have been part of and the places we have called home after the Aghet—the catastrophe. Armenians in Berlin come from the state of Armenia (East Armenia), from West Armenia (occupied by Turkey), from Syria, Iran, Lebanon, California and all over the world.

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Peoples’ Tribunal on Sri Lanka

Session III. 20th – 22nd May 2022 Berlin, Germany


19/05/2022

Was the EU’s terror listing of the LTTE, at the instigation of the US, the political trigger for the genocidal war against the Eelam Tamils?

As we see a confrontation taking place between the two sides of the geo-political divide as to who controls this strategically important island, while its economy collapses – the Eelam Tamils in the homeland and in the Diaspora will find the deliberations at this tribunal very instructive. And, as the world in witnessing again, in Ukraine, the failure of negotiations resulting in a terrible war, the discussions at the Berlin Tribunal will not only be of concern to the Eelam Tamils, but to all those concerned in peace through negotiations.

The Tribunal will investigate the following inter-related areas

  • Who holds the primary responsibility in the war against the Eelam Tamils?

  • Is the United Nations’ Human Rights Council manipulated by the perpetrators?

  • Was the war of extermination of Eelam Tamils a threat to peace in the Indian Ocean?

  • What is the significance of the international criminalisation of Tamil activists?

  • Is the destruction of social progress made in Tamil Eelam, particularly concerning women, part of the genocidal process?

  • Is the ongoing structural genocide supported by the external perpetrators?

In articulating the tribunal as that of the people, on Saturday 21 May from 2.00 – 4.00 pm (Berlin time) 30 leading human rights activists from Asia, Africa, Europe, and Latin America will engage in the Tribunal virtually in a manifestation of people-to-people solidarity.

The third session of the tribunal – like the Dublin sessions – will take place under the aegis of the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal. As with the previous sessions, the organisers will be the Internationaler Menschenrechtsverein Bremen in collaboration with the Irish Forum for Peace in Sri Lanka – Dublin

The Tribunal will open at 6pm on Friday and continue on Saturday and Sunday. Attendance has to be regulated, and if you wish to take part, please contact imrvbremen@gmail.com as early as you can. More information here–

Donations can be sent to: IMRV – Germany, IBAN: DE77 2001 0020 0009 9292 07 or GoFundMe

rls International Research Group on Authoritarianism and Counter-Strategies

Shedding light on different aspects of authoritarian ideologies, movements, and governments, and discuss emancipatory alternatives.


12/05/2022

Around the world, we see a resurgence of reactionary nationalist, religious, racist, classist, and anti-feminist ideologies and movements, as well as the accelerated undermining of democratic political systems accompanied by “shrinking spaces” for civil-society actors. The International Research Group on Authoritarianism and Counter-Strategies (IRGAC) aims to zoom in on the regional and global interconnections of authoritarian capitalism and reactionary populism and place them at the centre of scholarly debates.

The group brings together more than 15 scholar-activists from countries of the Global South with the goal of combining in-depth studies of national, regional, and local processes of socioeconomic transformation and politics with a global perspective that recognizes and analyzes the universal manifestations of authoritarian capitalism and universalizing processes that lie beyond the “rising tide” of authoritarianism. At the same time, we propose an internationalist perspective on local and regional counter-strategies, a perspective that, while discussing alternative paths and concrete, popular resistance strategies, campaigns, and initiatives, inquires about their potential to pave the way towards internationalist emancipatory transformative strategies.

The IRGAC currently assembles 12 post-doc fellows working at research institutions in the Global South who are fully funded by the Stiftung’s Global Scholarly Dialogue Programme, as well as a growing number of associated fellows and guest fellows from different countries whose research stays at German universities are funded by the RLS. The group is coordinated by Börries Nehe together with Jan-David Echterhoff.

The IRGAC holds regular on- and offline meetings and workshops to further develop and sharpen what we understand as global perspectives from the South on authoritarian capitalism and counter-strategies, and we publish new findings and research excerpts on its website. Together with the Regional Offices of the RLS and various research institutions based in Germany, we regularly publish calls for short-term research fellowships in Germany and cooperative South-South research projects.

Visit the IRGAC website for further information and full access to articles on authoritarianism and counter-strategies from around the Global South.

Palestine Institute for Public Diplomacy (PIPD)

Connecting Digitally. Mobilizing Towards Liberation


05/05/2022

The Palestine Institute for Public Diplomacy is an independent, non-governmental organization that aims to shift discourse and policy with movements and decision-makers around the world through people’s engagement and advocacy. The PIPD is based in Palestine and is led by a board of prominent Palestinians from the private sector, academia, and civil society. Our small team is spread internationally between Palestine, Belgium, Germany, and Jordan.

In Germany too, the Palestine Institute for Public Diplomacy (The PIPD) is active in the field of Palestinian advocacy. The reason for this step is, on the one hand, the enormous influence of German politics on the situation of the Palestinians and, on the other hand, the absence of a fact-based, fair discussion of the Palestinian struggle for self determination, freedom, justice and equal rights.

PIPD and its digital platform Rābet seek to strengthen Palestinians’ collective sumud as a global, intersectional movement for freedom, justice, equity and rights for all.

Rābet is the digital platform of the PIPD. Rābet is a digital space for Palestine by Palestinians, which listens, engages and uplifts. Rābet celebrates the beauty and diversity of Palestinian identity, society, culture, food, art and politics, while challenging the systems of oppression and injustices that we face as a people.