[van-announce] Operation Enduring Resistance: Remembering Nine-Eleven (Vancouver)

[harsha at resist.ca]

* please post widely *

Operation Enduring Resistance: Remembering Nine-Eleven

SATURDAY SEPTEMBER 10TH
SFU HARBOUR CENTER (515 W. HASTINGS)
FORUMS FROM 2-6 PM

SUNDAY SEPTEMBER 11TH  @ 2 PM
A COMMUNITY COMMEMORATION
GATHER AT MAIN STREET SKYTRAIN STATION (THORNTON PARK)

++++++++++++++++++++++


9-11 should never be forgotten. One of them happened only four years ago,
with about three thousand human lives as collateral damage. The American
people became victims of the kind of terror and grief experienced by
hundreds of thousands of innocent people around the world for many
decades. But George Bush and his cohorts quickly turned the genuine grief
of the people into a "crusade" of his own. A unilateral war, a global war,
the "War on Terrorism", was instantly declared - unleashing terror here,
there, everywhere. The "9-11" of 2001 became a landmark, dividing the
world between the war-ravaging US government and its allies - a handful of
reluctant, coerced or bought-out governments - on the one hand, and the
people of the world on the other.

But there was another "9-11", going back to 1973. It was precisely on
September 11 of that year that the US government staged the military coup
in Chile, gunning down the democratically elected president, Salvador
Allende, in his own office - and turning the whole country into a
decades-long dark night of brutal repression, unremitting exploitation,
and a laboratory for neo-liberalism.

Then there is September 12, 1977 when Steven Biko, first president of the
all-Black South African Students’ Organization, also became the
forty-first person in South Africa to die while being held in the custody
of the apartheid regime.

On September 13th, 1971, the U.S government ordered a shooting in the
Attica Prison in New York.  At least 450 rounds of ammunition were
discharged with 29 inmates dead. The Attica Rebellion, organized by
predominantly political prisoners from the American Indian Movement, the
Black Liberation Army, and anti-war activists, was the most well-organized
prison uprising in U.S. history.

And we must never forget September 14th, 1992 in Somalia when the United
Nations Security Council first began its “humanitarian” intervention.

What happened on that 9-11 in Chile, or that 9-13 in Attica, was not
unique. For decades the US-led system of imperialism has been doing
exactly that: in Asia, Middle-east, Africa, Central and South America;
ruthlessly suppressing people's aspirations for democracy, social justice,
economic well-being and genuine independence; and imposing brutal,
despotic tyrants in one country after the other.

On 9-11 of this year, 2005, we call upon all the people of goodwill, as
lovers of peace, equality and social justice, to come together to
commemorate the memory of the people who died in America four years ago,
and the countless thousands who before that day and since that day have
lost their lives, their limbs, their dignity and their homes in the wars
and imperialist greed undertaken by the USA, currently under the cover of
"War on Terrorism".

And when we commemorate, we also resolve to build solidarity among the
people of the world in their just struggles against imperialism.


Organized by a network of organizations- La Surda Latin American
Collective, South Asian Network for Secularism and Democracy, No One is
Illegal, Vancouver Association of Chinese Canadians, Committee for
Solidarity with Columbia, Iranian Federation of Refugees, Kalayaan Center,
and Vancouver Status of Women.

For more information, email noii-van at resist.ca or call 778-552-2099