“Public announcement
Women’s solidarity with our sisters in peace – Ana Politikovskaja and
Aung San Su Chi
We hereby wish to remind the public that, one year ago, Ana
Politikovskaja, one of the leading Russian journalists, was killed in
the center of Moscow, in front of the building she used to live in.
She was well known for her harsh, uncompromising criticism of the
state establishment and President Putin and his war in Chechnya, which
was being referred to as the reinforcement of the constitutional order
in Chechnya. That was, in fact, a war against the civilian population,
Ana insisted. To this day, her assassins have not been found, although
it is quite clear that she fell as a victim of the state terror of
Putin’s state machinery of death. Security forces, the very same death
squadrons who had been killing Chechen civilians, also killed Ana. The
murder of a journalist was a crucial moment, when Putin’s Russia
pursued on its course of repressive policy and totalitarian regime.
The Committee for the Protection of Journalists, seated in New York,
points out that Politikovskaja was the forty-second journalist to have
been killed in Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union and that this
was the twelfth in a series of murders that have occurred since the
year 2000 when Vladimir Putin came to power.
On this occasion, we express solidarity with our friends, the Russian
pacifists and anti-militarists, anti-Putin, anti nationalist
activists, as well as with the peace movement of Chechnya.
We refuse to accept any similarity between Serbia and Russia, we
reject both of these nationalisms, because both countries have been
persecuting the others and the different, especially journalists and
defenders of human rights and peace activists pledging for a radical
discontinuity with the state organized criminal past. We refuse to
become a Russian province. We hereby demand from the Russian
authorities that the organizers, initiators and executors of the
assassination of the journalist Ana Politikovskaja be punished most severely.
On the other side of the world, the military junta in Burma that have
been in power ever since 1966, cracked down on peaceful demonstrations
headed by Buddhist monks with brutal military and police forces.
Military units arrested participants of rallies and tortured them in
prisons, while the monks were confined to their pagodas.
We remind the public of the fact that the former state alliance of
Serbia and Montenegro exported arms to Myanmar, in spite of the EU and
US sanctions. In the course of 2004, 36 howitzers of domestic
production were sold to Myanmar, and another contingent of 54
howitzers in 2005. Yugoslavia began exporting arms, the industry of
death, to Myanmar, as early as 1953, and this practice has been
uninterrupted, thus supporting the repressive regime of the junta in
the stifling of democratic changes.
We demand that the state of Serbia admit accountability for the
violation of EU sanctions and that the responsible figures from the
Ministry of Defense be punished.
We demand from the military authorities in Burma to step down from
power and to respect the will of the citizens expressed in the
elections of 1992, which Aung Su Chi won. We demand that military
regime in Myanmar immediate and unconditional release Aung San Su Kyi,
the oppositional leader from home imprisonment.”
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