If not now, then when?
The Association Ya Basta! launches appeal for the mobilisation: Bush stay home!
Global Project Padova - Tuesday May 18th, 2004
[ print version ]
"We train young men to drop fire on people. But their commanders won’t allow them to write "fuck" on their airplanes because it’s obscene"

F. F. Coppola, Apocalypse Now

If not now, then when?

June 4’th, this year, the president of the United States of America, George W. Bush, a war criminal, thinks to be in Italy

In an attempt to instrumentalise the past, he will try to link his current occupation of Iraq and his siding with main multinational enterprises with the rhetoric of the Italian liberation from nazi-fascism.

If Rome and Italy was liberated from fascism and nazism, we owe it first of all to all those, men and women, who in the middle of the war and military occupation, chose to desert and to take part in the resistance, with or without arms, in boycott, in active disobedience, not collaborating. Only thanks to those it was possible to imagine a different future than that of the war which devastated Europe.

Today Iraq is the mirror of the horrors which the Empire is spreading over the world: brutal exploitation, environmental devastation, torture, arrests and civilians as military targets.

As association and collective, in our attempt to be there where resistance exists against this unjust order, we have very clearly understood that in all conflicts, there is one part which has the right to resist: namely humanity in all of its expressions, independent of culture, religion and the colour of the skin.

Already last June during our caravan that aimed to cross Iraq and Palestine, we found out that refusing to collaborate with the occupants and active resistance against them is what scares the lords of war the most.

Today Iraq is the central nerve point where the experimentation with the war of the new millennium takes place: Lethal arms used against civilians, private armies, the systematic use of lies and media manipulation, the degrading of enemies and the renewed systematic use of torture

June 4’th, in Rome and contextually in all of Europe, will be the moment to say: enough! The moment to affirm, that only when asserting the right to resist, and through the concrete practices of resistance against the war, in Europe as in Iraq, in Afghanistan, Palestine and every other scene of the global war, only then is it possible to create a present of peace and of rights.

The alternative is that of the daily horror that we are getting so used to.

We therefore launch this appeal to all realities of the basis, associations and movements and to all those who singularly or collectively want to give body to the refusal of the war:

To organise initiatives against the Italian participation in the war: as much against the economical one - embodied in all of the enterprises that take part the so-called reconstruction, as against the military presence.

To turn June 2 into the day against militarism, against the war, using the military funds for purposes of social corporation and development.

To declare the Roma "città aperta" yet another time, with the struggles for the liberation of our country and the current struggles of the global movements in mind. Resisting against war and fascism, banning the presence of war criminals like George W. Bush!

To participate in the mobilisations of June 4’th in Rome and in Europe, organising affinity groups promoting direct actions of protest and civil resistance.

The Association Ya Basta!





If you are interested travelling to Rome feel free to contact  confrontbushinrome@yahoo.co.uk for info or whatever.