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The Don't Dig movement, formed by ecologists from Turkey, Greece and Cyprus, released a statement on the occasion of World Peace Day.
| The peoples of Turkey, Cyprus and Greece celebrate World Peace Day. We send our greetings not to those who spread hatred between us but to the environmental and peace movements that raise the flag of solidarity between our peoples. After announcing that more than 80 million people in the world had been driven away from their homes by the middle of 2020, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Filippo Grandi, stated: "In the last ten years, the number of forcibly displaced people has doubled. This shows that the international community has been unable to preserve peace. With this frightening picture, we have passed another threshold, and as long as world leaders fail to say no to war, this situation will only get worse". When the multiple crises facing our world forces even those who bear the responsibility to use such words to describe the situation, anyone can imagine the magnitude of the problem we face. The multiple crises triggered by Covid-19 have further deepened the problems faced by the forcibly displaced. In the whole world, the governments that create war and conflicts rather than seeking solutions for the problems, are attempting to divert the anger against the people with anti-refugee racist policies. Instead of solutions based on the principles of human rights, they try to channel peoples' feelings of frustration against the oppressed by using slander and lies. We have seen in the course of the recent forest fires that have been devastating our region, that the governments of Greece, Cyprus and Turkey, which have been continuously fanning the flames of racism and fomenting enmity between their respective populations, can find billions of dollars for armaments, but when it comes to personnel and equipment for fighting fires, they claim that there are no resources available. Against the zombie politicians who see nothing beyond war and profit, defending the common interests of nature and humanity requires us to say no to the destructive policies of capitalism now. In this period in which we confront disasters one after another, leaving the question of peace to the tender mercies of the governments and the multinationals would clearly be suicidal. We will continue to organize solidarity from below for a world in which peoples are not being provoked to enmity, where billions of dollars are invested, not on armaments, but on puıtting out the fire that is destroying our planet, where humanity and nature coexist in solidarity and peace. Because the futures of both nature and humanity are inextricably tied. |
(TP/VK)
