Contribution à la conférence Anti-Otan d'Istanbul

Roland Marounek
28 juin 2004

Dear Comrades,

I thank the Peace Association of Turkey for the invitation in the name of the two organisations I represent here, the Comité Surveillance OTAN ('NATO Monitoring Committee') and the Stop United States of Aggression coalition, of which the NATO Monitoring Committee is a signatory.

The Stop-USA coalition, in which the Belgian Anti-Imperialist League plays an important coordinating role, is a coordination of about 40 organizations. We oppose the imperialist globalisation, and in the first place, its military policy and war mongering.
Today the United States of America, or a group of countries under the leadership of the USA, are the only ones who can develop a worldwide imperialist policy. That is the reason why we call ourselves "Stop.USA" and not only "Stop the war".
Of course this doesn't mean that we forget nor the growing role that the European Union is playing, and will play more and more in the future. Stop.USA is a clearly anti-imperialist organization, fighting the different imperialist powers.
Last year, during the aggression against Iraq, four medical doctors linked to our coordination were in Baghdad to express our solidarity with the Iraqi population, and to be able to testify and denounce from Baghdad, and afterwards all over Europe and even in New York the war crimes and real objectives of the USA.
They put together the necessary evidence for a court case in Belgium against General Franks, the chief US commander during the war. With this we got the attention of the world press, and even of Donald Rumsfeld, who threatened the Belgian government with sanctions if they would not change the so called 'law of universal competence' which made possible the prosecution of an American officer in a Belgian court… Of course the law was changed…. But we could develop a broad international solidarity campaign on this issue, and by this contribute in the development of the international antiwar movement.

The NATO Monitoring Committee was created in 1999 in Brussels, by a group of Belgian citizens, coming from different political backgrounds, all of them upset by the then recent aggression against Yugoslavia, and the occupation of Kosovo by NATO

The aim of the Committee is basically to constitute an instrument of information, to alert the public opinion about the real role, the importance and the objective of NATO. We want to expose to the people, that NATO is an instrument in hands of the USA to ensure their hegemony. We call for a complete dissolution of the Alliance.
The NATO Monitoring Committee is not a huge mass organisation, but in our opinion, this ideological work has nevertheless an effective importance.
On the other hand, the Committee rejoins other organizations, and it participated and backed the demonstrations against the US aggressions. Wednesday the 30th of June, it will participate in the STOP USA mobilisation in front of the US embassy, to denounce the puppet regime in Iraq.
We also rejoined other organization in the actions against the presence of nuclear weapons in our country, imposed by the USA through NATO. We denounce in this matter the violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty by our country, the USA and NATO, and call upon the dismantling of those bombs.

The up-to-date vocabulary, under which the Occident is hiding its present colonial expeditions, is "humanitarian intervention", or "bringing the democracy", or again "fighting against terrorism" – before the very same moves were rather packed up with "Christianity", or "Civilisation". They want to make us to believe that military aggressions are necessary, and that it could be necessary to violate the Charter of the UNO, in order to "fix a problem" they themselves created. We must expose what really mean concretely military basis and troops in an occupied country, in term of social, political or cultural disaster.
In this respect, it is very important in our opinion to denounce the real results of NATO in the Balkans, especially in the Kosovo. It is only due to the silence of mainstream media’s that people can believe this 'humanitarian intervention' was somehow a success that could be repeated elsewhere. We have to break this silence, to make known the real situation now in the ex-Yugoslavia
We are organizing in this prospect a 'fact-finding' mission in Kosovo this summer, where 'inspectors' have the intention to visit some of NATO protected enclaves where are living ethnic minorities, to meet them, and bring back testimony.

The invading of Afghanistan was an essential point in the US strategy in this region, for its control of Eurasia, and of the oil roads. The so-called war against terror is not about terrorism, it is about US military bases at the doors of Russia and China.
Our Belgian government, and the Spanish one, and the German one, officially 'against the war', are directly helping the US forces in Iraq, by their participation in the occupation of Afghanistan. And now, they intend to use this precedent to go one step forward with the occupation of Iraq. We call for the withdrawal of the Belgian troops, and all NATO troops from Afghanistan. We call for an immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all foreign troops from Iraq.

NATO imposes to us an alliance with war criminals, which have just committed an aggression against a sovereign country, the third in four years, in blatant violation of the Charter of the United Nations. In this shameful NATO-Summit, those criminals are now discussing about how to make people accept an official involvement of NATO in the colonial occupation Iraq that would represent a post-mortem legitimating of the aggression. The rulers of our countries must either break this alliance with criminals, or to be considered as accomplice.

They are lying to us about 'defence'; they are lying about 'security'. But defence against whom? The members of NATO are the ones who do possess and develop weapons of mass-destructions, with allies like Israel. The security of Europe and of the world is definitely not to be found in a Rapid Reaction Forces, within the European Union or in NATO, or in a policy of continued militarization, but rather in the struggle to make the world more just, and to reach to equal relations between sovereign countries.