Protest at the embassy of Kazakhstan

A delegation of PAME along with representatives from the “Democratic Rally for the People’s Freedoms and Solidarity” protested yesterday morning at the embassy of Kazakhstan. The protest was carried out on the occasion of the unprecedented prosecutions launched by the government and the Chinese-Kazakh oil company against the workers and the trade unionists who have been on strike for about tree months demanding wage-increases, additional benefits for hazardous occupations and trade union freedoms.

The delegation of PAME met the First Secretary of the embassy and protested the situation expressing its class solidarity with the workers in Kazakhstan. It also demanded the arrest and the punishment of the murderers, the cessation of the criminalization of the unions’ struggles and the persecutions against the workers.

In response to the demands of PAME the Secretary of the embassy justified the Kazakh government stressing that the workers needed permission to go on strike while he added that everyone who takes part in illegal strikes is imprisoned. He did not hesitate to argue that the workers had no reason to resort to struggles as they are well-paid. As regards the murders of the workers he underlined that they are “criminal accidents” in terms of criminal law and that they have nothing to do with political crimes.

“We condemn the stance of the government of Kazakhstan and the Secretary of the embassy and call on the working people to continue their struggle and express their solidarity with the struggle of the workers” stated Ilias Stamelos, member of the Secretariat of PAME in the Energy Secto, to RIZOSPASTIS.

Statement of the “Democratic Rally”

The “Democratic Rally for the People’s Freedoms and Solidarity” also issued a statement expressing its solidarity with the workers’ in the oil company. Amongst other things it stressed “that these persecutions are inspired by the decisions of the EU that criminalize radical thought, label the people’s action as terrorism and equate fascism with communism while they recommend the bans and the persecutions against the communist parties and the vanguard workers.

They are part of the organized ideological intimidation that seeks to identify the workers’ struggle with violence, to slander the class struggle using terms such as “instigation of social hatred”, to present the interests of the capital and its profits as inevitable, as an eternal law or a kind of “social contract”.” It adds: “we call on the working people in Greece and all over the world to be in a state of militant vigilance in order to repel similar methods of intimidation and repression that the bourgeois forces will objectively use in order to deal with the people’s reactions in conditions of a deep capitalist crisis, unemployment, absolute poverty and destitution.

We call on the Greek people to draw lessons from the war that the plutocracy has unleashed against them by violating its labour and democratic rights, criminalizing, slandering and using repressive mechanisms against its struggles, elaborating new laws in the name of combating violence and restricting demonstrations, the use of highly developed tools of repression (extension of surveillance, use of plastic bullets, water cannons) criminalizing not only radical activity and but also radical thinking.”

30/8/2011