UMUT-SEN reports from the field – Hatay / Samandağ

UMUT-SEN reports from the field – Hatay / Samandağ

UMUT-SEN reports from the field – Hatay / Samandağ

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[Since Day 1 of the earthquake that hit Turkey and Syria (February 6), Umut-Sen volunteers have worked side by side with mineworkers of Turkey in Iskenderun and Samandag (in the city of Antakya), Elbistan in the city of Maras, and the cities of Adiyaman and Malatya. Below is the translation of an Umut-Sen volunteer’s report from Day 4 (February 9) in Samandag, Antakya. The situation has changed since, but not for the better. While many people and animals have been rescued alive by independent search and rescue teams such as the ones mineworkers and Umut-Sen volunteers formed, currently, mineworkers and construction workers are still the only (non-foreign) competent search and rescue teams in the region. The state-led search and rescue operation teams—known as AFAD—continue to try and stop them from rescuing those who might still be alive under the rubble and from evacuating the deceased while protecting their bodily integrity. The Turkish state and AFAD insist on removing the rubble with earth diggers, denying tens of thousands of people hope, or the right to a funeral. The struggle between the state forces and several independent volunteer teams continues on the ground, as does the hope of rescuing more people alive.]

A group of our comrades left for the disaster area in early hours of February 6th. They are currently coordinating with miners on rescue missions and distributing essential needs on the ground. We’re relaying their reports from an area with no cell service and power:

“We’re in Hatay Samandag, and there’s no cell service… I’m writing as I make my way alongside the miners to different rubbles.

The situation here is catastrophic. There are 30 miners here, and they were stopped before they could even enter the city. Everyone is asking for help because virtually no official rescue team has reached here. AFAD doesn’t have any control over the area. Miners have rescued people in mere hours that the officials have spent two days failing to do so. Miners are now split into groups of 3-5-8. We’re with them. They have no time to stop and take a breath.

WE URGENTLY NEED EMERGENCY RESCUE TEAMS HERE.

Samandag is the southernmost tip of Hatay, located slightly outside the city. Because the roads are closed and the inclement weather intervenes, rescue teams are yet to reach here. The Independent Miners’ Union’s call to Turkish Coal Corporations (TKI) is urgent and must be spread. If we can pressure mining corporations to get the miners to the impacted areas, rescue missions will speed up significantly.

We urgently need emergency rescue teams here. There are cranes but no operators; there are voices crying for help from the rubble but no rescue teams to reach them. We’re overstretched. There’s no state presence, no local government. The firefighters are only bringing sledgehammers.

We’re digging out the dead bodies of people who were known to be responsive as early as this morning. We’re reaching them too late even though every second counts. All miners should be directed here, and rescue missions must speed up.There’s no water, no food, not even bread. Whatever we have is limited, and people are dying. There’s constant aftershock. At least %60 of Samandag has collapsed, and the rest will join them during these aftershocks.

Help may be directed to Iskenderun and Antakya, but it appears that the southern parts of the city are neglected in these aid flows. Most of the emergency aid is dropped off at Iskenderun, so on the way here; help teams exhaust their resources there and return. Antakya and Samandag, further from Iskenderun, are left to their own devices as a result.

We’ve been to Iskenderun, and their situation was dire. We need to make this clear: things are indescribably worse in Samandag. There are long lines for bread and water; people go hungry, people are hopeless. We spot a tweet asking for help, for instance, and we head for the area. We find absolutely no one there, just a couple of neighbors waiting around for their friends at best. The scale of this is far bigger than what it’s made out to be…”

[This article was resposted from Umut-Sen's website on 10 February 2023. Umut-Sen [Union of Hope] is an entirely independent socialist organization with its members spread across Turkey and beyond. It is run by political organizers and workers. Umut-Sen supports worker-led strikes, protests, and independent labor unions only. Umut-Sen members also form and (if they already exist) join rescue and relief efforts on the ground after every disaster in Turkey, natural or industrial.] 

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Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412