Kevan Thakrar is a long-term prisoner in HMP Woodhill that was jailed under the Joint Enterprise law.
In Kevan’s words, this law means “if one person commits a crime all of his contacts who knew it would happen or participated in a crime believing it could evolve in to something else (like a playground fight ending up in murder) are all guilty of it”.
Talk can be found at our Archive.org page
A couple of weeks ago we gave a talk at the Norwich Vegan Festival about anarchism and anti-authoritarian politics within veganism. Given the explosion of vegan consumerism in the UK today – and especially in Norwich, where there seems to be a new vegan joint opening every couple of months right now – it is important to remember that veganism has grown from fertile radical soil, where it strengthened and was strengthened by radical anti-authoritarianism. In this talk we look at some of the ways that veganism connects with other radical politics such as ecology, feminism, and class struggle.
Title: Peter Gelderloos presents “Worshiping Power”
Location: IT Room, The Vauxhall Centre, Johnson Place, NR2 2SA
Link out: Click here
https://www.liveleak.com/view?i=fa9_1485352794
Anarchists call against the G20 summit in Hamburg (Germany)
On the 7th and 8th of July 2017, when the most successful war criminals of the present, the most unscrupulous sweaters of human and nature, the self-titled leaders of this planet, meet in Hamburg, they will not be confronted and this be revaluated with some demands for better governance or social enslavement.
They will feel the rage of the street, when they are rushing with their convoys through deserted districts and talk about the nightly attacks of the last few weeks.
Given the recent passing of the Investigatory Powers Bill through the House of Lords – meaning it is set to become law – we have been hard at work updating the security across all our electronic devices.
As part of this effort, we finally decided to implement a PGP key for email. What this means is you can now contact us with even greater security than using RiseUp alone can offer. You can find our PGP key on the email contact page.
If you’d like an easy tutorial on creating and using PGP keys then please check out this post on Reddit.
For more information on broader digital security measures, take a look at this article on The Intercept.
Good news received a couple of days ago.
Dear friends and supporters,
the Feed The Revolution campaign ended three months ago and you’re probably wondering how the project is going. So, here is the short version: It is going well!
And now for the long version: The work in Tirbespiyê is continuing. In May the municipality gave us an area south of the city for the fertilizer facility. The area had been designated as a waste dump by the Syrian regime before the revolution, and there was already a fence, a high three-sided concrete wall and a half-finished maintenance building there.
When the campaign ended in mid-June it was well short of our ambitious goal of 200 000 USD. We knew that we would not be able to do the project without further help because we needed workers and building machines to get the facility ready. We therefore talked with the municipality again, and with the ministry of social affairs of Cizîre canton, who were aware of the great importance of this project and quickly agreed to take over a large part of the construction of the site.
Construction then stalled again, because of the war: the needed machines were all at the frontlines in Minbic and Şedade. In August the construction finally began with Zagros company, a local enterprise contracted by the municipality. Since then work has been advancing fast and well.
So far the well has been dug, the outer wall has been repaired, the huge mount of gravel and earth in the middle of the place has been dug away, the whole ground has been leveled – the area for the primary mounds with a slope of 3% – and been covered with a gravel layer in preparation for the asphalt. The house has been completed, but still needs plastering, painting and water and electricity connection, which is happening this week, after Cejna Qurbanî, the Muslim sacrifice festival. It has three rooms: One changing room with showers, one common room and an office including an archive.
Secondly there are three machines needed for the facility: A shredder to cut the straw, a large grinder to mix the biological waste and grind up larger pieces, and a a drum sieve for the final process, to separate the ready fertilizer from parts that still need more composting.We first wanted to build a high-end grinder that would last a long time and not be affected by rust or damaged by solid pieces in the waste. For that we needed chrome, the required quantity of which we couldn’t get in Rojava. So we tried to import it from Iraqi Kurdistan, but that didn’t work out because of the embargo. Finally we decided on building the machine a little differently with locally available steel, and on an optimized pre-sorting process to prevent stones or other unwanted objects from entering the grinder.
Thirdly a mixed Kurdish and Arab education team of five people is ready to give lessons on the process and the importance of waste separation in the communes and schools of Tirbespiyê, and 3 000 explanatory brochures in both Kurmancî and Arabic have been printed so far. The education will not start until the facility is ready, so the people can start the waste separation right away and there will be a place for the waste to go to. Also we have been collecting empty petrol barrels and sent them to a workshop in Qamişlo where they are being remodelled to be used as waste bins.
Here is a link to some pictures of the Tirbespiyê facility taken last week:
https://rojava.network/?page_id=20&lang=kmr
***
During the two months of near-stagnation during the summer we have been looking everywhere for a solution to the ever more urgent need for fertilizer. In Til Temir, a town in the west of Cizîre canton, we found a huge industrial cow farm that had been out of service since the region was invaded by Cebhet en-Nusra (Jabhat en-Nusra/JN) four years ago.
Around the site there were several huge reservoirs holding thousands of tons of cow droppings accumulated over the years. Even better, the farm also held several hangars full to the brim with straw. With so much readily available high-quality raw material we decided to start right away with a second facility in Til Temir. We managed to find an old grain storage just 3 km away from the cow farm with three empty hangars and a large asphalted area in front of them and got permission from the agriculture committee to use it for the project. As the local municipality didn’t have any vehicles available we rented two trucks and a wheel loader from a local entrepreneur at a very low price and started bringing the cow droppings and straw to the new place.
The Til Temir facility needs only a small budget as the place was almost ready to be used. The only further construction we did there was the digging of two wells. As opposed to the more mechanized Tirbespiyê facility the work will mostly be manual, apart from the three mentioned machines that are also being built for Til Temir.
If you want to see pictures of the work in Til Temir, follow this link:
https://rojava.network/?page_id=23&lang=kmr
So right now we are working on two facilities, one in Tirbespiyê and one in Til Temir. The money will be enough to get both facilities going until the project becomes self-financing. So far all of the money has been designated, except for 8 000 USD that we keep as an emergency fund in case of further obstacles (machine breakdown etc.). If everything goes to plan though we will use it to buy a skid loader for the Til Temir facility.
Once both facilities are producing fertilizer we will establish a fund for the financial surplus extra to what is needed to keep the facilities running, which will pay for upgrading and repairing the existing equipment as well as establishing further composting facilities all over Cizîre canton.
On behalf of the fertilizer project team and the Cizîre economic committee I want to thank you again for your trust and your support without which this project would not have been possible. We will keep you updated on the progress over the next months. If you have any questions or remarks, please contact us at info@rojava.network, subject: Feed The Revolution.
All the best from Rojava,
Îsmaêl Hêvî
Project coordinator
Cizîre canton economic committee
We received this message slightly too late to be shared at our Rojava screening but it is insightful and practical so we wanted to share it here. It comes from Jo at A Girl and Her Thumb.
So obviously the biggest news is that Turkey has invaded Rojava under the pretext of fighting ISIS, and is instead killing Kurds (as usual), including unarmed civilians in Rojava who are protesting the building of a new wall that Turkey is erecting along the border, between North Kurdistan (East Turkey/Bakur) and West Kurdistan (North Syria/Rojava).
It’s important that we stand up and take action on this. Turkey is a NATO member and our government is permitting this to happen. If we want Rojava to survive, this is the time to act. It has never been as important as this before. There is a new strategic alliance between Erdogan, the USA, Assad, Iran and Barzani (KRG/Iraqi Kurdistan) ALLLLL against Rojava and the wider Kurdish movement. These people and states all hate each other, but they are coming together to fight the Kurds.
Another important campaign is the campaign to free Ocalan. There are currently 50 people from multiple Kurdish parties and platforms on an “indefinite and irreversable” hunger strike. They are really ramping up the pressure on this one now, as Ocalan has been entirely cut off from absolutely everyone for something like 2 years now. The other day I met 2 men who have been on hunger strike for over a week already in Strasbourg, who were on their way to a meeting with the European committee against torture. They want them to apply to visit Ocalan on Imrali island and check his condition, as all other applications from lawyers, etc have been denied. There have also been fringe meetings at all the big trade union meetings, with the aim of getting the trade unions to sign up as supporters of the campaign. I believe this process is going very well.
There are also other campaigns, such as the campaign to delist the PKK and the campaign to open the Simalka border crossing, previously the only open border into Rojava, in order to allow vital supplies of food and medicines to enter.
You can also still fundraise for Feed the Revolution. I have their bank details, though they very much prefer cryptocurrency as they “don’t like to encourage the use of banks”.
On a smaller level, these are a couple of interesting articles about things people are doing in solidarity on the coops front:
One coop has partnered up with a bakery coop starting up in Rojava and they are fundraising specifically for that coop.
There is going to be this conference here in Brighton in November that might interest people:
http://steps-centre.org/events/emancipatory-transformations-radical-democracy-kurdistan/
Thank you to all that came and participated in our Zapatista documentary screening. It was small but hopefully everyone involved felt they gained something from the night. It seems likely we’ll do another screening in early July so keep your eyes open for more details regarding that. Furthermore, it’s likely this will not be the last time we look at the Zapatistas.
In other news, our next discussion group is during the evening of 23rd June, in Norwich, where a text regarding hunt sabotage and animal liberation written by one of the group will be looked at. There is no expertise or experience required to participate: getting together, socialising, and getting to know one another is as valuable as any political debate.
If you’d like to come along please email us or send us a message to our Facebook page.
We are well chuffed to announce our first attempt to screen a documentary focused on topics of interest to radicals. This one is called “Zapatistas: Chronicle of a Rebellion”, produced by the Mexican media outlets La Jornada and Canal Seis de Julio, and provides a linear timeline of the Zapatistas from their insurrection in 1994 until the date of production in 2007.
The Facebook event can be seen here.
It will be upstairs at The Owl Sanctuary on 2nd June, 7pm. The film contains some scenes of graphic violence.
Depending on how this works out, we hope there will be more and on a monthly basis, with an aim of building a community that is regularly engaged in conversation and action toward total liberation. There are so many more possibilities in this world that the society we live in cannot be how we end.
The next reading and discussion group is to be held on the evening of Thursday 26th May, during which we will get together in a public space to discuss the article “We Are All Very Anxious” by the Institute for Precarious Studies. If you are interested in attending, please contact us by email for further details.