The two big struggles in Romania: a message for international solidarity!

This is a message for immediate international distribution. Re-post and share!

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Greek version can be found HERE

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Sunday, the 1st of September, will mark the beginning of a new age in the struggles which are carried out in Romania. Protests will occur in more than 10 cities across the country (and more cities are deciding to participate at this nation-wide protest every day) against gold mining and shale gas fracking. The same thing will happen in many cities across Europe and even in North America.

For more than 15 years, there is a struggle against a Canadian gold mining corporation that wants to exploit gold and silver from the Apuseni mountains, in the western part of the country, which would represent the biggest open-pit mining project in Europe. The corporation wishes to erase the village of Roşia Montană and four mountain tops, only to be replaced by a lake full of cyanide. The estimations are that there will be used about 200.000 tons of cyanide, only to process 200 tons of gold and a couple hundred tons of silver! What will be next is a apocalypse, with extremely high chances of toxic catastrophy across Romania, Hungary, the Danube river and even the Black Sea.

People are pressured to leave their homes, and those that remain and resist are going to be expropriated by the paramilitary private police of the company, of course in the name of the state and it’s so called „national interests”. Mass-media has been bought, the same happened to the Government. Three days ago, the Government has passed the law project that will permit this exploitation to occur. What remains between a wish and reality is the decision of the Parliament. And this thing happened even if, for 14 years, the Government admitted that there are many illegal things done by the corporation.

In the same time, Chevron is almost on the brink of fracking the earth beneath our feet! There already have been made a couple of illegal probes, and in some parts of the country, the villagers are boycotting the corporation by stealing the wires used for detonations which have been layed out illegally on their property. Some villagers also got physically abused by the private henchman of the private corporations doing the prospects (owned by non-other than Franck Timis, one of the people behind the Roşia Montană project also). If they would start fracking, a very large portion of the country would be destroyed, and the environment heavily polluted! They tell us that we need shale gas to quit the dreaded dependency on Russian gas, but they say nothing about the fact that Romania is the one of the 3 European states that produces more gas than it uses. The problem is that we have privatized the natural gas and what is produced here is sold at cheap prices for the benefit of the powerful states of the Union while we import gas at very high prices.

People in the villages are informed and organized by activists, the majority of them shouting that if Chevron starts drilling, they will stop being peaceful, and take out their forks and resist! Words like „defending our land”, „industrial sabotage” and the likes can be heard more and more often. In some villages, the people have threatened the officials, and in others, like the city of Bârlad, that is the center of resistance against fracking, people take to the streets protesting in the thousands.

In the last couple of years, people from Romania forgot that they had a voice, that they had power, that they could change something. Many accepted the current situation of poverty and corruption, and forgot that they could unite and fight together. But Chevron and RMGC (Roşia Montană Gold Corporation – the Romanian „child” of the Canadian corporation) with the complicity of the state obliged us to wake up! People are very angry, they are fed up with what is happening for the last 24 years, since the so-called Revolution of ’89. They have had enough of the corrupt and dysfunctional political system and of the exploitative economical system. Every hope of this situation being just a phase of a wild capitalism (kind of local, Balkan – corrupt capitalism) that migrates towards a civilized, rule of law kind of capitalism has vanished. Since the states regulates by law theft and destruction what is the meaning of law? How benefits from the law and who are it’s victims? It is time to act!

This is a message for international solidarity! If we all are united against our common enemies, the State and Capital, one day, we could bring a better world in the place of the current one! Our commons are under attack: education, land, nature, water, health care just to name a few. In front of this new wave of primitive accumulation we must resist united and strong!

And the motto of the resistance is „The Revolution begins at Roşia Montană!”