The short text on Rojava published in Volere la Luna sums up better than any general reflection the emotional and conceptual experience of the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal in this end-of-year time, classically dedicated to budgets and forecasts.
The erasure and denial of peoples as subjects of their own history are the absolute protagonists of the year 2024, that saw the ‘inhumanity’ as the most serious definition of law. The people of Palestine – far beyond its political expressions, and geographical delimitations, from Gaza to the West Bank – continue to be the most symbolic representative of realities such as the Rohingyas in Myanmar and peoples deprived even of the visibility of the chronicle, as in the case of Sudan, Kashmir, the French colonies, Haiti…: each list sins by incompleteness and inaccuracy.
The term that makes these scenarios most tragic, across the board, is that of an impunity that defies any factual evidence, and that places the highest forums of law, such as the International Courts and the United Nations Assembly, in a situation of impotence: due to the persistence of mechanisms of power and hypocrisy, such as the veto, or the exclusion from priority agendas, up to the tolerance of non-intervention with respect to a State like Israel, which uses the rhetoric of tearing up the very statute of the United Nations in the midst of the Assembly.
The peoples are not resigned to their erasure, which is the ‘normality’ for a world that is actively reproducing globally, under different names and instruments, but with even greater arrogance, a strictly colonial order. The case of the Indigenous peoples of West Papua that featured in the PPT Session (London, 27-29 June 2024) is a reminder of how resistance can and must be recognised as a priority by an international community that continues to imagine-impose, with its increasingly conniving public and private actors, models of exploitation and inequality.
Rojava, which is scheduled as the first of the PPT’s sessions in 2025 (Brussels, 5-6 February 2025) is the most specific and dream-laden question, for a future that is not an extension of the nightmares of 2024.
Access the article: Let’s remember Rojava! by Gianni Tognoni, published in Volere la luna