01:00 Ewa Jasiewicz: … mostly people involved in the resistance. The question arises of who is being represented when ninety per cent of the population is gone, and structures have been created — working groups, or councils. Does that bode well for perpetuating a kind of grassroots democracy? It's difficult to say, because you need mass participation, and for mass participation people need to be able to organise together and meet each other and come together.
01:31 When you've got no vehicles, when movement is very difficult, when you've got no electricity, when you've got no water, you've got no food, you've got no internet, you've got no telephone — it's really difficult. Especially for women, and if you're poor. And often the poorest people were unable to leave. So there's all these questions around how you actually can physically self-organise under conditions of bombardment.
01:31 And we talked about these things with the people from [inaudible], and [they were] saying, yeah, we totally agree, we know we need the full participation of everybody in rebuilding our society, but we're being bombarded every day. Something that one doctor said to me was: our revolution is a baby, it needs nourishment, it needs milk — now, what you're talking about is walking, is running, is growing up. So there's this constant struggle for survival, basically, and this has an impact on how people can self-organise.
02:33 In terms of Russia — yeah, Russia's under the spotlight right at the moment, over indigenous people's land in Sochi, [over] LGBT rights. But not enough is really being said about Syria in this context. It's all very groovy to talk about Pussy Riot and everybody else, but they really should be getting a hammering [?] for their role in attacking Syria, and they should be restrained, and there should be sanctions against Russia.
03:03 And definitely people that I know [inaudible] say, of course we don't want a military intervention from the West, we don't want bombardment, we don't want this — but we also want to stop being bombed. So one way forward is to restrain the inflow of arms to the regime, and that includes restraining Russia.
03:03 Yarmouk — I don't know, sorry, I can't answer your question. I wish I could, but I don't have any up-to-date information. Obviously we know it's a decimated ghost town now. The family that I stayed with in 2005 — the father of that family, who set up a fantastic publishing house, Dar al-Shajar [?], in Yarmouk, he was killed by a sniper in front of his family, driving through the camp. And this is a common fate for many Syrians and Palestinians, and that's how some of these camps and towns have been depopulated, because the regime has placed snipers.
04:06 A lot of snipers were — to answer the cultural question — in the museum of Maarat al-Numan, [which] was a military base where snipers were killing people on a daily basis. So it's tough.
04:06 Unison — our comrade over there mentioned union support and solidarity with Syrian initiatives, and when we had our fundraiser in Brixton. This is really important, and unions are a way to get through to wider numbers of people, to involve them, to get people giving practical and material support to initiatives on the ground. I know Lambeth Unison have been opening their office for the Hand in Hand for Syria aid drop [?], which is really important.
04:36 I know the left has a big aversion to aid, or to actually doing something [like] practical solidarity, but people have to recognise it's absolutely essential, because it's enabling people to hold their ground inside Syria, and get by if they're outside the country as well, in order to be able to come back. So it can't be denied that practical aid is a form of solidarity.
05:07 But obviously we're conscious of how important it is not to have an embedded aid industry that maintains or normalises extreme displacement and impoverishment, and has an imperial overtone to it as well. I think everybody in the room is conscious of that.
05:40 Yeah, I think that's [time to] wind up. I'm happy to wind up.
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