JINHA

AMED – The first Middle East Democratic Youth Conference ended yesterday. Major decisions included a commitment to increase the struggle for Öcalan's freedom and to call a Middle East Young Women's Conference.

400 delegates from 16 Middle Eastern countries attended the conference from democratic, socialist and revolutionary youth organizations from across the region. Non-voting attendees also came from Argentina, France, Germany Russia and the Basque Country. The Democratic Society Congress (DTK) and Peoples' Democratic Congress (HDK) jointly organized the three-day conference in the major Northern Kurdish City of Diyarbakır.

Julia Gözen, of the HDK Youth Assembly, announced the decisions and shared perspective of the conference"Against the physical genocide of colonial powers and their guards in the Middle East, against the savage attacks and genocides, the force that can stop all of this and that can create organized, communal values will be the youth," said Julia.

"Capitalism has deepened the existing culture of power and state in the Middle East," said Julia. "And the nation-state has been the source of some of the greatest traps and disasters for the peoples of the Middle East."

The nationalist and sectarian politics of the capitalist system has led to a massacre of the Middle East and its mosaic of peoples, said Julia. The last two hundred years have seen the people of the region divided against one another by the "sharp knife" of the nation-state project. She mentioned the private wars, educational policies, media images and liberal thought as interlocking elements of the project to destroy the social character of the region.

But projects for creating an alternative way of life continue in the Middle East, with women and young people at the forefront of the rebellion, Julia said.

The conference delegates called on all youth of the Middle East to resist the projects of the U.S. and Israel as well as the fascist groups that have collaborated with imperialist forces in their attacks on Kobanê. They called on youth to speak their own languages, live their own cultures and beliefs, and resist assimilation politics.

The conference announced an urgent call for solidarity in the reconstruction of Gaza and Kobanê. They also agreed to increase the struggle for the freedom of jailed PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan.

Youth will begin organizing a second Middle East Democratic Youth Conference with a coordinating body consisting of representatives from all Middle Eastern countries.

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