Letter to Spanish officials: No to Ukrainian fascist congress in Madrid!

To: Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy
Complejo de la Monicloa, Madrid, Spain

Director Victor Garcia de la Concha
Instituto Cervantes, Madrid

Ambassador D. Ramon Gil-Casares
Embassy of Spain to the United States, Washington, D.C.

Permanent Rep. of Spain to the UN Roman Oyarzun
Permanent Mission of Spain to the United Nations, New York, NY

Representatives of the Government of Spain:

The International Action Center, an anti-war and human-rights organization based in the United States, joins with people of conscience worldwide who call on you to withdraw your government’s support for the Annual Meeting of the Ukrainian World Congress, scheduled to be held at the Instituto Cervantes in Madrid, a government institution, from Sept. 11-13, 2015.

The UWC, established with U.S. support in 1969, has long-standing ties to fascist organizations inspired by the Nazi collaborator and war criminal Stepan Bandera, and uses its cover as a “non-partisan civil society organization” to promote this racist and violent ideology.

The agenda of this year’s gathering in Madrid explicitly focuses on helping regime headed by President Petro Poroshenko in continuing to commit war crimes against the people of the Donbass region and suppressing opponents throughout Ukraine.

Among the goals of the conference are “support for the Ukrainian armed forces fighting in the east” and to “mobilize the diaspora to exert pressure on governments throughout the world to strengthen military aid to Ukraine.” While hundreds of Ukrainian oppositionists sit in Kiev’s jails, the UWC organizers plan an obscene march and rally called “Ukrainians of the world stand with Ukraine.”

According the United Nations, Kiev’s war against its own people has already cost nearly 7,000 lives. Further, this brutal war is being used as a springboard for NATO’s aggressive eastward expansion, which threatens to engulf all of Europe in a new war.

War mongering by the U.S. and European Union against Russia and the independent Donbass republics covers up the rapid growth of right-wing nationalist and neo-fascist movements in Ukraine, whose ugly face was displayed in the recent siege of the Ukrainian Parliament on August 31 in which two people died.

That your government would not only permit, but actively support, such a gathering is an outrage to the memory of the heroic Spanish Republicans who died fighting Franco’s rule, to the International Brigades from the United States and many other countries, and to the people of Spain today who are fighting against austerity and injustice.

We support all protests in Spain and elsewhere against this gathering of Ukrainian supporters of fascism and their backers.

¡No pasarán! Fascism shall not pass!

Sincerely,