Below is the synthesis of Landless Voices: Land Struggles vs Land Struggles vs Imperialist-Backed Wars, Aggression, and Occupation held April 2024. LANDLESS VOICES is a series of online consultative forums where rural people’s groups can share their land issues and struggles amid the global food crisis. The outcomes of the consultation series were shared during the May 13 Speakout of the Landless and served as reference to the Rural People’s Development Agenda of the Global People’s Caravan for Food, Land and Climate Justice.
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The Silenced Suffering platform was launched last year to call attention to the rising number of bombings targeting rural and Indigenous communities. In the Landless Voices session on imperialist-backed wars, aggression, and occupation, participating organizations have shared that behind these bombings is the interest to grab their lands and plunder their resources.
Many of these landgrabs are large-scale investments from imperialist backers, which governments protect through militarizing affected communities. Many of these projects are funded by international finance institutions including the International Monetary Fund-World Bank Group. In Burma, India, and DR Congo, state forces and armed militia are deployed in rural and IP communities to defend mining operations and instill fear among affected communities.
In other countries, state-perpetrated violence is employed to enforce colonialism and forcefully occupy territories, as in the case of West Papua and Palestine.
Aside from disrupting daily life, affected communities often face human rights violations including violations to the international humanitarian law, such as the burning down of villages, aerial bombings, and indiscriminate firing to name a few. More often than not, these states have tagged peasant and IP movements resisting these development aggression projects and political subjugation as terrorists to justify their military operations and instill fear among rural and Indigenous peoples, like in India and the Philippines. Of course, these also come with indescribable trauma.
The threat to life also comes in the form of famine. Not only access to food and productive activities are restricted, starvation is also used as a weapon of war.
These military operations and bombings also contribute to the destruction of our land and environment. It is worth noting that imperialists and their agents exploit such destruction to push their neoliberal agenda in the name of rehabilitation and development – precisely the premise of why the IMF-WB was founded 80 years ago.
The call to stop the bombing of rural communities is premised on people’s right to land and life. We need to highlight more of these stories from the ground and show our solidarity. Imperialist countries — especially the US — complicit governments, and their enablers including international finance institutions should be held accountable.