«We have decided to comply with the will of Ukraine and its embassy operating in Austria and have canceled the rent of all rooms of the ÖGB-Catamaran for the event entitled “International Summit for Peace in Ukraine” of the next end week”. Whoever speaks this way is a spokesman for the ÖGB, the Austrian federation of trade unions, which was supposed to host, today and tomorrow, a “pacifist” mega-summit with well-known guests from the international pacifist world. In the program published on the site (peacevienna.irg) we read, at the time of writing, names from Jeffrey Sachs to Noam Chomsky, from Clare Dely to the former Austrian president Heinz Fischer, to the Italian Maurizio Landini and representatives of Sant’Egidio, of the ACLI, of the Disarmament Network. The summit will be hastily held elsewhere (in the Lorely Hall, managed by a private individual), but the reasons for the choice of Ogb – an institution that would have given an entirely different ideological cover to the event – are inflaming the debate, because the Austrian trade unions have decided to accede to Ukraine’s request, which is justified in very clear words. Kiev’s embassy in Vienna has openly said it considers some of the organizers too connected to the world of Russian state propaganda, as well as some of the guests. They didn’t specify who.
The organizers are, in order, International Peace Bureau, CODEPINK, World Assembly of Struggles and Resistances of the World Social Forum, Transform! Europe, Europe for Peace, International Fellowship of Reconciliation (IFOR), Peace in Ukraine, Campaign for Peace Disarmament and Common Security (CPDCS), Prague Spring 2. Especially some, such as Code Pink, have received criticism and pushed other organizations to withdraw. Let’s proceed in order.
“We are appalled and are currently busy finding an alternative venue for the event,” said Leo Gabriel, event spokesperson. Trade unionist Wilfried Leisch called the cancellation “an outrage”: “Anyone who does not seek peace or even permit peace-seeking at a conference in neutral Austria and cancels a long-promised hall two days before the start of the event, it tramples all the democratic rules of the game and its own statutes».
Other important Austrian institutions also withdrew. The “Concordia Press Club” said no with this reasoning: “It’s about some people announced at this conference, and where they appear. That is, after February 24, 2022, they are still in the Kremlin propaganda media, where mass murder of the civilian population of Ukraine is called. Spokeswoman Daniela Kraus was referring specifically to economist Jeffrey Sachs, who continued to be a guest on RT even after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Dietmar Pichler, director of the Center for Social Media Competence in Vienna, wrote on twitter that Sachs, Chenoy and other guests allowed themselves to be exploited by Russia’s disinformation policy, “Sachs was also twice by the well-known Russian warmonger and propagandist Solovyov.” Claire Dely is a well-known Irish MEP who has spoken several times with RT about the faults of the complicit West, and campaigns against sending arms to Ukraine.
But even in the pacifist world there are those who have dissociated themselves from the planning of the event. For example Attac, whose spokesman David Walch, speaking with The Standard , harshly condemned “the denial of Ukraine’s right to exist as an act of imperial policy” and any attack on a country “under any pretext”, and explained that these positions would not exist, at least not with this clarity, in the draft final declaration of the summit. Other groups, including the Greens, had also withdrawn membership. And others had slipped out in protest against one of the organizers, Code Pink, who called the Euromaidan “a coup d’état”, is accused of having pro-Iran positions, of having denied the genocide of the Uyghurs in China, and of having a idea of pacifism summed up in banners with the words “No to war on Russia”: not the simple, traditional no war.
#Vienna #International #Summit #Peace #Ukraine #coincidence #Austrian #trade #union #Ogb #withdraws #headquarters #Ukrainian #embassy #people #connected #Moscows #propaganda