Final Resolution from 31 October 2008
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- Created: Sunday, 02 August 2015 18:38
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The final resolution adopted by the seminar gives the following summary:
From 28 to 31 August, between 600 and 700 miners, their families, as well as friends of the miners' movement, enthusiastically conducted the 3rd International Miners' Seminar in Gelsenkirchen together with international representatives from 14 countries. The goal of the seminar was to organize the international exchange of experience among the miners on their situation and struggles and the discussion of conclusions for coordinating their struggle beyond country borders.
Despite numerous state-political, financial and linguistic obstacles, an impressive exchange of experience could successfully take place at this significant international non-party affiliated event among the delegations from Poland, Kazakhstan, the Czech Republic, Turkey, South Africa, Venezuela, Bolivia, Columbia, Peru, India, the Philippines, Indonesia, Bangladesh and Germany. Among these were representatives of important international miners' struggles of the last years.
The miners, their families and friends from all countries can have a great say in shaping their own future, if they take up the signal coming from the 3rd International Miners' Seminar: It is the vision of a worldwide miners' movement that fights for itself and its children so that the resources of the soil, the earth, the water and the air belong to those who tap them through their labor, so that they can be used for providing a rich, dignified and healthy life for all human beings – without exploitation and oppression.
The attending representatives or delegations of the miners' movement described with moving words the bitter struggle of the miners and their families, full of privation for the daily survival and for a humane future, their longing for fraternal solidarity, mutual support and deeply felt class solidarity beyond country borders and nationalist prejudices. The seminar agreed that the women's movement is the most reliable ally of the miners' movement.
The International Miners' Seminar unanimously resolved:
- The extraordinarily successful and fruitful meeting was an important step ahead in the coordination of the international miners' movement beyond country borders. For this reason the seminar shall be transformed into an international miners' conference which shall take place regularly, with changing venues if possible.
- The immediate mutual information on the problems and struggles of the miners' movement in the various countries must become standard practice. Exchange of convincing arguments for the struggle over the mode of thinking, against division, nationalist and anticommunist prejudices. To this end, various means of communication shall be used. The common website of the international miners' conference shall play a special role, where a constant exchange of experience and information shall take place, where also the preparatory discussion for the next international miners' conference shall be organized.
- Let us develop diverse, effective forms of solidarity: Sending of delegations to striking workers, rejection of strikebreaking, organization of declarations and activities of solidarity, demonstrations in front of the embassies of the countries in question etc.
- Promotion and active support of regional meetings of the miners for the preparation of the rank and file of the international miners' conference and for the cooperation with other forces of the workers', people's and environmental movement.
- Organization of an internationally led discussion on a charta as common platform of the international miners' conference, in which its goals, common demands, principles and methods are fixed for raising the international cooperation to a higher level.
Miners of all countries, join together against the worldwide offensive of exploitation of the international monopolies! Millions of miners are a power.
Long live international solidarity!
Good luck!"
Four further resolutions of the seminar were adopted: on the solidarity with the dismissed strike activists of the pit Budryk in Poland, on the protest against the ban of the miners' demonstration in the Czech Republic scheduled for yesterday, for the release or rehabilitation of imprisoned leaders of the miners in Romania and on the solidarity with the striking GM workers in Venezuala.
