"ONE PALESTINE, NO BANTUSTANS, RIGHT OF RETURN FOR ALL PALESTINIAN REFUGEES NOW"

The Cape Town Anti-War Coalition (CT AWC), supported by Jubilee Western Cape, Khayelitsha Anti-Eviction Campaign, Treatment Action Campaign, Palestine Solidarity Committee Gauteng, Wits University Palestine Solidarity Group, and KTC Concerned Residents Movement, will picket the United Nations Conference on Palestine next Tuesday.

The picket will start at 9:30am on Tuesday 29th June 2004 at the International Convention Centre (next to the Arabella Sheraton hotel) next to the Waterfront, in Cape Town, where Thabo Mbeki will be opening the conference.

At 12 noon the CT AWC and Social Movements will join up with the Muslim Judicial Council at Kaisergracht. From here, there will be a mass march to the US consulate and back to the ICC. Messages from Palestinian groups will be read out. Memoranda will be handed over to the US, UN and ANC government. The CT AWC believes that the ANC government has betrayed the Palestinian struggle and its own history of fighting for freedom. The Palestinian Liberation Organisation and the Palestinian people in general supported the liberation struggle in South Africa, while Israel sold arms to the apartheid regime Yet the post-apartheid ANC government has strengthened trade and diplomatic links with Israel, which is itself a racist and apartheid regime. The ANC continues to allow Jewish mercenaries to flout our laws and fight in the Israeli Occupation Forces, and has publicly declared their support for Israel's Bantustanisation, or 2-state solution, of Palestine.

The United Nations is also supporting Israeli war crimes against the Palestinian people. It is hypocrisy for the UN to hold a conference discussing the "inalienable rights" of Palestinians, while its own High Commission for Refugees excludes Palestinian refugees in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, or the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Palestinian refugees are thus the only refugees in the world that are not protected by the United Nations, but merely offered ever dwindling food aid from the UN Relief Works Agency. On World Refugee Day on 20th June, the UN called for "A place to call home: Rebuilding lives in safety and dignity" for all refugees.

Yet 6 million Palestinian refugees are not allowed to return either to their original homes or even to the Israeli-occupied West Bank or Gaza Strip. Palestinians who took refuge in the West Bank after being driven from their homes in 1948, remain unprotected and under regular deadly attacks by Israeli Army. In 1947 the United Nations divided Palestine into 2 parts, the best land for a racist Zionist state and the remainder for a cheap labour reserve, a bantustan for Palestinians. The US regime annually gives grants of $6 billion to Israel, which have built Israel the third largest army in the world.

The presence of Israel helps America maintain control of the major part of the world oil resources in the region. The United Nations has shown itself to be continually sympathetic to American interests and ineffective against the war crimes that are being committed against the people of Palestine and Iraq. In Rafah, on 19th May the Israeli army fired tank shells and missiles at unarmed women and children protestors, whose only demand was that the Israeli demolitions stop. Had any other state perpetrated this massacre of civilians, the UN would have called for immediate sanctions placed on them. The UN restricts itself to words.

.../ends

For comment, call:

· Abduraghman Isaacs (Bonteheuwel Anti-War Commitee) 083 2567953

· Lutando Zicina (CT AWC) 083 4895349

· Soyiso Mtekwana (Jubilee Western Cape) 021 4479132

· Shahied Mohamed (CT AWC) 082 2020617

· Na'eem Jeenah (Palestine Solidarity Committee Gauteng) 084 5742674