THE SECOND DECLARATION OF SERPA

Gathered in the Portuguese city of Serpa, the participants at the Second International Conference on Civilization or Barbarism – Challenges of the Contemporary World:


1. Sound an alarm regarding the aggravation of the global crisis -- a social, economic, financial, military, energy, cultural and environmental crisis of the capitalist system– – and point out that it threatens the continuity on Earth of life itself.

2. Provide evidence that in the development of this crisis, capitalism, through its escalation of aggression and exploitation of humanity, has become an agent of the absolute regression of civilization.

3. Underline, that USA, the hegemonic power, in its desperate search for a way out of the structural crisis of the system, has chosen a strategy of state terrorism that has already taken on neofascist characteristics as it carries out so-called “preventive” wars.

4. Identify the European Union as a political-economic-military block that serves the interests of monopoly capital against the peoples of Europe and of other continents, and which, through the so-called Constitutional Treaty, is attempting to impose an ambitious qualitative leap in capitalist integration, to facilitate renewed offensives against the workers, to attack the rights and protections of individuals, to diminish national sovereignty and democracy, to deepen its neo-liberal, federalist and militarist character, and to obtain greater authority as an imperialist alliance. They urge, therefore, the peoples of the European Union to reject this project.

5. Condemn the aggressions against Iraq and Afghanistan, the occupation of these countries and the monstrous crimes committed there by the U.S. and British Armed Forces and their allied satellite countries, as well as the complicity of the Portuguese government in these aggressions, and salute the resistance of the peoples of Iraq and Afghanistan struggling for freedom and independence.

6. Condemn the Zionist aggression against Lebanon, supported by Washington, and salute the heroic resistance of the patriots of Hezbollah to the Israeli invasion.

7. Demonstrate their solidarity with the martyred people of Palestine in their combat against the Zionist occupation and for the creation of fully sovereign Palestinian State.

8. Warn about the danger of a U.S. aggression against the people of Iran and denounce the campaign of slander mounted on a world-wide scale to spread lies against the image of that nation, creator of a great civilization.

9. Demonstrate their solidarity to the multitudes in Africa, Asia and Latin America who are suffering the consequences of neocolonial policies and who are mobilizing against all forms of imperialist violence and exploitation and against the imposition of neoliberal policies by the international financial institutions. An annulment of the debt of the countries of the South that are victims of imperialism is thus an urgent necessity.

10. Condemn the direct and indirect military interventions of U.S. imperialism in Latin America, especially in Haiti and Colombia, and demand the closing of U.S. bases in different countries of the continent, including that in Guantanamo, in Cuba, occupied illegally.