Issued by the Office of ILPS Chairperson Jose Maria Sison
International League of Peoples’ Struggle (ILPS)
20 May 2018
The International League of Peoples’ Struggle (ILPS) condemns the utterly malicious conspiracy against Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, with the latest efforts by the British and Ecuadorean governments to make his life at the Ecuadorean embassy in London intolerable and eventually to cause his arrest on trumped up charges.
Because Julian Assange has exposed the truth about the crimes of imperialism through documentary evidence, he has become the target of the most vicious attacks from the Western powers led by the US and the most reactionary forces in the world that subsist on lies.
In this age of fake news and news spins being produced and reproduced by the big Western mainstream corporate media, Wikileaks has provided an alternative source of the truth. The US-led cabal of western governments and reactionary forces have conived in using every foul means to persecute Assange in a desperate scheme to silence him.
The latest recruit into the cabal of reactionaries out to get Assange is Lenin Moreno, the current president of Ecuador, whom the progressive ex-President of Ecuador Rafael Correa describes as a “wolf in sheep’s clothing”. It was Correa who granted Assange political asylum in 2012 and allowed him to stay at the Ecuadorean embassy in London to protect him from arrest by the British government that was acting as a stooge of the US.
Moreno served as Correa’s vice-president in the whole period of Correa’s presidency. At that time, he went along with Correa’s progressive policies like expelling the American military base in Ecuador at Manta and opposing the worst of the neoliberal economic policy measures being imposed by the US and the US-controlled institutions such as the World Bank and IMF.
But when Moreno succeeded Correa as president, he started to dismantle many of the progressive reforms implemented by Correa. In a recent interview, Ecuador’s Foreign Minister Maria Fernanda Espinosa has hinted that her government may withdraw the political asylum it granted Assange in 2012 and hand him over to British and then US authorities.
A system put in place under Correa to monitor Assange’s visitors that was meant to protect Assange from a possible dirty job by British or American agents has been turned by Moreno into a spying operation against Assange. In March, the Ecuadorian government cut Assange’s phone and Internet contact with the outside world and denied requests for visits by his friends and supporters.
The Ecuadorian authorities justified its actions by saying that Assange’s behavior is jeopardizing Ecuador’s good relations with the UK and other countries. If Assange is turned over to the British authorities, it is almost certain that he will be extradited to the US and prosecuted for espionage.
The ILPS demands a stop to the continuing persecution of Julian Assange. It calls on all its member-organizarions and all freedom-loving people of the world to condemn and oppose the latest efforts of the most reactionary forces in the world and the enemies of truth and freedom to put Julian Assange in jail and silence him. ###
