June 23, 2003

To the sons and daughters of our great people!

To those who have fashioned our glory and the intifada and
resistance!

To our heroic prisoners!

We salute you with admiration and in resistance and steadfastness!

These days, as the daily killing, the destruction of houses, the
colonial settlement, the Zionist terror, and the genocidal war
against our people, against our militants, and against the very
foundations of their human existence continue, the American
Administration is encouraging measures to ensconce its colonialism
of fraternal Iraq, to liquidate the just cause of our people, and
their legitimate resistance struggle; to spread their control over
the whole region, to plunder our resources, and to heighten
Zionist activity throughout the area via the so-called Road Map, and
the free trade and investment that the World Economic Forum on the
banks of the Dead Sea has called for.

As the talk continues about a so-called truce and cease fire, we in
the Popular Front maintain that any truce that grants the occupation
army and its agencies an exception, allowing them to continue their
aggression under what is called "targeted killing", and with time
bombs, such a truce in fact is only giving Sharon a free hand under
international protection to continue his bloody terror, leaving the
fate of our people, our militants, and our patriotic leaders to the
mercy of the occupation army and to the good intentions of the
terrorist Sharon. Furthermore, such a truce would serve as a warrant
for turning facts upside down, for branding our people's
resistance "terrorism," while calling the state terrorism of
the occupation "self defense" - as in fact was done in the
Declaration of the Committee of the Four issued at the World
Economic Forum.

Sons and daughters of our great people!

The Popular Front does not look at the so-called truce in isolation
from the National Program or from the issue of how to manage the
forms of the struggle. The PFLP affirms that the key to protecting
the national project, our supreme national interests, and our basic
national principles, including the release of all prisoners without
exception or discrimination, is the establishment of a unified
national leadership embracing everybody as a supreme authoritative
body for the Palestinian people in answer to the current stage of
our liberation struggle, to reality, to objective developments; and
in order to guarantee participation in national decision making and
in the implementation of policy on various levels; and to protect
the Palestine Liberation Organization, the sole legitimate
representative of our people and its Program of return, self-
determination, and an independent state with Jerusalem as its
capital.

A truce that is linked to our national program, and not to illusory
plans and maps of deception, one that provides for the protection of
the national security and the right of our people to resist the
occupation and to have temporary international protection in
accordance with the Fourth Geneva Convention, to hold elections as a
means for self-determination and to establish sovereignty and
national independence - that is the kind of truce that would prevent
the imposition of American-Israeli tutelage over our people and our
Arab Nation, that would prevent the Road Map from attaining its aims
of pushing us back to the never-ending vicious circle of security
negotiations, joint security patrols, and a "state" that amounts to
nothing more than temporary housing management.

We salute the consciousness of our people and their Patriotic and
Islamic Forces and of our Arab Nation who are burying the Road Map,
with its deadly incitement to civil strife, and the deceptive
American Israeli maneuvers aimed at destroying the intifada, the
resistance struggle, and the P. L. O. and its legitimate leaders.
The aim of these maneuvers is to install pliant alternative leaders
who are ready to renounce our fixed basic principles. We regard the
calls that have been issued and are being issued at the World
Economic Forum and in other contexts as an attempt to seize
the so-called fruits of peace that have been soaked in the blood of
the children of Iraq, Palestine, and the Arab Nation. These calls
are nothing but efforts to push normalization with the Zionist
entity, and subservience to the agents and brokers of colonialism
who are pleased to exchange the interests and national honor of
their people for the crumbs that colonialism and its agents throw
down from their table to their servants and slaves.

Victory to the intifada and the resistance!

Glory to the martyrs, and Freedom to the prisoners!

National unity is the path to freedom and independence!

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine

The State of Palestine

23 June 2003.

Arabic original at:
http://www.pflp-palestine.org/press/press-23-06-2003.html