Lakotah Statement On Gaza Flotilla‏

Naturally I had drafted a formal statement on our position on the Israeli act of piracy. Feel free to share as you wish comrades:

First, on behalf of the people of the Lakotah nation, I offer our deepest sympathies to those who have lost their lives to this act of criminal piracy,and to their families. I use the term piracy because when unarmed merchant vessels are fired upon, boarded, and hijacked in international waters, this most clearly falls under the definition of piracy. Those who choose to stand up and defend themselves in the face of this criminal action should be praised for their courage, not condemned for their legitimate acts of self defense. Furthermore, we seek those responsible for this criminal act of piracy to be both identified and fully prosecuted under international law.

We are pleased that so many peace loving and humanitarian nations have expressed their outrage at this crime. Naturally the people of Lakota are deeply concerned, as our nation has over 150 years of experience with what it means to be held in forced captivity under occupation of a hostile and ruthless foreign colonial power in concentration camps called reservations,with experiencing the murder of our people through massacres and extra-judicial killings, with the forced removal and killing of our children in their boarding schools, with our beliefs and practices outlawed, and with the constant seizure of our lands. As a humanitarian nation we are deeply concerned when any of these kinds of things happen elsewhere, and in this shared experience we do find some common understanding of the suffering of the people of Palestine.

I further assert as a fundamental principle of international justice that the duty of an occupying nation to a captive population is actually greater than to it's own people since even in the best of circumstances a captive people do not have the freedom to choose or change the government ruling over them or even to make basic choices about how they would live, something presumably the people occupying them do enjoy. The blockade of Gaza, a criminal act of collectively punishing a people as a whole, must be ended.

David Alexander Sugar
Ambassador at large
Republic of Lakotah