In the wake of the Caldari occupation of Syndicate, amidst panic and terror, Chairman Akimaka Saraki addressed a conquered people - who no-one, not even the State, can realistically blame for complicity in a nebulous conspiracy against the stargates in Jita still so secret that no-one even knows what it aimed to do - and said the following:
Less than six hours later, Heika Torigo has now utterly betrayed every word of that claim.
Is it acting with honor to incite the wholesale slaughter of a defeated people fleeing their homes and the combat zone? Still having hardly fired a shot, mind, even in their own defense. Some of that fleet are warships, certainly; but the Syndicate has never fought in a war, not even now, and those few vessels are manifestly no real threat to the might of the State. They will have refugees with them, families fleeing everything they have known and now hounded across the starlanes by gleeful butchers summoned by the State. I can hardly think of anything more antithetical to the ideals of honor than the massacre of innocents in the deep void.
Is this displaying loyalty, to a conquered and betrayed people? One who had considered the State their closest friends and allies, and fought and bled together for over a decade to preserve and build the Syndicate into what it is. What it was, now. While Caldari warships menace our stations, while the threat of reprisals hang heavy over our worlds, while our children cry and our people cower, we are forced to watch as the State demonstrates that the only alternative to their heavy yoke is death. That there is no escape. This is not loyalty, nor mercy, nor justice. This is shameful and brutal and cruel, and will be remembered as such.
Is it displaying strength for the State Navy to shirk from such crimes themselves, and instead contract out the massacre to greedy capsuleers? To turn that slaughter into a sick competition amongst these pirates for who can murder the most, the fastest? Who can desecrate the bodies of the dead? There is the flimsy pretext of strained force commitments by the State Navy - itself an admission of weakness - but this is only a most transparent cloak for the abject cowardice of these warmongers. An attempt to keep their hands clean of the slaughter of unknown thousands of innocents. But that blood will stain them, indelibly and forever; and so too for any who answer Torigo’s murderous summons.
I have no knowledge of what truly transpired in Jita - nor truly do any of us, since the State has shared nothing other than broad and vague allegations - but that doesn’t matter to me, right now.
These are my kin. However misguided their flight may be - for the Federation is no refuge for the descendants of the Five Thousand - and whatever crimes some few of their number have been involved in, they do not deserve to be massacred in the black. I know I cannot stop what is to come, and I must make my peace with that. I can only hope those in command of these fleets do not persist in an ill-advised flight that will surely end in their doom.
But I will bear witness to their deaths, and I will not forgive any complicit in their slaughter.
naa jaakrota onaan yudih hianojun komal
Strife never begets a gentle child