CELEBRATE THE DAY OF HEROISM MILITANTLY!
We, the Maoist Parties and Organisations, subscribing to this declaration on the 35th Anniversary of the Day of Heroism, established as the International Day of revolutionary Political Prisoners and Prisoners of War, salute the undefeated ideology of the international proletariat, Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, mainly Maoism, under whose undefeated banners we are advancing in the realisation of the reunification of the International Communist Movement; in hard and prolonged struggle, concretising the reconstitution of the communist parties in order to initiate and develop the People’s War in the respective countries, marching towards the Unified International Maoist Conference and the New International Organisation of the Proletariat.
On June 19, communists and revolutionaries all over the world celebrate this date, commemorating the rebellion of the prisoners of war of the Communist Party of Peru 35 years ago. Those who rebelled in defence of the revolution and their lives against the plans of reaction to annihilate them and strike a decisive blow to the People’s War. The monstrous and infamous genocide by governmental mandate of the fascist García Pérez crashed against the unbendable, vehement and fierce resistance of the comrades, fighters and sons of the masses who raised ideology, courage and heroism boldly deployed in the fiery war defiance, which embodies the monumental trilogy of the shining trenches of combat of Frontón, Lurigancho and Callao, historical milestone that will proclaim more and more the greatness of the Day of Heroism. Conquering a great political, military and moral victory for the Communist Party of Peru, for the class, for the Peruvian people and the peoples of the world. A historic milestone that we celebrate all over the world. Thus the heroes continue to win battles and serve the revolution. The proletariat and the peoples of the world always have a great respect and obligation for them: to continue the task in which they were engaged.
On this solemn occasion, we salute the present People’s Wars, which against all odds continue their invincible march, such as the People’s Wars in Peru, India, Turkey and the Philippines. People’s Wars that show the way forward to those yet to be born, serving the world revolution and to persist in upholding, defending and applying Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, mainly Maoism; People’s Wars that are the shining beacon for the current armed struggles for liberation and others that the international proletariat and the peoples of the world are waging to sweep imperialism and reaction off the face of the earth.
This occasion is propitious to denounce that, in the face of the unbending, fierce resistance of Chairman Gonzalo, in defence of the leadership of the Party and the revolution, the present fascist, genocidal, and fatherland-selling government of the old Peruvian state, headed by Sagasti, as well as its predecessors, confronted with a fierce and unyielding resistance from Chairman Gonzalo, in defence of the leadership of the Party and the revolution, are counting on the service of the rats of the revisionist and capitulationist right opportunist line (ROL), under the direction of the Yankee CIA – continues to implement the plan to annihilate Chairman Gonzalo, maintaining his absolute and perpetual isolation for nearly 29 years now. The authorities of the old state, from the Executive to its judicial and prison system act with blind hatred and perverse homicidal fury against the most important revolutionary political prisoner in the world by keeping him in isolation, with contact only with his jailers at various levels and information from the outside world previously distorted and manipulated by the Yankee CIA, Peruvian reaction and rats of the ROL. Defend Chairman Gonzalo and Gonzalo Thought, great leadership of the Communist Party of Peru’s and the Peruvian revolution!
In Turkey, prisons are the place where the ruling classes show their true face. The prisons in Turkey are managed by the ruling classes within the framework of this logic and the practices are directly proportional to the very nature of the regime. The history of the Turkish prisons is full of massacres of fascism against communists and revolutionaries and the unbreakable will of resistance and anti-capitulation of the communists and revolutionaries is indelibly written in front of them. As a result of the state’s attack, hundreds of revolutionary prisoners have been killed by torture or shooting. Especially during the time of the military junta, when the prisons were turned into torture centres, and this situation has not really changed in the times of fascism masking as parliamentarism. Hundreds of imprisoned communists and revolutionaries have been living for years now in conditions of isolation cells and acute isolation and their fundamental rights are permanently under attack. If one were to look only at the prisons in Turkey, one would see the true nature of the ruling regime in all its nakedness. At the same time, the behaviour and the joint hostility of the bourgeoisie all over the world is concretised there. The attack of 19 December 2000, the most recent massacre in the Turkish prisons, is a concrete example of this. This massacre was planned as a joint operation of NATO and the preparation of the operation was conducted with the contributions of a Spanish general. The main basis for this joint operation can be seen in the public statement of the Turkish prime minister, who pointed out that the communists and revolutionaries could be kept in prison, on the basis of their public connection and their direct contribution to the class struggle, as the direct obstacle to the policy followed by the IMF. The joint operation of the German state in cooperation with Greece, France and Switzerland against the TKP/ML in 2015 was also in the concept of the common hostility of the bourgeoisie against the communists and revolutionaries. While the arrests and imprisonments are a quest of the ruling classes to conjure up the vanguard of the class struggle, they also serve as a threat to the masses.
In India, more than 10,000 alleged Maoists are in prison, to them must be added many thousands of prisoners of national liberation movements (Kaschmir, Manipur, etc.) and other democratic movements, among them well-known personalities like Varavara Rao, G.N. Saibaba, also Ajith and Hany Babu Musaliyarveettil Tharayil who have been released in the meantime. India has the highest proportion of unconvicted prisoners in the world with 70% of the total number of unconvicted prisoners. Prisoners remain behind bars for years and even decades without the old Indian state pronouncing a final sentence against them. The “Operation Green Hunt”, the war against the people, is not only a campaign of annihilation, which terrorises especially the poor peasants with “Fake Encounters”, but also fills the prisons. There are big international movements against this, which have even forced Amnesty International to take action. But the political prisoners, who are released on bail after some time due to the great solidarity, are imprisoned again soon after. For this the old state makes use of the “Unlawful Activities Prevention Act” (UAPA).
According to information of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPPh) there are more than 650 political prisoners imprisoned in the Philippines until the end of 2020. The majority of the political prisoners detained during the Duterte regime, i.e. more than 200 prisoners, are peasants who are accused of being members of the New People’s Army. Among these peasants is Amanda Echanis, who was detained with her month-old son Randall Emmanuel. Moreover, the Duterte regime is notorious for its practice of extra-judicial executions on the grounds that they are “drug traffickers”. Its “war on drugs” is well known and is always directed against the broadest and deepest masses.
For more than 70 years, the people of Palestine have been giving hard and heroic resistance with great sacrifice against the Zionist policy of genocide. The total number of Palestinian political prisoners detained by Israel is about 4400. Among them 430 administrative detainees, men and women without charge or proof. There are 160 Children imprisoned by the Zionist state of Israel. And more than 30 prisoners are imprisoned for more than 25 years. In the course of the recent attacks of the Zionist armed forces against the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip, about 1400 Palestinians who offered tireless resistance were arrested.
But it is not only this Zionist state that represses the just struggle of the Palestinian people with blood and fire, but also the imperialist states like France that keeps Georges Ibrahim Abdallah prisoner for more than 36 years and denies him the most elementary rights recognised even by the own laws of the French state and the international treaties on the treatment of prisoners, etc. But, it is also necessary to say clearly, that the repression against the revolutionary prisoners in the European countries is not very different from that of the mentioned countries. A well-known case is the repression of British imperialism against Irish republican prisoners, examplary cases are Bobby Sands, Patsy O’Hara and Francis Hughes.
The struggles of the peasants for land in Brazil are violently repressed by the landlord-bureaucratic state, as a consequence of the repression of the de facto military government headed by the fascist Bolsonaro, many peasant leaders and activists of the League of Poor Peasants (LCP) have been taken prisoner, of which the comrades Ezequiel, Luis Carlos, Estefane and Ricardo remain in prison.
In Colombia, as a consequence of the fierce repression of the popular uprising by the government of Ivan Duque, which is supported by the imperialist US government of Biden, besides having perpetrated atrocious massacres against the population with dozens of dead and hundreds of wounded, many of whom have lost one of their eyes due to the violence of the police, military and armed civilian repression (auxiliary forces), it has arrested and imprisoned thousands of participants in the demonstrations. At least 70 children of the Colombian people have been killed by the police or armed civilians, around 800 were injured, there were eye injuries, 21 registered cases of sexual violence against women of the people and the militarisation of some cities of the country.
The above-mentioned cases are only a sample of the necessity to struggle for the defence of the social, political and prisoners of war. The struggle for the freedom, health, life and rights of revolutionary prisoners all over the world is a task that we have to carry out as part of the struggle for their demands together with the struggle for power; the struggle for the recognition of their status as political prisoners and prisoners of war is of the utmost importance. Because our imprisoned comrades transform the filthy dungeons of reaction into the bright trenches of the People’s War.
The People’s War shows the proletariat and the peoples of the world the only true revolutionary way out of the present world crisis, the broad and deep masses that are mobilising, displaying great activity and an explosiveness accumulated by decades of increased exploitation of the world by imperialism and its genocide of the pandemic; it is already exploding and will become bigger and more powerful, as the genocidal reactionary president of Colombia, Ivan Duque, has said: “The post-pandemic explosion is going to reach the whole world. Today it was our turn, but we are going to see it in other places in the coming years”. The words of the reaction are recognition on the part of those who do not need proof of their fears, their worries, the dark perspective they foresee, the dreams of blood that they plot are the best proof of the new era of revolutions that we have begun to enter.
The explosions of the masses are like the heralds of the new era of revolutions that has opened up. Because it is the masses who have made, are making and will make the great transformations, it is from those glorious hands that the new will always come forth to guide humanity. Because with their armed hands they conquer and defend the new power, the central task of the revolution. The masses cry out, they demand from us communists to lead them on the road of People’s War to make the democratic revolution, the socialist revolution and in the future the cultural revolutions, to confront the imperialist wars of aggression, to confront the imperialist war, to confront the imperialist world war, if it should happen, confronting and smashing revisionism as the main danger.
World reaction is aware of the danger that lurks around it; it sees how serious it is for them that the masses have set themselves in motion with such explosiveness and that it is the glorious proletariat led by its Communist Party that is marching to meet this spontaneous movement of the masses to lead them for their one great claim to power, and it is doing so by uprooting opportunism, by blowing revisionism to pieces.
Imperialism and world reaction are sinking in the midst of greater collusion and struggle, and in the midst of their agony they are making bloody swipes and with the help of revisionists and opportunists of all colours are seeking to conjure up the revolution by their reactionary exit, sowing electoral and constitutional illusions as in Peru where they are participating in the reactionary elections on the tail of the bureaucratic faction of the big bourgeoisie, as in other places, to go on to repress the revolution, practising the trilogy of capitulation: capitulation, amnesty and enlistment.
Elections are a means of domination of the bourgeoisie in the imperialist countries and, in the oppressed nations, they are a means of domination of the landlords and big bourgeoisie; they are neither an instrument of transformation for the people nor a means of overthrowing the power of the ruling classes, hence the just orientation of using them only for agitation and propaganda purposes. In the face of the crisis and the development of the objective and subjective conditions for revolution, depending on the concrete situation, reaction resorts to so-called “social aid packages” to try to lull the masses to sleep, to apply its anti-crisis packages with anaesthesia; in other cases, to divert them from the revolutionary road, it resorts to promoting reactionary governments headed by opportunism and the use of reactionary terror, or in other cases it resorts to fascism. All this reaction applies in the midst of sharp reactionary struggles, because the crisis and the revolution also fuel its struggles.
The fact that reaction uses opportunism and revisionism in its desperate reactionary way out of the crisis and to postpone the revolution is a further political proof of the maturity of the objective and subjective conditions for revolution throughout the world. This proves that revolution is the main historical and political trend in the world today, that it is expressed mainly in the oppressed nations, where the main contradiction oppressed nations-imperialism is developing; the oppressed nations which are the basis of the world revolution, where the majority of the world population lives, of which the overwhelming majority is made up of the peasantry fighting for land, the main force of the democratic revolution led by the proletariat through its party, which carries it forward by means of People’s War.
The revisionist and capitulationist right opportunist line in Peru, as the head of the new revisionism at world level, which denies the semi-colonial and semi-feudal character of the oppressed countries, saying that these have ceased to be so because of the “neo-liberalism” applied since the beginning of the 90s of the last century and in the case of Peru, furthermore, because with the People’s War the semi-feudal relations were destroyed and Peru has become dependent capitalist and “that the present struggle is for democratic rights, a new constitution and sovereignty”, these renegades deny what Maoism and Gonzalo Thought have established, that as long as the democratic revolution is not completed with the seizure of power in the whole country, the domination of imperialism, bureaucratic capitalism and semi-feudalism will not have been destroyed. Moreover, expressly in the case of Peru, where reaction has re-established the old power, it has re-established the old relations of production, that is, semi-feudalism, and in the countries where it acts with the development of bureaucratic capitalism, it evolves the semi-feudal basis, it does not destroy it. The new revisionism denies the developing revolutionary situation on the international level. That is to say, it denies the revolution as the main trend, it denies the new great wave of world revolution, it denies the strategic offensive of the world revolution, it denies the main contradiction, it denies the democratic revolution, it denies the land problem in the oppressed and therefore denies the world proletarian revolution. They are counter-revolutionary renegades.
We reaffirm the statement in our joint declaration for Mayday 2021: The prevailing social order, the imperialist world system, in it, US imperialism, the common enemy of the peoples of the whole world, is outdated and rotten to the core, it is sustained by the bloody bayonets of mercenary armies that will be powerless before us. Anyone who takes a look at the world today will see that we are facing a situation where the world proletarian revolution is the only way out, the only way for humanity and that the development of the objective and subjective conditions in the world are favourable for revolution.
The world is in chaos. Imperialism is a dying system. The peoples of the world are revolting against the death and misery caused by imperialism. All over the world – especially in Latin America (currently the weakest link in the imperialist chain), Africa and Asia – the people are massacred, tortured, disappeared and imprisoned because they have chosen to struggle.
In conclusion, it is up to us to raise our commitment, let us take up those lives, that example, that blood of our heroes of the Shining Trenches of Combat who on 19 June 1986 offered their lives in defence of the revolution and their lives and let us take them into our own flesh, let them ignite our own minds and tense our will more and more, so that the path opened with immense sacrifice that will be the astonishment of the centuries, will be the path that we continue to fulfil the task that they set themselves. The best homage we can pay them and we are paying them today is to persist on that path, on that course, and we will not stop, as Communist Parties, as a class and as the immense masses of the people of the world, and we will not stop until communism is achieved. Let that be the serious commitment that we take on today, once again, in homage to the heroes of the people.
Long live the 35th Anniversary of the Day of Heroism!
Eternal honour and glory to the fallen heroes! Long live the revolution!
Unite under Maoism! Crush with revisionism!
19 June 2021
Signatories:
Communist Party of Peru
Communist Party of Brazil (Red Faction)
Communist Party of Turkey / Marxist-Leninist
Committee Red Flag – FRG
Revolutionary Nucleus for the Reconstitution of the Communist Party of Mexico (NR-PCM)
Committees for the foundation of the (Maoist) Communist Party of Austria
Communist Party of Ecuador – Red Sun
Communist Party of Colombia (Red Faction)
Maoist Committee Finland
Committee for the Construction of the maoist Communist Party of Galicia
Committee for the Reconstitution of the Communist Party of the United States
Red Fraction of the Communist Party of Chile
Communist Party of France – Red Fraction