Friday, 18 March
6:00 pm
S-Bahnhof Sonnenallee
Siegfried-Aufhaeuser-Platz
Berlin, Germany
Jugendwiderstand (Youth Resistance), a revolutionary, anti-imperialist youth organization, is organizing a protest to free all political prisoners in Berlin on 18 March. Full call in German and Turkish: http://jugendwiderstand.blogspot.be/2016/03/heraus-zum-18-marz-kampftag-fur-die.html
Join us for March 18 – Day of action for the liberation of all political prisoners! Resist and fight against the justice system of the bourgeoisie and the imperialist oppression!
Freedom for all political prisoners….
The internationally-operating Rote Hilfe (‘Red Help’) – until present the most meaningful and largest solidarity organisation for workers’ and peoples’ movements – was officially founded not for nothing by the Communist Internationale on March 18, 1923. It was the anniversary of the Paris Commune of 1871 – the first attempt of the working class to take over the power and carry it with the goal of reorganizing the society. France’s and Germany’s ruling classes united to drown in blood this struggle of the oppressed. 30,000 men and women, workers, fighters and revolutionaries were hanged, 363,000 appeared before court. To commemorate this massacre and honour the fallen, this day has been known up until now as the international day of action for the liberation of all political prisoners.
Even today it remains in the nature of things for the universal imperialist system of exploitation to produce copious amounts of hardship, poverty and war, calling forth the exploited and the oppressed to commit to a most decided resistance. To assure their continuous rule and profits, the bourgeois countries, their armed institutions and their justice system resort to various forms of political repression: intimidation, spying, news-baiting, monetary fines, tightened laws, bans, trials, imprisonment, isolation, counter-revolutionary violence, torture, planned disappearances, murder and terror are in the program of the so fully ‘democratic’ dictatorships of the bourgeoisie in the imperialist capitalist system.
… in Germany …
In doing so, the offensives of the state-run agencies of oppression mainly hurt the progressive, organized and militant sections of the workers’, youth and people’s movements. In the FRG, they are currently going ahead with article §129 (a & b) covering spying and terrorism against the democratic organisation for migrants, ATiK. 10 of its members are sitting in jail as of April 15, 2015 and are awaiting their show trials. They are being accused of having supported and being members of the TKP/ML, a Maoist party that is fighting in Turkey and Kurdistan against the fascist rule. The same faith also strikes prisoners of another party that is also fighting in Turkey, the Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party-Front (DHKP-C), an example among others is the woman revolutionary Gülaferit Ünsal, locked up in a jail in Berlin; moreover, several prisoners from the ranks of the Kurdish national movement, having been handed long prison sentences, fill up the jails of the German imperialists. But resistance is legitimate. Neither the people of Germany nor the people of Turkey are under whatsoever threat from these prisoners – their democratic and revolutionary struggle only affects the decaying rule of a corrupt system, the people’s enemy.
Since the wave of house searches in May 2013, proceedings have also been opened against activists from Berlin, Magdeburg and Stuttgart, whom the authorities are accusing of membership in the militant Revolutionäre Aktionszellen and the Revolutionäre Linken on threadbare grounds. Even militant antifascists such as the Bremen football ultra, Valentin, who is to this day in pre-trial confinement, are becoming targets for investigative authorities and are being used to set an example. The obvious goal is to intimidate and break the activists and to pre-emptively smash the organized resistance. Even football fans, graffitists and fare dodgers are experiencing strong repression and are filling up this state’s prisons. If these class brothers and class sisters start struggling for their democratic rights behind bars in the newly-founded prisoner’s union GG/BO, then both social and political prisoners, prisoners of class resistance, will become a particular worry for the ruling class.
Even if, in Germany, there are currently no large, acute class struggles, the most recent waves of repression must be seen as forms of “preventive counterrevolution”, as measures of struggle against the workers’ and the people’s movement, way before these will be able to organize themselves on a higher level.
… and internationally!
While the FRG imperialism provides assistance to Erdoğan’s fascist AKP dictatorship by going ahead with overall attacks against Turkish and Kurdish migrants and their organisations, the political repression in the semi-colonial Turkey/North Kurdistan has an even uglier face: against the background of a reactionary war against the Kurdish people, last year, the 10,000 political and war prisoners in the Turkish jails were joined by another thousand of communists, revolutionaries, patriots, pacifists, critical journalists, scientists, artists and democratic activists young and old alike. In the filthy dungeons of the Turkish regime, they are often to expect torture and mistreatment. That is the general answer to the unfurling people’s struggles in the country. And even here, aside from the terror against the masses, which covers a bright spectrum, there are attempts to combat the organized sections of the people, as for example the Federation of Democratic Rights (DHF).
In India, there are over 10,000 political prisoners from the democratic people’s or the national independence movements, and revolutionary prisoners that took part in the People’s War of the Communist Party of India (Maoist), who are now sitting in the jails of the Hindu fascists. Some comrades, such as Saibaba or Comrade Ajith, despite the quasi total handicap and old age are kept under the most dishonourable of terms. Apart from the hundreds of war prisoners and the jailed masses of the People’s War in the Philippines and in Peru, in these cases too, the revolutionary leaders of the communist parties are held prisoners, such as, as of last year on the Philippines: Comrades Benito and Wilma Tiamzon and Comrade Silva; as well as Chairman Gonzalo in Peru, as of 24 years ago.
In occupied Palestine, several thousand prisoners from the national resistance are sitting behind bars of the Zionist regime. Of course, the General Secretary of the PFLP, Ahmad Sa’adat belongs to the most famous ones. Furthermore, tightly connected with the struggle of the Palestinian people is Georges Ibrahim Abdallah, the long-term prisoner of the French imperialists. Likewise, the examples from the Basque Country and Northern Ireland show that here as well, the fighters for independence and liberation must rot in the jail system. This also applies to the anti-imperialist-anarchist urban guerilla activists in Greece. Or even to Mumia Abu-Jamal and Leonard Peltier that are already being held hostage for several decades by American imperialism, while their health conditions are continuously worsening in the most dramatic fashion…
To the streets!
There are too many individual faiths and too many red, struggling hearts behind bars to count them all. Imperialism, hostile to humanity, takes its opponents seriously. Everywhere in the world he advances with might and main against the people’s resistance and especially against the communists and the revolutionaries. Too many to count are murdered or land into its prisons. This highlights imperialism’s fear of the revolution, and that the latter is not a mere phantasm, but rather has been for quite some time a material reality in many parts of the Third World.
The revolutionary war prisoners and the political prisoners are a part of our class’s worldwide struggle. They pursue the struggle even from behind the walls of the enemy according to their possibilities, although imperialism tries to break them with might and main. Our great respect and our complete support belong to them!
This is why on March 18, we want to carry to the streets our solidarity with all political prisoners of the universal people’s resistance movement and of the international working class!
Let’s strengthen our unity against bourgeois class justice and imperialism-propelled political repression. Let’s fight side by side face against the enemy’s attacks.
Resist and fight against bourgeois class justice and imperialist repression!
Solidarity means resistance – Freedom for all political prisoners!
