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Celebrating International Students’ Day

League of Filipino Students — UP Baguio Chapter

November 17, 2005

On this year’s celebration of the International Students’ Day, the League of Filipino Students joins the call of millions of students worldwide to end the unjust wars and indiscriminate military attacks of the anti-terrorist forces led by George Bush’s United States.

November 17th was first celebrated as International Students’ Day in memory of the students who were killed in 1939 on the streets of Prague, Czech as they spoke out against fascism. The Nazis stormed Czechoslovakian students where nine student representatives executed on the spot. More than 1200 students were sent to concentration camps and suffered torture. Fifty years later, November 17th of 1989, students again suffered repression on the streets of Prague as they called for democracy and freedom.

On that same day, November 17th, in 1973, students’ uprising in Greece began the fall of the Greek junta dictatorship. Greek students stood against the tanks and the armed forces of the Greek junta. A huge number of students were killed and tortured as they barricaded themselves for four days and nights in the Technical University of Athens.

Today, the International Union of Students building still sits at the corner of 17th November Street in Prague. The Union, with which the League of Filipino Students is affiliated, along with other students around the world, continue to struggle for peace, justice and equality.

The struggle of the student martyrs of Czech and Greece is not far from the continuing battle of students here in the Philippines. The current economic and political turmoil the country is hounding, along with continued state abandonment, pushes Filipino students to mobilize themselves and call for significant and genuine reforms.

The regime of Gloria Macapagal Arroyo is no different from the fascist Nazis who would not hesitate to take lives just to acquire and maintain power. GMA is the present-day Hitler of the Philippines, having Gen. Palparan as her primary “butcher”. The festival of killings and abductions of members of militant and progressive groups by military operatives is so rampant making the entire country a huge “killing field”.

With the Anti-terrorism Bill’s passage fast-tracked in the Congress, atrocities of GMA and her armed forces is becoming more unimaginable.

Making this bill a law would only serve as a badge to GMA’s fascism and puppetry to her blood-thirsty US-Imperialist masters.

Having all these realized, the revolutionary tradition of the student youth is once more relived.

Confronted with dreadful crisis, Filipino students are joining hands to continue the fight for a just, peaceful, and democratic society towards a better future.

Relive the Filipino students’ heroic tradition!
Justice for all the victims of state terrorism!
End u.s. military intervention in the Philippines!

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