Date: Sat, 18 May 1996 02:06:34 GMTThe following speech was held by the DHKP-C at the annual seminar of
Communist Parties and Organisations in Brussels, prepared by the
Belgian Party Of Work (PTB, Parti du Travail de Belgique) with the
general topic of anti-imperialist struggle under the "New World Order".
69 parties and organisations from all over the world participated in
this meeting. Parties and organisations who work illegal in their
countries, as well as those who participate in the governments, as well
as some parties of socialist states were represented. The congress
addressed six topics:
General theme: The anti-imperialist struggle under the "New World
Order".
The DHKP-C held its speech on topic two, Political mass work, armed struggle and anti-imperialist struggle in the Third World.
Merhaba ve Selam!
Dear comrades, before we speak about the topic of Political mass work, armed struggle and anti-imperialist struggle in the Third World, we want to point to an actual example from our country. On the day of united workers struggle, the day of workers struggle and solidarity, the police attacked the Mayday demonstration in Kadiky/Istanbul with tanks and automatic guns. In this demonstration 30.000 revolutionaries from the DHKP-C marched in a mass of 150.000 revolutionaries and democrats. Three revolutionaries, Hasan Albayrak, Dursun Odabasi and Levent Yalcan, were killed, dozens were seriously wounded, and hundreds of people were arrested. Attacking the workers, the civil servants, small merchants, peasants, people from the slum areas, the young and old, men and women, the fascist Turkish state once again showed its face of terror to the public.
Fascism, oppression, terror, massacres and attacks will not defeat our people who defend their dignity and who fight for liberation and freedom. The number of our martyrs may become countless, but our people will be victorious. Our fight for justice, liberation and dignity is lasting.
The revolutionaries who gave their lives in the fight against fascism, who fell on Mayday 1996, are our martyrs!
We will always honour them!
Dear comrades,
The DHKP-C, as the ones who fight for the Kurd, Turks, for the oppressed and exploited peoples of our country, as the ones who fight for the revolutionary liberation and socialism for the workers of all nations, greet you. We only have a short time to speak at this meeting, so we are not able to explain every subject which are important for the present and the future comprehensively. The most important points for each neo-colonial country according to political mass struggle, armed struggle and anti-imperialist struggle, are as follows:
The revolution will come through by our will-power. It is a matter of our boundless will-power for the revolution. Everything else is secondary, although other factors may shorten or lengthen the time of the revolution. This is not only a principle, but the plain reality of our present war experience. All objective conditions needed for a revolution in our country exist. The fascist regime is nearing its end. The crisis is lasting. Neither the military junta, nor the permanent repetition of elections, nor other economical or political measures can lessen the crisis. The level of the crisis is best described by a statement of the spokesman of the monopolists: "The people from the slum areas will cut our throats." The workers do not hope to get anything from the system. Parallel to the guerilla war in the mountains and the cities, large and small mass-movements, strikes, resistance, and local uprisings are following one another.
There is only one solution: to broaden the people's involvement in the struggle; to widen the political and military fight against the enemy. We believe this is the case in many countries, may it be in a different phase and a different way. We have to put our claim to power on the agenda. A liberation organisation or a party that does not reach out for power every moment will, regardless of its power fail to progress. Such a party is doomed to be affected by other powers and factors, by the so called "alternatives" of imperialism, and it will be affected by its pressure.
Today the main danger for most liberation organisations is not to believe in the realisation of revolution. The main danger is to lose revolutionary faith and courage, to withdraw in their "national shell", to abandon the long lasting fight for national - and class - liberation for limited demands. For people who fight for liberation, every defeat is temporary. But a defeat by abandoning the thoughts of socialism, by abandoning the purpose of armed liberation and organisation, is a defeat with the highest price.
Not only because our peoples have to resist the attacks by the fascist powers, it is mainly a strategic necessity, needed for the materialization of the revolution. Our era is still the era of people's liberations struggles. This fact has not been altered by the loss of prestige of socialism and the resulting temporary conquests by imperialism. Imperialism is most threatening and its politics are most miscarried in regions where people's struggles take place. On the other hand we should not use a routine or a temporary political equilibrium, we have to take our own reality as a basis.
The conditions in our country determine the specific phases of our people's war. The development of our war will not be that of a classical people's war, it will not spread from the mountains to the cities but it will be materialised simultaneously in the mountains and cities with the perspective of the united revolutionary struggle. The first phase of our war will be realised on the basis of armed propaganda. Our Party's program briefly explains this strategy as follows: "Growing out of the vanguard struggle will come a guerilla war, in which the guerilla army will grow and spread across the country. This emerging force will link in with people's movements and local rebellions to forge a people's army and the people's army will eventually raise in an all-out rebellion which will bring down the oligarchic state and lead to the ultimate victory in which the Revolutionary People's Liberation Power will be established. Our Party designates a particular form of revolutionary struggle to this popular rule, particular to our country, as a strategy of the Politicised Military War. At the same time as waging this struggle, other battles are fought to win the everyday democratic rights and demands for the popular masses. All of these are included in our strategy." Practice has shown we were right. In general the development of the war is taking place in this form.
Liberation organisations without a party, may be able to take over the power but they are unable to materialise the transformation of a social revolution. A party which fulfils its duties can be the brain; the party is the ideological leadership of Marxism-Leninism. At the same time it is the commander, expressing the unity between political and military leadership...
Disliked because of its bureaucratic structures and because of the slowness of the traditional communist parties, the notion of a "Party" left over the years negative traces in the thoughts of the masses working in many countries. Programs, statutes and rules in writing alone have no significance. A party is mainly formed by tradition, by values which are born under fire, by political courage, the willingness to fight, by the obligation to Marxism-Leninism under any condition and by experienced cadres. "Our bodies can be wounded, but we should not lose our head". This sentence expresses that our Party must under all circumstances have the talents and the resoluteness which are needed for guiding the war.
Our era is also the era in which revolutionary leaders are attacked seriously, and after the abandonment of socialism, the bourgeoisie has attacked them even harder. These years are the years of trying to change socialism into bourgeois-democracy, changing revolution into reformism, internationalism into nationalism; these are the years of cheating revolutionary organisations with abstract requests for peace, instead of fighting for the rights and freedom of the peoples. At this front we have set up barricades against the enemy.
This Front is the power that fights and makes the people fight. The Revolutionary People's Liberation Front are the muscles and the fists which beats the enemy. It is the mass, the body of our fight. The Front comprises armed and unarmed political mass-struggle. Political mass-work and propaganda with a separate Front or armed struggle is unimaginable. This means a Front has to have an unarmed wing besides its armed wing, but the armed wing has to be the basis.
Besides particular differences, the logic of the legal and the illegal struggle is basically the same. The contradiction is the one between the legitimacy of the people and the revolutionary forces on the one hand, and the illegitimate system on the other. In reality this is the main contradiction. We will use all legal sectors up to their last resources. But we will take legitimacy, and not legal democratic struggle, as a measurement. We should trust the power and the creativity of the masses. Legal struggle is to oppose our legitimacy to the enemy; at the same time it is a struggle for an area we won in an eye for an eye fight. Every legal organisation is a product of illegal struggle. The enemy has to accept our legitimacy. To spread DHKP-C posters or flyers leads to being murdered in the streets without trial or 15 years imprisonment. But hundreds of Party-Front flags and banners can be seen in demonstrations and acts of resistance. Counter-guerilla knows that the masses are prepared for every attack with their fists, sticks and their Molotov-cocktails. Counter-guerilla that attacks will not remain unanswered. Mayday is an example for this, and it is an actual one.
In 1977 the oligarchy murdered 34 people on Mayday in Istanbul. In 1988 we lost two of our comrades, in 1989 we lost one and in 1991 we lost another two comrades on Mayday. Today 20.000 people march under the banners and flags of the DHKP-C. Despite the danger of being killed or seriously punished, we regularly publish legal publications, we maintain our trade-union and mass organisations, we bury our martyrers in the mountains and the cities with thousands of people, we storm police stations, the centres of guilt, in the slums, we force ministers and police directors to come to the barricades to fulfil the demands of the people, we are living in the prisons with the identity of free prisoners, even if this means we have to die for it. Hundreds of people are descendants of this view of war and this tradition.
One of the main dangers for a revolutionary organisation is to be unable to teach the masses to struggle with a revolutionary soul, not to support the revolutionary people's movement which contain a lot of energy, to watch their ruin...
Palestine and Kurdistan are examples for this. In reality the self growing Intifadah and Serhildanen were not supported by the nationalist movements. They were only used as trump-cards against the enemy. They watched their ruin. As a result this mentality could not establish lasting militant mass-movements. Radicalism in the Middle East and the militant mass movements are now lead by islamic radicalism.
You can lead people that had to stand all kinds of pain and had to pay every price to victory. Political leadership determines the way. In the political mass struggle our basic politics can be described briefly as follows: first believing in the power of the masses, secondly not to bring forward a status quo which leads to a compromise with the system, but to prepare people to establish the revolutionary power of the people.
The problem is not the announcement of the leadership. It's the necessity of leading all forces that are oppositional to the system, united into the struggle. Of course every country goes through its own experiences. Besides we have to learn from examples that took place in Asia and Latin-America.
Nowadays the war in our country is no longer a vanguard struggle, the war is changing into a peoples war. All people's classes are extremely dissatisfied with the system. Class- and national contradictions are very different and mixed ones in Anatolia which has been transformed into a prison for the people. Imperialism and oligarchy created politics which pay regard to these contradictions. In this they have a lot a counter-revolutionary experience. They practice politics to instigate people's against each other and of creating enmity among them. For this they use religious and national differences. When they do not succeed they try to separate and isolate groups locally.
Fascism tried to develop Turkish chauvinism and Turkish enmity against the increasing Kurdish national consciousness and the Kurdish national movement; they also tried to develop the enmity between Sunni en Alevites against the Alevites. With this they forced the national Kurdish question and the awakening of the Alevites to kill each other. Fascism tried to separate these movements from the revolutionary struggle and tried to isolate them locally. This policy is still continuing. On the other hand broad actions of the workers, civil servants and students take place in the local uprisings in the slums. These actions are lead by our party. In March 1995 uprisings occurred in the large slums of Istanbul: Gazi, Okmeydane, Nurtepe and mraniye, uprisings that shook the whole country. Similar uprisings jumped over to Anatolia. The disadvantages of these mass-movements are their separated appearance, they didn't occur at the same time and could not be transformed into united actions.
It is our duty now, to unite all these mass-movements and acts of resistance into an united people's action, to assemble them in the revolutionary front. While we are expanding the war in the mountains and the cities, this is our everyday duty... Because of this, we put the foundation of people's committees and meetings in the slums, worker's committees and meetings and meetings of the civil servants on the agenda. This is nowadays discussed by the masses. Especially in regions where militant people's struggles were created, we can nowadays witness examples of people's committees and people's meetings.
Imperialism is not only worldwide exploitation and plunder, not only an armed villain in general terms. Imperialism is the main power, maintaining the economic, political and social structures in neo-colonial countries. In the underdeveloped countries, imperialism is the main responsible for exploitation, injustice and fascist barbarism, it is the main stay and source for all of this. Eliminating all the dynamics of national progress, imperialism itself organises fascist state structures from top to bottom, using an imported, dependent misshapen capitalism. The structure of imperialism is not an external but an internal development.
Without destroying this political and social structure, formed by a handful of collaborators, without overthrowing the fascist state, which means to eliminate the economic and social stays of imperialism, independence and liberation are not possible, at no given time. Despite the given names and proclamations; changes in the relations between the powers, a new status quo which does not alter the structure of imperialism will lead to nothing else but new dependency upon imperialism and the lasting of imperialist exploitation. We have to take an open and straight forward attitude towards imperialism, based on the front. Contradictionary policies will not lead to any success. The materialisation of our revolution is determined by teaching our peoples the militant anti-imperialist doctrine.
We live to see a phase where the demagogies of "world peace" and imperialist villainies get mixed. The biggest barrier for the imperialist to reach their aim of a false American peace of imperialism to make the people's to give up, are the anti-imperialist movements in the Middle East, Latin-America and Africa.
It is no coincidence that the massacre in Cana occurred just after the summit meeting of terror in Egypt. Imperialism and the Zionist villains are attacking in full strength to destroy the Palestinian resistance and all anti-imperialist dynamics in the region. The aggression against Korea, the Lebanon, Cuba, the massacres in Turkey and Kurdistan and the declaration of our organisation as the most dangerous in this region and world wide, and the boundless bloody terror against our organisation just mean the continuation of this policy.
In the last decade this policy was successful in certain regions. The ground they exploited were weak connections with Marxism-Leninism, policies built on temporary gains, the fear of reaching victory. Especially national- and petty-bourgeois movements orientate themselves at the power or are influenced by it, so they start to doubt their legitimacy. Organisations which are influenced by this establish inclinations to found legal parties, start to compromise or to disarm themselves.
To turn guerilla warfare into a bargaining chip is a dangerous gamble. There is no chance of victory for those who play these tactic. Disarmed people whose fingernails are torn out will not mass any peace. Besides, a peace like it is promised by imperialism will never happen. Genuine peace and freedom will only get real after we wiped out all traces of exploitation, dependence, and oligarchic dictatorship. Only the revolutionary power of the people will be able to achieve this.
We will never deviate from our determination to drive imperialism away from our country, we will never deviate from socialism. The people's liberation movements fighting against imperialism and oligarchy are the hopes for independence, democracy and socialism for the peoples. We will never allow this hop to diminish.
We are connected with, and obliged to, the liberation warriors that lost their lives in Palestine and the Lebanon, in Turkey and Kurdistan, in Cuba and Latin-America, the people who gave their lives all over the world for freedom and liberation, and we are loyal to their oath.
DHKP-C
Devrimci Halk Kurtulus Partisi-Cephesi