[BALITA NG MALAYANG PILIPINAS/ NEWS FROM FREE PHILIPPINES]
COMPATRIOTS, the underground revolutionary organization of Filipino migrants and Filipinos abroad –- a member organization of the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP) joins the Filipino people in strongly condemning the killing of landless peasants and Lumad and the wounding of scores of others in Kidapawan, North Cotabato last April 1.
Compatriots denounces the use of arms and state violence by the police upon orders of the provincial bureaucrats against the unarmed peasants who were demanding that government provide them with rice and food because of the hunger they have been suffereing from the effects of extreme drought in the region.
The violence unleashed by the forces of the state against the hungry and unarmed peasants only confirms to us the validity of revolutionary armed struggle to defend the exploited and oppressed classes, and overthrow the rotten, fascist and oppressive system.
The ruling classes of compradors and big landlords represented by the US-Aquino regime will not voluntarily give up their power, privileges and control of the entire semi-colonial and semi-feudal system, nor extend any concession to their class enemies without giving a fight and unleashing the full force of state terror against the workers, peasants and other oppressed classes and sectors who seek system change in order to defend their interests.
The Kidapawan killings have once again highlighted this fact, and have merely added to the string of violence heaped on poor and landless peasants by the US-Aquino regime, specifically its chief political representeative, Benigno S. Aquino, whose Hacienda Luisita continues to extract, in the literal and figurative sense, the blood of its poor and hungry peasants by perpetrating a string of massacres, killings, harassments, landgrabbing and deception against them.
The Kidapawan killings have also unraveled before the peasants and workers and the rest of the Filipino people that the coming national elections is a farce, a grand deception of the ruling classes to misrepresent democracy and promise socaal change, even when the majority in Philippine society, the peasantry, continues to be landless, oppressed and condemned to poverty and marginalization.
Many Filipinos who have gone abroad to seek work come from the peasantry. Landlessness is a principal factor for poverty and hunger in the Philippines that drives so many of our compatriots to endure the abuse, exploitation, discrimination, government neglect and racism abroad just so their poor families back home can buy enough rice and food for their table, send their children to school, and pay the debts they incurred from expenses in going abroad.
The Filipinos abroad are so much concerned about what is happening in the motherland. They are as much concerned as with the revolutionary movement in seeking genuine social change in the Philipppines, in achieving genuine democracy, national freedom, social justice, genuine developmen,.industrialization and lasting peace.
Compatriots is an expression of that revolutionary and collective vision and movement among Fiipinos abroad to support the people’s democratic revolution in the Philippines.
Compatriots joins the people in calling and demanding for justice for the victims of the Kidapawan killings, the peasants and Lumad.
Compatriots vows to arouse, organize and mobilize the many Filipinos abroad for the national democratic revolution in the Philippines, and to generate the broadest political and material support for the New People’s Army in the Philippines and the revolutionary movement. #
