Over 200 Central Luzon State University (CLSU) students staged a protest walkout on June 22 at their Nueva Ecija campus to condemn the suppression of their democratic rights, Red-tagging, and state harassment of the university’s student leaders. Anakbayan-CLSU led the action with the support of the CLSU University Supreme Student Council (USSC).
Students and their leaders already faced successive attacks from state forces and even from university authorities at the opening of CLSU’s academic year in June.
Suspected state forces mounted posters inside and around campus that Red-tagged student leaders on June 9–15. Students removed those posters several times, but the suspected state forces repeatedly mounted new ones. They also distributed leaflets containing Red-tagging.
The University Security Force (USF) stopped volunteers from the CLSU USSC and Artista at Kabataan para sa Lupa at Soberanya (AKLAS, or Artist and Youth for Land and Sovereignty) Nueva Ecija on June 11 while they finished a mural painting as part of the coordinated activity Advocacy Wall. The mural was an artwork calling for land rights, wages, education, social services, and social justice.
Two suspected state forces on June 12 “looked for” CLSU USSC chair and incumbent CLSU Student Regent Rashela Ballesteros, Cairo Sandoval of the Independent Campus Journalists’ Union for Press Freedom (ICJUPF), Loi Matias of Unity of Leaders and Students for Advancement of Democratic Student Rights and Welfare (USAD-DSRW), and Eyu Bartolome of Anakbayan Nueva Ecija.
Commonly used to Red-tag progressive and legitimate mass youth organizations, the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) held the annual NSTP orientation on June 13. They presented an alleged former New People’s Army member and accused progressive organizations of recruiting youth into the armed movement.
Besides Red-tagging, the AFP displayed its objectification of women by parading and using female soldiers as models to entice first-year male students to join the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps.
Before the CLSU students launched the walkout, organizations, publications, and student councils at the university issued a united statement. Twenty-eight organizations, publications, and councils condemned the Red-tagging, surveillance, intimidation, and deception by state agents against their fellow students and the wider ranks of struggling youth in the province.
“We stand united that these fascist attacks may appear isolated, but are actually a design of institutionalized and systemic sabotage of the youth’s and the entire people’s democratic and patriotic aspirations for genuine free education and a truly liberated society,” their statement said.
They declared their firm stand: the youth will not be silenced. “As student leaders, activists, and journalists, the students carry the basic interests of the people and fellow students onto a broader arena to create meaningful change through collective and organized action,” they said.
Meanwhile, the walkout and the students’ call pushed the CLSU administration to issue a memorandum creating a Committee on the Formulation of Guidelines on Addressing Red-Tagging Concerns. The groups said this step ensures academic freedom and other human rights.
