The National Democratic Front of the Philippines joins the International Committee in Support of People’s War in India (ICSPWI) and all anti-imperialist forces of the world to honor the martyrs of the revolution in India and the Philippines.

Today, July 1st marks the 13th year when comrade Azad was kidnapped in the city of Nagpur and was brutally murdered by the Indian reactionary government. Comrade Azad’s work is important not only to the Adivasis, Dalits, peasants and workers of India, but to the global anti-imperialist struggle as well.

As in India, in the Philippines, comrades Ka Laan and Ka Bagong Tao were forcibly disappeared and killed by the Philippine bourgeois state. They, like so many other revolutionary men and women, are martyrs who sacrificed their lives for the people, for the revolution, for the abolition of classes in communism.

Long live the heroes and martyrs of the people’s war!
Long live the People’s War in India!
Long live the People’s War in the Philippines!

In Praise of Martyrs

We praise to high heavens
And for all time
The heroes who die
In the hands of the enemy
In the battlefield
In the torture chamber
And against the wall.
In these bloody places,
The struggle is sharpest
And the meaning of one’s life
Is tested in one crucial moment.
Courage to the last breath
Makes the martyr live beyond death.

Jose Maria Sison
9 December 1977