Press Statement
April 11, 2003
Renato Magtubo
Chairman
Partido ng Manggagawa

 

FROM ONE OPPRESSOR TO ANOTHER

The fall of Baghdad may be the end of the brutal dictatorship of Saddam Hussein but it is just the start of Iraq's occupation by US imperialism and oppression under a new puppet regime.

With the collapse of Saddam's dictatorship, the antiwar movement now demands the withdrawal of all invasion troops out of Iraq and for the Iraqi people to decide the fate of post-war Iraq. Any interim government led by puppet Iraqi exiles and under the tutelage of the US and UK military will be the new yoke on the shoulders of the Iraqi people.

Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo's comparison between the fall of Saddam and the ouster of Marcos is historical revisionism and one more proof that she views the world with American-made eyeglasses. The few thousand Iraqis cheering the dismantling of Saddam's statue cannot compare to the millions of Filipinos rising up against the Marcos dictatorship. A tyranny ousted by foreign invasion and another by people's uprising is so totally different not just in the means but more important, in the end.  Iraq's "liberation" through US guns will be akin to Philippine "liberation" in World War Two that led to Parity Rights and American neocolonial control.

With the fall of Saddam, the anti-war movement has neither lost its bearing nor lost steam. The military defeat of Iraq by the awesome combined war machine of the US-UK axis of imperialism was never in doubt. Fact is, Baghdad itself has fallen but no trace of any weapons of mass destruction has been found, the supposed reason for the invasion of Iraq.

The peace movement was born out of struggle against America's imperialist policy of aggression that apparently will not end with the invasion of Iraq. Already Bush and Blair are provoking another war, this time directed against Iran and Syria. Imperialist jingoism will not be satiated by the victorious invasion of Iraq but on the contrary be whetted further. An enemy that is thirsty for more blood now confronts the antiwar movement.

Militant labor will lead the local peace movement in the country in participating in tomorrow's Global Day of Action. Instead of a stop to the war in Iraq, the demand will be self-determination for the Iraqi people and a stop to new wars of aggression.