01 November / International Bulletin / No. 145

With a big festival thousands of youth, women, workers and migrants celebrated the 20th anniversary of our party's foundation, the MLCP, in Leverkusen, Germany.

Thousands from several European countries came to celebrate the 20th anniversary of our party with  the slogan 'Uprising, revolution, socialism!'. People from France, England, Switzerland, Belgium, Austria, Scotland, Croatia and Spain came to celebrate this great festival.

The festival was initiated by Communist Youth Organization with a loud and powerful demonstration . Crying slogans as 'Long live our party MLCP', 'Long live Kobanê' or 'Uprising, revolution, socialism!' and carrying our party's flags and banners dozens of youth marched the streets of Leverkusen.

The festival's program started off with a panel discussion on the Rojava revolution, in which the PYD representative Ariya Issa and the socialist journalist  İbrahim Çiçek discussed the current situation in Kobanê, the importance of the Rojava revolution – also beyond its borders – and the struggle in the Middle East. Numerous participants of the festival asked questions or contributed short statements to the discussion.

A representative of MLCP greeted the thousands of visitors in our party's name. A video was shown, in which our party's 20 years of marching under fire were presented; the MLCP combatants from Rojava greeted the festival with a video message. They said: 'In Rojava a new system has been established. This is why we as combatants of MLCP could not remain silent. Therefore, we fight together with the YPG-fighters against the reactionary forces. We ask everybody to join the struggle.'

The Rojava revolution, the heroic Kobanê resistance and the struggle of MLCP and its immortal fallen as  Suphi Nejat Ağırnaslı (Paramaz Kızılbaş), who lost his life just a few weeks ago defending the Rojava revolution in Kobanê, formed the center of the whole festival. Many relatives of the MLCP's immortal martyrs were participated, as for instance  Suphi Nejat Ağırnaslı's sister and Serkan Tosun's father. The latter greeted the visitors in his speech and said: 'I bow to the heroic resistance in Rojava. Serkan was a good and brave person, a comrade who gave his life without hesitation. I'm proud of him.'

Besides numerous music groups, that filled the program, the head of the Limter-Iş union Kamber Saygili spoke. The HDP chair Figen  Yüksedağ and the NAV-DEM chair  Yüksel Koç greeted the festival, the struggle of MLCP and the revolution in Rojava.

TCP/ML and MCP sent greetings as well as the central committee of PKK , which stressed the joint struggle with MLCP and called the revolutionary movement of Turkey a 'main ally'.

Several international delegates participated at the festival and greeted the MLCP's struggle in short statements in their languages. Furthermore, many organizations, that were not present, greeted the festival and the MLCP's 20 years of struggle with written statements. Greetings from Croatia, Spain, Lebanon, South Africa, Nepal, Germany, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Sri Lanka, France, Iran, Morocco, the Netherlands and Afghanistan were read out loud.

The festival exuded an enormous revolutionary strength and energy. It represented the character of our party and its 20 years of history as a marxist-leninist party.