International Day Of Peasant’s Struggle

1.

The Glorious Bangladesh War of Liberation could have not been organized and waged had not the Bangladesh peasantry made the Liberation War part of their life. They were swayed by the call for liberation. It was the brave peasantry that dared to stand steadfastly by the Mujib Nagar Government, the provisional Bangladesh government, as it took oath in a rural vicinage in those days of fire and killing by the occupying Pakistan army. It was an April-day, April 17, 1971. The following crimson war-path is glorified with supreme sacrifices, overwhelming majority of which was made by the unvanquished Bangladesh peasantry. The Bangladesh peasantry sent its best sons and daughters to the war for liberation. Its flame of liberation-dream never gets extinguished.

2.

Dominating world economy presses peasants to dwell perpetually in an abode, where poverty is in plenty and happy life is scarce. The world economic arrangement needs a peasantry without head and eyes. Peasants across the world are dominated by antagonistic contradictions. Poverty, ignorance, insecurity, and a life without dignity are ensured for them by the dominating world system.

3.
History is replete with struggles for dignity, justice and security, and with martyrs. Peasants around the globe have relentlessly carried and are carrying on this struggle. Their struggles embolden and ennoble humanity’s endeavor for a dignified, decent life. But, peasantry in many lands is not allowed to reach their dreamed destination. This compels peasantry to unfurl its standard for struggle.

4.

The peasants in Brazil made notable sacrifices on April 17, 1996. A massacre took the toll. Nineteen peasants of the landless movement, MST-Brazil were killed while they were on a peaceful journey to make their appeal to get access to unplowed and unseeded land. At least 10 of the peasants were extrajudicially executed after they had been overpowered. Sixty-nine peasants were severely wounded. The journey was part of their peaceful struggle for land and dignity.

Since 1996, April 17 has been declared International Day of Peasant’s Struggles. People around the world take oath for struggle to survive with dignity.

Those Brazilian peasants were evicted from their land more than two years ago. Their all peaceful attempts to get the right to settle down on an unproductive, fallow land had failed. Consequently, about 1,500 landless peasants and members of their families, all members of the Landless Peasants Movement (MST), started their peaceful march to the state capital of Pará, to present their demands. The march stopped on the highway as pregnant women and children needed rest. At around afternoon, two police contingents arrived there from opposite sides and started firing on the resting peasants and their family members. Many of them dispersed. The first to fall was Amâncio Dos Santos Silva, known as “Surdo-Mudo” (“deaf-mute”). Unable to hear the shots, he took longer time than the others to perceive the police action.

5.

In countries, more than hundred, the day is observed as the International Day of Peasant’s Struggle. The day is observed by organizing marches, rallies, cultural programs, debates, exchange of opinions with allies of peasantry, exhibition of organic products, publicity work, and many other types of activities.

Peasantry is increasingly finding it in perilous position with the onslaught by neoliberalism and MNCs. In many countries, peasant organizations are virtually being deactivated and made apathetic to peasant problems. Burning problems of peasant life go unnoticed as neoliberal ideas dominate peasant leadership, as peasant leadership accepts premises forwarded by neoliberalism. The concept of Food, A Basic Human Right is pushed to nowhere, and is being replaced by some other pseudo right like turning debtor. Discourse on poverty does not identify the source of poverty. Instead it is being sustained within a limit safe to status quo. Interesting part of the episode involves section of peasant leadership that does not effectively contest the concepts being sold. A vacuum thus gets created and the vacuum is being overtaken by individuals and organizations having stakes in neoliberalism. Their agenda turns peasant leadership’s agenda, and peasant issues retreat. In cases, peasant issues are sold by NGOs with “different aims, purposes, interests, organizational cultures and structures, and mechanisms for decision making and accountability than peasant organizations”. (Annette Aurélie Desmarais, La Vía Campesina: Globalization and the Power of Peasants)

Consequently, the vital issue of food sovereignty gets lost as food sovereignty covers the issues of food as a basic human right, sustainable management of natural resources by peasantry, and agrarian reform, which is not only redistribution of land. Even, the concept of cooperative is neglected as peasantry is increasingly made dependent on loan capital.

6.

The day, April 17, is not meant to get engaged into adventurous or terrorist acts as those play no role in making social advancement or achieving food security for country. Rather, exposing hollowness of neoliberal ideas and its effects on peasantry can be a way to observe the day. Highlighting plights of peasants turns important aspect of the observance as intellects standing by status quo ignore plights of peasants’ and broadly of the poor, and express observations, which are not related to reality.

Peasants around the world, working on cotton, coffee or cocoa fields, in the Nile Delta or in Iraq, blacks in the US farms, on the verge of committing suicides in India, in the terraced rice fields in the Philippines, today face the same fate, a fate of uncertainty, haunting hunger, encroached areas of public education and health care, and indignity. The world force of accumulation have united them, and made them international.