Our freedoms and our oppressions are all connected

By Syeda Ayesha Gardeza, Mazdoor Kisan Party (Workers and Farmers Party), Pakistan – Responsible for Media and Information

May 19^th, 1919, is the date Mustafa Kemal Atatürk arrived in the northern Turkish city of Samsun to start the armed struggle against the imperialist occupation of Türkiye and its collaborators. The date is considered as the beginning of the war of liberation. It is today celebrated as an official holiday as the “Day of Commemorating Atatürk, the youth and sports”.

The Youth Union of Türkiye (TGB) and the World Anti-imperialist Youth Union (WAYU) have organized on May 19, 2026, an international event with participation from dozens of countries of anti-imperialist struggle. During the convention, several speeches were held.

One of the speakers was Syeda Ayesha Gardeza, Responsible for Media and Information of the Mazdoor Kisan Party (Workers and Farmers Party), of Pakistan. Below, we present her speech to our readers.

Greetings to my comrades from across the globe. It is an honor to stand here in Istanbul among young people from across the world who refuse to accept imperialism, occupation, exploitation, and genocide as the natural order of humanity. I bring revolutionary greetings from the Mazdoor Kisan Party of Pakistan, and we dedicate our presence here today to the heroic people of Iran who fought US imperialism in a way we previously thought impossible, hence reviving our revolutionary vigor and commitment to the cause of anti-imperialism. We dedicate it to Cuba and the Venezuelan people who, despite sanctions, siege, destabilization, assassination attempts, and endless imperial aggression, continue to stand with dignity against the US-led imperial order.

My name is Ayesha Gardezi and I come from a country that has been stung by the venomous fangs of yankee imperialism time and time again. From drone attacks during the so-called war on terror to oppressive anti-people IMF programs, we have faced imperialist aggression on every front. Pakistan boasts one of the youngest populations in the world, with nearly two-thirds of our people under the age of thirty. Yet what should have been our greatest strength has become one of our deepest tragedies. Millions of young people inherit unemployment, inflation, collapsing public services, privatized necessities and futures held hostage by debt and dependency. And while ordinary people suffocate, our ruling class continues to govern not in the interests of Pakistanis, but in the interests of Washington, the IMF, and global finance capital.

Every IMF agreement strips away another layer of sovereignty.

Every privatization programme sells off another public asset.

And this is why Pakistan’s youth crisis is not simply economic. It is political. It is civilizational. And it’s not isolated. It’s connected with the struggles of the youth everywhere, the perpetrator is the same. The hand strangling the youth of Pakistan is the same hand funding genocide in Gaza, sanctioning and destabilizing Cuba and Iran, and looting the Global South: the hand of American imperialism.
Imperialism teaches young people that resistance is impossible. That collective struggle is outdated. It spends billions on media, NGOs, academia, and cultural machinery to convince us that the only people resisting American hegemony are “dictators”. It weaponizes Islamophobia to justify war, occupation, and sanctions. It manufactures fear around countries like Iran, Cuba, China, and the Sahel while it robs entire nations of their resources, sovereignty, and dignity. And look at how desperate this empire has become.

First, the United States abducted the president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, alongside the First Lady, in an open act of imperial gangsterism. Then came the assassination of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in a joint US-Israeli strike on Iran. And now they openly discuss destabilization and regime change from Havana because any nation that refuses submission must either be sanctioned, overthrown, bombed, or destroyed.

But despite all this, a political awakening is taking place.

Across the Global South — and increasingly even within the imperial core itself — young people are discovering that the system they were told would bring prosperity has instead produced alienation, precarity, endless war, and social decay. The “dictators” and “regimes” they were taught to despise are the guardian angels generating the final crisis for imperialism.

We must give credit here to Palestine. It wasn’t until the glorious Al Aqsa flood and the events that followed, that young people across the world were jolted awake. The thick fog of CIA funded propaganda began to clear and isolated seemingly personal struggles started revealing patterns; patterns of subjugation and dominance, occupation and exploitation, violence and manipulation. It exposed a cabal whose interests take precedence over the lives and dignity of the rest of humanity. The youth in Pakistan is doomed to die in the shackles of debt trap so that the Bretton Woods institutions can continue feeding the wealth of imperial elites — the Trumps, the Epsteins, and the parasites of global capital. Meanwhile, children in Gaza choke beneath rubble. Cuba is strangled by sanctions. Sudan bleeds through proxy warfare. Iran is endlessly threatened with sanctions and sneaky destabilization attempts.

If not for the Al Aqsa Flood, many around the world would not have seen these patterns, our freedoms and our oppressions are all connected. Therefore, my message to the youth which I cannot stress enough would be to seize the moment, the opportunity that we have been given by the axis of resistance. They laid the groundwork for us. Now we must organize, we must build discipline in our cadre, we must stand together. We must educate the workers on class consciousness and anti-imperialism while the winds are blowing in our favor and the axis of resistance is keeping the cause alive. We cannot let this moment pass us by.

We are witnessing this ourselves in the Mazdoor Kissan Party. Across Pakistan, workers, peasants, and students are searching for revolutionary politics instead of the hollow promises of liberalism, identity politics, and elite electoral games.

In recent years, our movement has regained new energy. More and more young people are coming to our rallies, study circles, workers’ meetings, and peasant struggles because they understand that capitalism and imperialism offer them no future. Our task, now, as revolutionary youth is to build the structures capable of defeating the imperialist machinery.

Because imperialism is organized.

Finance capital is organized.

NATO is organized.

The Zionist settler project is organized.

And if we wish to defeat them, then we too must become organized.

I believe we will together deliver one of the final blows to the already crumbling walls of yankee imperialism, zionist hegemony and western domination.