Speech of Tunisian representative at the WAYU congress in Istanbul, Türkiye
Speech of Tunisian representative at the WAYU congress in Istanbul, Türkiye
By Zied Achek – General Union of Tunisian Students (UGET), National Executive Member
May 19th, 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 speeches was from Zied Achek, National Executive Member of the General Union of Tunisian Students (UGET). Below, we present the speech to our readers.
Comrades,
I come from Tunisia.
A land that has known the whip of the colonizer, the chains of the dictator, and the slow poison of the IMF — all in the same century. A land where my grandfather fought the French with his bare hands, where my father marched against Ben Ali, and where my generation woke up to find that the revolution had been stolen before the ink on the history books was dry.
But I also come from UGET. Founded in 1952. Before independence. Before anyone gave us permission.
And that is the first lesson I want to leave with you today. We never asked for permission.
Imperialism does not sleep. It does not retire. It does not feel shame.
It simply changes its costume.
Yesterday it was the warship and the rifle. Today it is the debt and the structural adjustment program. Yesterday it burned your village. Today it buys your government. Yesterday it put your leaders in chains. Today it puts them in suits and teaches them to do the job themselves.
The result is the same.
Poverty that is manufactured. Hunger that is manufactured. Migration that is manufactured. And then — the same people who manufactured it look at our young men drowning in the Mediterranean and call it a crisis of civilization.
No. It is not a crisis of civilization.
It is civilization — their civilization — working exactly as designed.
Palestine.
I will not whisper this word. I will not wrap it in diplomatic cotton. I will not say “the conflict” or “the situation” or “the ongoing tensions.”
I will say what it is.
It is a genocide. Financed. Armed. Protected by veto. Broadcast live on every screen on earth while the institutions built after the last genocide watched and wrote reports.
They bombed the universities.
Let that land in your chest for a moment.
They did not bomb the universities by accident. There are no accidents in colonial warfare. They bombed the universities because a Palestinian with knowledge is a Palestinian with power. Because a people that reads cannot be made to forget. Because education is resistance — and they know it even if we sometimes forget it.
When the university in Gaza burned — every student in the world should have felt it personally. Because the same logic that justifies bombing a university in Gaza will justify silencing a student in Tunis, in Istanbul, in Caracas, in Dakar.
It is the same war. Different theaters. Same director.
Che Guevara once said that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love.
I believe that.
But I also believe that love without anger is not enough. You must love your people enough to be furious at what is being done to them. You must love humanity enough to call the enemy of humanity by its name without flinching.
And the name is imperialism.
Not a vague, abstract imperialism. The concrete, specific, named imperialism — with its military bases and its financial institutions, its puppet regimes and its media empires, its bombs with serial numbers and its borders drawn by strangers on stolen land.
That is what we are fighting.
And we will not be polite about it.
Our generation has been told many things.
We have been told to be realistic. To be moderate. To engage with the system from within. To wait for the right moment. To trust the process.
And while we were being told to wait — Gaza was being flattened. The Sahel was being bled dry. Our young people were drowning at sea. Our universities were being defunded. Our movements were being surveilled and criminalized.
I am done waiting for the right moment.
The right moment is always now.
Look around this room.
We are from different countries. We speak different languages. We carry different wounds.
But we are the children of the same struggle. The struggle that Lumumba died for. That Allende died for. That the students of Tunis and Algiers and Johannesburg bled for. That the fedayeen of Palestine carried in their hearts when they had nothing else left.
That struggle did not end. It was never allowed to end.
And so it falls to us.
Not as a burden — as an honor.
I want to close with something simple.
When you leave this room — do not leave as individuals. Leave as comrades. Exchange more than contacts — exchange commitments. Build more than networks — build solidarity that costs something, that shows up when it is inconvenient, that does not disappear when the cameras go away.
The empire counts on our division. It counts on our exhaustion. It counts on the day we decide it is too much and go home.
Let us be the generation that never went home.
Let us be the generation that made the empire tired first.
Free Palestine — from the river to the sea.
Down with imperialism — in every land where it breathes.
Long live the student — who chose the people over comfort.
Long live UGET.
Long live international solidarity.
The student lives. The struggle continues.
Hasta la victoria — siempre.