AFTER some 500 anti-Marcos protesters buried an effigy of the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos at the Inayawan landfill last Tuesday, about 20 students held their own protest rally at Fuente Osmeña yesterday.
Carrying placards with statements such as ‘Marcos is not a hero’, the students joined the rally organized by the Cebu Chapter of the Anakbayan partylist, to mark International Students Day and to show their opposition on the Supreme Court’s decision to allow the burial of the late former President Marcos at the Libingan ng mga Bayani.
Anakbayan Cebu chair Niño Olayvar said that to grant a heroes burial to the late dictator Marcos is tantamount to repressing the students rights.
“We will not let society forget how the students who fought for democracy against a dictatorial Marcos, and how they sacrificed for the freedom we have now,” Olayvar stated in Cebuano.
Several students also joined the rally to demand for free education and to call for a stop to tuition increases in all colleges in Cebu City, both privately-owned and state-owned.
Joise Andrea Cesista, chair of the Rise4Education Alliance, a socio-political group which advocates for everyone’s right to free education, also said that the ‘annual trend of tuition fee increase is the modern-day manifestation of student repression’.
She also said that the group was also calling for the scrapping of the newly implemented laboratory fees in state universities.
“Because education is not a privilege. Each one of us has the right to free and non-commercialized education,” she said.