Homeless Joma says Washington overrated CPP-NPA

"I am overrated."

These were the words used by self-exiled communist leader Jose Ma. Sison to describe the move by Washington to tighten the noose on him and brand the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) and the New People’s Army (NPA) as "foreign terrorist organizations."

Sison is now practically homeless after municipal officials in Utrecht, the Netherlands, decided to suspend the assistance provided to him and his family by the Dutch government.

The Dutch assistance is mainly used to pay rent for Sison’s apartment in Rooseveltlaan where Sison, his wife Juliet de Lima and their son Jasm have been residing.

Sison and De Lima’s joint current account with Postbank was also frozen by the Dutch government. The communist leader has been in self-exile for 14 years as a "refugee" seeking political asylum from European authorities.

The communist leader said the freezing of his bank accounts and withdrawal of allowances by the Dutch government and the US government’s branding of him and the CPP-NPA as terrorists have practically equated him with Osama Bin Laden, the Saudi Arabian dissident who leads the al-Qaeda terror network.

Sison said most of the mainstream Maoist movement’s main bodies of leadership, the CPP central committee and the NPA’s military commission "are all in the Philippines."

In 1967, Sison and a handful of radical student activists founded the CPP in Pangasinan after they severed ties with the Partido Komunista ng Pilipinas (PKP). The following year, Sison established the NPA in Capas, Tarlac with the help of former rebel Bernabe Buscayno, alias "Commander Dante," and other guerrillas from the Hukbong Mapagpalaya ng Bayan (HMB).

While Sison admits to having been the CPP Central Committee’s chairman from 1968 to 1997, he added that "today I am just the chief political consultant of the National Democratic Front (NDF)."

The NDF, underground umbrella organization of the CPP-NPA, has been involved in peace negotiations with the government for several years, but the talks have been stalled for over a year now after the NDF refused to denounce the political killings carried out by NPA hit men.

Sison said a probable reason the United States has cracked down on him is that "the US can never forgive me... I have been one of the pioneers who revived the anti-imperialist and anti-feudal movement in the Philippines in the early 1960s."

At the time, Sison said, the PKP-HMB was on the brink of extinction.

Sison added that because he founded the CPP-NPA, US authorities have also denied him entry.

"I have never been granted a visa for the US," Sison said, adding that he wanted to go to America to attend the burials of his mother and elder sister, who succumbed to cancer, in the early 1990s.

Sison said he will not "beg" for mercy to have his social benefits in the Netherlands restored. Sison prefers to "assert" his "human rights," he said.

The Dutch government merely "blocked its own money (which comes from) the Dutch agency under the Social Affairs Department... The Dutch government pays me the amount of some 200 euro a month as a non-recognized asylum seeker," Sison said.

Sison also said the report that the CPP-NPA-NDF has $24 million deposited in foreign bank accounts is a "fairy tale (and) a big lie coming from the Philippine military. The CPP is a very intelligent organization and it has no money stashed abroad."