Reds downplays deadline to finish off NPA

BAGUIO CITY, Philippines — The Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) debunked President Duterte’s proclamation that the military would defeat the New People’s Army (NPA) by the middle of 2019.

“It will surely end up in complete failure,” the CPP answered, adding that Duterte’s forecast is baseless.

“By ordering the military and police to wage all-out war and inciting them to commit rape, abductions, torture, murder and the most despicable forms of abuses to suppress the people’s resistance, he is provoking the broad democratic sectors to rise up and join and support the New People’s Army,” the CPP said in a statement.

The rebels believe Duterte cannot defeat the NPA’s strong and determined forces with wide support of the masses that have sustained the rebel movement over the past five decades, with successive regimes failing to crush the guerrillas.

The CPP even boasted that under the Duterte administration, the number of NPA fighters surpassed previous highs.

After more than a year of all-out war in Mindanao with US support, Duterte has failed to crush even a single NPA front and the rebel NPA are steadily growing nationwide, the rebels said.

The CPP is claiming that the admnistration and the military “are fooling no one with the AFP “surrender scam” where AFP officials outdo each other in coming up with longer lists of “surrenderees,” citing that “under the scam, thousands of peasants are being forced to parade themselves as ‘surrenderees’ in violation of their rights under international humanitarian law.”  

The CPP said with the military’s surrender scheme to compel rebels to give up their arms, military officials pocket millions of pesos for so-called “integration programs.” 

Intelligence funds from Malacañang are downloaded directly to the personal bank accounts of field officials who succeed in mounting media spectacles of so-called surrenderees, it further claimed. 

The CPP said the anti-NPA Task Force of the military will implement a crackdown against the legal democratic opposition, which the AFP call the “political infrastructure” of the CPP-NPA and other organizations and political forces labeled as fronts of the CPP.

Also believing that the task force “will put the entire state machinery to high gear under the regime’s effort to crackdown against all opposition,” the CPP surmises that instead of weakening the NPA, “with his strongman tactics, Duterte is succeeding only in pushing more and more people to join and support (the rebels).”

With the terrorist proscription case which charges scores of activists of being members of the CPP, as well as with the militarization of the bureaucracy, Duterte’s task force will move more to the NPA, the CPP warned.

CPP founding chairman Jose Ma. Sison said yesterday Duterte’s challenge for him to return to the Philippines is just a childish provocation.

In a statement posted on the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP’s) website, Sison said that Duterte vowed to kill him. 

“Duterte has long vowed to kill me if he had the chance. He continues to be overeager to have the chance to kill me by challenging me to return home and wage war,” Sison said.

Sison, NDFP chief political consultant, said he would not fall into Duterte’s trap.

“I merely laugh at this childish provocation which manifests his roguish or stupid kind of mentality,” Sison said.

Sison said it is not up to Duterte to decide when he would return to the country.

“I will return home either to clinch his downfall or to persuade him further to make peace after he ceases to terminate the peace negotiations and allows the GRP negotiating panel to meet its NDFP counterpart to complete and sign the Comprehensive Agreement on Social and Economic Reforms (CASER),” Sison said. - With Jose Rodel Clapano