Joma says NPA to intensify war; calls Duterte No. 1 terrorist

Jose Maria Sison. FILE PHOTO / INQUIRER

LUCENA CITY—With President Rodrigo Duterte’s cancelation of the peace talks following his threat to classify the New People’s Army (NPA) as “terrorist group,” the communist guerillas have no choice but to intensify the rebellion to topple the government, exiled Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) founder Jose Maria Sison said Thursday.

“The Filipino people and revolutionary forces waging the people’s democratic revolution have no choice but to intensify the people’s war through extensive and intensive guerrilla warfare in rural areas and partisan or commando operations in urban areas,” Sison said in a statement.
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He added: “The legal democratic forces and broad opposition have no choice but to develop the underground and encourage endangered activists to become fighters in the people´s army.”

Sison, chief political consultant of the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP), tagged Duterte as the “number one terrorist” in the country.

He said Duterte´s “bloodlust and mania for mass murder are boundless.”

“He is culpable for the abduction, torture and mass murder of an increasing large number of poor people suspected drug users and pushers, peasants and indigenous people in suspected guerrilla fronts and Moro people suspected of aiding the Dawlah Islamiyah from the time of the indiscriminate bombing of Marawi City to the present in several Bangsamoro areas,” Sison said.

Sison said with the “despotic, criminal and corrupt character” of the Duterte administration, there are already “rumblings” even within the state security forces.

“Duterte is now worried to death by his own fear that anti-Duterte officers within his own army and police are inclined to act in the name of the people and unite with the broad opposition and mass movement in order to end the Duterte regime in the same manner that the Marcos and Estrada regimes were ended,” Sison said.

Sison said Duterte “is utterly malicious and shameless” in threatening to classify the CPP-NPA-NDFP as terrorist groups and also threatens to arrest members of the leftist organizations.

He said Duterte’s scheme aims “to set up a fascist dictatorship in the service of US imperialism and his fellow oligarchs among the big compradors, landlords and corrupt bureaucrats.”

Sison said the US-Duterte regime “is hell-bent on frustrating the people´s clamor for peace negotiations to address the roots of the civil war through the adoption and implementation of social, economic, political and constitutional reforms as the basis of a just and lasting peace.”

“The regime is striving to intimidate the people with its own terrorist scheme and crimes in order to seize absolute autocratic power for Duterte and limitless opportunity for the bureaucratic corruption of his family and ruling clique,” he said. /jpv