LUCENA CITY – Exiled Communist Party of the Philippines founder Jose Maria “Joma” Sison said President Duterte’s formation of a civilian hit squad as the counterpart of the dreaded New People’s Army (NPA) rebels’ Sparrow Unit was a ploy to cover up the widespread summary execution by alleged government forces and other forms of state violence against innocent civilians.
“I think that Duterte is citing them (Sparrow) as a pretext for organizing more death squads of the AFP (Armed Forces of the Philippines) and PNP (Philippine National Police) for the mass murder of mere suspects who are not even the target of any court warrant of
arrest,” he said in a Facebook interview from his base in Utrecht, The Netherlands.
When asked if the Sparrow Unit still operates and would engage Duterte’s “death squad” in an assassination contest in the urban centers, Sison replied: “As far as I know, the Sparrow Units are no longer deployed as widely as in the 1970s and 1980s.”
Citing information from the rebel forces, Sison claimed that there were no more autonomous Sparrow Units based in the urban centers.
Though he admitted that there were occasional “commando teams with special missions from their mother units” based in the rural areas.
He said Duterte was making it look like the Sparrow Units were scattered in the city to sow fear to form death squads.
In the history of the NPA, it maintained a special partisan unit called “Sparu or Sparrow,” an urban-based hit squad that targets policemen, soldiers, government officials, and the so-called “enemies of the revolution.”
The hit squad, particularly the Alex Boncayao Brigade (ABB), gained notoriety in the 1980s for summarily killing lawmen and suspected government agents.
Sison said Duterte’s all-out-war against Maoist-inspired insurgents was “getting nastier.”
On Tuesday, Duterte announced that he was forming his own hit squads to assassinate communist rebels or sympathizers thinking of joining the rebellion against the government.