Duterte to Reds: You deserve no mercy

President Rodrigo Roa Duterte. KING RODRIGUEZ/PRESIDENTIAL PHOTO

MANILA, Philippines – President Rodrigo Duterte on Tuesday said the communist rebels do not deserve mercy as he slammed them for being “cruel and brutal.”

Duterte said he no longer considered the New People’s Army as revolutionaries but “criminals.”

“They are all criminals.  Do not consider them revolutionary. They are just plain bandits and that is the way we should treat them,” he said in his speech during the Barangay Summit on Good Governance Region XI in Davao City.

“Don’t surrender anymore because if I see you again I will shoot you.No more surrender because you are a cruel and brutal people. The national media is here. You do not deserve mercy,” he added.

He said he would just “finish” the rebels whom he said were “in a continuous crime of rebellion 24 hours a day” by going “around the community asking for money and killing them if we don’t give. “

“Why do I need to have a warrant? By the fact that you are a rebel you are a 24-hour violator of the Revised Penal Code of rebellion,” he said.

The President said he would soon stop accepting rebel surrenderers and would just order the killing of the rebels.

The peace talks between the government and and the Communist Party of the Philippines-New People’s Army-National Democratic Front (CPP-NPA-NDF)  collapsed in November 2017 after the President signed Proclamation No. 360, formally terminating the talks with the Maoist insurgents.

The termination came after rebels launched a series of attacks against government troops.

Executive Secretary Salvador Medialdea said on Tuesday that the government would not declare a holiday ceasefire despite Joma Sison’s pronouncement that the rebels were ready to declare a temporary suspension of fighting this holiday.

READ: No holiday truce with Reds – Medialdea

“I no longer believe this could be done through the talks,” Duterte said. “They were the ones who declared a unilateral ceasefire, I did not ask for it, but they were also the one who launched the attack in Sorsogon and here in the region. They killed the wife of a Cafgu,” the President said. /cbb