Joma hits P21-B barangay budget vs NPA
LUCENA CITY – Exiled Communist rebel leader Jose Maria “Joma” Sison assailed the proposed P21-billion fund to address the needs of the so-called “insurgency-cleared and threatened” villages across the country.
“Claims of clearing barangays with public money used as payment will only be a kind of racket for military officers who will pocket the money,” Sison, Communist Party of the Philippines founder, said in a statement from his base in Utrecht in The Netherlands on Wednesday.
He further claimed that the proposed budget was “like the racket of faking lists of New People’s Army (NPA) surrenderers and casualties by which military officers pocketed large amounts of public money.”
Sison charged that government budget was “extremely lopsided in favor of the military, police and intelligence and discretionary funds at the expense of social services (public education, health and the like) and relief and rehabilitation of communities ruined by military
operations and natural disasters.”
Sison said in a statement that National Security Adviser Hermogenes Esperon Jr. in a report from Tacloban City by government-run Philippine Information Agency on Tuesday disclosed that the government would need P16.84 billion for 842 insurgency-cleared barangays and another P4.189 billion for 2,793 threatened villages in different parts of the country.
