Joma: ‘State terrorism running high’

LUCENA CITY –– Top rebel leader Jose Maria “Joma” Sison believed there were sweeping violence and harassment against the political opposition and critics of the Duterte administration.

“Under the tyrannical rule of Duterte, state terrorism is running high with red-tagging, abductions, arrests with planted firearms and murders of social activists, critics, and political opponents,” Sison, Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) founder, said in a statement from his base in Utrecht, the Netherlands.

“There is already a de facto fascist dictatorship in the Philippines,” he added.

Sison said Duterte’s Executive Order No. 70 ordering the creation of a task force to end the insurgency “amounts to  a declaration of state terrorism under the pretext of anti-communism.”

Sison made the statement in reaction to the recent mass arrests of leftist activists, militant human rights workers,  labor, and peasant organizers in Bacolod and Manila as alleged members of CPP’s armed wing, the New People’s Army (NPA).

On Tuesday, Brig. General Debold Sinas, acting director of the National Capital Region Police Office, revealed that police forces have been monitoring suspected CPP leaders in Metro Manila.

Sinas refused to identify the supposed communist leaders that they were after.

Progressive groups have condemned the government forces for red-tagging activists and legitimate nongovernment organizations, calling it retaliatory attacks for their criticisms of the Duterte administration./lzb