‘Futile,’ says communist leader of US offer to fight NPA
MANILA, Philippines — Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) founder Jose Ma. Sison dismissed as “futile” a US offer to help the Philippines in its counter insurgency operations.
In an e-mail statement, Sison questioned how Filipino and American troops could defeat the nearly 40-year-old guerilla campaign of the New People’s Army when they have yet to wipe out the al Qaeda-linked Abu Sayyaf in the south.
Sison was reacting to the pronouncement of United States Pacific Command Chief Admiral Timothy Keating that if requested by Philippine authorities, American troops would help in operations against communist insurgents.
“Further military actions and further threats from the US are futile,” said Sison, who has been living in exile in the Utrecht in The Netherlands since 1986.
“Since 2002, the US and the Arroyo regime have exposed the limits of what they can do by failing to completely subdue the minuscule Abu Sayyaf bandit group,” he said.
Sison added that the US was “sinking in the quagmires of its own making” in Iraq and Afghanistan, the battlegrounds for the so-called global war on terrorism that the US had been leading.
At the same time, the communist leader said Keating’s statement would open the doors to “far worse human rights violations.” He said the timing of the statement was suspicious, since it came ahead of the July 15 implementation of the Human Security Act or the Philippines’ anti-terrorism law.
“My estimate is that the Filipino people and the revolutionary forces will become more determined than ever before to wage the national democratic revolution through people’s war and that they are not at all cowed by the actual atrocities and threats that have been unleashed against them by the US and the Arroyo puppet regime,” he said.
Reacting to reports that exploratory talks between the Philippine government and the National Democratic Front (NDF) had been held in Norway recently, Sison said formal peace negotiations would resume only when “certain prejudicial questions” are answered.
“The prejudicial questions that need to be resolved first of all include the gross and systematic human rights violations, the murder and abduction of NDFP consultants in the peace negotiations, the ‘terrorist’ listing of the CPP, NPA and the NDFP chief political consultant and the misappropriation of funds for the indemnification of the victims of human rights violations under the Marcos regime,” he said.
He said a ceasefire between the military and the NPA would be possible only when a “10-point concise agreement” proposed by Speaker Jose de Venecia several years ago would be approved.
Sison is the chief political consultant of the NDF, the political arm of the CPP.
Formal peace talks bogged down in August 2004 with the rebels dissatisfied by government efforts to remove Sison and the NPA from the terror lists of the US and the European Union.
View article as posted on INQUIRER.net
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