Duterte’s obsessive diatribe vs CPP-NPA

Having succeeded in railroading the passage by Congress of the “AntiTerrorism Act of 2020” bill – widely condemned and assailed, both nationally and internationally – and poised to sign it into law shortly, President Duterte has moved further onward.

He has pinpointed the main target of the measure: the “CPP-NPA-NDFP terrorist group,” as the security forces refer to the Left revolutionary forces waging a 50-yearplus armed struggle for fundamental change. It’s no longer the Abu Sayyaf and other armed extremist groups in Mindanao, which the bill’s proponents had identified as being tied up with the international terror group ISIS.

Raising the issue of terrorism as the government’s “number one” concern during last Monday’s meeting of the government’s task force on COVID-19, Duterte pointed to the CPP-NPA as the “No. 1 threat to the country.”

“Forces arrayed against us,” he said, have taken advantage of the pandemic, specifically naming the Abu Sayyaf and the CPP-NPA. But he made a distinction: describing the former as “terrorist with no ideology… and of no value,” and the latter as the “high-value targets” having an ideology with “more pernicious” effect that could undermine the peace and security of the country.

It is on this distinction that Duterte justifies his oft-repeated directives to the AFP to hit hard the CPP-NPA (saying in Filipino, “upakan mo, upakan mo”).

In fact, since February 2016, when he first cancelled the GRP-NDFP peace negotiations that had attained “unprecedented” advances, according to both sides in their joint statements, the AFP has pursued an “all-out war” declared by Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana. Duterte then ordered the AFP to carry out aerial bombings to “level the hills” where the NPA forces were assumed to be present.

His seeming obsessive-compulsive diatribes against the CPP-NPA since then are evidenced by the following instances:

• In February 2018, he told businessmen in a speech at the Manila Hotel that the peace talks were “beyond his control” and that he would heed what the military would recommend. He added that he was offering P25,000 as bounty for every NPA member killed and P50,000 for every NPA squad leader slain.

• That same month, Duterte publicly claimed “all the rebellious factions in the Moroland are affiliated with the ISIS (excepting the MILF and MNLF)” and vowed to wipe out the terrorists. But he added the CPP-NPA as target, saying, “We will treat them the same way that we treat everybody as terrorist… I do not believe in their ideology anymore.”

• In late August 2018, after threatening to resign out of exasperation over corruption, then saying he would stay on till the end of his term, Duterte went on to warn the NPA: “I have a lot of weapons, I will freely use all the jets to bomb you… and if I hit civilians, then it’s part of the territory.”

• As the AFP drummed up the canard of a “Red October” plot to oust him, he ordered the military to “neutralize all the NPA fighters they would encounter.” “Shoot first,” he told his soldiers, “Do not worry, I am here for you. And I will not allow that you will go to jail for even a day.”

• In September 2019, Duterte ordered anew the AFP to pursue an “all-out war” against the NPA. This time around, he stressed, there would be no stopping in the fighting, and he wouldn’t accept any surrenderee. “Gusto ko, kung maaari, tapusin ko [ito] sa panahon ko (‘I want, if possible, to finish this during my term’),” he added.

At no other time has Duterte appeared and sounded more pathetic in ranting against the CPP-NPA than last Monday.

Grappling with mounting public criticisms on the government’s overall inept and harsh response to the still-surging COVID-19 crisis and the overbearing, abusive manner of the police and military in implementing health safety measures, the president had to pass the blame again on the CPP-NPA. He magnified just one incident wherein the NPA allegedly attacked state troops distributing aid to people affected by the crisis in one hinterland area.

Similarly, back in February 2016 he hit back angrily at the NPA by invoking an incident when NPA forces manning a checkpoint fired at and killed two soldiers they had intercepted. He has since generalized the incident, repeatedly cancelling the GRP-NDFP peace negotiations, which he had alternately resumed and cancelled, allegedly because the NPA kept on killing “my soldiers”.

By these accounts, it appears that Duterte has fully abandoned the pursuit and completion of the GRP-NDP peace negotiations on social, economic, and political reforms to achieve just and lasting peace – one of his 2016 presidential campaign promises under the populist slogan, “Change is coming!”

Had he exerted political will to pursue his latest directive, last December, for his peace negotiators to resume the peace talks, he could have claimed credit for the formal signing of already mutually initialed agreements hammered out painstakingly in formal and informal talks held in Europe. One is on agrarian reform and rural development (ARRD), the other, on national industrialization and economic development (NIED). Two other accords could also have been signed: a mutually coordinated ceasefire agreement, and guidelines that would have ensured the smooth conduct of further negotiations.

The ARRD and NIED were major portions of a targeted Comprehensive Agreement on Social and Economic Reforms (CASER), referred to as the “meat” of the peace acccord hailed by various peace advocate groups. But two of Duterte’s key military advisers – national security adviser Hermogenes Esperon Jr. and peace adviser Carlito Galvez Jr. (both former AFP chiefs) – viciously assailed the CASER mainly on ideological grounds. All the while Duterte remained silent.

Having only two years to go in his presidency, Duterte has wholly entrusted to the militarists in his Cabinet the implementation of an ambitious plan for ending the 50-year-plus armed conflict by using newly procured superior weapons plus draconian measures through the prospective AntiTerrorism Act of 2020.

How they would carry out the plan under conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic will be closely monitored by local and global defenders of democratic rights and other human rights. Closely watching, too, are the International Criminal Court and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Already an open letter – with 500 signatories including former presidents, prime ministers,Nobel Prize winners, and legislators sent to the Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (Idea) based in Stockholm, warns that authoritarian regimes are using the pandemic “to silence critics and tighten their political grip.”

Among the countries cited as having introduced authoritarian measures during the pandemic, or as having fallen short of accountability are the Philippines, Hungary, El Salvador, and Turkey.

* * *