JOMA: DON’T BLAME REDS FOR PH UNDERDEVELOPMENT

LUCENA CITY—TOP communist rebel Jose Maria “Joma” Sison refuted President Duterte’s assertion that the more than five decades of insurgency was the cause of the country’s underdevelopment.

“Duterte is wrong in blaming the revolutionary movement for the gross underdevelopment of the Philippines, widespread unemployment and mass poverty,” Sison, Communist Party of the Philippines founder, said in a statement from Utrecht in The Netherlands on Sunday.

Sison insisted that the revolutionary movement “is the consequence of and response to the extreme oppression and exploitation suffered by the people under the semicolonial and semifeudal system represented by Duterte.”

Sison maintained that of all Philippine presidents, the presidency of ousted strongman Ferdinand Marcos and the 3-year-old Duterte administration “have been the worst.”

“It is during the time of the most brutal and corrupt presidents like Marcos and Duterte that imperialist powers and the semicolonial and semifeudal ruling system of big compradors, landlords and corrupt officials oppress and exploit the people the most and make them suffer so intolerably that the armed revolutionary movement grows so rapidly,” he said.

On Thursday, Mr. Duterte blamed the communist insurgents for the underdevelopment of the Philippines saying “our country could have been highly developed if not because of your violence.”

Evolution

“We cannot solve the problem of the Philippines by revolution … It has to be by evolution,” Mr. Duterte emphasized in his speech during the distribution of benefits to former New People’s Army rebels in San Isidro, Leyte, in a press release from the Office of the Presidential Adviser on the Peace Process dated Jan. 24.

Mr. Duterte said the generational cycle of violence perpetrated by the communist rebels must come to an end.