Ang Bayan, March 28, 2023
The leadership of the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) today issued a statement on the occasion of 54th anniversary of the New Peple’s Army (NPA) tomorrow, March 29. The CPP exhorted the NPA’s commanders and Red fighters to “stir up and spread the flames of the people’s war for national freedom and democracy.”
The Central Committee of the CPP cited “intensified imperialist oppression against the Filipino people” and emphasized the need to “attain freedom from US control and domination, and carry out land reform and national industrialization” which it said “are the key steps to turn (the Filipino people’s) lives around.”
It denounced the neoliberal economic measures being carried out by the Marcos regime which cause the broad masses of the Filipino toiling people to suffer from “dispossession of their livelihood by real estate companies, plantation, mining companies, infrastructure, as well as land reclamation projects.”
The Party said there is a “clear link” between “fascist suppression and the antipeople neoliberal economic policies and programs” of the Marcos regime. It lambasted the US government for being responsible for the “widespread campaign of terrorism and fascist monstrosities” under the Marcos regime.
It denounced the plan of the US to construct more military bases in the Philippines to use the country “as part of its war theater preparations against China.”
The CPP said “the broad masses of the Filipino people are suffering from increasingly intolerable forms of oppression and exploitation… they are ever determined to wage resistance in order to free the country from clutches of US imperialism and the subservient ruling classes, and attain genuine national freedom and democracy.”
The message traced the growth of the NPA over the past 54 years of waging revolutionary armed struggle saying “it has frustrated the enemy’s campaigns of encirclement and suppression one after another” from the first Marcos regime to the current second Marcos regime. The Party said the NPA has “steadily advanced and surmounted every disadvantage and setback.”
“The preservation and nationwide growth of the NPA through more than five decades of fighting clearly proves the correctness of the strategy and tactics set forth by the Party for waging protracted people’s war in the Philippines,” said the CPP Central Committee.”
“The key has always been for NPA units to constantly expand and deepen its links with the broad masses of peasants,” said the CPP.
The CPP said “there are clear prospects for a new period of revolutionary surge in the Philippines.” It said it is certain that NPA will win more achievements and victories “in the coming period of revolutionary surge.” (CPP Information Bureau