By Jose Maria Sison
Chief Political Consultant, NDFP Peace Panel
May 8, 2021
This coming month of June, Duterte will start his final lame-duck year in his office. He is expected to publicly decide what he wants beyond the constitutional limit of his term and make some crucial moves in the months of June to September before the registration of presidential and other candidates begins in October if elections would be held in 2022.
Since the time that he sabotaged and terminated the GRP-NDFP peace negotiations in 2017, Duterte has indicated so many times his intention to grab power like Marcos did through martial law proclamation and charter change. Since 2020, he has also indicated he could rig the 2022 presidential elections and install his stooge in the same way that he rigged the 2019 mid-term elections to gain a super-majority in Congress.
According to sources close to the national security cluster of the Duterte cabinet and the NTF-ELCAC, Duterte plans to carry out false-flag operations to scapegoat the CPP and NPA and order the mass arrest and mass murder of the red-tagged social activists, human rights defenders, critics and oppositionists in order to proclaim martial law, claim false victory over the revolutionary movement and intimidate the broad masses of the people.
At the same time, under conditions of martial law or otherwise, he keeps in reserve the option of holding and rigging the 2022 elections to install a stooge as president and himself as vice president. His overriding concern is to prevent the election of a new president that would allow his arrest and trial by the International Criminal Court for the grave human rights violations that he has committed Duterte keeps on overestimating his mental and physical staying power, despite the fact that he stays out of public view for long periods of time because of his frequent dialysis treatment and the increasing signs of dementia, forgetfulness, incoherence, slurred speech and abusive language during his public appearance and playing of his pre-recorded statements.
Whatever Duterte decides and succeeds in doing to control events in the short run of events, he like his paragon Marcos will eventually be overtaken by the consequences of his crimes of treason, state terrorism, mass murder, plunder and prevarication and by the accelerated worsening of the socio-economic and political crisis of the ruling system which he has aggravated.
Among the worst crimes of Duterte are the following:
- He has committed so many grave human rights violations, especially the mass murder of tens of thousands of people, including the victims in the bogus war on drugs and in the war against the people’s armed revolution.
- He has exposed himself as a traitor by repeatedly asserting that China possesses the West Philippine Sea and the abundant marine and mineral resources beneath. He is the puppet tool of China in violating the sovereign and maritime rights of the Philippines under UNCLOS and the 2016 judgment of the Permanent Court of Arbitration in favor of the Philippines against China.
- He pretends to be independent of US imperialism but has carried out his all-out war policy against the revolutionary movement upon the the diktat of the US and with its military assistance. He has served the continuing economic, political and military dominance of the US over the Philippines.
- He has become the supreme drug lord and head of the supreme crime family in the Philippines by using the mass murder of more than 30,000 people to grab control over the illegal drug trade in combination with Chinese
criminal syndicates. - He has corrupted military and police officers in order to make the reactionary armed forces and police his private army for counterrevolutionary as well as purely criminal purposes.
- He has plundered and bankrupted the Philippine economy through bureaucratic corruption, military overspending and other misappropriations of public funds for the benefit of his family, business cronies and favorite generals.
- He terminated the negotiation and drafting of the Comprehensive Agreement on Social and Economic Reforms in order to continue and aggravate the exploitation of the Filipino people by foreign monopolies, big compradors and landlords.
- He allowed the Covid-19 pandemic to spread in the Philippines by allowing 500,00 Chinese tourists and casino players from January 2020 onward despite warnings from WHO authorities.
- He promised health measures and economic assistance to help the people against the pandemic and the massive loss of jobs and other means of livelihood but instead he has betrayed them and used the pandemic as an opportunity to divert public funds in order to enrich himself, his family and cronies.
- He has pushed the public debt to the unsustainable level of Php 10.4 trillion (as of February 2021) by retaining a neocolonial and semifeudal economy dependent on raw-material extraction and cheap labor and wasting resources on bureaucratic corruption and military overspending.
Because the Duterte regime has committed all the above-mentioned crimes and more, it cannot achieve its vile objective of destroying the CPP, NPA, NDFP, revolutionary mass organizations and the organs of the people’s
government because they thrive on the escalating conditions of oppression and exploitation and because they follow the general line of new democratic revolution through protracted people’s war.
It is of decisive importance for all the patriotic and progressive forces to build and strengthen a broad united front in order arouse, organize and mobilize the Filipino people in their millions and to isolate, weaken, fight and frustrate
whatever scheme Duterte chooses to implement in order to prolong himself in power and delay his day of reckoning.
Such a broad united front can be instrumental not only for ending the traitorous, tyrannical, terrorist, genocidal, plundering and mendacious Duterte regime but also for opening the road to a just peace by resuming the peace
negotiations that addresses the roots of the armed conflict through basic social, economic and political reforms.
