Amidst the flood of protests and condemnation for its central role in the plunder of billions of the people’s money, the US-Marcos regime has ordered salary increases for its fascist armed forces and police last December 3. The reasons are obvious: buy their loyalty and consolidate control over the AFP and PNP to further effectively use these fascist forces in the regime’s all-out war against the peasant masses in the countryside and, arrest and suppress the growing people’s protests movement that arose out of outrage at rampant corruption, harsh economic conditions and political repression, that threaten to oust the ruling fascist regime.
While keeping a close eye on the surge of the people’s protest movement in the cities, the regime’s fascist forces are further holding firmly on its grip on its brutal terrorist war against the peasant masses and their communities as the people’s armed resistance rages on. Serious human rights abuses committed against the peasant masses continue unabated, and violations of International Humanitarian Law particularly committed against the armed and non-armed members of the revolutionary movement are covered up.
International humanitarian law (IHL) are a set of rules governing wars to ensure the rights of those involved and not involved in armed confrontations. It was created mainly to safeguard the welfare of civilians amid armed conflicts. The distinction between combatants and non-combatants, the use of appropriate force according to proportionality, the determination of who and what are legitimate targets, protection against killing, injury, and harm to those not involved in combat, assurance of minimal harm to civilians and their communities, are the core principles of IHL.
The Government of the Republic of the Philippines (GRP) and its armed forces routinely violate these principles in their war against the revolutionary movement.
Ang Bayan, the CPP’s official organ, has listed these IHL violations as follows: willful killing of the captured and incapacitated; abductions and enforced disappearances of revolutionaries including civilians with them; forced abduction of pregnant women guerillas on medical leave and kidnapping babies and using them as hostage for force the surrender of their guerrilla parents; arrests, fabricated charges and forced surrenders; coercion, inhumane detention and treatment; desecration of remains; and, the use of disproportionate force (bombings of communities).
Peasant communities endure the brutal state of de facto martial rule in their communities – their right to pursue their livelihoods, free movement and social communications are violated, strictly controlled and hindered. Savage US counterrevolutionary measures employed during the Vietnam war are implemented unabated in the countryside ravaging peasant communities.
Just recently, in Gandara, Samar province, south of Metro Manila, up to 29 families or more than 80 individuals have been forced to evacuate from the villages of Marcos and San Miguel as of November 24, 2025 after alleged gunbattles between the military and the New People’s Army (NPA) in the upland areas bounding the towns of Gandara and San Jorge.
In Sitio Pusol, Barangay Limot, Kalinga province, north of Manila, fascist troops of the 103rd Infantry Battalion of the Philippine Army (IBPA) occupied the community and has encamped in the area after encounters between soldiers and the NPA guerrillas between November 21 and November 14, 2025. Local residents have an ongoing struggle against the construction of the Saltan hydropower project which will displace entire communities, destroy livelihoods and adversely impact the ecosystem. Militarizing the communities could be the regime’s way of pressuring the locals to agree to the project, according to human rights groups.
Human rights groups have already documented and condemned many human rights and IHL violations committed by the fascist AFP recently, including the use of disproportionate force, aerial and indiscriminate bombings of peasant communities, in Abra and Ilocos provinces in 2024. In earlier documented cases, the AFP has violated the principle of proportionality by dropping 250 and 500-pound bombs on peasant communities and areas suspected of being guerrilla camps, in Eastern Visayas in November 2022, in Butuan City and Malaybalay City in Mindanao island.
In these counterrevolutionary operations, peasant communities and their farmlands and forests were destroyed.
The gravity of environmental destruction, human rights and IHL violations and militarization in peasant communities has again drawn the attention of the international community. In October 2025, international groups organized fact-finding missions in Rizal, Occidental Mindoro, Leyte, and Negros Occidental provinces.
The recent international fact-finding mission found that ongoing large-scale resource extraction, land conversion, and militarized ‘development’ projects endanger both ecosystems and those who protect them, and that continuing abuses are linked to counter-insurgency and surveillance operations by state forces, including extrajudicial killings, enforced disappearances, and harassment of community leaders, organizers, and activists.
“These violations often occur in areas overlapping with ancestral domains and protected territories. The worsening climate crisis, further fueled destructive extractive industries and stolen public funds meant for safeguards against natural disasters have displaced communities, worsened food insecurity, and ecological loss — conditions that drive local resistance and calls for accountability, which the government often too immediately labels as ‘insurgency’ and ‘security threats’”, the mission stated in their report.
This latest manifestation of international solidarity is a stark reminder to the US-Marcos regime that the international community and the friends of the Filipino people are closely watching, and will always stand in solidarity with the peasant communities and victims of human rights violations and war crimes, as they have justly and honorably done so in the past.
The indictment and convictions of such quasi-bodies such as international people’s tribunals, and similar findings conducted by international agencies such as the UN and the International Criminal Court may be used in the future in prosecuting both states and individuals as in the Nuremberg trials which prosecuted Nazi war criminals.
However, revolutionary justice will always take precedence in dispensing justice to the Filipino people.#