Communist Party of the Philippines I April 24, 2021
Together with the New People’s Army (NPA), the Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) extends greetings of revolutionary solidarity to its allies in the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP) on the occasion of the alliance’s 48th anniversary.
The CPP and NPA take pride in having hundreds of thousands of allies who belong to revolutionary organizations of workers, peasants and farm workers, semiproletariat, minority peoples, Moro, youth, teachers, women, church people, health workers, scientists, cultural workers, employees, lawyers and overseas Filipinos. The NDFP now has 18 allied organizations and continues to expand as more and more get organized to help wage the national democratic revolution.
The NDFP has accumulated a great number of achievements over the past decades. Its 12-Point Program has served to enlighten the broad masses of the people and inspired people to wage revolutionary struggle. Serving as governmental representative the provincial, regional and national levels, the NDFP stands for the interests of millions of people under the auspices of the people’s democratic government. It has been outstanding in representing the interests of the exploited and oppressed classes in peace negotiations with the Government of the Republic of the Philippines.
There is an urgent need to further raise the level of strength and determination of the NDFP as the Filipino people faces crucial battles for national freedom and democracy.
In the face of the national treachery of the Duterte regime over the surrender to China of the country’s rights in its exclusive economic zone in the West Philippine Sea, it it urgent for the NDFP to bring together the Filipino people under the banner of national freedom. The fight to defend and take back the country’s seas is as historically significant as the resistance of Datu Lapulapu and the indigenous Filipinos to defend their land and seas against the Spanish colonizers.
The NDFP must unite all patriotic sectors and individuals to demand the immediate withdrawal of Chinese militia vessels, industrial fishing boats, Coast Guard and naval crafts from the country’s territorial waters. The NDFP and all its forces must amplify the Filipino people’s outrage over China’s infringement on the country’s sovereignty, and protest the plunder the country’s fish and other marine resources which have resulted in depleted supplies to the detriment of the Filipino people, especially the Filipino fisherfolk. They must also denounce the wanton plundering and siphoning of Philippine mineral and agricultural resources.
We call on all the NDFP’s forces to denounce Duterte as a national traitor for having allowed China to build its military facilities, encroach on the Philippine EEZ and take away the country’s resources. He has set aside the country’s rights under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Seas (UNCLOS) as recognized by the International Arbitral Tribunal in its decision of July 2016. Duterte has failed to put up a robust and comprehensive strategy to defend Philippine sovereignty to confront the giant imperialist China. He uses the false argument that we could not win a war against China to justify his refusal to take carry out any political, diplomatic or military action.
The NDFP’s forces must mobilize all its forces to manifest the Filipino people’s demand to take back the country’s sovereign seas. They should carry out a widespread education and cultural movement to rouse the patriotism of the Filipino people. They must unite and mobilize the broad masses to demonstrate their collective indignation in the parks, streets, communities, factories, school campuses, offices and so on.
The need for the NDFP and all its forces to strengthen and take action is also crucial in the face of the intensifying fight against Duterte’s plans to perpetuate his political dynasty by imposing a fascist dictatorship or rigging the 2022 elections to have his daughter or factotum replace him.
The NDFP’s forces must help in building the broadest united front against the Duterte tyrannical regime. They must denounce the Duterte regime for prioritizing corruption, its overspending for the military and police to consolidate its state terrorist rule. This has resulted in the bankruptcy of the ruling regime, massive foreign and local borrowing, epic failure to manage the Covid-19 pandemic, a severe economic crisis marked by historic levels of joblessness, loss of income and widespread hunger and poverty.
Building and mobilizing a broad united front against the Duterte regime is the key to ousting Duterte and his cohorts from power. The NDFP must help in uniting the biggest number of forces against the Duterte regime by linking up with the wideest sections of society, to carry out out education and propaganda to expose the grave abuses under Duterte’s tyrannical rule and appeal to the people’s sense of duty to uphold and fight for democracy.
The NDFP and its forces must continue to galvanize and mobilize the Filipino people in great numbers. It must fight for the people’s urgent public health (mass testing and greater budget allotment for public hospitals and laboratories) and socioeconomic demands (wage and salary increases, suspension of land rent, higher farmgate prices, state subsidies amid crisis and others). They can continue to support the socioeconomic work and campaign for food production work in the countryside and support the widespread mutual aid efforts across the country, while exposing the basic ills of imperialism, feudalism and bureaucrat capitalism, and linking the people’s day-to-day struggles to the need to wage a national democratic revolution with armed struggle as the principal form.
The NDFP and its allied organizations must continue to raise the militance and revolutionary determination of the broad masses of the Filipino people in fighting the fascist regime. As the Duterte regime resorts to heightened state armed attacks against the legal democratic forces, the NDFP’s forces can play a critical role by strengthening their underground organizations and network of support, to absorb and protect those being persecuted and hunted down by the regime’s fascist agents or facilitate their transfer to the guerrilla zones where they could afford the protection of the NPA.
Many of the NDFP’s underground organizations were tempered in the struggle against martial law during the 1970s. Combined with the Party’s branches and committees, they will undoubtedly play a critical role in the event that Duterte resorts to imposing a fascist dictatorship by serving as the most consolidated and most organized force of resistance.
As a revolutionary united front, the NDFP and its allied organizations must carry out more vigorous efforts to mobilize the people to support and join the revolutionary armed struggle. We call on our allies in the NDFP to join the New People’s Army and help carry forward the people’s war. At the same time, the NDFP and its allied organizations must continue to wage campaigns to support the armed struggle in the form of material and financial contribution to the cause of the armed resistance.
The NDFP forces must expose the Duterte regime’s cruel tactics in its dirty war against the peasant masses in the countryside. In the cities, they must untiringly expose the killings and rights abuses being committed by the military and police against civilians who are being subjected to brutal suppression in the form of killings, threats and intimidation, arrests, torture, non-stop harassment and other forms of abuses in the vain hope of denying the NPA of mass support. The NDFP must actively expose and call for a stop to the costly campaign of aerial bombardment which endangers the lives of people in rural villages and mountain communities. They must expose and denounce the garrison-like control of villages and communities in the guise of
the so-called “Retooled Community Support Program” of the AFP.
In the countryside, the NDFP forces must actively forge an anti-fascist united front to help the peasant masses in their fight to defend their rights, and oppose military abuses committed in the course of its “surrender drive” and attempt to take over control of the civilian functions of government. They must expose and oppose corruption in the implementation of the E-CLIP and the NTF-ELCAC’s Barangay Development Program, and resist plans to construct so-called “farm to market roads” that are in fact, “mining and military roads.”
The NDFP must join the rest of the Filipino people in valiantly fighting the crucial battles for national freedom and democracy. They must draw inspiration from all their heroes and martyrs in the resistance of past centuries. In a few days, we will mark the 500th year of the victory of Lapulapu and the indigenous Filipinos in the Battle of Mactan, the first victory in the long and continuing history of armed resistance for national freedom and social liberation.
Long live the National Democratic Front of the Philippines!
Long live the Communist Party of the Philippines!
Long live the New People’s Army!
Long live the Filipino people!
