The Communist Party of the Philippines (CPP) sneered at the Armed Forces of the Philippines’ (AFP) prediction that there is only one remaining New People’s Army (NPA) front in the entire country, calling the claim “absurd.”
Reacting to AFP chief of staff Romeo Brawner’s statement on the CPP’s 56th founding anniversary last Friday, the CPP said the general is only trying to mislead the public.
“Curiously, he has failed to specify its location, leaving both the public and the NPA to speculate about which of the AFP’s ongoing military operations in approximately 20 provinces is targeting it,” CPP chief information officer Marco Valbuena said in a statement Friday, December 27.
Valbuena also scored Brawner’s claim that the CPP is suffering from a “leadership vacuum” following the arrest and killing of alleged top revolutionary leaders in recent years.
“The AFP is spending hundreds of millions of pesos on intelligence and combat operations to “cut the head” of the Party. Yet, no amount of assassinations, extrajudicial killings, abductions, or arrests can halt the Party’s leadership in the Philippine revolution,” Valbuena said.
In his statement, Brawner repeated AFP’s call for “remaining members of the CPP-NPA to go home to abandon their armed struggle.”
Last January, Brawner predicted the “strategic defeat” of the NPA by year’s end.
Valbuena however said Brawner’s “desperate” statement is testament that the CPP, NPA and the national democratic revolutionary forces in the Philippines remain the biggest stumbling block to US military intervention, bureaucrat capitalist corruption, and the AFP’s reign of fascist terrorism.
“The Marcos regime’s national betrayal and complete subservience to US imperialism, alongside rampant corruption, escalating poverty and hunger, and state-sponsored terrorism, make waging revolution even more urgent, just and necessary,” Valbuena said.
Valbuena added that all their members welcome the CPP Central Committee’s anniversary statement calling for greater determination in advancing the people’s national democratic revolution. # (Raymund B. Villanueva)
