Reds Told to Expand, Launch More Attacks

From Phase 1 to Phase 2, Oplan Bantay Laya has perpetuated gross human rights violations. It has carried out mass intimidation, arbitrary arrests and detention, massacres, assassinations and torture, enforced disappearances, rape, arson, food blockades and forced evacuation of rural and indigenous communities to serve the landgrabbing interests of foreign corporations, mining companies, high bureaucrats and local tyrants. Oplan Bantay Laya has gained global notoriety for the killing of legal mass activists of workers, peasants, youth, women, religious leaders, journalists, lawyers and judges, human rights activists and NDFP consultants. The victims are first maligned by the military as “communists” and “enemies of the states” before they are murdered or disappeared. After murdering or disappearing them, the political, military and police authorities of the Arroyo regime blame the NPA for the criminal deed and further malign the victims as having been victimized by their own comrades for supposedly malversing funds or being enemy spies. The murderous and deceptive scheme of the criminals in power cannot hoodwink even the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings.

It is sheer fantasy for the enemy to think that Oplan Bantay Laya 2 can destroy or reduce the NPA to “inconsequentiality” within the period of 2007 to 2010. The NPA has mastered the strategy and tactics of the people’s war against the brutality and deceptiveness of Oplan Bantay Laya. It has delivered fatal blows to wipe out enemy units and to render impotent the rest of the armed forces and police.

In the one year period before the current NPA anniversary, the NPA was able to launch more than 500 major and minor tactical offensives against the enemy. It has been able to increase the number of NPA units as a result of the seizure of weapons from the enemy and the progress of mass work. It has been able to maintain 120-130 guerrilla fronts and to expand and upgrade most of them. It is now in a position to increase the number of guerrilla fronts. These can be the building blocks of relatively stable base areas and even as the enemy causes some fluctuation in the number of guerrilla fronts due to concentrated onslaughts.

The NPA owes its great victories to is resolute and militant implementation of the general line of new democratic revolution through protracted people’s war. It follows the leadership of the Communist Party of the Philippines as the advanced detachment of the working class. The Party makes sure that the national democratic revolution is to be basically completed through the overthrow of the semicolonial and semifeudal ruling system before the socialist revolution can follow. It wields the revolutionary armed struggle and the united front as the two powerful and invincible weapons of the revolution.

The Party is at the head and at the core of the NPA. It makes sure that the three integral components of people’s war are developed. These are the building of the people’s army through revolutionary armed struggle, the carrying out of agrarian revolution and the building of base areas as the political, military, economic and cultural bulwark of the revolution.

To build the NPA, the Party makes sure that the Red fighters are recruited from the revolutionary mass movement, particularly from the ranks of cadres and mass activists, the local militia and the self-defense units of the mass organizations. It provides the recruits with politico-military training, and the soonest possible participation in tactical offensives. More and more Red commanders and fighters gain experience and the arms to increase the number of NPA units by launching tactical offensives against the enemy.

The people’s army and the people’s war have developed in the countryside over a protracted period of time because of the support of the peasant masses. They join and support the people’s war because they are interested in agrarian revolution. They are the majority of the people. The fulfilment of their outcry for land is the main content of the democratic revolution.

The minimum land reform program has been implemented on a national scale. In many areas, the land in the hands of brutal agricorporations, despotic landlords and landgrabbers have been recovered and redistributed to the peasants, farm workers and national minorities. The time has come to extend in a big way, the main land reform program. This is becoming possible through the success of the minimum land reform program as well as the growing strength of the revolutionary peasant movement and the people’s army. The growing strength of the peasant movement and that of the people’s army interact and support each other to advance genuine land reform and destroy the power of the land-based exploiters and oppressors of the people.