By Prof. Jose Maria Sison
Chief Political Consultant
National Democratic Front of the Philippines
3 March 2007
It was perfectly alright for me to have kodakan (picture-taking), yugyugan (dancing) and kantahan (singing) with the Filipina movie and singing star Ara Mina, Janno Gibbs and migrant workers during a Christmas party. It was the biggest festivity of the Filipino community in The Netherlands. I was invited as a special guest.
Members of the negotiating panel of the National Democratic Front of the Philippines (NDFP) headed by chairperson Luis Jalandoni and the Philippine embassy officials headed by Ambassador Romeo Arguelles were there to mix with the Filipino community. There was nothing extravagant, nothing comparable to the wild parties thrown by the sybaritic officials of the Arroyo regime and its Armed Forces.
My pictures with Ara Mina, Janno Gibbs and many other people during the Christmas party are posted in www.josemariasison.org The website editor posted the happy pictures to show my closeness to the Filipino community and the variety of my activities and to counter the attempt of the US imperialists and the Arroyo regime to demonize and isolate my person.
More than 95 percent of the content of the website consists of serious articles about the problems of the Filipino people and the entire world in the face of US imperialism and brutal regimes like that of Arroyo. The website editor is smart and has a good sense of humor in putting a comic relief in the website.
The people in the Philippines and abroad should visit the website to make their own judgment. As a result of the propaganda barrage by the reactionary Armed Forces, the website editor has noted a big jump in the number of people visiting the website. I have to restrain my website editor from thanking the Armed Forces for unwittingly calling public attention to the website.
If they are truly concerned about the plight of the Filipino people, the reactionary Armed Forces should stop the extrajudicial killing, abduction and torture of so many people and the massive military operations, attacking the rural and urban communities in the Philippines and displacing hundreds of thousands of people from their homes and farms.
The Arroyo regime should stop its puppetry to US imperialism, its corruption, its plundering and its brutality in using the reactionary Armed Forces, police and death squads against the broad masses of the people, and the progressive legal activists and critics.
The regime and its Armed Forces are trying to conceal their crimes by waging a campaign of vilification and intrique against me. They are engaged in a futile attempt to deflect attention from the gross human violations that they have perpetrated and from the findings and conclusions of the Alston mission and Melo commission.
My attendance in a Christmas party does not change the frugality and austerity of my life. I am prohibited from working for a wage and yet my social benefits have been terminated due to the “terrorist” listing started and pushed by the US government upon the special request of the Arroyo regime.
As regards to the claim of the Armed Forces that the New People’s Army is “rotting” in the Philippines while I am supposedly enjoying life in exile, I think that the people should also visit everyday the website www.philippinerevolution.net to know the happy and creative political, economic, social and cultural life and the heroic and successful revolutionary struggles of the people and the revolutionary forces like the Communist Party of the Philippines, NPA, the NDFP, the mass organizations and organs of democratic power.###
