By Prof. Jose Maria Sison
NDFP Chief Political Consultant
August 28, 2018
Duterte is threatening to accept no more ¨surrenders¨ from the New People´s Army and is inciting his military officers and troops to kill upon sight NPA suspects and all those he considers as enemies of the state.
But in fact he has long been applying the deceptive and murderous methods of Oplan Tokhang in Oplan Kapayapaan. Barangay officials are required to list down the names of NPA suspects, relatives and sympathizers under the guise of letting them surrender and clear themselves and even get cash rewards.
But those listed down are subsequently photographed and misrepresented as ¨NPA surenderees¨ and the military officers pocket the reward money. The worst thing about the list of surrenders is that it is also a death list as in Oplan Tokhang.
The list becomes the basis for killing people extrajudicially. Like the death squads of the police in Oplan Tokhang, military officers are emboldened to fulfill their kill quotas because of presidential guarantees of impunity and cash rewards for every murdered NPA suspect which are much higher than in the fake surrender racket or in the phoney war on drugs.
The recent incitation of Duterte to his military minions not to acceot surrenders but to kill NPA suspects upon sight proves that his line of localized surrender negotiations has utterly failed and has turned his own home region into a bigger cauldron of armed conflict.
Duterte is unwittingly putting his own life in more serious danger ithan ever. Among his military officers, there is a significant number who view Duterte himself as the No.1 enemy of the Philippine state for the following reasons among others:
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He has violated the bill of rights in the 1987 constitution by inciting arrests without judicial warrant and causing mass murder with impunity;
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He has turned the police and military into his private criminal instruments by inciting them to commit mass murder and corrupting them with rewards at public expense;
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He has betrayed national sovereignty and territorial integrity by selling out the Philippines´ exclusive economic zone and extended continental shelf in the West Philippine Sea to China and conspiring with China to turn the Philippines into a Chinese debt colony;
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He is junking the 1987 constitution to impose tyranny on the Filipino people and to aggrandize foreign monopoly interests by letting them have 100% ownership of land, natural resources, public utlities, and mass media in violation of economic sovereignty and territorial integrity; and
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He has adopted policies that impose a heavy tax burden on the people and that have jacked up the prices of basic goods and services in order to raise the tax revenues for funding bureaucratic corruption, graft-ridden infrastructure projects and acquisition of military equipment and supplies and amortization of the ever growing foreign and local public debt.###