The article of Juan Sarmiento of Inquirer News Service, titled “Communist Party ’hit list’ denounced” and dated December 26, 2004, refers to an open letter to me as CPP founder from Walden Bello and Etta Rosales, supposedly asking me the accusatory rhetorical question, “Does this mean you intend to kill us one by one?”
I have not yet received the letter and I expect Sarmiento or the letter writers themselves to forward it to me, especially after giving it wide publicity. I am making this statement only as a prompt response to Sarmiento’s article. I intend to answer the letter directly and fully as soon as I receive a copy of it, unless its full substance is already reported by Sarmiento.
He reports that Bello and Rosales have extrapolated and concluded that they and others are the targets of a “hit list” of the New People’s Army on the basis of a dia-gram made by the CPP International Department to show the ideological and political connections of certain pseudo-revolutionary grouplets in the Philippines to various Trotskyite and social democratic groups and parties abroad.
Consequent to the article of Sarmiento, I have revisited the diagram in question which appears in the December 7, 2004 issue of Ang Bayan, as published in the website: www.philippinerevolution.org. Any honest reader can see for himself or herself that this diagram is nothing more than a presentation of the fragmentation of pseudo-revolutionary petty bourgeois grouplets in the Philippines and their connections mainly with various Trotskyite factions abroad. It is not at all a list of criminal suspects subject to arrest and investigation by the NPA and other proper authorities of the revolutionary government.
It is a gross act of mendacity, malice and slander to misrepresent the diagram as a “hit list” and to use the misrepresentation in order make me the target of character assassination. The purported letter writers are obviously engaged in a spin or psywar operation. This is orchestrated with similar operations of the military propaganda mills and is timed with the 36th anniversary of the reestablishment of the Communist Party of the Philippines. There is an overall attempt to distract public attention from the full message of the CPP Central Committee, now appearing in the aforesaid website, and to malign the CPP.
Since November, I have been preoccupied with my duties as the newly elected chairperson of the International League of Peoples’ Struggle (ILPS) as well as pursuing my complaints against the Dutch government and the European Council in connection with the “terrorist” listing initiated by the US upon the prompting of the Arroyo regime. As NDFP chief political consultant, I have also been occasionally involved in some back channel communications with certain Oslo and Manila officials regarding the GRP-NDFP peace negotiations.
The malicious letter writers are assisting the US in maligning and criminalizing me, setting me up for physical attacks by the CIA and sabotaging the GRP-NDFP peace negotiations. My first impulse has been to ignore the Sarmiento article because the lie reported is so blatantly false and the malicious intent to smear me so obvious. But I have decided to confront the lie because it can do harm one way or the other to myself and to others, including the purported letter writers.
Based on my experience, I do not think that the revolutionary forces would take any punitive action against anyone just because he or she holds pseudo-revolutionary or even blatantly counterrevolutionary ideas. The revolutionary movement respects the freedom of thought and expression. As so many documents issued by the revolutionary movement declare, it can seek to punish only criminal acts like murder, espionage, gross malversation and robbery. These are the criminal offenses for which Romulo Kintanar and Arturo Tabara were held responsible, as Ka Roger of the CPP Information Department has pointed out.
But I do worry about the malicious letter writers and their kind, not because the revolutionary forces might hold them culpable for crimes which can be proven in the people’s court but because the murderous type of rabid anti-communists in the military and police might harm these pseudo-revolutionaries and then blame the crime on the revolutionary forces.
Since the 1960s, we have come to know of instances of the most rabid anti-communists in the military and police engaging in bloody crimes of intrigue. They kill certain persons or make them disappear and then make the revolutionaries the scapegoat. Oplan Jericho was specially designed by US and puppet officers in 1988 to kill me in the Philippines or abroad and then put the blame on communists. I am in receipt of information that no less than a cabinet member suggested in a meeting of the national security division of the Arroyo cabinet that I be assassinated.
The malicious letter writers are either playing into the hands of the most bloodthirsty elements in the reactionary establishment and are unwittingly making themselves patsies or they are assured by their handlers in the US and puppet intelligence and psywar agencies that they can get political and financial benefits from the acts of state terrorism now being unleashed against the people and all genuinely patriotic and progressive forces in the Philippines.