The Bagong Alyang Makabayan said Wednesday there is no need to condemn the New People’s Army (NPA), explaining armed struggle was “not necessarily terrorist.”
“A poor man steals from a grocery to feed his hungry children. It is a crime. Do we condemn the man? No. We know he was forced to commit a crime because of poverty and desperation,” Bayan secretary-general Renato Reyes during the Senate inquiry on red-tagging.
“A farmer loses his land to land-grabbers. He loses his livelihood. He joins the NPA because they are implementing a kind of land reform. Do we condemn the farmer? No. Landlessness made him rebel,” he added.
Reyes also said condemning armed struggle instead of addressing the reason that caused it “will only lead to the denial of the social basis of armed conflict and falls right into the militarist approach.”
“We take note of many government officials in the past, [President Rodrigo] Duterte included, who were not required to make such condemnations and who used their position in government to push for peace negotiations,” he added.
The Bayan secretary-general said the right to rebel was recognized internationally.
“There have been several armed rebellions in the Philippines where the government employed peace negotiations instead of terrorist-labelling,” Reyes said.
Bayan explains why they won’t condemn NPA
Military officials and civilians have dared Makabayan party-list representatives and their allied leftist groups like Bayan to condemn the CPP-NPA to prove that they were not legal fronts of the communist movement.
Reyes said that to force militant groups to condemn the CPP-NPA was to put them on a “witch hunt.”
“Will you now require every citizen to make a similar condemnation just to prove they are not NPA? Again, that is witch-hunting. That is dangerous. It encourages rather than discourages red-tagging,” Reyes said.
According to a 2011 human rights journal, red-tagging or red-baiting was “the act of labeling, branding, naming and accusing individuals and/or organizations of being left-leaning, subversives, communists or terrorists.”
Last month, several banners and tarpaulins saying the CPP-NPA-NDF is not welcome were spotted in various areas in Metro Manila. However, Mayor Isko Moreno immediately ordered to remove tarpaulins declaring communist groups persona non grata.
