By: Winston O. Llamaz
The Communist Party of the Philippines-New People’s Army (CPP-NPA) was designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) by the US Department of State on August 9, 2002, alongside with 73 other terrorist organizations worldwide.
The 15-member European Union (EU) has similarly declared CPP and its military arm, the New People’s Army, as a foreign terrorist organization on January 13, 2020; and alongside Australia on October 28, 2002. Same was relisted as FTO on November 13, 2013. Similarly, New Zealand made the same move on October 10, 2010, and renewed the designation of CPP-NPA as a terrorist organization on September 26, 2019.
The Anti-Terrorism Council of the Philippines also formally designated the National Democratic Front (NDF) as a terrorist organization on June 23, 2021, citing it as “an integral and inseparable part” of CPP-NPA that was created in April 1973.
“CPP cadres and NPA units have been organizing as local organs of political power (people’s committees of self-government), the barrio organizing committees, and barrio revolutionary committees,” said the founding chairperson of the CPP, Jose Ma. Sison in his interview with The News Lens.
The statement made by Sison confirms the CPP-NPA-NDF’s working organizational structure composed of the Open Sectoral Organization and the Underground Mass Organization (UGMOs). CPP leads the Open Sectoral Organizations to recruit members from various sectors. They target urban-based activists, sectoral leaders, and organizers. The open sectoral organizations eventually are used as platforms to recruit members in their underground mass organizations. While UGMOs are organizations that advocate and support armed struggle (NPA) and the violent terroristic activities of CPP-NPA-NDF.
The lifeblood of CPP-NPA-NDF is the continuous recruitment of its members. They invest and propagate hatred and disunity, and promote their propaganda arsenal and machinations. For 53 years, the Filipino children and youth are radicalized in schools, educated in and imbibed with the language of hate and mistrust towards government, and then recruited into UGMOs and ultimately join the NPA ranks.
The exploitation and the infiltration by CPP/NPA have taken their toll on young Filipinos. As a result, unbearable numbers of Filipinos have died. They lie buried in shallow and unmarked graves across the country. Hundreds of innocent children have died in skirmishes with government forces. They died believing in the lies the communist terrorist group taught and spread in contrast to being a student activist fighting in the streets for truth.
Recently, the death of Mr. Chad Booc following a 15-minute firefight with the Infantry Brigade of the Philippine Army in Purok-8, Barangay Andap, New Bataan, Davao de Oro on a Thursday (February 24, 2020), has unmasked the pattern of lies and deception of CPP-NPA-NDF. Booc is a CPP-NPA-NDF cadre masquerading as an activist, as revealed in a statement made by Assistant Prosecutor Flosemer Chris Gonzales. It was supported by the confession of Rurelyn Bay-ao, an IP youth leader from Talaingod, Davao del Norte, that NPA-linked schools’ radicalization used them in mass protests and eventually recruited them into the armed struggle. She further revealed that Mr. Booc was his teacher in Haran, Manila, and Cebu Bakwit Schools.
The fate of Booc and other active communist terrorist group members, hiding under the masks of activists and human rights defenders, had exposed themselves after ending up on the fatality list of armed encounters with security troops in the mountains.
The slain NPA members, including Mr. Chad Booc, were victims of deception and wrong ideology of CPP-NPA-NDF. On February 15, 2021, Booc was one of the personalities arrested by state authorities at the University of San Carlos, Talamban Campus in Cebu City. It was due to complaints made by parents from Talaingod, Davao del Norte, relative to the alleged kidnapping of their indigenous people’s (IP) children. The local court in Cebu released him and six others after court proceedings. Booc elevated his membership and joined the armed movement, believing in the propaganda of his superiors that bearing arms is the highest form of struggle. The lies propagated by CPP-NPA-NDF totally deceived him.
We are citing Mr. Chad Booc, a 27-year-old cum laude from the University of the Philippines-Diliman, with a Bachelor of Computer Science degree, a promising youth supposed to be for a better Philippines who was deceived and died young.
How much more innocent blood are to be spilled and sacrificed? How many more dreams of the Filipino youths are to be crushed for the CCP-NPA-NDF’s brutal ideologies using their inhumane doctrine of armed struggle and people’s protracted war, a doctrine marred with lies, manipulations, extortions (revolutionary taxes), and magnified by murders?
The 53 years of the long winding road for CPP-NPA-NDF is definitely founded on lies and deception, fueling the blood of young Filipinos. The Filipinos must unite to condemn their atrocious acts and debunk their deceptive propaganda, for they have no regard for human rights and no respect for life.
